How To Be An Agnostic

Following Socrates

Encountering Socrates

Not much is known about Plato’s life before his encounter with
Socrates. He was from an aristocratic, politically active family,
and it is likely that his turn to full-time philosophy came after
disillusionment with politics – perhaps as a result of having seen
Socrates condemned at the hand of a democratic state. He may
have been a wrestler in his youth, if you believe the specula-
tion that his name was actually a pun on the Greek for ‘broad’ –
platus – as in ‘broad-shouldered’. He may have travelled in Egypt
in his early life, seeking wisdom in what was an ancient culture
even to the ancient Greeks. He did not marry. Any indications
as to his character are tentative since, apart possibly from the so-
called Seventh Letter, he wrote nothing in his own voice.
But after they met, everything changed. The infl uence of
Socrates on him was massive and profound. It has been called
fateful, because afterwards life never looked the same again.
There is a story – and stories are what we seek for the spirit they
convey – that on the day Plato met Socrates he was due to have
a tragedy performed in the theatre of Dionysos, the Theatre
Royal of Athens. Plato cancelled the performance and burnt
the manuscript there and then. Socrates made Plato re-examine
everything: this is why Socrates is always depicted in the dia-
logues as on the move, questioning, seeking more. And this is
what made Plato wiser, not that Socrates revealed timeless doc-
trines to him, but that Socrates’ passionate desire for what was
good and true, his love of wisdom, captivated Plato too. After
all, what is it that makes a person truly wise? Not that they utter
sagacious words, even less that they know it all. Neither is it
that they are warm or welcoming, for to meet them might be
unsettling. Rather, their wisdom is manifest in their attitude, in
the sense that they are digging deep. Their wisdom is appealing
because, being with them, you are enabled to dig deeper too.
What was a momentous meeting for Plato could have become
just a paragraph in the history of philosophy, and no more impor-
tant than a detail like knowing that Kant read Hume or that