Following Socrateswith its way of life, in the manner of Socrates who was in love
with wisdom: students were fulfi lling a vocation. More prosai-
cally, it is perhaps not too fanciful to imagine an unwritten rule
of life too, not unlike that of St Benedict, which detailed those
things necessary for a communal, purposeful life, such as the
partitioning of the day.
The diversifi cation of styles
Plato’s philosophy school was hugely successful. It carried his
own encounter with Socrates to those who never knew Socrates
in person, not by promoting a set of intellectual principles but
by inculcating a practice. This was shaped by exercises and dis-
ciplined by reason but ultimately the goal was to form individu-
als who saw the world with a philosopher’s eyes – transmitting
the charism of Socrates.
It was a pattern others sought to emulate. After Aristotle
left the Academy he formed his own, the Lyceum. From what
remains of Aristotle’s writings one can infer that he thought
the ideal for the good life was to become all that you might be.
He called it ‘great souledness’. For the philosopher, this meant
someone who had developed the greatest ability to contem-
plate, an activity of pure attention which the most excellent
would engage in alone: ‘He has slow movements, a deep voice
and calm speech,’ Aristotle amusingly writes. Contemplation
was key because, at best, it was non-discursive. To speak phil-
osophically is merely to link words together. Meaning comes
from within. In practice, this is something that people can only
achieve after much training and effort: the school provided the
place where things could be explored and discussed in order to
train the attention.
After Plato and Aristotle, there are generally reckoned to be
four other schools: the Cynics, the Pyrrhonians, the Stoics and
the Epicureans. Although they evolved and emphasised different
aspects of their ethos over the hundreds of years for which they
existed, one can see them all as attempts to form ways of life that