How To Be An Agnostic
of it. Like Romeo who gasps, ‘Did my heart love ’till now?’, at
the merest thought of Juliet, Socrates longed for what he lacked.
His ignorance, and knowledge of his ignorance, powered a
relentless desire for the truth about himself, his fellows, and the
verisimilitudes of the world around him.
There is a second dimension to this philosophical love that
comes out in the encounter too. Socrates is drawn to others, not
only because of his sympathy, but also because it is with others
that he gains the best understanding of himself, and they of
themselves. This is again implicit in his reaction to the oracle.
He did not test himself on his own, as a modern recipient of
such words might do, perhaps by experiment, perhaps by trying
to write a book. Rather he went out onto the streets. As Plutarch
later put it:
Socrates did not set up grandstands for his audience and
did not sit upon a professorial chair; he had no fi xed time-
table for talking or walking with his friends. Rather he did
philosophy sometimes by joking with them, or by drinking
or by going to war or to the market with them...This meant that Socrates got to know people, and the better he
got to know them, and they him, the better the philosophy. It
was, for Socrates, not just about exploring ideas but was about
understanding how people are the way they are. He believed
the key to wisdom was self-understanding as well as defi ning
abstractions. He had to get to know others to see if they were
wiser than he was, a test that puts character as well as clever-
ness under the spotlight. In addition, it is an approach that
recognises that intuition and emotion are on a continuum with
reason. How we implicitly react to things should count along-
side how we explicitly rationalise them. As Wordsworth realised,
thoughts are ‘representatives of our past feelings’.
When it really worked, this was a process of befriending:
‘I think that someone who is to test adequately the soul which
lives aright and the soul which does not, needs to have three