The Gift of Fire | Page 4

although Plato is surely the most
humorous and ironic of philosophers, it is just not possible to read
Socrates' Apology as a witty trick at the jury's expense. It is a sober
autobiography. Socrates explains that he has simply spent his life in
trying to discover what the god could have meant in saying, by an
astonishing oracle, that Socrates of Athens was the wisest of men.
Socrates had discovered, as he had expected, that he knew nothing, but
also that the same was true of everybody else. The oracle meant, in
effect, that the wisest of men was just as unwise as all other men. But
we seem to be fundamentalists about the oracle. There is a curious
contradiction in us when we say that Socrates is an inimitable one in
billions because of the power of his mind, and thus deny the power of
his mind to judge truly as to whether he was an inimitable one in
billions. Our minds, which are not up to the work of imitating him, are
nevertheless quite strong enough to overrule him. Strange.
In old age, Franklin admitted that his plan for the achievement of moral
perfection had not entirely succeeded, and that he had not, after all,
been able perfectly to imitate either Jesus or Socrates. But he did not
say that such imitations would have been impossible, or excuse himself

from them on the grounds that they would have been impractical or
unrealistic, or even, as the modern mind seems very likely to say, that
they would have been counterproductive and little conducive to success.
He says that, all in all, while he was but an occasional imitator, even so
he had thus lived a better and a happier life than he would have
otherwise had. And I do suspect that Socrates himself might have said
much the same, for he, too, was surely an occasional imitator of
Socrates.
The Socrates we have in the dialogues of Plato simply must be a
"perfected" Socrates, a masterpiece every bit as much artistic as
philosophical. I have lived, and so have you, in this world, which is the
very same world in which Socrates lived. Only its temporary
particulars have changed. He did, if only when Plato wasn't around, or
perhaps before Plato was around, worry about money. He quarreled
with his wife, and fell out of patience with his children. He spoke, and
even acted, without considering the full meaning and probable
consequences of his words and deeds. He even, if only once or twice,
saw Reason clearly and completely, and went ahead and listened to
Appetite instead. And once in a while, from time to time, he lost his
grip on that "cheerful and temperate disposition" without which neither
the young nor the old, neither the rich nor the poor, can hope for that
decent and thoughtful life of self-government that is properly called
Happiness. And such outrageous and unconventional charges I can
bring - as can you - against Socrates or anyone, with calm assurance,
for Socrates was just a man. To do such things, as he himself very well
knew, was merely human.
So now I can see before me one of those persons whom I call, in a very
strange manner of speaking, "my" students. There she sits, as close to
the back of the classroom as possible. She is blowing bubbles with her
gum, and not without skill. She intends to be a schoolteacher. She has
read, in their entirety, two books, one about some very frightening and
mysterious happenings in a modest suburban house on Long Island,
and the other about excellence. I now have reason to hope that she has
been reading Emerson, and she probably has. She is not a shirker, but,
at least usually, as much a person of serious intent as one should be at

her age and in her condition. Her understanding of Emerson is not
perfect, but neither is mine. The essay she has been reading, I have read
many times, and every time with the realization that my understanding
of it, up to now, of course, has not been perfect.
I know this as surely as I know that Socrates was once exasperated by a
yapping dog: Someday, perhaps this day, when I have explained some
difficult proposition's exploration by Emerson, that young woman, or
somebody else very much like her, will raise her hand and ask the
question, and ask it just as Socrates asked, out of what she knows to be
her ignorance, and her desire not to be ignorant. And her question will
remind me that I am ignorant, and that I didn't know it, and that I do not
want to be.
I probably give less thought than I should to the question of whether