HAVE YOU MET SOCRATES?
Harry and Bonaro Overstreet

What is philosophy? Philosophy is a special way of going at things. It is not the engineer’s way nor the biologist’s way; it is not the artist’s way nor the businessman’s way. Yet it is a way that has involved the energizing of some of the greatest minds of history.

Philosophy as a way of going at things involves man as a question-asking creature. Early in life, as soon as he gets words at his command, the child begins to ask questions. These spontaneous questions are oddly enough philosophical, for they include such issues as the origin and nature of man—”Where did I come from?,” “What is this?,” “Who am I?” A friend of ours who is the mother of a little boy called us one day and said, “You know, I suddenly had something happen that made me very tired.” We knew by the undercurrent of her voice that she was laughing at herself. “My little boy came in and asked me, “Mother, who made God?” Then she added, “I can see ahead the many years he will be asking me about all those things that I don’t know the answers to.”

Life begins spontaneously and naturally, reaching toward life with question, question, question. When do children stop asking questions and begin handing back answers? And why is this? We do know that children run into a long desert period in which they ask few questions. This may be because we have framed education so that it would give back the answers. However this might be, we have a terrific responsibility for trying to understand what happens environmentally to the question-asker. As the child grows older he stops asking questions, but this is not because the questions have all been answered. He stops asking questions either because he has accepted answers that are still questions (though he does not realize this) or because he has given up feeling that life is something you go around trying to understand. He begins just to take life and that is it. So this is the one thing that must concern us all: What happens to the philosophical, inquiring mind of the new human being?

There is sense in which cultures, including our own Western world, recurrently become like the Prodigal Son. They have such experiences as to cause them to rise up and say, “I will return to the house of my father.” As we think of encouraging our youth to philosophize, it may be that we are once more rising up with a determination to return to the house of our Father.

ANALYSIS AND SYNTHESIS

It is easy for us to be guilty of oversimplification as we try to bring order out of the multifariousness of life. We must go below the surfaces of life and take charge of situations rather than be pushed around by them. The way of analysis has taken us so far afield that it must now rectify itself. Since the nineteenth century the way of analysis has been taking things apart. It is like the child who takes the watch apart but cannot get it back together again. While the age of analysis was great, we must now enter upon the age of synthesis. Our people are restless in their desire to go after the meanings of life instead of the purely analytical. While knowledge increased tremendously during the age of analysis, it is nonetheless true that we must now return to the great synthetic tradition of putting the pieces together to see where we are and what it is all about. We must learn to cope with being human!

Philosophy has failed in our day largely because it has joined the analytical to the neglect of the synthetical. Plato stated that philosophy is a spectator of all time and existence, which was a great statement when we were young. If we were to make that statement in a professional philosophical gathering today, we would be looked upon as very outdated. But this synthetic approach must be part of the approach to life. What is the synthetic approach? It is more than a study of the history of philosophy, which is not synthetic, but rather a deadening analytic approach. The synthetic approach is a study of the totality of human personality. Philosophy should be studied in terms of the great personalities.

We can remember the thrill that came when we first encountered Ralph Waldo Emerson. It was long ago when we first met him, and he has never gone out of our lives. Here is a man, a human being who is well-rounded, who says many things that add so much to our lives. This is the synthetic approach, for the distinctive synthetic entity is the human personality.

SOCRATES THE MAN

When Socrates came into my life it was even a greater experience than meeting Emerson. The most precious approaches of life are coming in contact with the indubitably great personalities. It may be that academic philosophy has largely lost out because it has turned up its nose at that. What would be the effect on students if they came to know Socrates intimately and enthusiastically. It is certainly true that in religion one has a deep religious experience not merely by reading the Bible or going to church, but through an encounter with the great person, Jesus. It is through such an encounter that we get a glimpse of the truly great life.

One does not get the greatness out of philosophy by arguing about the abstract issues. Such greatness comes by “joining the human race” and meeting beautiful personalities.

In one of Edmund Arlington Robinson’s poems he tells of a small boy for whom life had no meaning. The desperate youngster came to the point where suicide seemed to be the only answer. He resolved to jump in the river. As he hesitated on the bank something happened. Robinson puts it this way: “There came along a man who looked at him with such unexpected friendliness, and talked with him in such a common way, that life grew wonderfully different.” The prime occupation of the teenager, and for all human beings, is taking the impact of life and learning how to handle it. We are to learn what may be done with the experience of being human.

Life looks wonderfully different to one who has companioned with Socrates. We can build better images of ourselves, creative images, by encountering those people to whom life looks wonderfully different. One of the first things that we discovered about each other after we met is that we both kept Socrates at our elbow. Socrates was for both of us a person who set an image of what life was like, that it is to be grandly and decently lived. This is true of all philosophy, right down through Socrates, Spinoza, William James, Emerson, Whitehead, and whom you will. Philosophy is the record of personality taking hold of life and wrestling with it, and seeing how you come out with meaning.

QUALITIES OF SOCRATES

Just think of this man we are going to meet. The people of his day had not known anything about him before, but somehow they learn about this man Socrates with his tremendously important qualities.

He was a “gadfly.” He bothered people with his questions. They did not like to have him around. He could see through their superficialities. He was not deceived by stereotypes, cliches, and slogans. He could discern the contradictions in their shallow argumentation. Socrates made a nuisance of himself. He was a crank! And yet look at this man: He was the wisest man in Greece. Why? Because he knew it all? No, but because he knew that he did not know. Though he was the wisest he was the most modest. He made no claims of being an expert at anything. In fact he spent most of his time asking questions-trying to find out things!

By “gadflying” Socrates was putting complexity back into life. He stirred up minds that had become caught in dogma. He bothered those people who thought they had all the answers. He revealed to them that life is always more complex than it looks to one who has his patterns and opinions fixed. Dogmatism tends to drain the complexity out of life. Socrates had the rare ability of putting complexity back into life. Yet he was not the kind of trouble-maker who enjoys putting people on the spot. There is the obnoxious kind of gadfly who is only interested in showing off what he knows. Socrates was not like that.

Let us go across the centuries and look at William James again. We can imagine James and Socrates talking as they meet at a street corner. They are having a good time together now where there is room for both of them. James says that one of the functions of philosophy is to make dogmas fluid again. Fluid again? That is what Socrates was doing.

James said that one should have air and space in his soul, lest those around suffocate from the loss of good, sound thinking. He and Socrates were the kind of men who re-complexified life in a world guilty of over-simplification by dogma, habit, partisanship, preoccupation, institutionalization, and caution. A great person lets life be complex because he is not afraid of complexity.

And keep in mind the word re-complexifying. That is a beautiful word. In the classroom students should learn how varied the approaches to problems can be. Views that are too simple should be complexified. And yet this is to be done modestly. We should not trust the person who merely complexifies, making complexity an end in itself. Like Socrates we must learn to be humble in the face of complexity. The true philosopher realizes his own intellectual and spiritual need. He has the peculiar power to have coped with reality on so broad a front that he has encountered questions that he cannot answer, and he knows he cannot.

Socrates walked humbly with his God. He is the kind of person who could say, “The unexamined life is not worth living.” He was not making parlor talk when he said that, but rather he was in the presence of the judges who had the power of life and death in their hands. Socrates could have avoided a death penalty if he had agreed to stop asking questions, stop probing, stop upsetting things, stop making important people look silly.

The gadfly of Athens was not willing to live with a chloroformed mind, for that would not be life at all, and so he chose to die. When the executioner asked him if he were ready to die, he replied, “Do you not know that I have been preparing to die all my life.” He was not afraid. He even bathed himself and prepared his body for burial before drinking the hemlock. He spent his last hours talking about such great ideas as immortality.

This man who talked about the unexamined life not being worth the living is somebody to meet.

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Harry and Bonaro Overstreet are a husband and wife team who lecture and write in the fields of philosophy and psychology. They have written such well known titles as The Mature Mind, The Mind Goes Forth, and What We Must Know About Communism. Harry is now retired from the post he held for 30 years as professor of philosophy at City College of New York. Bonaro is also a poetess. This lecture on Socrates was given at MacMurray College in a philosophy symposium directed by Prof. Garrett. It is here published for the first time. The editor has made a few alterations in transcribing it, all this with the gracious permission of the Overstreets.