Lapis Magazine

Clearly, the milling crowds remind him of that boisterous marketplace at the foot of the Acropolis where he spent most of his days, talking excitedly with everyone, from slaves to generals.

But these preoccupied New Yorkers are not about to stop to talk with a barefoot old man in a worn chiton. So I lead Socrates towards a better venue — east along 42nd street, past merchants and vendors selling everything from Disney action figures to fake IDs. “How many things are sold here, that I do not need,” Socrates observes, as he had often done as he roamed the agora.

I hold his elbow firmly as I steer him through the on-rushing crowds and honking vehicles. Gawking at the towering video billboards, he comments dryly: “Powerful images! But they remind me of those shadows on the walls of Plato’s Cave. I only hope that you and your friends see that they are only distractions from Reality.”

As we make our way east towards where I think Socrates will feel more at home, he recognizes the same types of people he knew so well in ancient Athens. “A typical Cynic,” he mutters as we pass a man crouched in a doorway, sipping from a brown paper bag and cursing the passers-by.

At 6th Avenue, we pass a street-corner orator holding forth to a tiny crowd in front of a bodega. It prompts Socrates to comment: “A true Sophist – he’s a master of argument and rhetoric, but doesn’t have a real commitment to pursuing the truth.”

Socrates’ comparisons remind me of Joseph Campbell’s famous quip that you can often see Oedipus and his mother at the corner of 42nd street and Broadway, waiting for the light to change.

Again, Socrates’ eyes turn upwards – this time arrested by the ticker-tape of news headlines revolving around the top of a building:

Finally, we have reached my destination — the grand block-long set of steps leading to the entrance to the New York Public Library at Fifth Avenue and 42nd Street. On this broad stairway, groups of my fellow New Yorkers have taken time out from their frantic lives, to sit and talk, as Socrates loved to do, about the issues they face.

After listening intently to one of the groups, Socrates turns to me and acknowledges: “This is where I belong… Now I’ll be able to test the integrity and reasoning power of your compatriots.”

As Socrates enters the conversation, I glance up the stairs, and notice the enormous statue flanking the doorways to this repository of learning. It’s a depiction of Socrates himself, titled “Truth”. How fitting that he finds himself most comfortable here, at the portals leading to lifelong learning.

Looking back, I see that one of the six people with whom Socrates is dialoguing has got everyone else responding excitedly to what she has just said. “What a fine point,” Socrates is saying. “I’m so glad you made it. I do not want you to be convinced by me. I want you to be convinced by the Truth.”
***Over the past 20 years I have followed Socrates’ Way as a spiritual path. This path has led me beyond the conventional image we all remember from school and college: The fierce master of “The Socratic Method,” that interrogatory style of argument that exposed muddled thinking.

While that spirit of fierce intelligence still energizes our rational, scientific culture, I have come to know and love another Socrates: The one Nietzche heard, “whose voice descends into the depth of your soul, letting you taste a new yearning.”

Gradually I have discovered this other side to Socrates: a master whose chief values included authenticity, personal spirituality, friendship, and care of the soul. This Socrates uses a rich rhetorical repertoire that goes beyond syllogistic logic, as Robert Persig revealed in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintainance.

“You have heard me speak of an oracle or sign, which comes to me, and is the divinity, which Meletus ridicules in the indictment. This sign, which is a kind of voice, first began to come to me when I was a child.”

It was this inner voice that lay at the core of Socrates’ vociferous dialoguing. He might well have said the same thing that Jung declared late in his life: “There was a daimon in me. It overpowered me, and if I was at times ruthless it was because I was in the grip of the daimon. Since my contemporaries, understandably, could not perceive my vision, they saw only a fool rushing ahead.”

Free Yourself from the Cave of Illusion

Socrates’ best-known parable is that of “The Cave.” It is the archetypal Western metaphor for our progress from illusion to reality.

“Imagine a group of people confined to an underground cave, in which they have lived their entire lives,” Socrates’ says to his young friend Glaucon in Book Six of The Republic. “They can do nothing but stare straight ahead, at the back wall. Behind them is a fire blazing at a distance, and between this fire and their backs are men carrying figures made of wood and stone, so that the shadows of these objects are cast on the wall in front of the prisoners. For them, those shadows are the only reality.” (If this begins to sound like today’s coach potato fixated on his TV, the analogy is apt!)

Then, you will recall, Socrates portrays the experience of one of the prisoners who is freed from his captivity, taken to the upper world – our world – and then returns to try to tell his fellow prisoners what reality is like.

Thinking people in every generation have applied this parable of “The Cave” to their specific circumstances. Down the centuries, philosophers and theologians as diverse as St. Augustine, Rousseau, Spinoza, Hegel, and Freud have evoked “The Cave” to dramatize the difficulties of seeing through our delusions and fantasies, to attain truth.

Whenever we think of our intellectual progress as a movement from darkness towards the light, we are using imagery, which started with Socrates’ allegory of “The Cave.” It was his way of dramatizing our journey towards understanding.

Steer the Chariot of Your Soul

Socrates conveyed our lifelong struggle for emotional harmony through a powerful image: a charioteer challenged to control two mighty steeds.

“Of the nature of the soul, let me speak briefly, and in a metaphor: a pair of winged horses and a charioteer,” he says in The Republic.

“One of the horses is noble, and the other is ignoble, and driving them is immensely difficult.

“The right-hand horse is upright and cleanly made – he is a lover of honor and modesty and temperance; he needs no touch of the whip, but is guided by word only.

“The other is a crooked lumbering animal; he is insolent and proud, shag-eared and deaf, hardly yielding to whip and spur.

Daniel Goleman has explored this terrain for our time in Emotional Intelligence, where he enjoins us to greater awareness of our emotional states, and to control of “emotional hijacks”.

Challenge Your Oracles

One of the charges against Socrates was that he failed to worship the gods of the city. And indeed, he could not accept conventional religion of his day.

Even when he received a message from a divine source, Socrates felt compelled to test it by his own intuition and reason. Most famously, the Delphic Oracle told his follower, Chaerophon, that “there is no man wiser than Socrates.” Rather than accepting this gratifying accolade, Socrates insisted on mounting a research project to verify or disconfirm it. That quest started him on his search for a man wiser than himself. Only when he failed to find one, did he realize how to interpret the Oracle correctly: that those who thought themselves wise were no wiser than he, who always assumed a posture of ignorance.

Socrates’ way of thinking about the gods exemplified his way of approaching every issue. He

_ questioned conventional thinking;
_ demanded clarity;
_ learned from everyday experience;
_ came to his own conclusions.

Grow with Friends

For Socrates, philosophizing consisted of talking with others about the issues that matter most in our lives and our communities. Only in the actual moments of interaction, he firmly believed, did real understanding occur.

He held this view so strongly that he eschewed writing down his own views. There are no texts signed by Socrates. We would know nothing about him, were it not for the admiration and affection of his friends, Plato and Xenophon, who devoted a good part of their lives to writing about their dear friend.

“Good friends give me greater satisfaction than other men get from good horses or dogs or gamecocks,” he said with characteristic irony. “If I have anything good, I teach it to my friends, and I place them with others from whom I think they will make some gain. There is no possession more valuable than a good and faithful friend.”

Speak the Truth

Socrates exemplified the independent spirit who is willing to speak truth to power. All his life he challenged his fellow citizens, as individuals and collectively, to examine their principles and their behavior.

“I am that gadfly which the gods have sent to sting you Athenians,” he declared in his Apology. “Our state, my friends, is like a great steed – powerful and impressive, but lazy and dim. Without the constant provocation by the gadflies, it would grow even more unwitting and unfit.”

His name has been invoked from their jail cells by Theoreau, Gandhi, and Martin Luther King, each imprisoned for their acts of civil disobedience. These dissenters are often recognized, in historical perspective, as having upheld the highest values of their society and culture.

We need our gadflies – whether we call them dissidents, whistle-blowers, mavericks, or even revolutionaries. Every organization, every society, rots from the top when it suppresses or ignores criticism. Healthy organizations, as well as healthy societies, thrive on what Socrates calls “their freedom, their willingness to look at all the evidence in the search for truth.”

But this role of challenging the status quo, cannot be left to others. Each of us must be a gadfly of sorts, from time to time, in our own way, in our community and organizations, if not on the national level.

Marion Wright Edelman, founder of the Childrens’ Defense Fund, has put it eloquently in her own Socratic “Apology,” The Measure of Our Success.

“Do not think that you have to make big waves in order to contribute,” she writes. “My role model, Sojourner Truth, slave woman, could neither read nor write but could not stand slavery and second-class treatment of women. One day during an anti-slavery speech she was heckled by an old man. ‘Old woman, do you think that your talk about slavery does any good? I don’t care any more for your talk than I do for the bite of a flea.’

“Perhaps not,” snapped back Sojourner Truth. “’But the Lord willing, I’ll keep you scratching.’