The Seekers: The Story of Man's Continuing Quest to Understand His World Read Online Free PDF

Greek physicists had demanded too much too soon. And they were not the substantial source of modern science nor the enduring catalyst of the modern scientific spirit. Instead, they produced what A. E. Taylor calls one of the periodic bankruptcies of science.
    A second Ionian revolution—more momentous for the future of a seeking mankind—found Socrates as its leader and symbol. He now made philosophy more intimately personal than ever before. He asked not only what but whether man knew. Socrates left no writing and no dogma. His radically human approach to philosophy was expressed in his life. His historic influence would be not in his answers but in his questions. And he would survive in dialogues—a new literary form of questions and answers, followed by more questions and answers toward still more questions. For him it was the spoken word, the encounter between living people, with the word as the catalyst of thought, that struck sparks. And the spoken word had an enticing elusiveness, not found in writing, which always invited scrutiny. Its meaning depended on memory, which also had a special meaning for him.
    The influence of Socrates, then, was not in a school of philosophy but in his person. Historians of philosophy separate the “Pre-Socratics” from the Socratics not because of a new doctrine but for a new emphasis, a new kind of seeking. His iridescence for later Seekers came from his life and the circumstances of his death. Unlike Jesus, Socrates had the misfortune to have his life reported by literary persons—Aristophanes, Xenophon, Plato, Aristotle—each with his own ax to grind.
    So a halo of ambiguity surrounds the life of Socrates. And his life has become doubly intriguing, because, as Bertrand Russell observed, we really do not know how much we know about the real Socrates. Everything we know about him is reflected in the distorting mirror of another strong personality. The scholars’ “Socrates Problem” allows each of us to have our own Socrates. Beside the biographical memoir Plato had to invent a new literary form—the dialogue—to communicate the meaning of Socrates. No writings of Socrates survived, and his meaning would live in reports of his spoken words.
    Plato deftly revealed the suspense of the philosopher’s quest. We are told that Plato began not as a philosopher but as a dramatist. He had written tragedies before he met Socrates, but, according to tradition, he burned them after he came under the influence of Socrates. Then he used his dramatic talent to interpret a philosopher whose message could be carried only in the spoken word. For a philosopher whose mission was the discovery of ignorance, the Socratic dialogues provided a convenient vehicle. The drama of the living search in Plato’s Socratic dialogues was somehow not diminished by their uniformly inconclusive conclusions.
    Another subtle Socratic paradox was latent in the dialogues—the idealized art of conversation. Socrates himself repeatedly denied the role of teacher, and he never bores us with the wagging didactic finger. But he did boast the role of midwife. “And like the midwives, I am barren, and the reproach which is often made against me, that I ask questions of others and have not the wit to answer them myself, is very just—the reason is, that the god compels me to be a midwife, but does not allow me to bring forth. . . . But to me and the god they owe their delivery. . . . many of them in their ignorance . . . have gone away too soon; and have not only lost the children of whom I had previously delivered them by an ill bringing up, but have stifled whatever else they had in them by evil communications.” The very midwifely (“maieutic”) technique by which Socrates revealed the general ignorance suggested that truths lay undiscovered within each person being questioned. So the Socratic technique implied a latent wisdom in everyone.
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    There was a real Socrates, born in Athens about 469 B.C. His