Paul Johnson's Unexamined Socrates

SAINT SOCRATES, PRAY for us,” Erasmus remarked in one of his Colloquia. For thousands of years, since his trial and death in 399 BCE, we have seen Socrates as a martyr to truth: doing what the gods command, sacrificing his life for the high cause of wisdom. Yet Socrates was not a saint, or not only a saint. He was also a reckless firebrand willing to make seemingly absurd claims. In his method as Plato conveys it, everything has to be filtered through argument, and the argument, always dazzling, can stymie us at any moment. Having gained our confidence, Socrates will lead us to a ridiculous or shocking hypothesis, a trivial or grand-sounding fable, or a metaphysics that claims seamless purity but looks somewhat jerry-built.