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Socrates, The Sociable Hermit

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Peter France

Hermits


Socrates


So when we come to Socrates – an unprepossessing figure who walked barefoot; whose meat and drink were of the poorest; who wore the same cloak, summer and winter; who claimed that the most valuable possession he had was his leisure and that to be content with little is to approach the divine – a sea change has begun. It would be a misrepresentation, of course, to claim Socrates, that most sociable of men, as a hermit. His whole life was spent in public – the market-place, the streets, the gymnasia. He had no liking for the country and rarely went there. ‘Fields and trees’, Plato makes him say, ‘will not teach me anything; the life of the streets will.’ He loved the market-place because there he had opportunities to talk with and therefore learn from his fellow Athenians.


But the market-place also, paradoxically, reinforced his asceticism by allowing him to experience the pleasures of abstinence. He once happily remarked, surrounded by the great variety of goods for sale:


‘How many things there are that I do not want !’


In his indifference to possessions and public opinion Socrates had the cast of mind of the solitary; but it was combined with an intense sociability that kept him in the city. He did not need to live in the desert to prove his independence. He was well able to assert and maintain it through his conversations. He was sociable but not committed to company. He could stand absorbed in his own thoughts from one dawn to the next if a thought struck him and he felt the need to unravel its potentialities. Dinner might cool and friends be kept waiting while Socrates pondered alone.


In another important respect Socrates cleared the philosophical ground for the solitaries: he argued for replacing the approval of society as the spur to human activity by the individual conscience. The aim of the wise man was no longer the plaudits of the masses but autarkeia, or self-sufficiency. A contemporary of Socrates, Hippias of Elis, had also preached a doctrine of self-sufficiency but, in his case, it was a demonstration of his own virtuosity rather than of abstemiousness. He taught that the greatness of the polis was based on its economic independence and that every individual could achieve the same greatness and become a polis in himself by learning the arts of self-sufficiency.


According to Plato, he once presented himself at the Olympic festival, where his fellow Sophists enjoyed parading themselves, wearing clothes and ornaments all of which he had made with his own hands, including an engraved ring and an ornate Persian belt. Socrates taught a different self-sufficiency: for him the wise man was not the one whose abilities had been expanded to fill his needs, but one whose needs had contracted to balance his abilities. Such a person seemed to others deprived. Antipho, the Sophist, once approached Socrates and, in the presence of a crowd whose attention he was trying to capture, said:


I thought, Socrates, that those who studied philosophy were to become happier than other men; but you seem to have reaped from philosophy fruits of an opposite kind; at least you live in such a way as no slave would continue with his master: you eat food and drink drink of the worst kind; you wear a dress that is not only bad but the same in summer and winter, and you continue shoeless and coatless. Money, which cheers men when they receive it, and enables those who possess it to live more generously and pleasantly, you do not take … you must consider yourself to be but a teacher of wretchedness.


Socrates answers that, since he doesn’t take money for his conversations, he is at liberty to talk to the people he likes. As for his diet: ‘he who eats with most pleasure is he who least requires sauce’. The purpose of changing dress in winter and summer is surely to enable people to go out in the different weather conditions, but Socrates points out that he has never had to stay at home because he was too hot or too cold, or because his feet hurt. He then rounds off his apologia for the ascetic life with words that inspired later generations:


‘I think that to want nothing is to resemble the gods and that to want as little as possible is to make the nearest approach to the gods; that the Divine nature is perfection and that to be nearest to the Divine nature is to be nearest to perfection.’



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