wisdom is not for sale
Socrates' views about the limits of human knowledge had important implications for his status as a teacher of wisdom, a 'sophist'. It would be hypocritical for a person who doubts the value of any human wisdom to teach other people to be wise.
In fact Plato suggests that Socrates did not even pretend to be a teacher of wisdom. 'I have never set up as any man's teacher', he declares. 'But if anyone, young or old, is keen to hear me talking and carrying out my own mission, I never refuse to let him do so; nor do I charge a fee for talking to him, or refuse to talk without one' (Plato, Apology, 33a). In this respect, Plato's Socrates is sharply distinguished from the sophists, who claimed to have wisdom and to be able to impart it to the young - for a hefty fee.
Sophists taught teenagers who had finished their basic training with a tutor. Like an education at a good American college today, a course of study with a well-respected sophist did not come cheap. The most famous (like Protagoras or Gorgias) could charge around 100 minae for a complete course of study. This is roughly equivalent to $500,000 - more than the current cost of a bachelor's degree from Harvard or Yale, which is around $300,000. Less famous teachers could be hired for a much lower fee. Euenus of Paros charged only five minae for a whole course.
High fees were justified by the importance of the product for sale. As one contemporary commentator put it, 'We value what is expensive more than what is free.' Those who were 'reassuringly expensive' treated their financial success as evidence for their value: 'The proof of wisdom is the ability to make the most money', as Plato's Socrates sarcastically put it. Inevitably, fathers who paid such large sums worried about whether they were getting their money's worth. Would these self-professed teachers of wisdom equip their sons well for society? Or did they only make young people question the ways of their fathers? As we have seen, Aristophanes' Clouds articulates many of these anxieties.
Unlike all other freelance wisdom-mongers in the city, Socrates did not charge private fees for his teaching. Sophists were often seen as intellectual whores who would sell their minds to all comers. By contrast, Socrates asked (in Xenophon's account), 'Who do you know who is more free than I am, since I accept neither gifts nor wages from anybody?' Presumably the claim never ever to accept gifts is a flattering exaggeration. Socrates certainly accepted dinner invitations, and it may well have been his rich friends who ensured that his wife and children did not starve. But the main point is clear enough. Socrates was a poor man who could behave like an aristocrat through his indifference to worldly goods. His refusal to charge fees allowed him to choose his associates freely - although, as we shall see in the next chapter, Socrates' strange ways with money earned him enemies as well as admirers.
For Plato, Socrates' refusal to charge fees was philosophi- cally significant. His Socrates often declares that the sophists are well worth the money they charge, if indeed they are able to teach people to be wise. If there were a person capable of teaching wisdom, Socrates would advise any father to spend his life savings on an education with such a man, and count it cheap at the price. But if the sophists do not really know the things they profess to teach, and if wisdom is not really the kind of thing that one person can teach another, then the whole enterprise of sophistic education is wrong-headed. Socrates rejects the idea that wisdom can be gained through commercial exchange.
Plato describes Socrates discussing wisdom at a party with a pretentious tragic poet called Agathon. Socrates says:
Oh, Agathon, it would be wonderful if wisdom were the kind of thing that would flow from us, from the fuller one to the emptier, if we just touch one another, like water which runs from a fuller cup to an emptier one on a piece of wool. If wisdom works that way too, I would feel enormously privileged to sit next to you. I reckon I would soon be filled up with a beautiful big river of wisdom.
But Agathon recognises that he is being teased. 'Socrates,' he says, 'I know you are making fun of me.' Wisdom is pre- cisely not the kind of thing that can be transferred from one person's mind to another's, like water on a piece of wool. A wise person can interact with a foolish one and leave him none the wiser.
In modern American colleges, and increasingly in Britain, students and parents want to get good value for the large cost of a higher education. You do not pay $75,000 a year to learn that you know nothing. Plato's Socrates suggests that money taints the whole educational process: you cannot be entirely open-minded about the value of a product that you have bought. All consumers fear buying 'a pig in a poke'. We want to get what we pay for and we want, therefore, to be able to examine the product before we buy. But buying an education cannot fit this model, because the evaluation can take place only retrospectively and will itself be affected by the experience that has been bought.
Modern societies are increasingly built on the exchange of cultural or intellectual capital for economic wealth. Plato's Socrates challenges this system, suggesting that the search for truth should be entirely distinct from commer- cial exchange. You may be able to buy social advancement, political connections or better job prospects for your children by sending them to Yale, but you cannot buy them access to the truth.
If wisdom is not the kind of thing that one person can teach to another, then the sophists' fees are obviously a waste of money. But, even more than that, the fees of the sophists may be morally dangerous, if they lull people into the false belief that they can pay somebody else to do their thinking for them. Wisdom, Socrates insists, is not a commodity. This is a radical claim, both for the Athenians and for us today.
happiness, choice and being good
Socrates' views about knowledge and wisdom were deeply paradoxical by any standards. He thought that nobody could teach another person to know the truth. And yet knowledge was more or less the only thing worth having, since knowl- edge alone can make us both happy and good.
Socrates set knowledge at the centre of human behaviour. He claimed that 'Nobody willingly does wrong' and argued that whenever people behave badly - to each other or to themselves - it is because they do not know the truth about what they should do.
This is, on the face of it, an absurd idea. We all see people acting against their own best interests all the time and often they seem to know quite well what they are doing. For example, everybody knows perfectly well that smoking cig- arettes is bad for your health. It tells you so right there on the pack: smoking causes cancer and other diseases. If we extend 'doing wrong' to cover immoral as well as imprudent action, the Socratic position seems even more ridiculous. People behave badly all the time. Some murderers are crimi- nally insane, certainly. But many more people act in cruel, unjust, dishonest ways, even though they seem to be quite well aware that what they are doing is wrong.
One obvious explanation, which both Plato and Aristotle adopted (with variations), is to suggest that people are divided into several different parts, including both rational and irrational elements. Perhaps your rational self knows that cigarettes may make you die a horrible early death. But another part of you - which Plato names to epithymetikon, the 'desiring part' - has a nicotine craving to satisfy. Similarly, your 'desiring part' might want money more desperately than your superior moral part wants to avoid committing murder. Reason often seems to fight with desire; our rational knowledge of what we ought to do is overwhelmed by our passions.
Socrates' position, then, was extremely surprising, and on the face of it extremely implausible. He believed that in so far as we know the good, we act upon our knowledge. This leaves an obvious problem. How can a philosophy that denies the existence both of wilful imprudence and of delib- erate crime make any sense of the world we live in?