The Gift of Fire | Page 3

them out. Indeed,
unless we are sufficiently his imitators, we might only know enough
not to want to seek him out, for some of those who sought Socrates out
found reason to wish that they hadn't. Unlike Jesus, or, to be more
accurate, unlike the Jesus whom many imagine, Socrates often brought
not the Good News, but the Bad.
Nevertheless, people do from time to time come to know enough about
Socrates to be drawn into his company, and to agree, with rare
exceptions, that it would indeed be a good thing to imitate him. The
stern poet-philosopher Nietzsche was one of those exceptions, for he
believed, and quite correctly, that reasonable discourse was the weapon
with which the weak might defeat the strong, but most of us often do
think of ourselves as weak rather than strong, and what seemed a bad
thing to Nietzsche seems a good thing to us. However, when we do try
to imitate Socrates, we discover that it isn't as easy, and as readily

possible to millions, as the imitation of Jesus is said to be.
So we make this interesting distinction: We decide that the imitation of
Jesus lies in one Realm, and the imitation of Socrates in quite another,
The name of the first, we can not easily say, but the name of the second
is pretty obviously "mind." Even the most ardent imitators of Jesus
seldom think of themselves as imitating the work of his mind, but of,
well, something else, the spirit, perhaps, or the feelings, or some other
faculty hard to name. But those who would imitate Socrates know that
they must do some work in the mind, in the understanding, in the
intellect, perhaps even in the formidable "intelligence" of the
educational psychologists, beyond whose boundaries we can no more
go than we can teach ourselves to jump tall buildings. We may
apparently follow Jesus simply by feeling one thing rather than another,
but the yoke of Socrates is not easy, and his burden not light, nor does
he suffer little children to come unto him.
And we say that, while it would be truly splendid to imitate his
example, it really can't be done as a general rule for ordinary life. Very
few of us are as smart as Socrates, after all, and the smartest of us are
already very busy in computers and astrophysics. Socrates appeared
once and only once among us, and the chances of his coming again are
very slim. We may hold him up as a shining example, of course, but as
a distant star, not a candle in the window of home. He is one in billions.
So we must, it seems, resign ourselves to living not the examined life
but the unexamined life, responding to the suggestions of environment
and the inescapable power of genetic endowment and toilet training.
Nevertheless, millions and millions of us contemplate no serious
difficulty at all in imitating the example of Jesus, who, as it happens, is
also held to be one in billions. We do not say, Ah well, a Jesus comes
but once among us, and we lesser folk must content ourselves with
remembering, once in a while, some word or deed of his, and trying,
although without any hope of truly and fully succeeding, to speak as he
might have spoken, to think as he might have thought, and to do as he
might have done. Sometimes, to be sure, provided that we do in fact
understand him correctly, which is by no means always certain, we

might come near the mark. But it is childish and idealistic to imagine
that we can, especially in this busiest and most technically demanding
of worlds, plainly and simply live as Jesus lived. No, we do not make
those reservations, but suppose rather that, in the case of this one life
among billions, we can launch ourselves, all at once, and as if by magic,
into the Way in which he walked. And this is because we imagine that
the Way of Socrates is barricaded by the wall of an intelligence test,
and the Way of Jesus is not, that the regularly examined life requires a
lot of hard mental labor, and that the good life is as natural and
automatic as the singing of the birds.
But there was at least one man who held, and who seems to have
demonstrated in a very convincing fashion, that Socrates was not at all
special, that he was, indeed, just as ignorant as the rest of us. We can
not dismiss him as a political enemy or an envious detractor, or even as
a more "advanced" philosopher who had the advantage of modern
information to which Socrates had no access. It was Socrates himself
who made that demonstration. And,