The Socrates Express

Rarely, once or twice in a lifetime if you’re lucky, you stumble across a sentence so unexpected, so plump with meaning, it stops you cold. I found such a sentence buried inside an odd little book called The Heart of Philosophy, by Jacob Needleman. I say odd because at the time I didn’t know philosophy had a heart. I thought it was all head.

Here is the sentence: “Our culture has generally tended to solve its problems without experiencing its questions.”

I put the book down and turned the words over in my mind. I knew they contained an important truth but I didn’t know what. I was confused. How does one experience questions? And what is wrong with solving problems?

A few weeks later, I found myself sitting across from the man who wrote that profound and perplexing sentence. Jacob Needleman is a professor of philosophy at San Francisco State University. Age has slowed his gait. His voice has grown reedy, his skin thin like crepe paper, but his mind remains nimble. Jacob thinks before speaking and, unlike most professors of philosophy, uses words normal people use. Words like “question” and “experience.” The way he combines them, though, is anything but normal.

As we sit on his deck overlooking the Oakland Hills, sipping Earl Grey tea and water infused with lemon, I ask Needleman, in so many words: Are you nuts? We ask questions. Sometimes we pose questions. We might grapple with questions. We do not experience questions. Not even in California.

Needleman is silent. For a long time. So long that I fear he has dozed off. Finally, he stirs, and speaks in a voice so low I have to inch closer to hear.

“It’s rare but it’s possible. Socrates experienced questions.”

Of course. The inscrutable, inevitable Socrates. Philosophy’s patron saint. The King of the Question. Socrates didn’t invent the question, but he altered the way we ask them and, in turn, the answers they yield. You think and act differently because of Socrates, even if you know nothing about him.

Socrates isn’t an easy man to know. Perched so high on the pedestal we’ve erected for him, he’s barely visible. Just a speck. An idea, and a fuzzy one at that.

This is a shame. Socrates was not a speck. He was not an idea. He was a man. A breathing, walking, defecating, lovemaking, nose-picking, wine-drinking, joke-telling man.

An ugly man, too. The ugliest man in Athens, it was said. His nose was broad and flat, his lips full and fleshy, his belly large. He was bald. He had crablike eyes, widely spaced, that endowed him with great peripheral vision. Socrates may or may not have known more than other Athenians (he insisted he knew nothing), but he definitely saw more.

Socrates ate little, bathed rarely, and always wore the same shabby clothes. He walked barefoot everywhere, even in the dead of winter, and with a strange gait, somewhere between a waddle and a swagger. He could go days without sleep, drink without getting drunk. He heard voices—well, a voice. He called it his daemon. “This began when I was a child,” he explained during his trial on charges of impiety and corrupting the youth of Athens. “It is a voice, and whenever it speaks it turns me away from something I am about to do, but it never encourages me to do anything.”

Taken together, Socrates’s peculiar appearance and idiosyncrasies made him otherworldly. “He seems to have entered mankind’s ‘great conversation’ from outside, as if from another planet,” says the contemporary philosopher Peter Kreeft.

This is true, I think, of all philosophers. They possess an otherness that borders on the alien. Even Marcus, a Roman emperor, felt like a misfit. Diogenes, a founder of Cynicism, was the ultimate oddball philosopher. He lived in a barrel, masturbated in public, and in general traumatized the good people of ancient Athens.