We have discussed the socio-psychological process presented by the enigmatic figure of Anaxagoras because only in the light of this process can the mind of Socrates be explored.
Nothing is better established in our tradition than the fact that Socrates experienced a philosophical conversion. Plato gives a full account of the process in the Phaedo. This passage is so important that we quote it in full.
"Then I will tell you, said Socrates. When I was young, Cebes, I had a prodigious desire to know that department of philosophy which is called the investigation of nature; to know the causes of things and why a thing is and is created or destroyed appeared to me to be a lofty profession; and I was always agitating myself with the consideration of questions such as these: -- Is the growth of animals the result of some decay which the hot and cold principle contracts, as some have said? Is the blood the element with which we think, or the air, or the fire? or perhaps nothing of the kind -- but the brain may be the originating power of the perceptions of hearing and sight and smell, and memory and opinion may come from them, and science may be based on memory an opinion when they have attained fixity. And then I went on t examine the corruption of them, and then to the things of heave and earth, and at last I concluded myself to be utterly and absolutely incapable of these enquiries, as I will satisfactorily prove to you. For I was fascinated by them to such a degree that my eyes grew blind to things which I had seemed to myself, and al to others, to know quite well; I forgot what I had before thought self-evident truths; e.g., such a fact as that the growth of man the result of eating and drinking; for when by the digestion food flesh is added to flesh and bone to bone, and whenever there is an aggregation of congenial elements, the lesser bulk becomes larger and the small man great."/ 33/
"… Then I heard someone reading, as he said, from a book of Anaxagoras, that mind was the disposer and cause of all, and I was delighted at this notion, which appeared quite admirable ad I said to myself: If mind is the disposer, mind will dispose all, for the best, and put each particular in the best place; and I argued that if anyone desired to find out the cause of the genera don or state of being or doing or suffering was best for that thing, and therefore a man had only to consider the best for himself and others and then he would also know the worse, since the same science comprehended both. And I rejoiced to think that I had found in Anaxagoras a teacher of the causes of existence such as I desired, and I imagined that he would tell me first whether the earth is flat or round; and whichever was true, he would proceed to "plain the cause and the necessity of this being so, and then he would teach me the nature of the best and show that this was best; and if he said that the earth was in the centre, he would further explain that this position was the best, and I should be satisfied with the explanation given, and not want any other sort of cause. And I thought that I would then go on and ask him about the sun and moon and stars, and that he would explain to me their comparative swiftness, and their returnings and various states, active and passive, and how all of them were for the best. For I could not imagine that when he spoke of mind as the disposer of them, he would give any other account of their being as they are, except that this was best; and I thought that when he had explained to me in detail the cause of each and cause of all, he would go on to explain to me what was best for each and what was good for all. These hopes I would not have sold for a large sum of money, and I seized the books and read them as fast as I could in my eagerness to know the better and the worse.
"What expectations I had formed, and how grievously was I disappointed! As I proceeded, I found my philosopher altogether forsaking mind or any other principle of order, but having recourse to air, and ether, and water, and other eccentricities. I might compare him to a person who began by maintaining generally that mind is the cause of the actions of Socrates, but who, when he / 34 / endeavored to explain the causes of my several actions in detail, went on to show that I sit here because my body is made up of bones and muscles; and the bones, as he would say, are hard and have joints which divide them, and the muscles are elastic, and they cover the bones, which have also a covering or environment of flesh and skin which contains them; and as the bones are lifted at their joints by the contraction or relaxation of the muscles, I am able to bend my limbs, and this is why I am sitting here in a curved posture -- that is what he would say; and he would have a similar explanation of my talking to you, which he would attribute to sound, and air, and hearing, and he would assign ten thousand other causes, which is, that the Athenians have thought fit to condemn me, and accordingly I have thought it better and more right to remain here and undergo my sentence; for I am inclined to think that these muscles and bones of mine would have gone off long ago to Megara or Boeotia -- by the dog they would, if they had been only by their own idea of what was best, and if I had not chosen the better and nobler part, instead of playing truant and running away, of enduring any punishment which the state inflicts. There is surely a strange confusion of causes and conditions in all this. It may be said, indeed, that without bones and muscles and the other parts of the body I cannot execute my purposes. But to say that I do as I do because of them, and that this is the way in which mind acts, and not from the choice of the best, is a very careless and idle mode of speaking. I wonder that they cannot distinguish the cause from the condition, which the many, feeling about in the dark, arc always mistaking and misnaming. And thus one man makes a vortex all round and steadies the earth by the heaven; another gives the air as a support to the earth, which is a sort of broad trough. Any power which in arranging them as they are arranges them for the best never enters into their minds; and instead of finding any superior strength in it, they rather expect to discover another Atlas of the world who is stronger and more everlasting and more containing than the good; -- of the obligatory and containing power of the good they think nothing; and yet / 35 / this is the principle which I would fain learn if anyone would teach me." 37
Xenophon, whose mind was far less subtle, but whose capacity for hero worship was certainly as great, lets slip one or two hints about Socrates' early enthusiasms that tend to support Plato's aunt. He tells us that Socrates' school at one stage in his career had consisted of a group of scientific investigators; 38 that he possessed advanced knowledge of astronomy and geometry. 39 There is a certain naiveté about Xenophon's description of Socrates' contact with natural science. In the Memorabilia he states categorically, at the start, that Socrates despised the investigations of scientists. "In the first place, he would enquire," reports Xenophon, "did these thinkers suppose that their knowledge of human affairs was so complete that they must seek these new fields for the exercise of their brains. . . ." 40 And again, "Indeed he would argue that to trouble one's mind with such problems was sheer folly. 41 Later on he seems to forget himself and tells us a number of startlingly contradictory things about his hero. "For instance, he said that the study of geometry should be pursued until the student was competent to measure a parcel of land accurately in case he wanted to take over, convey or divide it, or to compute the yield; and this knowledge was so easy to acquire, that anyone who gave his mind to mensuration knew the size of the piece and carried away a knowledge of the principles of land measurement. He was against carrying the study of geometry so far as to include the more complicated figures, on the ground that he could not see the use of them. Not that he was himself unfamiliar with them, but he said that they were enough to occupy a lifetime, to the complete exclusion of many other useful studies.
"Similarly he recommended them to make themselves familiar with astronomy, but only so far as to be able to find the time of night, month and year, in order to use reliable evidence when planning a journey by land or sea, or setting the watch, and in all other affairs that are done in the night or month or year, by distinguishing the times and seasons aforesaid." 42
From the passage in the Phaedo just quoted one or two points/ 36 / arise in fairly clear outline. Socrates went through a philosophical conversion; this conversion was a turning-away from materialism and a concept of material causation to idealism and a belief in teleological causation. The transition came as a result of reading a book of Anaxagoras who had promised to exhibit "mind" as the ordering principle of the universe: He rejoiced if the book could really explain all process as well as all existence by showing what it was best that it should be. But he found to his great disappointment that Anaxagoras had not really synthesized mind and matter nor brought into harmony the concepts of mechanical and ideal causation. And finally this new way of thinking is represented by Plato as a sudden change, revulsion of feeling due to his disappointment with the inadequacy of Anaxagoras' use of the concept of mind. Taylor's comment on the passage is as follows: "Of course since he gives us no chronological indications except that the events belong to the early life of Socrates, it is quite possible that the intellectual revolution he describes in a page or two may have taken some considerable time for its completion." 43 There is no need to be so agnostic on this point as Taylor. In the first place, it is antecedently highly improbable that a mind should make this kind of volte face and pass from materialism to idealism, as it were, overnight. In the second place, we have a great deal of positive evidence to demonstrate that Plato's account cannot be taken as a reliable story of Socrates' intellectual transition. From Theophrastus, an unusually reliable authority, who may himself have studied in the Academy (he was certainly in Athens during Plato's lifetime) but who turned away from idealism to botanical and biological investigations and had therefore no interest in recreating a Platonic Socrates, we have the positive assertion that Socrates was a pupil of Archelaus, the successor of Anaxagoras as head of the school when the latter was forced to leave Athens. 44 Aristoxenus of Tarentum, an associate of Aristotle, says that Socrates was first introduced to Archelaus when he (Socrates) was seventeen and that their friendship continued for many years. 45 Diogenes Laertius preserves the remark of a fifth-century tragic poet, Ion of Chios, that Socrates, when a young man, visited the / 37 / island of Samos in the company of Archelaus. We can probably attribute this visit to the year 44i-4o when Athens was blockading the island of Samos. Archelaus and Socrates, both young men at the time, may have been serving in the Athenian force.
There is some evidence that the relationship between Archelaus and his promising pupil was more intimate than modern taste approves between a teacher and pupil. Diogenes Laertius says that Socrates, when a boy, had been the favorite of his teacher Archelaus, which is confirmed by Porphyrius, who says that Socrates when a youth of seventeen years was not averse from the love of Archelaus, for at that time he was much given to sensuality, which was later supplanted by zealous intellectual work.' 46
Putting these statements together we get a fairly coherent picture. Socrates evidently spent many years in close association with Archelaus and was probably a member of his school. 47
Diogenes Laertius mentions as authorities Io, Aristoxenus, and Diocles-a tradition going back to Socrates himself. Others who mention this tradition are Cicero, Sextus, Porphyrius, Clement of Alexandria, Simplicius, Eusebius, and Origen. Zeller has expressed his disbelief in the association. His first argument to the contrary is based on the silence of Plato, Xenophon and Aristotle. Certainly the first two of these had good reasons for passing over lightly the earlier materialistic and democratic associations of Socrates. Secondly, according to Zeller, Socrates refers to himself (in Xen. Sym) as an autourgos, a self-taught philosopher. This weak denial must be taken to refer to the later idealistic Socrates. Socrates could well claim that in developing his idealistic point of view he was an originator. But he never himself denied that he learned from Anaxagoras. In his argument Zeller makes one more extraordinary assumption-that Socrates was seventeen years old when Anaxagoras left Athens, and that at seventeen he must have / 38 / passed the stage of pupillage. That would reveal a remarkable precocity!
Nothing is known from contemporaries of the views of Archelaus -the comments concerning his actual philosophic opinions are those of much later authorities. The lack of firsthand information, however, is compensated by the unanimity of the doxographers on certain important points. From their isolated statements we can at least discern the basis for a tradition about the school of Archelaus. It is very clear that he developed the philosophy of Anaxagoras in a materialistic direction.
Diogenes Laertius says 48 that he was the first to bring Ionian physical philosophy to Athens and was called a physicist. While this is clearly a mistake, it is an understandable mistake if Archelaus developed the materialistic side of Anaxagoras. Further, says Diogenes, "Physical philosophy ceased with him, for Socrates introduced 'ethics.' "
Origen gives us a statement that is terse but arresting; Archelaus held that in mind subsists a kind of immediate mixture. 49 Stobaeus supports this view by attributing to Archelaus the statement that air is mind and God, but that mind is not a creative principle in the universe. 50
Plutarch and others maintain that he regarded air as the first principle of things, and held that air and what was created from air by the process of condensation and rarefaction (water and fire) were infinite. 51 "He treated the mixture of matter just as Anaxagoras had done and he treated first principles in the same way. He held that in mind subsists a kind of immediate mixture. The principle of motion lay in the separation from one another of heat and cold; that heat set things in motion and cold puts them at rest." So far his views make little advance on the physical theories of the Ionian school; in fact, his view of the separation of opposites and their strife as the ultimate causative principle is very close to Ionian doctrines. But in discussing the development of living creatures / 39 /the evolution of man, Archelaus takes over the ideas of Anaximander and adds a new richness of content and description. Anaximander had put in a somewhat obscure way the notions that men were born "in the inside of fishes" and that "man was like another animal, namely, a fish, in the beginning." But he had seen, with remarkable insight, that human beings must have emerged through an evolutionary development. 52 Archelaus, developing this theory, says that "as regards living creatures when the earth grew warm, at first in its lower portion, wherever the warm and the cold mingled, man appeared and many other living creatures, all having the same mode of life, nurtured as they were from the slime. The time required was not long-but later they were begotten from each other. And men were separated off from die others and established leaders and laws and arts and cities, and so on. And he says that mind is developed in all living creatures. Each uses intelligence; but some more slowly and some more quickly. 53
The most striking bit of information about Archelaus' thinking comes to us from Diogenes," who makes it clear that Archelaus united his materialistic and evolutionary theories with a thoroughly sophistic view of ethics and human institutions. "The just and the base are not so by nature but rather by convention." There could be no more convincing example of the inherent unity of physical science and sophistic relativism.