Socrates
Essay Preview: Socrates
Report this essay
Theresa Wise
Philosophy 101
M. Washburn
Socrates said that no harm could come to a good person. He felt that it was the person that you have been that relates to a good life and not the length of time you lived. The quality of life that you led is much more important than anything else in his eyes. He would have rather lived a short time and lived with virtue than have lived a very long and empty unexamined life.
Socrates main focus of what was good in life was the tending to of ones soul. He did not see himself as a teacher but as a physician, a midwife that leads a person to find knowledge, the knowledge that we all have within us but must be guided many times in order to find it. Knowledge is wisdom to Socrates and it is wisdom that shapes our actions and beliefs and thus making us the person that we are, either good or bad. Once a person has found knowledge and have allowed nous to be in charge of their soul, they are able to lead a wise and self controlled life. A nous controlled soul does not allow for misguided desires or selfish thoughts to lead us into bad situations that would hurt ourselves or those around us. To Socrates it was more important to take care of the soul than it was to take care of physical or social matters. All of those external things would some day go away but the soul is going to be with us forever. If we did not do right by our soul then we are indeed sick but in a more serious way than any physical ailment. At the time of his death Socrates was asked by his friends how would he have them bury him, his reply to them was “In any way that you like; but you must get hold of me, and take care that I do not run away from you.”(Thompson, 126) He was attempting to show them that he
was not the one being buried, just his body. His soul, Socrates, would be fine. No harm could come to him, not even by the drinking of the hemlock that would end his time on earth. He knew that the only thing that mattered, his soul, was healthy and he had lived the type of nous driven life that the Gods