Perfection: Coming to Terms with Being Human

3. Interpreting the Call

39 chapter three Interpreting the Call Socrates describes the call as a “prophetic voice” that first came to him in early childhood and remained his “constant companion .”1 The voice commanded his “service to God (23b), which he took to mean that his life’s calling must be that of “leading the philosophical life” (28e), of “elucidating the truth” for others (29d) and encouraging them “not to think more of practical advantages than of . . . [their] mental and moral well-being” (36c). To those who accused him of corrupting the minds of the youth, Socrates said, “I am . . . a gift from God” (31a). He could not say this if he did not believe it to be true, he said, for the voice, his daemon, always spoke up and prevented him from committing any wrongdoing (40a–b). When the call came, lying was out of the question, as was any involvement in the politics of public life, “corrupted” as they were by the teachings of those (the sophists) who were eloquent but unwise, who were skilled in the oratorical practice of making “the weaker argument defeat the stronger by employing flowery language . . . decked out with fine words and phrases” (17b–18b). Although he accepted being called an “orator” as long as that was defined to mean “one who speaks the truth” (17b), Socrates 40 • Perfection “would much rather die” as the result of his philosophical ways and commitments than engage himself in the unethical maneuvers of sophistry (38d–e). His daemon never balked at this decision , nor did the companion balk when Socrates turned to the teachings of Hippocrates (the father of scientific medicine) as a remedy for curing rhetoric’s ills. Socrates’ diagnosis and prescription are clear: in performing its principal function of influencing men’s souls, rhetoric is suffering from the malady of sophistry, of granting priority to opinion, appearance, and probability over science, knowledge, and truth. As science is currently developing a rational understanding of the body and its diseases, so must rhetoric develop a rational understanding of the soul and of any topic that is discussed to influence it. If rhetoric is to be cured of its ill-mannered behavior such that it will no longer insult the intelligence of those who “know the truth about things” or further infect those who do not, it must acquire the healthy status of a techne. It must become scientific in scope and function; it must know itself to be a true medicament of the soul.2 Hippocratic physicians made use of the orator’s art. Whether in spoken or written form, rhetoric enabled these first men of scientific medicine to define and defend their techne during public debates and while treating patients in their homes or in the physicians ’ workshops. It thus served the important purpose of calling into being a “medical public” that, owing to its new scientific education , could stand with the Hippocratic physicians in their initial fight against traveling sophistic lecturers and those quack doctors whose practice still admitted the use of magical charms.3 Plato commended this rhetoric of science in his Laws.4 Hippocratic physicians employed it, however, so as to be done with it. The author of the Hippocratic and rhetorical treatise The Art gives testimony to this fact when, in concluding his defense of scientific medicine, he willingly discredits what he has been engaged in by noting with approval that “the multitude find it more natural to believe what they have seen than what they have heard.”5 Once a physician’s medical skills are demonstrated not in words but in action, rhetoric becomes superfluous for the Hippocratics, or at best something that must be uttered to patients whose opinions and fears reflect their ignorance about the truth of medicine and about the trust they should have in Interpreting the Call • 41 their healers’ diagnostic and prognostic abilities.6 As the author of the Hippocratic text Decorum notes, the wisdom that these healers possess and that they must constantly seek as their first priority makes them “the equal of a god. Between wisdom and medicine there is no gulf fixed.”7 Under Hippocratic doctrine, rhetoric is destined to lose its status as medical science flourishes. Indeed, according to the author of the Hippocratic Law, “There are in fact two things, science and opinion; the former begets knowledge, the latter ignorance.”8 Medicine is a science and must remain a science by...