We see here many of the traits of a Socratic dialogue: Socrates, professing to have no special knowledge, seeks it from a companion, often a self-proclaimed expert. He extracts a definition. He extracts other statements from the companion, and then shows how those other statements are incompatible with the definition. He extracts yet another definition and examines that one in turn. Socrates appears to be deeply committed to attaining virtue but lacking in the means to arrive at it. Yet we see also that Socrates is a master of logic and has some strongly-held convictions about what virtue is. He also tends to emerge as the one speaker who can make sense of the discussion. But we rarely see any progress. What is going on here?
Socrates’ life is an enigma; the views that he on occasion advances as his own are paradoxical. His method, if he has one, seems totally inadequate to produce the virtuous life that seems to be his goal. How could settling on a definition of some virtue make a person virtuous? Is Socrates then merely playing mind games with his interlocutors? Is he intent on embarrassing them in public? Is he perhaps mocking the pretenses of his contemporaries, or, worse yet, mocking the conventions of society along with the foundations of morality?
Or is Socrates sincerely committed to the pursuit of virtue and the good life, but unable to arrive at the promised land? Is his life a saga of failed attempts to define virtue and perhaps failed attempts to get others to care about his quest? This is the view of some of the Socratics and of a fair number of modern interpreters of Socrates.
On the other hand, Socrates is the man who stood firm against six thousand angry men in the Assembly of Athens, and would not allow them to break their own laws in their haste to condemn six generals to death. This is the man who, when he was on trial for his life, told five hundred jurors that he was the best thing that ever happened to Athens, that he was the champion of virtue and in the service of the gods in turning the people of the city toward goodness and justice.
Whatever we may think of Socrates’ philosophy and his idiosyncratic method of pursuing it with the citizens of Athens, it seems to have given Socrates deeply-held convictions, powerful enough that he risked his life to uphold them on several occasions. And it seems to have inspired in his followers, including the well-born and highly intelligent young men of Athens, a deep admiration and indeed reverence for him as the best man of his generation.
It is likely that Plato, Xenophon, and the other Socratics dedicated their lives to making sense of the thought and carrying on the work of their intellectual master. Not that they fully understood it, and not that they agreed among themselves on exactly what the master was up to. But Socrates was, for all his self-effacing attitude, a charismatic figure who inspired emulation in his followers. He alone seemed completely immersed in the philosophical life, to the point of abandoning all accumulation of goods, all self-aggrandizement, all personal promotion in his pursuit of the truth. He was the man they trusted to lead them to the promised land of philosophical wisdom. And perhaps he might show them how to bring order out of the chaos of their time as the leading city of the Greek world collapsed into anarchy and civil war.