The Gospel of Hellas - Research Institute for Waldorf Education

the rise of philosophy
could lead to the center of his power of intellect, but it could also linger at the
mere surface of formulas and thus result in sophistry.
Sophistry appeared as a children’s disease of the new faculty of dialectic.
The Sophists, with all their hair-splitting, quibbling, fallacy and trickery, abused
the independence of the intellect and brought the Greek mind to an abyss of
materialism, skepticism and irony through which the golden treasure of all its
art and science was in danger of being lost. The Sophists were caricatures of the
true philosophers.
Who brought the decisive turn in the course of dialectic? Who healed the
children’s disease of the intellectual soul? The redeemer of sophistry was one
who began to work among the Sophists at first as their disciple, then as their
master, and finally as their savior: Socrates.
The life of Socrates was coincident with Hellas’ turning point brought
about by the Peleponnesian War. Following those decades at the end of the
fifth century the Hellenes came into their full personality. The feeling of mere
membership in the polis gave way to that of complete individualism. Great
was the danger that the individual might lose all his background of tradition,
religion and custom and might now fall into the snares of irony, wit, and
skepticism and into the materialism of sophistry!
Socrates was a dialectician, yet he did not misdirect the attention to mere
surface wit but led it to the center of the intellect. He did not write down a
single line of his thoughts; he devoted himself entirely to the Dia-Logos. Hence
he called himself a midwife of thought. His method of thinking was indeed a
way—a walking with the legs and a talking with the tongue: a speaking thought,
a thinking speech. The “logos in between”—the dialogue—was a living being
who strove for the truth and through wisdom called forth temperance and
justice. The dia-logos was the new principle wherewith to attain harmonia and
kalokagathia—the true dignity of man.
Socrates was the mightiest individual at the time of the Civil War. The
walls of Athens were destroyed, the fleet of the empire was lost, the colonies
fell away from the metropolis and nothing was left but the impertinence of
Alcibiades, the skepticism of Euripides and the frivolity of Aristophanes in
the unchecked state of individualism. Despite these catastrophic changes in
the world around him, Socrates revealed anew the word of Heraclitus: “Man’s