Chapter 1: The First Philosopher

Chapter 1 of 'The Well-Balanced Soul'

“I met a man today who showed me that everything I thought I knew was built on sand.” - Plato

Is it possible to define what makes a “good” life? Most people would say no, it’s subjective. I’d like to introduce you to someone who would deeply, deeply disagree.

The year is 399 BCE and Athens is tense. The greatest democracy the world had ever known lay broken, recently defeated by Sparta in the Peloponnesian war. Athenians gather in the town square for political discourse. The scorching, dry air hums with the chatter of merchants and politicans. The city that had birthed philosophy, theater, and democracy now crawls with spies.

A strange old man walks barefoot through the marketplace, a bit out of place among the Athenians. He owns nothing and he’s not pleasant to look at. Short, stocky, with a snub nose and bulging eyes, historians have described him as bearing resemblance to a satyr. His face is weathered by years of poverty and his tunic barely covers his frail body.

He’s somewhat legendary amongst locals for his strange behavior. He often would stop mid-conversation and stand motionless in the street for hours lost in thought. He claimed to be guided by a daimon, an inner voice, that would guide him in all his actions. Scholars debate what he meant. Intuition? Something genuinely supernatural? The man claimed it was a gift from the gods. He had an unsuppressable habit of goading strangers into conversation, often to the point of agitation. He would seek out politicians lecturing the public, and begin to ask questions. Simple questions. Obvious questions. Questions that shouldn’t be difficult to answer.

The man’s name is Socrates and he was the son of Sophroniscus, a stonemason, and Phaenarete, a midwife. Fittingly, he would later call himself a “midwife of the soul.” Were it not for a strange series of events, he might have lived and died in poverty, an unknown figure wandering the streets of Athens. But fate had other plans. Centuries later, Steve Jobs would claim he would trade all his Apple stock for an afternoon with Socrates. Einstein, studying in Bern, would credit Socrates as as inspiration for his scientific breakthroughs. To understand why Socrates held such influence, we first need to see the world through his eyes.

A woman in the market once asked Socrates why, if he had renounced possessions, he spent so much time in the city surrounded by luxuries? To which he replied, “To remind me of all the things I am free from.”

The “Science Of The Soul”

Though Socrates often looked like a madman, he carried a rare gift that would shape the minds of millions throughout history: an almost superhuman endurance for questioning what others took for granted. He would stop a Greek politician in the middle of a speech about justice and cut straight to the heart with a simple question.

“Could you define justice?”

More often than not, his conversation partners discovered they could not.

In his younger years, Socrates was a soldier who served with honors in the Peloponnesian War. He was a brave and respected fighter, but his comrades remembered him for his unusual habits, marching barefoot through snow unaffected and going days without food. His mind was rigorous and methodical. His endurance was relentless. Socrates would peel back layer after layer of assumed knowledge until he lay bare new, unimaginable insights for all to see.

Socrates devoted his life to what he called a “science of the soul,” an effort to understand life’s most important questions with greater objectivity. What is justice? What is virtue? What is goodness? We use these words constantly, and they shape the way we live, yet most of us cannot truly define them.

He believed that just as there are principles that govern the health of the body, there are principles that govern the health of the soul. And just as mathematics has objective formulas, he believed there were objective truths about what makes a life good. These truths, however, are not obvious. Like math or medicine, they require study, effort, and intellectual rigor. For Socrates, investigating these principles was not optional. It was the foundation of a meaningful life.

Socrates’ method comes to life in his dialogue The Gorgias. He arrives late to a gathering at the home of Callicles, a wealthy socialite infamous for his hedonism and a rising figure in Athens’ emerging oligarchy. The scene is vivid: Callicles, drunk and surrounded by food and women, plays the host. Into this setting, Socrates introduces an unexpected topic—moderation.

(claude- open here with socrates, asking callicles a quesiton about why calliclies chooses a life of indulgence.”)

Callicles knows socrates ways well, or so he thinks.

Callicles: “Your philosophy, Socrates, teaches people to suppress their desires, to live like children rather than be in the full, natural power of men. When people who are naturally capable of enjoying all good things instead restrain themselves, they are cowardly. The truth is this: luxury and freedom—when they have power behind them—these are virtue and happiness. Everything else is just pretty words, human conventions that go against nature.”

Socrates: “That’s a bold statement, Callicles. And I appreciate your frankness—most people aren’t willing to say openly what they really think.

“But tell me this: do you think a person who can never satisfy their thirst is happy?”

Callicles: “Of course not. Such a person would live like a stone.”

Socrates: “What about someone who is always thirsty but always has unlimited water? Would that person be happier than someone who has moderate thirst?”

Callicles hesitates, sensing a trap but not yet seeing it clearly. “I suppose the one who is thirsty, but can always drink would be happier, yes.”

Socrates: “And what if we extend this? What about someone who is always hungry but can always eat, would such a person live more happily than a person who has moderate hunger?”

Callicles: “You’re being ridiculous, Socrates.”

Socrates: “But I’m following your logic. You said happiness consists in being able to satisfy your desires. So wouldn’t the person with the most intense desires, who could satisfy them all, be the happiest?”

Callicles: “That’s not what I meant, and you know it.”

Socrates: “But help me understand what you do mean. You’re saying that having fewer desires might actually make someone less happy than being able to satisfy unlimited desires?”

This is how Socrates works. Precise. Methodical.

Socrates presses further. “Are all pleasures equally good? Is the pleasure of eating when hungry the same as the pleasure of learning something true and beautiful?” Is the pleasure of drunkenness the same as the pleasure of helping someone in need?”

Socrates continues. “Consider this, my friend. You say that the good life consists in satisfying desires. But some desires, when satisfied, leave us wanting more of the same. Others, when satisfied, bring lasting contentment. Some pleasures make our soul’s content; others make us worse. Surely these differences matter?”

Callicles: “You’re overcomplicating things, Socrates. Pleasure is pleasure.”

Socrates counterparts often didn’t have the intellectual rigor or patience to follow him.

Socrates: “But is it? When you indulge in wine, are you the same person afterward as you were before? When you spend time in contemplation of truth and beauty, aren’t you also changed? But it seems to me that some activities, like seeking wisdom, strengthen the soul while others, like drinking wine, weaken it. Some bring us closer to contentment, while others lead us further from it.”

Gandhi once said that our actions express our priorities. In The Gorgias, Socrates systematically dismantles Callicles’s unexamined belief that hedonism is the best way to live. He draws a clear line between insatiable desires that addict and enslave us, and noble desires that genuinely nourish the soul. By the end, Callicles falls silent, frustrated, unable to answer Socrates’ questions. Too proud to admit defeat in front of his guests, he says nothing. But his certainty is shaken. For the first time, he is forced to consider that the endless pursuit of pleasure might not lead to the good life after all.

Socrates was always guiding his listeners toward a subtler reality hidden behind the one we see every day. Reaching it required rigor, patience, and constant examination. He believed every person should take up this pursuit, which he called the “Dialectic, ”the first and most essential form of education.

Through this disciplined inquiry, Socrates believed we could begin to grasp the deeper reality behind words like “beauty,” “good,” and “virtue.” These were not vague impressions, but terms with real definitions waiting to be uncovered. He called this study “Ethics,” a true “science of the soul,” often drawing comparisons to Pythagoras’s discoveries in mathematics.

His students caught glimpses of something most people never perceive: the hidden structure of the psyche that illuminates what it means to live well. His philosophy gave shape to questions most dismiss as subjective, and no one in history who has ever seen the world through Socrates’ eyes, can ever unsee it.

A Definition of Beauty

In another dialogue, Socrates is searching for a definition of Beauty with a young man in the marketplace. The conversation begins as the young man admires a vase.

“This vase is beautiful, shall I buy it?” the young man says.

“Indeed,” Socrates replies. “But tell me, what makes it beautiful?”

“Well, its proportions, its colors, the way it catches the light.”

“Ah, so you’re saying that beauty lies in these visible qualities?”

“Yes, exactly.”

Socrates nods thoughtfully. “Could you define beauty?”

The young man takes a long pause, and goes blank. “I cannot.”

Socrates: “If beauty is what you see with your eyes, then why do we also call a piece of music beautiful? Or a mathematical proof? Or an act of courage? None of these things have the visible properties you described. Is it really the vase, or the visible qualities that is the source of beauty?”

Socrates often invites his partners to question their own perception. He continues.

“You say this vase is beautiful because of its proportions and colors. But surely you’ve seen other vases with different proportions and different colors that you also found beautiful. So beauty can’t simply be this particular combination of visible qualities, can it?”

“It would be unwise,” Socrates warns, “to experience beauty without questioning its source.”

“When you look at this vase and call it beautiful,” Socrates explains, “your soul is recognizing something it already knows—the eternal pattern of Beauty itself. The vase is beautiful not because of its material properties, but because it reminds your soul of something in the higher spiritual realms.”

In Socrates’ view, what we call “beautiful” in the visible world is only a reminder of a higher, truer reality that exists beyond the material. Beauty, for him, is not contained in objects themselves but in the way they awaken something within us—an inner memory of that higher realm that lifts the mind into deeper thought.

His students would later describe these latent memories as “Forms,” patterns stored in the unconscious and stirred by external experiences. A thing is beautiful not because of its surface qualities, but because it participates in the eternal Form of Beauty, whose true source lies in the spiritual realm.

In the same way, Socrates spoke of the Forms of Justice, Courage, Virtue, and Goodness—eternal principles that give shape to the highest dimensions of human life.

In Tibetan Buddhism, it is said that all our actions are driven by a longing for a deeper truth, hidden like a spring of water buried far beneath the ground. To reach it, you must dig a deep well. The work is demanding—it requires patience, intellectual rigor, and a measure of faith, since there is no proof the water is there until you find it. Most people, the Buddhists say, never reach the wellspring of truth because they keep digging potholes, moving from one to the next continually.

If you have the patience to work your way through Socrates’ dialogues, you may never dig another pothole again. Take the idea of beauty. Most people mistake its source for the objects they see, staying trapped in a world of shifting appearances. But those who learn to see through the visible, toward the eternal Form behind it, begin to align their lives with what truly matters.

Socrates never wrote a single word of his dialogues down. And if not for a chance encounter with a well-born teenager around 407 BCE, he likely would have died in obscurity.

(this is the first part of chapter 1, will post the remaining tomorrow!)