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“taken there by my belief as to the best course, if I had not thought it more right and honourable to endure whatever penalty the city ordered rather than escape or run away?” 30 Science should, of course, continue, but Socrates felt that the
phusikoi
were not asking the really important questions. If you were interested in morality or meaning, you would have to look elsewhere.
    Like the
mystai
at Eleusis, the people who came to converse with Socrates did not come to learn anything but to have an experience and a radical change of mind. The Socratic dialogue was a spiritual exercise. The French historian and philosopher Pierre Hadot has shown that unlike modern philosophy, which tends to be purely notional, Athenian rationalism derived its insights from practical exercises and a disciplined lifestyle. 31 The conceptual writings of philosophers like Plato or Aristotle were either teaching aids or merely served as a preliminary guide for those looking for a new way of living. Unlike the
phusikoi
, Socrates was primarily interested in goodness, which, like Confucius, he refused to define. Instead of analyzing the concept of virtue, he wanted to live a virtuous life. When asked for a definition of justice, for example, Socrates replied: “Instead of speaking it, I make it understood in my acts.” 32 It was only when a person chose to behave justly that he could form any idea of a wholly just existence.
    For Socrates and those who came after him, a philosopher was essentially a “lover of wisdom.” He yearned for wisdom precisely because he realized that he lacked it. As Paul Friedlander has explained, there was “a tension between
ignorance
—that is, the impossibility ultimately to put into words ‘what justice is’—and the direct experience of the unknown, the existence of the just man, whom justice raises to the level of the divine.” 33 As far as we can tell from Plato’s dialogues, Socrates seems to have been reaching toward a transcendent notion of absolute virtue that could never be adequatelyconceived or expressed but could be intuited by such spiritual disciplines as meditation. Socrates was famous for his formidable powers of concentration. “Every now and then he just goes off,” a friend remarked, “and stands motionless, wherever he happens to be.” 34 Alcibiades, the famous Athenian politician, recalled that during a military campaign, Socrates had started thinking about a problem, could not resolve it, and to the astonishment of his fellow soldiers “stood there, glued to the spot,” all day and all night, leaving his station only at dawn, “when the sun came out and he made his prayers to the new day.” 35 Plato’s dialogues were a model for the type of meditation that Socrates and his followers practiced; it was nothing like yoga but took the form of a conversation with oneself—conducted either in solitude or together with others—that pushed thought to the very limit.
    But this type of internal dialogue was possible only if the self that you were conversing with was authentic. Socrates’ mission was to awaken genuine self-knowledge in the people who came to talk to him. He had invented what is known as dialectic, a rigorous discipline designed to expose false beliefs and elicit truth. Consequently a conversation with Socrates could be disturbing. Even if somebody started to talk to him about something quite different, his friend Niceas explained, he would finally be forced to “submit to answering questions about himself concerning both his present manner of life and the life he has lived hitherto. And … Socrates will not let him go before he has well and truly tested every last detail.” 36 He would discuss only those subjects that his conversation partners felt comfortable with. Laches, for example, as a general in the army, thought he understood the nature of courage and was convinced that it was a noble quality. And yet, Socrates pointed out, relentlessly piling up one example