Socrates Divine Mission And The Examined Life Sparknotes

Kylee Green
Socrates’ Divine Mission and the Examined Life Socrates’ begins his divine mission when the oracle says that he, in fact, is the wisest man. Socrates then goes on to try to prove that prophecy wrong because he feels that there are many people who are wiser than him and there are so many things that he does not know. Socrates starts to talk about his divine mission in front of the court as a way to explain himself to them. He described to them about how he questioned men who he considered to be very wise. He goes first to the politicians. Only to conclude that they are not wise because they thought they knew more than they did. Then Socrates goes to question the poets. He decides they are not wise because they could not explain their own writings. Last, he goes to question the artisans who he also finds unwise, for the same reasons as the others, they believed they knew more than they did. After this questioning, he comes to the conclusion that he is indeed the wisest man, because he is the only one who acknowledges that he knows nothing (Pojman and Vaughn p.8).
He is continuously trying to dig deeper into people’s minds to learn more and examine what they know. Leading the examined life is not about being the wisest, but about assessing ones’ everyday involvements to understand more about life altogether. The oracle prompts Socrates to lead an examined life by telling him that he is the wisest man. It causes him to go out in pursuit of the truth. This is the process where he questions the politicians, the poets, and the artisans to better understand their wisdom and match it to his