Aspasia: The Woman Who Slapped Socrates

By Neel Burton | July 19, 2026

If Aspasia taught Socrates, Western philosophy begins with a woman.

Socrates holding his cheek — According to Plato, Socrates’ education may have included the occasional slap.

By Dr Neel Burton — Psychiatrist, philosopher, and wine writer; Fellow of Green Templeton College, University of Oxford; author of over twenty books.

Few figures in ancient Greece are as intriguing—or as neglected—as Aspasia of Miletus, the companion of Pericles, the friend of Socrates, and the greatest female intellectual of classical Athens. Although she has been erased from the traditional history of philosophy, there is substantial evidence that she did far more than beguile great men. If that evidence is to be believed, Socrates is rooted not only in Anaxagoras and Pythagoras, but also in Aspasia.

The first piece of evidence comes from no less than Plato’s Menexenus, in which Socrates claims to have learnt the art of rhetoric from Aspasia of Miletus, ‘an excellent mistress… who has made so many good speakers [including] the best among the Hellenes—Pericles, the son of Xanthippus.’

To prove it, Socrates recites a funeral oration that Aspasia recently composed and taught to him. He tells Menexenus that he still ought to remember the speech because, whenever he forgot the words in rehearsal, Aspasia threatened to slap him.

The speech closely resembles—and gently satirises—the famous funeral oration delivered by Pericles and recorded by Thucydides. When Socrates is done reciting, Menexenus marvels that such an oration could have been written by a woman.

The Menexenus is not the Gorgias or the Republic. Even those who do read it tend to skim over this passage or dismiss it as mere fiction or comedy.

But should they? Fortunately, Plato is not our only witness.

The Most Remarkable Woman in Athens

Aspasia emigrated from Miletus to Athens, where she lived as a metic, or resident alien. After his amicable divorce from Deinomache, she became the companion of Pericles, the leading statesman and general of Athens. According to Plutarch, Pericles kissed her every morning before leaving and every evening upon returning.

Owing to her foreign birth, unmarried status, and influence over Pericles, Aspasia became one of the most controversial figures in Athens. Comic poets branded her a prostitute, and in the Acharnians Aristophanes goes so far as to blame her for starting the Peloponnesian War.

This raises an obvious question. Why would Plato have chosen such an infamous woman for the Menexenus? Plato is no Aristophanes, and even his comic touches are generally in the service of his philosophy. Had his intention been merely to parody funeral oratory, he could easily have done so without invoking Aspasia. The more interesting question is not why Plato jokes about Aspasia, but why he mentions her at all.

Socrates’ Teacher

The Menexenus is not the only Platonic dialogue in which Socrates claims to have been taught by a remarkable woman.

In the Symposium, he relates a conversation that he once had with a mysterious priestess, Diotima of Mantinea, who, he says, taught him the true nature of love. This is Plato’s famous ‘Ladder of Love’, by which aching lust can be sublimed into wisdom and virtue.

Armand d’Angour, among others, has argued that Diotima is in fact Aspasia under another name—with Plato, this time, having taken the precaution to disguise her identity.

If so, Plato has presented Aspasia not only as Socrates’ teacher of rhetoric, but also as the source of philosophy’s most influential account of love.

Plato Was Not Alone

Plato was not alone in portraying Aspasia as an intellectual authority.

Besides the two famous ones, Plato and Xenophon, at least another nine of Socrates’ followers wrote Socratic dialogues. Among these dialogues we know of two with the title Aspasia, one by Aeschines and another by Antisthenes.

In the Aspasia of Aeschines, Socrates urges the millionaire Callias to send his son Hipponicus to Aspasia for instruction. Socrates presses his recommendation by citing Aspasia’s credentials in rhetoric and in marriage guidance—precisely the same combination of talents that we find independently confirmed in Plato (rhetoric) and Xenophon (marriage guidance).

A pattern is beginning to emerge. Aspasia is not some isolated anecdote. She is repeatedly presented by various Socratics as someone from whom others—including Socrates himself—could learn.

Aspasia Speaks

A substantial fragment of the Aspasia of Aeschines has come down to us, preserved in Cicero. In it, we can finally hear Aspasia in her own voice.

Aspasia asks a husband named Xenophon whether he would prefer his own horse or a better horse belonging to his neighbour.

“The better horse,” he replies.

Would he prefer his own farm or a better one?

“The better one.”

Would he prefer his own wife—or a better wife?

At this Xenophon falls silent.

Aspasia then asks his wife a parallel series of questions. She too admits that she would prefer finer possessions—and then blushes into silence when asked whether she would prefer a better husband.

Aspasia concludes:

Since each of you avoids answering me that question alone which was the only one which I wished to have answered, I will tell you what each of you are thinking of; for both you, O woman, wish to have the best husband, and you, O Xenophon, most exceedingly desire to have the most excellent wife. Wherefore, unless you both so contrive matters that there shall not be on the whole earth a more excellent man or a more admirable woman, then in truth you will at all times desire above all things that which you think to be the best thing in the world, namely, that you, O Xenophon, may be the husband of the best possible wife; and you, O woman, that you may be married to the most excellent husband possible.

The conclusion is striking enough. More striking still is the method. Aspasia proceeds much as Socrates would: by asking apparently innocent questions, drawing analogies, exposing contradictions, and gently leading her listeners towards a conclusion they reach for themselves. Her conclusion, moreover, echoes that of Diotima. Love’s highest purpose is not pleasure but virtue.

Did Aspasia Teach Socrates the Socratic Method?

According to Plato, Socrates developed his method of questioning, the method of elenchus, after his friend Chaerephon asked the oracle of Delphi whether there was anyone wiser than Socrates. Astonishingly, the oracle replied that there was no one wiser—leaving Socrates, who knew only that he knew nothing, perplexed.

To discover the meaning of the oracle, Socrates questioned several supposedly wise people, and in each case concluded: “I am likely to be wiser than he to this small extent, that I do not think I know what I do not know.” From then on, he dedicated himself to the service of the god of the oracle by seeking out anyone who might be wise and, “if he is not, showing him that he is not.”

Plato presents the oracle story as the turning point of Socrates’ career. By validating his skeptical stance, it gave him the impetus to develop his own distinctive method of doing philosophy.

The method of elenchus consists in questioning one or more people about a concept, exposing contradictions in their initial assumptions, and provoking a reappraisal of the concept. As the process is iterative, it leads to an increasingly refined definition of the concept, and, in due course, to a shared recognition that it eludes our understanding—and hence that we know far less than we thought we did.

With our initial dogmatism transmuted into a state of puzzlement and suspended judgement, we are ready to become much more open and subtle thinkers—assuming, of course, that we have not first become angry and resentful.

But although Socrates may have perfected the method of elenchus, it is unlikely that he originated a mode of conversation that seems so naturally and fundamentally human. Diogenes Laertius, the ancient biographer of philosophers, claims that it was the sophist Protagoras who ‘first introduced the method of discussion which is called Socratic’. In Plato’s Parmenides, the pre-Socratic philosopher Parmenides, who was a generation older than Protagoras, himself uses the method of elenchus on Socrates to undermine Plato’s Theory of the Forms.

It remains that while other thinkers tried to make a show of their knowledge, Socrates tried to make a show of his and everyone else’s ignorance. In contrast to the pre-Socratics and especially to the sophists, he seldom claimed to possess any positive knowledge; whenever he did, it was because he had learnt it from somebody else, or because he had been ‘divinely inspired’. In Plato’s Phaedrus, he compares himself to an empty jar, filled through the ears by the words of others.

Against this background, Aspasia begins to look less like a literary curiosity and more like a plausible influence. In Plato, she teaches Socrates rhetoric. Perhaps she teaches him love. In Aeschines, she employs the very methods later associated with Socrates himself.

Did Aspasia invent the Socratic method? Almost certainly not. Did she influence the man who perfected it? The surviving evidence suggests that the possibility deserves to be taken far more seriously than it usually is.

A Different Beginning

None of this proves that Aspasia was Diotima, or even that she taught Socrates. Ancient history rarely affords such certainty.

But the evidence does point in that direction. Plato presents Aspasia as Socrates’ teacher—and has her threatening to slap the man he most admired. Other members of the Socratic circle independently portray her as a teacher. The surviving fragments show her employing the same methods, and pursuing the same moral aims, for which Socrates became renowned.

For centuries, the story of Western philosophy has begun with Socrates. It may be that it ought to begin not with Socrates alone, but with the remarkable woman from Miletus who taught him rhetoric, perhaps taught him love, and may even have helped shape the philosophical method that transformed the Western world.

If Aspasia taught Socrates—and perhaps even slapped him—Western philosophy begins with a woman.

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A Life in Ideas: Aristotle

By Neel Burton | May 11, 2025

How the Son of a Court Physician Became the Most Influential Philosopher in History

Plato and Aristotle. Detail from the School of Athens by Raphael. — In Raphael’s *School of Athens* (1509–1511), Plato holds his *Timaeus* and points towards the heavens; Aristotle holds his *Ethics* and gestures towards the world before him.

By Dr Neel Burton — Psychiatrist, philosopher, and wine writer; Fellow of Green Templeton College, University of Oxford; author of over twenty books.

Few people have shaped the world as profoundly as Aristotle. Yet, for all his influence, surprisingly little is known about the man himself. As one historian remarked, all that can be said with certainty is that ‘the man was born, worked, and then died’. Even so, the surviving fragments reveal an extraordinary life, which transformed the son of a provincial court physician into the most influential philosopher in the West.

Aristotle was born in 384 BCE in Stageira, on the Chalcidice peninsula of north-eastern Greece. In 348, Philip II of Macedon occupied and destroyed the city, but then had it rebuilt and repopulated in honour of Aristotle, who had been his childhood friend and whom he had appointed to tutor his son, Alexander, the future King of the Oikouménē, or Known World.

The Stagirite’s father, Nicomachus, served as physician to Philip’s father, Amyntas III of Macedon, and descended, purportedly, from the god of medicine, Asclepius—as did his mother, Phæstis. With the healing arts running so thickly in his blood, Aristotle would have been expected to follow in his father’s footsteps. Certainly, his medical background, and the empiricism of physicians such as Hippocrates, informed his method and philosophy.

Aristotle had a brother and sister, and was probably the youngest of the three siblings. At about the age of thirteen, he lost both his parents and became the ward of Proxenus of Atarneus (in Æolis, Asia Minor), who rounded whatever medical training he had received from his late father. Proxenus married Aristotle’s sister, Arimneste. Together, they had a daughter, Hero, and a son, Nicanor. Hero in turn had a son, the historian Callisthenes of Olynthus, great nephew to Aristotle.

Plato’s Most Brilliant Student

In 367, Proxenus sent the seventeen-year-old Aristotle to study at Plato’s Academy, which had by then become a pre-eminent centre of learning. If Diogenes Laertius is to be believed, the grown-up Aristotle had small eyes and slender calves, dressed fashionably, and spoke with a lisp.

Aristotle remained at the Academy for nearly twenty years, only leaving after Plato’s death in 347. The reasons for his departure are unclear: he may have felt slighted at being passed over for the scholarchship of the Academy in favour of Plato’s nephew, Speussipus; or he may have fled, possibly even before Plato’s death, for fear of the growing anti-Macedonian feeling. In 351, the orator Demosthenes had delivered his First Philippic denouncing Philip II’s imperial ambitions, and in 348, the year before Plato’s death, Philip had razed Athenian ally Olynthus to the ground.

Twenty years at the Academy convinced Aristotle not only of philosophy’s power, but also of its limits. Where Plato sought truth by looking beyond the visible world, Aristotle increasingly sought it within it.

The Philosopher and the Tyrant

Then in his thirty-seventh year, Aristotle travelled with fellow Platonist Xenocrates of Chalcedon to Assos (in the Troad, Asia Minor) to join the court of Hermias of Atarneus, who had studied at the Academy. Aristotle may or may not have gone to Assos as an ambassador of Philip, who wished to have Hermias for an ally. In either case, it seems that he exerted a moderating influence on Hermias, who softened his harsh tyrannical rule—enabling him, in short succession, to win over neighbouring peoples and expand his territory.

In 344, Hermias was captured by a mercenary in the service of Artaxerxes III of Persia and tortured for information about the invasion plans of his ally Philip. But Hermias held his silence, his dying words being that he had done nothing shameful or unworthy of philosophy. Aristotle honoured the memory of his perfect friend with a statue at Delphi and a still extant hymn to virtue.

At around this time, he married Hermias’ niece and adoptive daughter, Pythias, who helped him in his work and bore him a daughter, also Pythias.

Paradise on Lesbos

After the death of Hermias, Aristotle and his student Tyrtamus crossed over to Lesbos to research the flora and fauna of the island and its remarkable lagoon, then known as the Pyrrha lagoon, now known as the Gulf of Kalloni.

Tyrtamus went down in history as Theophrastus [‘Divinely-speaking’], the nickname given to him by Aristotle. Supposedly, the more empirical Theophrastus concentrated on the flora while the more speculative Aristotle concentrated on the fauna, so that the one is remembered as the father of botany and the other as the father of zoology. In fact, Theophrastus also wrote on animals, and Aristotle on plants, but these works have been lost, as have almost all of Theophrastus’ wide-ranging works.

Aristotle was not simply doing biology for the sake of biology, but for the sake of philosophy. Like Plato, he was searching for universals, but this time from the ground up. ‘We should’ he said, ‘venture on the study of every kind of animal without distaste; for each and all will reveal to us something natural and something beautiful.’

Teaching Alexander

Aristotle spent no more than two years on Lesbos.

In 343, King Philip commissioned him to tutor his son Alexander, who was then around thirteen years old, promising in return to rebuild his native Stageira and repatriate its former citizens. In the Temple of the Nymphs at Mieza, near the Macedonian capital of Pela, Aristotle taught not only Alexander but also his close friend or lover Hephæstion, and two other future rulers, Ptolemy and Cassander.

It is said that Aristotle prepared for Alexander an annotated copy of the Iliad, which inspired the prince to model his life on that of the demy-divine Achilles. Even if the story is invented, Aristotle’s influence over Alexander is indicated by the crowd of zoologists and botanists that accompanied him on his Eastern conquests, and by the official chronicler of these conquests, who was none other than Aristotle’s great nephew, Callisthenes of Olynthus.

According to both Plutarch and Aulus Gellius, upon hearing that Aristotle had published some of his teachings, Alexander wrote to him from Asia:

Alexander to Aristotle, greeting. You have not done well to publish your books of oral doctrine; for what is there now that we excel others in, if those things which we have been instructed in be laid open to all? For my part, I assure you, I had rather excel others in the knowledge of what is excellent, than in the extent of my power and dominion. Farewell.

Later, as pharaoh in Egypt, Ptolemy built the Great Library of Alexandria, turning the city, which had been founded by Alexander, into a major centre of learning. Alexander, and Ptolemy after him, did much to disseminate Greek culture, so that three centuries later Greek seemed like the natural choice of language for the New Testament.

Aristotle’s Great Project: Organising All Human Knowledge

In around 339, Speussipus suffered a stroke and died, and Xenocrates became the third scholarch of the Academy, with Aristotle passed over for a second time. Among those who frequented the lectures of Xenocrates at the Academy were Zeno of Citium, founder of the Stoic school, and Epicurus of Samos, founder of the Epicurean school.

In 334, Aristotle, now returned to Athens, established his own school in a public exercise and training ground dedicated to the god Apollo Lyceus [‘Apollo the Wolf-god’], whence its name, the Lyceum. A temple had once stood on the expansive site, which in Aristotle’s time had different areas dedicated to different purposes. Both Socrates and Plato had spoken or taught there, to the extent that the Lyceum is the setting of Plato’s Euthydemus, which features Socrates and Cleinias, the grandson of Alcibiades, in conversation with Euthydemus and Dionysodorus, a pair of moronic brothers and sophists.

Aristotle taught in the morning, and in the afternoon would sometimes give a public lecture. He often did his thinking and teaching while walking along the Lyceum’s shaded paths, or peripatoi, so that his students, who doubled up as his colleagues and researchers, came to be known as the peripatetics.

Over the next twelve years, Aristotle wrote many of his works and collected the West’s first great library, including copies of the constitutions of 158 cities. He also developed the world’s first botanical garden and zoological park from the plant and animal specimens that Alexander kept returning from the East.

After the death of his wife Pythias, he became involved with Herpyllis of Stageira, who bore him a son whom he named Nicomachus after his father. To this son, he dedicated his major work of ethics, the Nicomachean Ethics. According to the Suda, he also had an eromenos [younger male lover], the historian Palæphatus of Abydus.

Aristotle’s school lived or limped on until 86 BCE, when Athens was sacked by Sulla, the only man in history to have occupied both Athens and Rome. According to Plutarch, Sulla felled the ancient planes of the Academy and Lyceum to build siege engines. In antiquity, the Lyceum had stood to the east of the city wall. In 1996, its remains were uncovered in a park behind the Hellenic Parliament, while clearing space for the new Museum of Modern Art.

Exile and Death

In the East, Callisthenes had become increasingly critical of Alexander’s adoption of Persian customs, especially those, such as proskynesis (falling down before the king and kissing the ground or his feet), which fed into his mounting megalomania.

When a former pupil implicated Callisthenes in a regicidal plot, Alexander left Aristotle’s great nephew to perish in prison. According to Diogenes Laertius, Callisthenes was ‘confined in an iron cage and carried about until he became infested with vermin through lack of proper attention; and finally he was thrown to a lion and so met his end.’ The death of his great nephew soured Aristotle’s relationship with Alexander, and prompted Theophrastus to write a treatise on grief, the now lost Callisthenes.

Even so, Aristotle’s long-time association with Alexander had led the Athenians to perceive him as Macedonian. After Alexander’s death in Babylon in 323, anti-Macedonian feeling in Athens flared up, and Demophilius and Eurymedon the Hierophant charged Aristotle with impiety, possibly for praying to his late friend Hermias rather than anything in the Physics or Metaphysics. Aristotle fled to the solitude, or loneliness, of his country house at Chalcis in Eubœa, an island off the Attic coast and the homeland of his mother’s family. Referencing the trial and execution of Socrates, he explained, ‘I will not allow the Athenians to sin twice against philosophy.’

In the event, Aristotle died within the year, in 322, aged sixty-two, possibly from an abdominal condition. Theophrastus, who was not Macedonian but Lesbian, had remained in Athens as scholarch of the peripatetic school. In his will, Aristotle named him as his successor and bequeathed him his works and library. On the family side, he left a furnished house, three female slaves, and a talent of silver to his wife or concubine Herpyllis, and appointed his nephew Nicanor as guardian to the still young Nicomachus. Nicomachus became a pupil of Theophrastus and, according to Aristippus, his eromenos. He died in battle while still young.

Theophrastus inherited not only Aristotle’s school but also the intellectual legacy of the man who, for centuries to come, would simply be known as ‘The Philosopher’.

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How the Western Mind Nearly Took an Eastern Turn

By Neel Burton | June 18, 2024

The Surprising Affinities Between Greek and Indian Philosophy

Le Char d'Apollon by Odilon Redon — *Odilon Redon, Apollo’s Chariot (c. 1910). Both Plato and the Katha Upanishad compared the human soul to a chariot.*

By Dr Neel Burton — Psychiatrist, philosopher, and wine writer; Fellow of Green Templeton College, University of Oxford; author of over twenty books.

Essay substantially revised on 14 August 2026.

Western philosophy and Indian philosophy are presented as two quite separate traditions. Yet go back to their beginnings and the distinction starts to break down. Some of the earliest Greek philosophers held ideas that today we would be more likely to call ‘Eastern’ than ‘Western’.

At almost the same moment in history, Greek and Indian thinkers began asking many of the same questions, and, sometimes, coming up with remarkably similar answers.

How are we to explain these affinities? And if the two traditions began so close together, how did they end up so far apart?

Pythagoras

Pythagoras of Samos (c. 570-c. 495 BCE) was a near contemporary of Anaximander and Anaximenes, as well as the Buddha. He might even have met Thales of Miletus—‘the first scientist’—who, it is said, advised him to travel to Memphis to take instruction from Egyptian priests.

In antiquity, Pythagoras was better known as a philosopher than a mathematician. Although he may have introduced it to the West, the theorem that came to bear his name had been discovered centuries earlier by the Babylonians and Indians. His association with this theorem hints at some kind of Eastern connection.

At the age of 40, Pythagoras left Samos for Croton in southern Italy, where he established a philosophically minded religious community. Unusually for the time, Pythagoras admitted men and women alike. Of the 235 famous Pythagoreans listed by Iamblichus, 17 are women.

The men and women who entered the community’s inner circle were governed by a strict set of ascetic and ethical rules, forsaking personal possessions, assuming a mainly vegetarian diet, and—since words are so often careless and misleading—observing the strictest silence.

In India, at around the same time, the Buddha’s followers were organising into monasteries. The Buddha delivered many of his discourses in the monastery of Jetavana in Shravasti, which had been donated to him by the banker Anathapindada. Buddhist monks could eat meat if it was offered to them, but only after ensuring that the animal had not been slaughtered on their behalf. At her insistence, the Buddha’s aunt Mahapajapati became the first of many Buddhist nuns.

The first Buddhist monasteries served as a prototype for the world’s first residential university at Nalanda, just as Pythagoras’ community served as a model for philosophical institutions such as Plato’s Academy and Aristotle’s Lyceum, and, later, for the monastic life and associated early universities.

Music played an important role in Pythagoras’ community. Pythagoreans recited poetry, sang hymns to Apollo, and played on the lyre to cure illnesses of body and soul. One day, or so the story goes, Pythagoras passed by some blacksmiths at work, and found that their hammering produced especially pleasing sounds. He then noticed that their anvils were simple ratios of one another, one being half the size of the first, another twice the size, and so on.

This insight led to his ‘harmony of the spheres,’ according to which the movements of the heavenly bodies are in a mathematical relationship akin to that between musical notes, and, together, amount to a grand cosmic symphony.

Pythagoras (the name means ‘Oracle among the people’) never divorced religion from philosophy and science, which, even in his day, left him open to accusations of mysticism. No doubt under the influence of Orphism, a mystery religion rooted in pre-Hellenic beliefs and the Thracian cult of Zagreus, Pythagoras came to believe in metempsychosis, that is, in the transmigration of the soul at death into a new body of the same or a different species, until such a time as it became moral.

He himself claimed to have lived four lives and to remember them all in detail: in his first life, he had had the good fortune of being Aethalides, son of Hermes, who had given him the faculty of remembering everything even through death.

Taken together, vegetarianism, asceticism, a mixed community devoted to spiritual discipline, cosmic harmonies, and a belief in the transmigration of souls look rather more like a school of Indian religion than the beginning of Western philosophy.

But similarity does not prove influence. Ideas could have travelled through Persia and the wider networks connecting the Mediterranean with India, or they could reflect a deeper Indo-European inheritance. Or it may all be a simple coincidence. My own suspicion is that these similarities owe something to ideas travelling, indirectly and often imperceptibly, between East and West. Maybe Parmenides can help us figure it out.

Parmenides

After Pythagoras’ death in c. 495 BCE, the Pythagoreans deified him, and attributed him with a golden thigh and the gift of bilocation (being in two places at once).

In India, the first Upanishads, the Chandogya Upanishad and Great Forest Upanishad, had by then already been written. The central vision of the Upanishads is one of pantheism (all is God), with God hidden in nature ‘even as the silkworm is hidden in the web of silk he made’. God is Brahman and the part or aspect of Brahman that is in us is Atman. The aim then becomes to achieve the knowledge and unity of Atman and Brahman, which is wisdom, salvation, and liberation (moksha). When Socrates argued for self-knowledge over knowledge, he made the same turn as the Upanishads.

The student of Western philosophy might be reminded of Parmenides (c. 515-c. 440 BCE), who was still young when Pythagoras died. In his poem, On Nature, Parmenides contrasted the Way of Truth to the Way of Opinion. Through a chain of strict a priori deductive arguments from premises deemed incontrovertible, Parmenides argued that, despite appearances (the Way of Opinion), the universe must consist of a single undifferentiated and indivisible unity, which he called ‘the One’—comparable, of course, to Brahman.

In both East and West, we are asked to distrust the multiplicity presented by the senses and seek, behind it, a deeper and indivisible reality. As the Katha Upanishad puts it: ‘Who sees the many and not the one, wanders on from death to death.’

Plato, who might be considered the great systemiser of Western philosophy, was heavily influenced by both Pythagoras and Parmenides.

Plato

In the Metaphysics, Aristotle says that Plato’s teachings owed much to those of the Pythagoreans; so much, in fact, that Bertrand Russell upheld not Plato but Pythagoras as the most influential of all Western philosophers. Pythagoras’ influence is perhaps most evident in Plato’s mystical approach to the soul and in his emphasis on mathematics, and, more generally, reason and abstract thought, as a secure basis for the practice of philosophy.

Just as Plato (c. 427-c. 347 BCE) leaned upon Heraclitus and his theory of flux (‘No one ever steps twice into the same river’) for his conception of the sensible or phenomenal world, so he leaned upon Parmenides for his conception of the intelligible or noumenal world, which he rendered as the ideal, immutable realm of the forms.

Plato’s Phaedo, in which Socrates discusses the immortality of the soul with a pair of Pythagorean philosophers, is essentially an Upanishad in both form and content. Socrates argues that the forms cannot be apprehended by the senses, but only by pure thought, that is, by the mind or soul. Thus, the philosopher seeks in as far as possible to separate soul from body. As death is the complete separation of soul and body, the philosopher aims at death, and can be said to be almost dead.

Although the Phaedo is at the root of Western psychology, philosophy, and theology, it is also deeply Eastern in advocating supreme detachment and ego suppression or disintegration as the route to salvation.

In the Meno, Plato argues that learning is really recollection (anamnesis): the soul already possesses knowledge, and philosophical enquiry merely helps it to remember. Socrates demonstrates the point by questioning an uneducated slave boy until he works out a geometrical problem for himself. The truth, it seems, is not simply out there waiting to be discovered, but somehow already within us—a thought that sits remarkably well with the Upanishadic turn inward towards Atman and self-knowledge.

Underlying Plato’s theory of recollection is the idea that the soul existed before birth. Across the Phaedo, Phaedrus, and Republic, he repeatedly returns to the transmigration of the soul through successive lives, with its fate after death depending upon how it has lived. In the Myth of Er at the end of the Republic, the dead are rewarded or punished before choosing their next lives and drinking from the River of Forgetfulness prior to rebirth. Odysseus, having learnt from the sufferings of his former life, chooses the quiet life of an ordinary man—which he found easily, because neglected by everybody else. The parallels with the Indian doctrines of reincarnation and karma are difficult to miss.

I’ve kept the most striking parallel for last. In the Phaedrus, Plato compares the soul to a chariot with a charioteer and two winged horses. The divine chariot has two tame horses, while the human chariot has one tame horse and one unruly one, making the charioteer’s ascent towards truth a constant struggle. The Katha Upanishad reaches for the very same image. This time, the body is the chariot, the Atman or true self its lord, reason the charioteer, the mind the reins, and the senses the horses. A person without understanding is ‘like a bad driver with wild horses’.

Stoicism

Centuries later, the Stoics, who were influenced by Plato, would once again develop ideas that seem remarkably close to Indian philosophy—especially, this time, Buddhism.

Both traditions warn against attachment and the tyranny of desire; both seek freedom by changing our relation to events rather than controlling events themselves; and both loosen the boundary between self and others in favour of a wider identification with humanity—or even with life as a whole.

In both East and West, then, philosophy could mean something much more demanding than thinking clearly or holding the right opinions. It was a discipline of the self: a way of transforming consciousness and attaining freedom.

Over time, however, philosophy and spiritual practice drifted apart in the West, while in India they remained more closely entwined. The Western tradition retained much from Pythagoras, Parmenides, Plato, and the Stoics—mathematics, logic, metaphysics, rational argument—but gradually lost much of their conception of philosophy as a spiritual practice and path to liberation.

The great difference between Eastern and Western philosophy may therefore lie not so much in how they began, but in what happened to them afterwards.

Had that other strand prevailed, the division we now draw between ‘Eastern’ and ‘Western’ philosophy might look very different.

Perhaps the Western mind did take an Eastern turn. It just didn’t stay the course.