Socrates is my favourite philosopher because he believed philosophy should be lived, not just spoken about. I’ve often thought that he must have been a Nirvanean, my preferred word for “Enlightened”. In this short excerpt from my book, The Nirvaneans, the arguments for this notion are discussed:

The love of wisdom (Sophia), or philosophia in Greek, began in Ionian Greece in Homeric times. It was a deliberate increase of consciousness on the part of a small number of people who lived close to the land but who recognized that the mind of man had a structuring and ordering facility which seemed to be above the processes of nature. Their often puzzled cogitations gave birth to philosophy which, in turn, spawned science, metaphysics, mathematics and all the other systems of pure thought that bedevil students to this day.

Philosophers were known to be otherworldly and lost in thought. They dressed in simple robes and lived frugally — rich living, they thought, degraded the mind. Such a life would inevitably produce more than its share of Nirvaneans — Plotinus and Plato are two other examples.

The Greek philosopher Socrates is almost the perfect exemplar of the Nirvanean qualities of simplicity and ethics. I believe him to have been a Nirvanean, for a number of reasons. He spent his entire lifetime, as far as we know, engaging others in conversations about the need to be good. That was the sum total of his life. Moreover, he was completely unworldly, careless of his appearance, and had no visible means of financial support. In Plato’s Georgias, one listener complains that, if Socrates is right, life would need to be turned upside down! — we have observed elsewhere that the Nirvanic viewpoint literally turns our normal conceptions of reality upside down.

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