One of the Socratic puzzles is how to make sense of wrong-doing. For if our beliefs about what is good and right are basically correct, how is it that we sometimes choose to do what is wrong? Socrates held that wrong-doing is always the result of ignorance. All people choose what they believe is good, but they are sometimes in error about what is really good. But how is such ignorance possible? Well, it occurs when we do not take sufficient care to reflect on the nature of what we are really doing and how our actions align with what we know is truly right. But that observation alone does not answer the question, for it then becomes: why don’t people take sufficient care to do this? After all, if everyone is concerned to choose what is good, surely they will then also be concerned to take the thought necessary to discover what is really good. And if nothing but taking thought stands between them and true belief of what is right, then why don’t they do it? There must be something that interferes with or misguides a person’s thought and so prevents his clear-sighted choice of what is right.
Briefly put, the Socratic response is: what prevents effective thought about the correct choice is compulsion that arises from, and in turn reinforces, an erroneous self-conception.[1] Why, for instance, does a man gamble when he acknowledges upon questioning that he can’t afford it, when he agrees that it’s rational to expect that he will lose both money and time and gain nothing? Is he choosing what is good? It must be that he really doesn’t know what he apparently acknowledges, and that he has no clear vision of the truth of his words or of what he is really doing. “After all,” he may say to himself, “I might win big, and then all of this will make sense.” When he says this to himself, he implicitly denies what he openly admits, that gambling is stupid.
He views himself as somehow special and above the laws of probability that govern everyone else. A person such as this is in the grip of a self-conception that is at variance with the truth. The conceit of this false self-idea is the source of his irrationality.
On the Socratic vision, wrong-doing always involves irrationality of this sort: one chooses what appears to be good under the influence of a false idea of what sort of being one is. If the idea is very strong, it will filter one’s entire vision of the world and its influence will permeate most of one’s choices. Polus, who appears in the Gorgias, is an example of such a person. He longs to set himself apart from most of humanity (the “weak,” i.e., those who are not clever and enterprising as he is) and attain a privileged position from which he can lead the “good life,” a life of colossal ego-gratification. Polus would be a tyrant, and is already tyrannized by a fantasy self-concept. As long as he is dominated by this false self-conception, his character will lack any real form, and so he will remain ruthless, i.e., capable of anything except friendship.
The end or goal of Socratic philosophy is self-knowledge, and in this context, that means a clearing away of false self-conceptions so that one may become free of compulsions and more able to choose what is really, and not just apparently, good. What separates the human from the divine is that human beings lack full self-knowledge, are thereby liable to the irrationality of mental habits, compulsions, and addictions, and so stand in need of philosophy.
In the Phaedo, Socrates says that philosophy is preparation for death. Part of what he means is that philosophy aims to recall its practitioner to his humanity and thereby render him more fully human. The most eagerly forgotten fact is that a human is mortal. One’s persona seeks to suppress the liberating sense of life entailed by the remembrance of mortality.
[1] Rational behavior and compulsive behavior are opposites. The root of the word ‘rational’ is ‘ratio’, which means ‘proportion’. The implication is that rational behavior is proportioned to its situation, and irrational behavior is out of proportion, or inappropriate, to its situation. The classical virtue of moderation or temperance may be construed as the character trait that tends to a general proprotionality of action to circumstance. In possession of this virtue, one’s actions are tempered by one’s real situation. Clearly, such temperance requires that one recognize one’s situation for what it is. Thus, temperance requires recognition (and so areté, once again, is knowledge).