Conceptual Comments

Arete and the Good

In his discussion of the simile of the sun, Socrates explains that just as the sun causes all that it illumines to come into being as well as into visibility, so the form of the Good causes all that is available to intelligence to come into being as well as into intelligibility.[1]  That is, the form of the Good both illumines the other forms and causes their existence.[2]   Let me offer one interpretation of this simile with regard to the forms of the virtues.  I suggest that the virtues may be considered to come into being as the result of the successful counsel of reason in the face of various sorts of temptation to moral weakness.[3]  Consider prudence.  The role of prudence is to counsel action for the best possible outcome (ultimately eudaimonia).  As such, its job is to discover what is really, and not just apparently, good and to guide decisions accordingly.  To the extent that it does this, the person so exercising prudence is virtuous.  Generalizing, the idea may be understood this way: acting for what is good is virtuous and the different sorts of virtues are just the different sorts of success of reason against different sorts of countervailing passions or desires.  The success of reason in the face of circumstances that would otherwise cause greed or anger is temperance; the success of reason in the face of circumstances that would otherwise cause fear is courage.  Thus, the virtues come into being only in relation to the good, the guide star of reason.

The contrary, sophistic approach denies that goodness has any objective being.  A pure sophist would hold that what is good is merely a matter of subjective opinion, and so that what is virtuous is also merely a matter of subjective opinion.  The ultimate standard of what is good and virtuous is, in this view, personal desire.  What is desired is, ipso facto, desirable, and the personal powers that enable you to get what you desire are virtues.  On the sophistic approach, desire is the standard of success: its fulfillment is success, its frustration failure.  For the Socratics, on the other hand, the standard of success is reason: its fulfillment is personal freedom, its frustration is psychological slavery.  Since he denies the objective being of goodness, the sophist has to find some other function for reason.  What he suggests is that reason is an instrument to enable you to get what you want.  He gives no credence to Aristotle’s distinction between contemplative and instrumental reason.  For the sophist, all reason is instrumental.

Comment on Prudence and Reason

Prudence is essentially foresighted; prudence looks to the future and shapes current plans and policy to the prospect.  In the ideal state, prudence is exercised by the rulers who have the responsibility for taking care of the future of the state.  In the ideal person, prudence is exercised by the rational part of the soul.  Prudence, then, is the peculiarly rational virtue.  A failure of prudence, then, is most clearly a failure of rationality.  (The failure of any virtue is a failure of rationality, but it’s not so obvious in a failure of courage, for example.)

A relevant question: what is rationality?

1. A Sophist would say that rationality is only the calculation of, and the practical application of, the means of getting what you want, whatever it may be. Reason is itself neutral about goals.  What goals you set depend on what you value, and values are subjective.
2. A Socratic would say that rationality is more than this, because if it were only this, you would just be a slave to your goals. Then your fate would be random since some goals, when reached, help to conduce to happiness and some do not.[4]  So rationality must also do this other job: evaluate goals.  Everyone aims for happiness, and so the job of rationality is then to discover of any goal whether it will yield happiness when achieved.  If you use a lot of practical intelligence to achieve goals that will not really make you happy, then you are not really being prudent; there is a failure of rationality here.  We all work for goals that we think will make us happy, but the job of prudence is to discover whether they really will.

We have said that a counterfeit of prudence is timidity.  The reason for this characterization is that a person who tries to be prudent, but who does not have the rationality necessary to evaluate any prospect for genuine happiness, is likely to be so fearful of making a mistake that he misses genuine opportunities and ends up choosing badly anyway.  But in light of the above discussion, we can now see that there is another counterfeit of prudence: that of the person who does not know how to evaluate prospects for happiness, but who doesn’t know that he doesn’t know this, and who confidently and dogmatically believes that he does know.  This sort of person will make his plans and pursue them with ingenuity and industry, racing full-speed toward a dubious and unpredictable future, his sense of control an illusion.  Ordinary practical intelligence tends to support this sort of vice, which is a counterfeit of prudence.  Essentially, it’s the vice of dogmatism and is characteristic of the timocratic and oligarchic world views, which mistakenly identify the good with honor and money.[5]

[1] Republic 506e-509b.

[2] In Platonic metaphysics, Beauty and light have the same mode of being.  Beauty is the appearance of the Good, but our first familiarity with it is indirect; we are first aware of beautiful objects before we are aware of Beauty as such.  Similarly, we are first aware of illumined things before we are aware of light as such.  As light is the shining of the sun, so Beauty is the shining of the Good.  All beauty commands its regard, and awakes in human beings an instinctive, primordial yearning.  See Diotima’s speech in the Symposium.

[3] I follow David Ross here.  See his Plato’s Theory of Ideas, 2nd ed. (Oxford, 1953), pp. 39-44.

[4] A Sophist would say: “No, no; happiness is just achieving your goals, whatever they are.”  The Socratic replies: “Happiness has to be more than that since you can achieve some goals without ever achieving happiness.”  So there is a disagreement here about what human happiness is.  The Sophist believes that happiness is getting what you want, whatever it is; the Socratic believes that happiness is getting what you want only if what you want is truly good.  The Sophist replies: “Goodness is just a subjective matter.  Good is whatever you think is good.”  The Socratic: “No, people can make mistakes about what is good.  Small mistakes and big, life-time mistakes.  Therefore, goodness is not just whatever you think it is.”  The Sophist: “You can make mistakes like that only when you have some false beliefs about what you’re getting, as when you work toward something and it turns out not to be what you thought it was.  But that doesn’t mean that you were wrong about the goodness of what you thought you would get.”  The Socratic: “It does if that conception of goodness is not real, if it’s based on some fantasy of happiness that is not educated by a knowledge of human nature.”  The Sophist: “There is no such thing as human nature.  People are just animals who are more or less smart at getting what they want.  If you want to understand someone, you don’t have to go any deeper than finding out what he wants.”  The Socratic: “Desires are only one facet of human nature, and in the best people, they do not govern choice or behavior.”  The Sophist: “Desires govern choice and behavior in all people.”

[5] I’m inclined to think that both timidity and this other courterfeit of prudence are usually motivated by the same thing: fear of the future.  One person tries to keep the future at bay by holing up and trying not to change; the other tries to force his future into his control by doggedly pursuing his goals.  Both of them lose control and, ironically, bring about their own fearsome futures.  As I write this, I wonder whether a person who fears the future and so clings to his goals really is very efficient at pursuing them.

This post concerns 427d-Book IV of Plato’s Republic.

From Book I, the working assumption is that justice in the state is the same as justice in the soul.  By 427, the ideal city has been outlined and the question is now raised whether this city has the virtues that make for eudaimonia.  If it is true that justice in the state is the same as justice in the soul, then any good city (as any good person) will have these virtues.  The virtues are listed in the Republic as Wisdom (read: Prudence), Courage, Temperance, and Justice.  The one that we are interested in understanding is justice.

At the point where it is asked whether justice is to be found in the company of the other virtues, Plato distinguishes parts of the soul and parts of the state.  Classes in the state correspond to parts of the soul.

Why conclude that there are parts of the soul?  What justifies this idea?  There’s a short answer, that appeals to ordinary moral experience, and a longer answer that connects the division with a broader theoretical concern.  The short answer is that a person may sometimes experience inner conflict between, for example, what she desires and what she judges is for the best.  Also a person may sometimes get angry at himself for having done something that he wanted to do.  This internal conflict is evidence for the conclusion that there are internal parts of the soul that may contravene or oppose one another.  Socrates called these parts: (1) Reason, from whence judgments about what is for the best, (2) Spirit, from whence emotion such as anger and the sense of pride, and (3) Appetite, from whence desire for things necessary and unnecessary (such as food and sleep, trinkets and furs), good and bad.

The long answer turns on the idea, frequently argued by Socrates, that virtue is knowledge.  Socrates considers the test of knowledge to be action.  That is, to know what is right is to act rightly.  What a person believes shows more clearly in his actions rather than in his words.  It follows that it is not possible really to know what is right and then act wrongly.  Unjust behavior is therefore a sign of ignorance of what justice is.

This conclusion, though, is contrary to the appearances.  For it seems that someone can know what is right and then act wrongly.  Socrates seems to over-intellectualize human behavior.  But can one do evil intentionally, in full knowledge that it is evil?  Socrates says no, though it seems clear that people do act that way.  In short, knowledge of justice seems, contrary to what Socrates holds, to be necessary for right behavior, but not sufficient for it.  It seems, that is, that something else is needed, namely, the will to act rightly.

To answer these appearances, Socrates discusses the relationship between the parts of an ideal state since they are correlates of parts of an ideal person.  An individual is internally self-governed, as a state is.  So knowledge of the sort we spoke of in the last paragraph is in the “reasoning part” (i.e., the “guardian” part).  The second class, the auxiliaries, is supposed to have courage, i.e., right belief (not knowledge) of what one should and should not fear.  The auxiliaries act from correctly trained habit.  Courage is the ability to keep to this training in the presence of confusion, pain, etc.  So though it may be said that courage is not itself knowledge, but rather a certain cultivated temperament that has become part of one’s character, it is, nonetheless, knowledge plus this character trait of tenacity and boldness that equals courage in the total person, since if the reasoning part makes mistakes, then the spirited part will not have right belief but wrong belief and will then misplace its boldness and tenacity.  Since such mistakes scarcely conduce to a good life, they cannot be said to proceed from virtue, or, more specifically, from courage.  Knowledge is then a necessary presupposition of courage.

Thus, when Socrates says that for a person to know what is just necessarily results in his acting justly, what he means is that wisdom in the reasoning part of that person brings correct belief to his spirited part, and it is this part that provides the will for him to overcome any contrary desire.  Courage, then, which is a kind of moral knowledge of which action is the test, is located not in the reasoning or spirited parts independently, but in the unity of reason and spirit.  Moral success signals the unity of reason and spirit; moral failure signals their division.  This theoretical division thus gives Plato a way to account for moral success and failure and also helps to explain the thesis that virtue is knowledge.

Plato thought that moral mistakes that divide a person against himself (rendering him dysdaimonic) were almost always due to intemperate, “unruled”, desire, i.e., desire that succeeds, contrary to nature, in mastering reason.  Desire should not rule, Socrates argued, because desire, untempered by reason, is always tyrannical; mistaking its own pleasure for the good, it will use and exploit the other parts of the person for its own ends, not for the real good of the whole person.  The person in whom desire rules is thus a slave of his passions and lacks the freedom to do what he really considers best.  Thus, one of the main goals of Socratic moral education is to cultivate an effective alliance, as it were, between reason and spirit that will keep appetite temperate and in harmony with the whole.

The virtues of the rational part are: prudence (wisdom), courage, and temperance.  The virtues of the spirited part are: courage and temperance.  The virtue of the appetitive part is temperance.  Justice in the soul is the harmony of all parts when these virtues are present in due proportion.  Thus, the main virtue of the appetitive part is shared in equal proportion with the other two parts, for temperance is the recognition that the rational part should rule.

Thus, reason must have all of virtues.  Courage is associated with the spirit, but there is such a thing as intellectual courage, too.  The spirited part must be highly trained, for it needs to act from correctly formed habit when necessary, but the intellect also needs training and must form correct intellectual habits on which it may rely when the intellectual challenges are great.  And the temperance of the rational part consists of the acknowledgement that it is an organic part of the soul it rules and so that it should rule itself as well as the other parts.  Temperance in the rational part makes it recognize that it should not rule arbitrarily, like a tyrant, but with circumspection, as an aristocrat (aristos-archos: “rule by the best.”)

The tripartite distinction among parts of the soul is what may be called a “nested” distinction.  That is, it also applies, though only partially, to its parts.  We have already noticed that the virtues of reason are threefold (prudence, courage, and temperance), that the virtues of spirit are twofold (courage and temperance), and the virtue of appetite unitary (temperance).  This implies that the reasoning part of the soul may also be divided into three parts, and the spirited part into two, corresponding to the distinction among the virtues.  Thus, both reason and spirit may be beset with their own form of desire that tries to overcome the proper function of that part of the soul.

For example, the appetite of spirit is for honor, victory, and respect.  If this appetite is disciplined by genuine regard for what is good, then the result is courage.  But if the desire becomes stronger than this regard, then the result is foolhardiness or a blinding, stubborn pride, which is concerned to satisfy spirit’s appetite without essential concern for what is really good.

Another example.  The appetite of reason is for control.  After all, its function is prudence and prudence wants to keep the company solvent and prospering, as it were.  If this appetite for control becomes stronger than reason’s regard for the good, then the result is either timidity or domination, depending on the resources of the person.  In either case, the passion that typically overcomes reason and feeds the desire for control is fear of the future.  A person who has few resources will become timid and will tend to neglect the future out of  a self-deceiving denial that things are out of control.  (Ironically, timidity usually brings about what it most fears.)  On the other hand, a person of greater resource who is overcome by an appetite for control will typically become a highly disciplined tyrant, of the timocratic or oligarchic sort, and will industriously work toward certain goals without adequate knowledge of whether they are really good.

natural virtue — (esp. among the scholastics) any moral virtue of which a human being is capable, esp. the cardinal virtues: justice, temperance, prudence, and fortitude.  Also called “classical virtues.”  Cf. theological virtue. The Random House Unabridged Dictionary of the English Language.

Socrates argued that the four virtues (the “classical” or “natural” virtues) are actually four aspects of a single virtue that he called practical wisdom.  This idea has been called the thesis of the “unity of the virtues.”  Socrates’ main reason for holding that the virtues are unitary was that the difference between courage, say, and an apparently similar disposition such as foolhardiness, is knowledge.  That is, a person of courage knows when to act boldly; a person without such knowledge will act boldly when he shouldn’t.  So

boldness + knowledge = courage, and
boldness – knowledge = foolhardiness.[1]

And that, too, makes the difference between any one of the other virtues and its counterfeit (e.g., prudence and timidity).  But knowledge (practical knowledge of when and how to act) is unitary, so the virtues are one.

Aristotle argued that practical wisdom is modeled in the more specific practical knowledge of the athlete or soldier or musician in action.  Practical wisdom, Aristotle argued, is not entirely natural but flows from a cultivated or trained “second nature.”  The action of a good musician, for example, is not natural in the sense that it flows from his animal nature; nor is it thoughtful in the sense that the musician takes thought or deliberates about what he does.  Rather, his action flows from a disposition trained by thought and deliberation, a “second nature.”  In the context of action, the musician does not take thought but acts directly from his previously formed second nature.  So Aristotle thought that practical wisdom might be developed by training and education, depending to a goodly extent on the resources of one’s culture, though he recognized that such moral development is a boot-strap operation; in a sense, one has to be wise in order to become wise, for moral education is wasted on the foolish.  A teacher can give out illustrations and examples, but a student must be ready to recognize the essence of the matter on his own.

Socrates argued that each of the four classical virtues has a counterfeit, and also that virtue as such—as unitary practical wisdom—has a counterfeit.  A counterfeit, as the word indicates, is something that appears to be the real thing and that is mistaken for the real thing by those who are not prepared to recognize the difference.

A vice, then, is an imitation of a virtue because it appears to its practitioner as good.  Any sort of action deliberately done is considered by the one who acts to be virtuous (i.e., conducing to happiness).  If he did not effectively believe this, he would not do it, for it is the nature of human beings that they always act for the sake of what they consider to be good.[2]

Practical wisdom is the wisdom necessary to lead a good life, a life that is worth living for a human being.  As Socrates puts it in his Apology, the unexamined life is not worth living for a human being.  It follows from this that the life worth living is the examined life.  This suggests that practical wisdom is the wisdom needed to examine one’s life.  But how does one go about examining one’s life?  You cannot hold it out in front of you and turn it over and over like an object.  You’re in the middle of it, living it, and you can’t view it objectively as a god standing outside of time.

Socrates’ practice is to avail himself of his membership in a human community.  At every opportunity, he undertakes to learn from others in conversation.  He always questions them about what they are doing and asks them to give an account of it, on the assumption that they know what they are doing.  Human beings are such that they always act for the sake of what they consider to be good.  Thus, any account of what one is doing must finally indicate some path to some higher good and therefore some conception of what a human being is such that the good can be thus attained.  Bringing these conceptions into noetic light and examination in the very course of their practical effect is the Socratic means of leading the best life.

[1] In the Protagoras, Socrates characterises courage as self-confidence plus knowledge, and mere foolhardiness as simply self-confidence.  Thus, he says, all courageous people are self-confident, but not all self-confident people are courageous.  The idea is that without knowledge, self-confidence is wasted or wrongly applied and so cannot contribute to a good life and so is not, of itself, a virtue.

[2] A person may, momentarily, give up on the question of what is good and say to himself, “Well, it’s really all relative.”  But such a state must quickly pass, for a person must go on making practical decisions.  And such decisions require some conception of what is humanly good if they are to have any coherence.  A person may attempt to rid himself of the reflective thought that always addresses the issue of goodness.  Taking drugs or alcohol, or compulsively pursuing some diverting, highly engaging activity are typical measures.  Or, more commonly, one may attempt to make of oneself a mere component of some system larger than oneself, such as some economic or social system.  The paradox of such self-manipulation or self-objectification, though, is that it involves an on-going, effective, high-level strategy to avoid thinking about what one is doing.  One has to take thought and avoid taking thought simultaneously.  It looks logically impossible.  We give it the common name of self-deception.  Leading such a self-deceived life is the antithesis of leading the examined life, and its only alternative.

The Greek “techné” translates both “art” and “craft.”  Plato did not recognize any difference between what we call the arts and the crafts or trades.  He did not use any equivalent to our concept of “fine art,” according to which such art is essentially removed from practical life and is reserved for some special realm of rarefied, non-worldly experience.  All art is practical, on the Platonic view, since, as any techné, it tends to the goodness of human life.  Plato did, of course, talk about counterfeit art, art of the sort that appeals to and cultivates the selfish fantasy life of its audience and that thereby diminishes their ability to function as friends and as citizens.  Such counterfeit art is not like what we call fine art, but more like what we would call “the movies;” it’s essentially cynical manipulation of popular images for the sake of monetary profit.

Both the musician and the doctor are, as masters of technés, artists, on Plato’s view.  Both of them bring theoretical knowledge to practice for the sake of the good.  In the case of the doctor, that good is the health of the patient; in the case of the musician, that good is the beauty of the music.  The “intoxication” of a great piece of music is, I would say, “divine madness.”[1]

Especially in the Phaedrus, Socrates describes the perception of reality (which is the function of “reason”) as a joyful experience.  Platonic rationality is not, then, mental coolness, and Platonic self-control is not repression of emotion.  When a symphony orchestra plays well, there is a sense in which the orchestra is now “in control.”  That’s the control of Platonic self-control.  There is another, more pejorative sense of “control” as willful and repressive.  If the orchestra tries to control the music in this latter sense of ‘control’, it kills the spirit of the music.

Look at it this way:  The good kind of control is one in which, as it were, the music controls the orchestra; the orchestra submits to the authority of the music and lets it take over.  This submission or surrender requires a good deal of musical wisdom; a bad musician does not have the ability to surrender his will in this way.  Plato’s idea of reason can be characterized as submission of this sort to reality.

[1] See the Phaedrus.  inspired by its beauty. The opposition that we tend to ascribe to “reason” and “emotion” is not found anywhere in the Platonic dialogues.  I believe that this concept of reason is derived primarily from the 17th century European Enlightenment that identified rationality with the spirit of a mechanical physical science.  This concept set up a series of oppositions between reason and emotion, thinking and feeling, reflection and sensation, etc. that Plato would not have countenanced.

Remarks on the Gorgias:  Can Reason Persuade?  Socrates, Oratory and Self-Deceit.

In Plato’s Gorgias, Socrates is portrayed in dialogue with men influenced by the Sophistic teaching of oratory.  These men have concluded that the first political art is the art of persuasion by means of language (never clearly distinguished from force or fraud) and that techniques of such persuasion applicable to any subject matter can be developed and taught.  Broad conclusions about the nature of a desirable human life are implied: e.g., that the best life is one which garners the most power of the sort that the ability to persuade confers, the power to impose one’s will.  One implication specific to language is that the more persuasive argument is always the better argument, and that a persuasive argument is one that actually persuades.  From an initial ethical relativism, then, a relativism of reason follows: what is good or reasonable is what is accepted as such.[1]

One of Socrates’ first questions to Gorgias is whether these techniques of persuasion work universally or only in the company of those who are ignorant about the subject.  Gorgias admits that it is only in the company of the ignorant that his techniques work.  But this is hardly enough to dismay the students of oratory since the “many” (the demos) is the source of political power and the demos will never be expert but ignorant.  Thus, techniques of persuasion will always give power.

The Socratic response is, very generally speaking, that a good life is concerned not with what is apparently good but with what is really good, and that oratory is, by its nature, concerned only with appearances.  It follows that oratory is no part of a good life.

Throughout the Platonic dialogues, the political is equated with the psychological.  That is, it is assumed that for every political phenomenon, there is a psychological one that is its origin and reflex.  On the Socratic analysis of oratory, oratory is revealed to be the political expression of the psychological phenomenon of self-deception.  Self-deception is concerned with the manipulation of appearances for the sake of a hidden agenda.  Likewise, oratory: it is the polis lying to itself as self-deception is the individual person lying to himself.  By implication, every citizen taken in by an orator is complicit, for a political lie must have its sustaining personal dishonesty.

The model of reason to which Socrates contrasts oratory is craft (techné), one example of which is medicine.  A techné combines theoretical principles with practical application to promote the good of its object independently of the welfare of its practitioner.  Socrates argues that the true political art is justice (diké), which, he argues, is a techné that aims at the public good and not at the empowerment or enrichment of its practitioners.  Oratory, he says, is the counterfeit of justice, taking its appearance without its essential concern.

One of the most provocative questions raised by the Gorgias is whether justice is a techné.  Because of its theoretical organization, a techné can be taught.  But Plato argues elsewhere (in the Meno) that justice cannot be taught.  If it were teachable, then good parents would never have bad children.

Practical wisdom is clearly not just one techné on par with others.  Piloting, medicine, and practical wisdom are not commensurable.  I suggest that the knowledge that is virtue is in some respects like medicine, in that it is principled and aims at the good of its object (which goodness Socrates conceived as the inculcation of its natural ordering), and thus is practical knowledge, as any techné.  It is this crucial feature of wisdom that Socrates seeks to highlight in the Gorgias.

In other respects wisdom is not like an ordinary techné.  I have two differences in mind.  First, the knowledge that is virtue essentially involves humility; a virtuous person, that is, maintains an effective awareness of the ineluctable finitude of his knowledge of virtue (i.e., a practical knowledge of his ignorance).  That is to say, he is aware that he can never have a theoretically complete knowledge of virtue (since he can never have a completed knowledge of himself).  This awareness of the theoretical incompleteness of one’s self-knowledge makes possible the sensitivity and openness necessary for accurate practical judgment.  Theoretical self-certainty about virtue makes for dogmatism, conceit, and practical blundering.

The second difference is that whereas a techné such as medicine is a techné the practice of which one can intermittently take up and quit, wisdom is not so voluntary.  Practical wisdom, you might say, is the techné the practice of which is being a human being.  The discipline of this techné is unrelenting and its failure results in a diminishing of one’s humanity.  It’s as if you are a work of art (a sculpture, say) to which every action and project of yours contributes in some way.  Your aim is to bring out the excellence or beauty of this work by being true to its nature.  You are not the arbitrary or tyrannical creator of this work (which is yourself), for its material possesses a prior integrity or nature that you must respect and to which you must respond if you are to render the beauty that is possible for it.

In short, the techné that is wisdom is forced.  Like it or not, you are always in the process of making/sculpting yourself; every choice and act has its effect.  But since you are at one and the same time the craftsman and the craft object, you cannot stand away from this project.  It is thus not the sort of knowledge that can come into your deliberate and arbitrary control and it cannot be retained intact over lapses of practice.

It is this lack of objective control over practical wisdom that makes it unteachable.  We all remain constant students of this certain techné; none of us can truly claim full mastery.  Thus, since none of us is an authority on the question of wisdom (as some of us are in the other crafts), our appropriate role is one of friendship, by which we promote wisdom in ourselves and others simultaneously.  Friendship involves virtues of honesty and truthfulness that are the very antithesis of self-deceit.  Friendship in the community leaves no room for oratory.

The question of whether reason can persuade is relevant to politics as well as psychology.  Increasingly, it seems, our public policy, to the extent that it is influenced by public opinion, is shaped by those who employ the best professional persuaders, i.e., people who specialize in generally applicable techniques of persuasion.  The thought I wish to provoke is whether there is a voice of reason that has its own force beyond the techniques of professional persuasion, of salesmanship.  This is the question raised in Plato’s Gorgias, and I take the Gorgias as my text.

Let me articulate here some Platonic doctrine about the meaning of terms such as ‘wisdom’, ‘virtue’, and ‘justice’.  On the Platonic view, everyone, simply because he is a human being, wants to lead a good life.  As this is sometimes put, everyone wants to be happy.  Our ‘happiness’ translates, with misfortune, the Greek ‘eudaimonia’.  A closer English translation is ‘flourishing’.  Eudaimonia denotes the fulfillment of human potential to the point of excellence, where this potential is not simply natural but mediated and transformed by culture.[2]  The opposite of eudaimonia is dysdaimonia, denoting division or strife of the soul; thus, eudaimonia carries the connotation of spiritual unity.  Virtue is needed for happiness; our ‘virtue’, with its Hebraic-Christian overlay, translates with equal misfortune the Greek ‘areté’, which denotes, generally or specifically, excellence in the fulfillment of potential.  Thus, the cultivation of areté was considered necessary for eudaimonia.

An example of a specific non-moral virtue is musicality.  Developing a natural talent for music, a person may then acquire an excellence in the performance of music, and thus may be said to have acquired a musical virtue.  Not everyone has musical talent, but certain virtues were generally considered in Greek moral thought to be necessary for anyone who would lead a good life.  These were the cardinal moral virtues of justice, temperance, courage, and prudence.  Socrates argues elsewhere that these four virtues are actually four aspects of a single virtue, which may be termed “practical wisdom” (so that courage necessarily involves prudence, etc.).  Socrates shares with his interlocutors the assumption that a wise person is virtuous and is thereby, in the active personal realization in which virtue consists, in possession of a good and happy life.  It’s worth noting that the Greek idea of goodness carries an aesthetic connotation, so that what is good is beautiful and admirable in the way that all beautiful things are, stirring a mix of admiration and desire.

One of the central questions in the Gorgias is whether justice, understood in the usual way as fairness, and temperance, understood as self-control, are really virtues.  At one point, Callicles tries to re-define justice with a speech about “natural justice,” according to which it is by nature that the stronger should dominate and lord it over the weaker.  He ridicules justice and temperance, as usually conceived, as burdens of the weak who do not have the enterprise to fulfill their desires or the power to forestall retaliation.

Due to the truth of the thesis of the ultimate identity of the political with the psychological argued by Plato through several dialogues (notably in the Republic), the question broached at the top of the previous page about public life ramifies to a question about the nature of the individual human soul.  Viz., is it at least possible that there be among my own deliberations and decisions—the formulation of personal policy—a motivation from reason that is distinct from, and not just a scheduling of, the motivations of compulsion, desire, fond hope, quiet desperation, personal or family myths, likely stories, etc.?  Socrates argued in the affirmative; his sophistic interlocutors implicitly subscribe to the negative.

Plato’s Gorgias attempts to present ideas as they really are: embodied in human speech and character.  In the dialogue, a certain man named Polus takes up the dialogue with Socrates after the opening conversation with Gorgias comes to an impasse.  The ideas that Polus represents cannot really be understood without understanding who Polus is.  He is an ambitious young man who has promising career prospects and who has taken as his ideal of success those who have gathered enough political and economic power to do, as he sees it, exactly as they please.  The wherewithal to fulfill arbitrary preference is, for Polus, the mark of a successful, i.e., a good, life.  He therefore holds Archelaus, the tyrant of Macedonia who overthrew the Macedonian king by stealth and systematically murdered all of the legitimate heirs, as an example of someone who is truly successful since Archelaus holds absolute and unrivaled power in his country.  Because of his absolute power, Archelaus suffers from none of the repression of desire that counts as temperance in the lives of most of the rest of us.

Polus longs not for human solidarity, but to set himself apart from the rest of humanity.  Typically of such men, he conceives of himself as somehow special and deservedly exempt from the frailties and fate of ordinary people.  Implicit in his view is a theme that another character in the dialogue, Callicles, later makes explicit: that the cunning and strong owe it to themselves to take a larger share of what life has to offer, contrary to that conventional notion of justice that insists on fairness and which is the trick that the many weak try to play on the superior few to get them to rein in their natural strength.  In short, it is, ultimately and naturally, might that makes right, power that makes for goodness.

Perhaps I have said enough to indicate Polus’ character.  Polus is, of course, only a literary character.  Yet he exemplifies a sort or type of man well known to ancient Athens and modern Hartford.  In the dynamic of his character, reason has no guiding role to play; the moving force of all decision and action is desire, and the only role for intelligence is the acquisition of means for the cultivation and fulfillment of desire.  For Polus, reason is a slave of the passions.

At the beginning of the Gorgias, Socrates has come to find out from Gorgias what sort of art Gorgias teaches.  Polus and the others admire Gorgias because he professes to teach them the skills needed to persuade assemblies and so to advance themselves in their political careers.  When Socrates asks Gorgias what sort of art he teaches, Gorgias answers that he teaches oratory.  “What is oratory?” Socrates asks.  “It is the noblest art of all,” says Gorgias, “for as a master of this art, one can give a convincing answer to any question whatever.”

This valorizing description of oratory is hardly the informative definition that Socrates was seeking.  As Socrates questions Gorgias and begins to make progress toward the essence of the idea of oratory, Gorgias admits that such an “art” will work only in the company of the ignorant, since knowledge has a steadfastness about it and cannot be persuaded to just any conclusion, the way ignorance can.

At this point, an indignant Polus asks Socrates what sort of art he thinks oratory is.  Socrates replies that he does not think oratory is an art at all but merely a sort of “knack.”  The word translated into ‘art’ here is techné.  Socrates’ intent is to contrast Gorgias’ sort of business as professional persuader, on the one hand, with a discipline that is clearly rational and which will therefore serve as a model of practical reason, on the other.  As mentioned before, a techné combines theoretical principles with practical application to serve the good of its object.  Ship piloting is one of Socrates’ examples; medicine is another.  The purpose of the art of piloting is to apply theoretical knowledge of sea, sky, and ship to the particular task of preserving cargo and passengers across a journey.  The success of this application is the success of reason.  But note that reason in this case does not serve the pilot’s interests, but the passengers’.  That is why the passengers typically have to pay the pilot.  The practice of the art itself does not serve the practitioner’s good, but the good of its object.  Likewise for medicine and all other arts. The implication is that it is characteristic of a reasoned practice to aim at a good that is independent of its practitioner’s personal and prior interests.

But for each real techné, Socrates notes, there is a counterfeit that takes the art’s appearance but is really concerned not with the good of its object but with its practitioner’s personal and pre-conceived interests.  Such counterfeits therefore always serve ulterior interests.  The success of such a counterfeit depends not on reason but on a certain cunning that shrewdly assesses its audience’s disposition.  This success is the success of flattery, and Socrates calls it a “knack.”  It is merely a knack because it has no theoretical component; it is all practice and, since unprincipled, cannot give an account (logos) of itself.

The success of such a knack requires that its audience be sufficiently hedonistic that they confuse goodness with pleasure and are then inclined to act for the sake of pleasure rather than for the sake of the good.  The knack that is oratory plays to the pleasure of its audience through flattery and appeal to prejudice, greed, fear, etc.  Oratory is essentially manipulative and so requires some unaccounted flair for playing on the psychological makeup of its audience.

For Polus’ instruction, Socrates lists four technés, two of the body and two of the soul.  For the body, he lists medicine and gymnastics.  For the soul, he lists justice and legislation.  Each of these aims at the good of the body or the soul (of the individual or of the community).  Oratory, he says, is the counterfeit of justice, using language to persuade about questions of justice (right and wrong, good and evil) when its real concerns are elsewhere.  The counterfeit of legislation is what he calls sophistry; “pork-barrel” legislation is an example of sophistry, as any general policy, personal or public, that is skewed by special interests.

The counterfeit of gymnastic, he says, is cosmetics since it promotes the appearance of health without concern for its reality.  And the counterfeit of medicine is pastry-cooking, since medicine is concerned with what you take into your body that promotes health (medicine and nutritional food), while pastry-cooking is concerned merely with the pleasure of taste for the sake of the pastry cook’s profit, and disregards the welfare of the body.  In general, the moral distinction between pleasure and goodness corresponds to a metaphysical distinction between appearance and reality.  (There is some hint here of the Buddhist idea that adopting pleasure and pain as standards of value creates a world of addictive illusion.)

[1] Analogously, the stronger force is the force that actually prevails.  The power of  logos (speech and, by extension, thought) is conceived as instrumental for one’s prior purposes.

[2] A eudaimonic person is, literally, “watched over by a good spirit.”  Originally and in ordinary talk, eudaimonia was just a matter of doing well, of having the good fortune to prosper.  The philosophers noted: (1) that ordinary prosperity does not of itself make a good person or a good life; and (2) that such prosperity anyway depends too much on luck for it to be a worthy goal of one’s actions.  The thought was that the goodness of one’s life should be, to a reasonable extent, under some rational control and not subject to the fortunes that bring material prosperity and take it away.  Thus the way was opened to refine the notion of eudaimonia by asking what a eudaimonic life might be apart from ordinary prosperity.

The Meaning of Death

In the Phaedo, the Socratic way of life is portrayed under the test of the prospect of immediate death.  Such a prospect is the ultimate test for any way of life.  A philosophy of life that forgets that life ends will break down here and not only leave its adherent with nothing, but leave him with the realization that he is left with nothing.  Even when the question of piety, for instance, is of immediate concern to oneself, it is possible to ignore it, and, through lack of philosophical resources, not even to realize that it is of concern.  But if you have the good fortune to live long enough, then it will not be so easy in like manner to ignore the question of the meaning of one’s own death.  The substance or hollowness of a way of life will begin to show itself here if nowhere else.

The guiding principle of Socratic philosophy is “Know thyself.”  When waiting for the hemlock, the upshot of that principle seems to be: “Know that you are mortal.”  But still the command needs interpretation.  Clearly, knowing that you are mortal means, among other things, knowing that you are going to die.  But even this proposition remains unclear until it becomes clear what death is.  Thus, Socrates addresses the question of the nature of death and puts all the arguments he can find to the test.

Socrates lived his life in the pursuit of wisdom.  His implicit guiding question at every turn was:  “What is the nature of this situation in which I now find myself?  What does it ask of me?  What am I called upon to recall that I may recognize this situation for what it is and so choose and act from the best knowledge available to me?”  In short, he lived his life undertaking the task of anamnesis at every turn, attempting to perceive the essential forms of every situation, from the particular situation, for example, of having to defend himself in court to the most general situation of being a human being living on the face of the earth.  If he was successful, then he never forgot that the life he aspired to comprehend has a natural end.  (Forgetting mortality, the understanding of everything else is deeply skewed out of proportion to the scale of human life.)  In the Phaedo, what has always been implicit acknowledgment of personal mortality comes to explicit recognition as Socrates tests the arguments relevant to the question, “What is death?”

As reported in the Apology, Socrates once said that he does not know what death is, and that as far as he knows it may be the greatest blessing.  He said this to indicate why it would not be reasonable for him to renounce his way of life under the threat of death.  But in the Phaedo, he is seriously engaged in the question of what death is, as if he expected to find out.  Why doesn’t he just say to his friends, “Well, guys, I don’t know what death is, so I think I’ll just wait and see.  Maybe I’ll find out and maybe I won’t.”  He doesn’t say this because he knows that, as in all other situations in life, without preparation of the soul, nothing will be seen; experience comes to the prepared mind.  In accord with his guiding principle, then, Socrates must test all the ideas about death available to him, just as he tested ideas about virtue and piety, so that he comes as close as possible to recognizing his death for what it is, just as he came as close as he could to seeing piety and virtue for what they are, but without the arrogance of a final, dogmatic opinion.  On the Socratic view, this is the only path of wisdom open to a human being.

  A Problem of Interpretation

There appears to be a conflict between one clear implication of the Socratic imperative to self-knowledge on the one hand, and the arguments of the Phaedo on the immortality of the soul, on the other.  The most important element of self-knowledge is the practical knowledge that one is not a god, existing eternally in an essentially unchanging realm, but a mortal, living within the limitations of time and historical circumstance.  This knowledge requires an incorporation into one’s self-conception of the recognition that all of one’s thoughts, plans, and ambitions are within the setting of a finite life and are properly scaled to its dimensions.  The fact of one’s inevitable death is not, on the view suggested by the imperative, a calamity that is somehow accidental though inevitable.  Rather, it signals an essential aspect of one’s human being.  If such knowledge is acknowledged in practice and not just in theory, then one’s self-regard and, by extension, all of one’s knowledge is profoundly tempered; with anamnesis of mortality, you are rendered more reasonable and open to humane experience.

On the other hand, the arguments of the Phaedo seem clearly to be in favor of immortality of the soul, or seem at least to be searching for such a conclusion.  But any such conclusion runs, apparently, counter to the significance of the Socratic imperative sketched above.

Let me suggest one approach to this problem.  The conflict would be resolved if we add the following line of thought to what has already been observed about Socratic philosophy:

There is nothing about human life that cannot be questioned and examined.  But real questioning implies alternative answers and alternative lives.  We can form the idea of immortality by deriving it from a questioning of the proposition that each of us will die.  Since it is part of the examined life to let nothing that we assume about ourselves remain untested, unexamined, unquestioned, let us bring ourselves into self-knowledge as far as our abilities allow by questioning too this proposition of mortality.

Thus, we must ask: what does the question of mortality mean?  What sense do the alternative answers make?  Like the final episode in a drama, what happens here makes all the difference for the meaning of what happens before.  Some of us assume that we are the sort of beings for which death is a final extinction.  Others assume that we are the sort of beings that live forever.  But what do these assumptions mean in real terms?  We can’t allow them to remain purely speculative and impractical.  We need to know how we are to live differently if one answer rather than another is true.

Since we recognize death at least in a limited way, we can inquire about it, bring it under examination and make its questioning part of our life.  The question, “What is death?” is one of the most important and one of the most difficult; without illumination here, we remain in large a mystery to ourselves and the meaning of our lives remains a question mark.

One implication of this line of thought is that an abandonment of the possibility of immortality signifies an abandonment of much of what we would become.  It is part of our nature to strive for, hope for, aim for, more than what is merely human; a striving for self-overcoming is part of our destiny.  Thus, it is never given to us to know in any explicit, thematic way, what the limitations of human nature are, as if we were to find borders across which we could not step.

A potentially tragic vision of human nature is implied in this “resolution,” for it implies that on the one hand our aspirations may always be over-reaching our humanity, so we may be ever bound for brutal disappointment.  Yet we need our highest aspirations for a full realization of our potential and self-knowledge.  Abandonment of those aspirations implies a lapse into the cynical relativism or stifling dogmatism that human beings naturally find oppressive and disheartening.

1. The Definition of Elenchus

 The Euthyphro is a good example of the Socratic practice of elenchus (“cross-examining”).  Formally stated, elenchus is a process of examining and refuting propositions (usually a series of propositions proposed as definitions for some interesting eidos) in dialogue with another, where the dialogue is motivated by a concern for truth.  In the Euthyphro, as in other dialogues, one person offers a definition of an important idea, which proposed definition is examined and refuted.  Another, better definition is then formulated in light of what was wrong with the first.  This second definition is then also examined and refuted, opening the way for a third and better definition, and so on.  If the idea under definition is central to human self-understanding, then the process of definition is theoretically without limit, though it makes progress toward an absolute and final definition.  The theoretical unlimitedness of the progress toward definition is a function of the constitutional limitation of human beings and human knowledge.[1]  Elenchus is a moral as well as an intellectual exercise; part of its function is to deflate the unwarranted self-confidence of prior opinion.  To the extent that a Socratic interlocutor is dogmatically committed to his opinions, elenchus reduces him to a state of aporia (confusion or helpless perplexity, literally, “no port”) which is the image of his true state.

One of the presuppositions of the elenchic method is that learning takes place not through the passive reception of information, but through the active correction of prior belief.  The idea is that we are capable of learning to the extent that we are able to expose our beliefs to the risk of refutation, and that we actually do learn to the extent that they are shown to be in error.  It is, of course, not enough just to be informed that some of your opinions are in error; to learn, you must also understand why they are in error.  It is part of the Socratic ideal to test the most fundamental of your relevant beliefs in any situation in order to deepen your understanding of what you are doing in that situation.

Part of the moral aim of elenchus is to free its practitioners from the compulsive tyranny of opinion and to put their beliefs in service to the pursuit of truth by expressing and examining them honestly so that action that hinges on those beliefs will be honest and responsible.  Succinctly put, elenchus is a dialogical process of pursuing truth, in belief and action, through the explication and testing of one’s beliefs.  The constant practice of elenchus is part of the Socratic ideal of living the examined life.

Of the four classical virtues, elenchus specifically requires courage, for you must first state what you believe and then examine that belief without letting your ego or ulterior interests get involved.  The courage that is required is really the courage of honesty.  Honesty is a concern for the truth as it is regardless of practical consequences.  And the courage of honesty is tested when practical matters are at issue.  Thus, elenchus requires honesty, and honesty requires courage when the questions are real, i.e., have consequences that matter.

Elenchus addresses highly general beliefs, but not inconsequential beliefs that have no bearing on your practical decisions.  If you can change a certain belief when the change has no practical consequences, then that belief is not a candidate for elenchic examination.  Socrates’ discussions are always highly abstract, but the dramatic settings of the dialogues make clear that there is always something quite concrete and practical at stake.  The beliefs examined in elenchus are not idle or speculative, but working beliefs.

Elenchus is self-examination in the sense that it presses home questions like these:  “What are you really doing?  If you look at what you are up to in the light of your highest principles, what is your natural response?  Shame or self-respect?  Does it shame you to regard your action in the full light of your highest principles (so that you feel like quitting the discussion and not thinking about it), or do you find that you are acting consistently with your highest idea (so that you can regard what you are doing openly, with acceptance, without wanting to look away)?”

The dialogic process of elenchus aims to bring into question, and therefore to consciousness, the fundamental contours of the life that one is actually leading.  To the extent that self-knowledge of this sort makes a person a better human being, elenchus promotes the moral improvement of its practitioners.  It is therefore part of the practice of what we may call virtue (areté or excellence), since it helps to develop the unique potential of what it is to be a human being rather than a mere animal of cunning.

Elenchus requires the courage to put practical concerns aside and pursue the truth for its own sake.  If one has sufficient courage for this, then one presumably has sufficient courage to allow the conclusions of that pursuit to have their full impact on those practical concerns.  It’s somewhat ironic that the elenchic inquiry into truth is possible only when there are real concerns at stake (since it is those concerns that make the inquiry a real one), though the concerns at stake must not be allowed to affect one’s inquiry.  It appears that honesty is a matter of maintaining the proper tension between theoretical inquiry and practical conduct, a tension that aligns and benefits both.

2.  Digression on courage and belief

 Elenchus requires courage, but even thinking about and stating what you honestly believe requires courage, and a certain amount of preliminary self-knowledge as well.  In our feint-hearted moments, most of us would rather not believe anything.  After all, belief carries the burden of responsibility.  Owning a belief, you are then responsible for its justification; rather than holding it arbitrarily, you need to be able to give good reasons for it.  (A belief is certainly no good—hardly a belief at all—if you are unable or unwilling to say anything persuasive about it.)  It also carries certain risks.  First, your belief may be in error.  You are then liable to suffer the ego-bruising embarrassment of being shown to hold a false belief, as well as the intellectual pain of a temporary epistemic confusion.  Second, you may find yourself alone and perhaps lonely in your belief.  For a belief that you will hold only if it crosschecks with what other people think is merely a comfortable and provisional opinion, hardly an honest personal belief at all.  And third, you risk a certain trauma to your self-respect (i.e., shame) should you find, upon reflection, that you are not acting according to your beliefs.

Sometimes I would like to avoid all the work and risk of personal belief and just believe what everyone else does or whatever the experts say (the anonymous “they”), and thus sink into the unthinking comfort of a mere animal or herd mentality.  But in the anonymous or merely animal mind, there is no starting point for elenchus.  Elenchus requires, rather, some of the courage of self-knowledge to begin with.

And the fact is that I can never really be just like everyone else in point of belief.  For my beliefs arise out of the specific problems and prospects of my involvements in the world, and these involvements are, in sum and detail, historically unique.  Their unique configuration requires constant independent thought if I am to live true to them; addressing and revising those beliefs, within a general awareness of the nature of my world, is the only way I have of thinking anew about who I am, where my world has come from, and where it is going.  It is not practical to forego this thought, for the unexamined life is not worth living.

[1] Socrates’ elenchic conversations exhibit four general rules:

1. You must say what you truly believe; nothing should be said hypothetically or merely for the sake of argument. This helps keep the discussion relevant to the genuine concerns of the people involved.
2. You may change your mind at any point in the discussion; the whole point of elenchus, after all, is to straighten and correct reflective belief, so certainly you should be able to make such corrections as you go along and not be forced to keep to what you say at first.
3. The issue of the conversation must be real; that is, the issue, though pursued on the level of theory, must be a practical one the outcome of which will make a difference to one’s decisions.
4. The participants in the conversation must find agreement at each step of the conversation. The only test of truth available to the conversationalists is that of agreement between them. If the conversation is to progress toward truth, the partners must remain in agreement.

1. Obedience

The Crito is about obedience.  What is it to obey the law?  Is it just to do as the law says?  No, for a person who is quite lawless, though also cunning, might do that.[1]

Consider the attitude of a cunning but lawless person: he will not just go about breaking laws indiscriminately, for that would quickly result in great disadvantage to him.  No, he will avoid violating a law if there is no substantial advantage to be gained by its violation, and some risk of being caught and punished.  But he will break the law if the prospective advantages of doing so are great enough and the prospect of being caught and punished are slight enough.  And if he can be assured that there will be no punishment whatever forthcoming upon the violation of some law, though there will be some personal advantage, then he will do it.  If breaking a law just never offers sufficient advantage, or escaping punishment just never is sufficiently assured, then he will never break the law.  Viewed externally, he will appear to be law-abiding.  But his attitude toward the law is as toward some source of risk that has to be managed; his reasons for not breaking the law are of the same sort as his reasons for not driving recklessly and for not taking dangerous drugs—one is likely to get hurt that way.  No-one intentionally obeys the laws of physics.

In short, it is the prospect of force employed against him that makes the lawless person pay attention to the law and avoid its violation.  But this is not real obedience; it’s a mere trade-off of interests that only appears to be obedience.

On the Socratic view, obedience to the law of one’s community essentially involves a concern for the cultivation of a harmonious relation between oneself and the community, a relation that aims at the real good of both.  Socrates believed that the relation that one has with the community at large is continuous with, and includes, the relation that one has with one’s parents and, ultimately, the relation that one has with oneself.  These three are not, finally, isolated elements but are systematically connected.  The attitude of obedience implicitly recognizes this deep and ineluctable continuity of one’s self regard with one’s respect for family and community, recognizes that the relation with oneself is unavoidably and finally extended to the community, just as one’s attitude toward the community rebounds on one’s self-respect, and so seeks to find a beneficial alignment of self, family, and community.  The lack of concern for the good of the community characteristic of the essentially lawless person finally manifests itself in a lack of concern for his own real good.

Genuine obedience is an expression of a more general attitude that, in the Socratic dialogues, has been called piety.  So let me attempt to put the idea of obedience into a broader conceptual setting by saying something about piety.

To grasp the Socratic idea of piety, it is important to understand that Socrates did not view the world as an essentially lifeless thing as we do (however much the world is populated by living things).  For him, the world itself is an organic entity of which humans and their societies are parts.  Socrates saw the political arrangement embodied in the polis (the Greek city-state) not as an artificial set-up based on an implicit contract among pre-social individuals, as we tend to view our society, but rather as a natural development of the organic constitution of the world.  Socrates would not have recognized any deep difference between positive and natural law.  He viewed citizenship as one of the essential and natural functions of the human being.  From the gods to the world to the city to the citizen there runs a natural and organic continuity expressed in the idea of cosmos (order).  The city-state was not made by humans, as an article of craft is made, any more than the human species was made; a polis grows in the world the way a forest does, as an expression of one of the world’s natural potentialities.  Thus, for Socrates, one’s attitude toward one’s state is properly of a piece with one’s attitude toward the world at large.  And we have already seen that he considered that this attitude properly and naturally is one of piety.

The Socratic doctrine that humans are social by nature and not by artifice was made explicit in Aristotle’s political theory.  It is understandable that the Greeks would regard the polis as the highest and most appropriate expression of this sociality.  But one can reject the idea that the polis is the highest development of sociality and still subscribe to the idea that humans are social by nature.  If the Socratic idea that psyché is the internal reflex of external dialogue is correct, then human beings need each other for thought itself and conversation is the ground of culture.  If thought is natural to human beings just as human, then culture is the natural ground of society.

Piety is the attitude that places one in proper relation to one’s continuity with the world at large; it is an attitude that fosters an awareness of one’s finitude and temporality as a human being but also an awareness of one’s unity with the world, an infinite and eternal being.  It is an attitude that opens up, as best as may happen, our essential finitude and temporality to the infinity and eternality of the world.  Through this reverence, one knows one’s place in the world, and by extension, one’s place in the city.  From piety flows justice in one’s relations with others, humility in one’s relation to ultimate truth, and obedience in relation to the law.  Obedience is a specific mode of the more general attitude of piety.

2.  The counterfeit of obedience

Socrates’ piety, as expressed toward his native city, was grounded in a concern for the good of Athens.  His relation to Athens was as that of a true friend.  But Athens mistook his piety for impiety because in a time of conservative repression, moral truth was not a pleasant thing.  Athens became tyrannical, confused the good with the pleasurable, and deemed Socrates impious.  Had Socrates simply followed orders in this situation (“Mind your own business, Socrates.  Go home and keep quiet.”), he would have appeared to be obedient.  But following orders without reflection on their moral character is only a counterfeit of obedience.  True obedience is not merely submission to men in power and to their edicts.  It is submission to the moral truth, and it is expressed in a concern that the community of which one is a citizen be a good community, conducted in accord with its own most basic moral belief.  As a friend will recall you to your own belief, so Socrates tried to recall Athens to itself and was executed when Athens resented the discomfort.

[1] For more on the Socratic idea of lawlessness, see the discussions of tyranny as a psychological condition in the Gorgias and the Republic.

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).

PRIMORDIAL BELIEF AND ANAMNESIS

In this discussion of the theory of the human soul that I attribute to Socrates, I shall use the term, “primordial belief,” to refer to those true beliefs that each person holds at least implicitly if not avowedly.  Briefly put, primordial belief is belief about what sort of living is worthy of a human being.[1] Initially, such belief is merely true belief and does not qualify as knowledge as long as it remains noetically unreflected, even though it is true and influences, more or less, all of one’s decisions and behavior.  Such belief is potentially knowledge, for it is possible for it to become justified true belief through careful recollective thought.

Primordial belief as such is not theoretic (i.e., noetically reflected), and when Socrates discusses knowledge, it is usually theoretic knowledge to which he refers.  Socrates uses ‘knowledge’, that is, to refer to true belief that is “tied down,” i.e., justified by its careful anamnesis from the primordial level.  (Knowledge = justified true belief.)  Elenchus, operating on psyché to evince anamnesis, is a practice that helps to bring what we believe in a forgetful and darkened way into noetic light.  If elenchus is done carefully and anamnesis occurs, then that which has been recollected counts as on the way to knowledge (though never fully and finally knowledge, which is possible only for a god outside of time and change) because the respondent is able to recognize the theoretical connections between what he recollects and what he has known before.  He is then able to justify his belief by explicit appeal to these theoretical connections.

In the Meno, Socrates argues that “knowing is remembering.”  But what sort of remembering is this?  The original term for this sort of remembering is ‘anamnesis’.  Anamnesis is the kind of recollection that brings together fragments of what were thought to be isolated or independent or what were just barely noticed, and results in a new understanding of what was previously noticed or known disjointedly.  Anamnesis unifies and makes sense out of what was disparate and incoherent before.  The re-collective connotation of ‘anamnesis’ (i.e., the connotation of “re-gathering” or “re-organizing”) should be taken seriously.  Anamnesis recollects primordial belief together with the elements of your current situation so that you are more able to recognize that situation for what it is.[2] After anamnesis is achieved, the connections that are recognized seem so obvious and natural that you may wonder how you didn’t see them before.  You may even have the sense that you should have seen them before.  But it then becomes easier to recognize other situations of the same kind.

The Platonic doctrine of knowing as recollection (anamnesis) implies that an essential part of the meaning of any general idea consists in its applicability to specific circumstances.  That is, an essential part of a general idea is its function to re-collect, re-member, i.e., re-organize one’s cognitive experience.  In Plato’s view, a general idea gives one a perceptual or recognitional capacity, and part of the point of mastering general ideas is to cultivate such practical capacities.  To master a general idea is to acquire a form of knowledge, and to have such knowledge is to be able to re-cognize a general idea in a particular situation.  On the Platonic view of knowledge as anamnesis, every general idea has a theoretical side, but it must also have a practical, applicative side since its purpose is to serve as a recognitional lens for experience.  (It is made clear in the Republic that there is a further, and equally essential, third element to any general idea: a general idea is essentially constituted by reference to the eidos of the good.  Thus, Plato’s conception of general ideas is analogous to the notion of a techné.  See glossary.)

In Plato’s view, all experience is organized, or re-collected, by general ideas.  Socrates’ claim that such ideas are already in the soul (i.e., are a priori) and need only a questioning experience to bring them out, means, as I read Plato, that the most effective way to focus an idea as a cognitive lens is by questioning its internal logic within circumstances that call for its practical application.

One implication of this line of thought is that on the most fundamental level, all people are in accord on the issue of what sort of life is worthy for a human being, and disagreements are the result of error or confusion resulting from a lack of noetic clarity about what the communicants really believe.  Moral error is then just a failure to gather and apply in a timely, practical way, what one already believes in one’s heart.  Conversely, moral virtue is the practical skill that consistently enables such application.

The Socratic striving for definition is intended to facilitate the practice of virtue.  One of the rules of elenchus is that the participants must state what they really believe.  Since most of us don’t clearly know what we really believe when we need to know it, the practice of elenchus requires us to reach for greater self-knowledge.

[1] A little more specifically, these are beliefs about essences–e.g., the essence of Goodness, Justice, Courage, Beauty, Piety, Right, Love, Death, etc.–that make possible practical, action-guiding recognition of instances of events and situations that partake of these essences.  Someone who has some true belief about what justice is (as we all do) has the ability to recognize actions that are just and unjust.  If his true belief becomes knowledge (through careful anamnesis), then this ability becomes the basis of an art that he can refine and exercise with greater certainty.  An art of this sort helps to stabilize one’s judgment beyond the confusing influences of irrelevant desires and interests.

 [2] Socrates attempts to get Euthyphro to recognize what he is doing in terms of a deeper understanding of piety.  Elenchus is not a teaching method, but a rigorously honest kind of conversation.  Any recollective recognition that may occur to Euthyphro must be his own experience; Socrates cannot tell him anything of importance.  Euthyphro ends the dialogue in cowardice by claiming to be busy and running away.  Meno’s paradox is really in force with Euthyphro; having no sense of what he doesn’t know, Euthyphro is closed to Socrates’ attempts to engage in a mutual search for recollective knowledge.  Anything of real value that Euthyphro may learn, by and by, will come to him accidentally or by the beneficence of a god.  His situation is universal in this respect: to the unprepared, the most profound language is merely sound, the most compelling situation, merely show.  The wisdom of Socrates consists not in a mere passive acknowledgement of the fact of one’s ignorance, but in an urgent, practical sense of the need to recognize more profound aspects of one’s situation.