Here is a draft of a talk I am to give soon. I was asked to present something that might inspire majors and non-majors, and to do something more like what I would do in a class than what I would do giving a conference paper. This is the result so far. It is a formalization of the sort of thing I might do in an upper-level class. Since I think of it as a talk and not a paper, it is not bedecked with all the scholarly niceties–footnotes or full footnotes, etc. Most of the footnotes are really just drawers in which I have stashed useful quotations or (I hope) brief, helpful clarifications. Comments welcome.
Category Archives: Socrates
Socrates–Poem (Edward Young)
Night is fair Virtue’s immemorial friend.
The conscious moon through every distant age
Has held a lamp to Wisdom, and let fall
On Contemplation’s eye her purging ray.
The famed Athenian, he who wooed from heaven
Philosophy the fair, to dwell with men,
And form their manners, not inflame their pride;
While o’er his head, as fearful to molest
His laboring mind, the stars in silence slide,
And seem all gazing on their future guest,
See him soliciting his ardent suit,
In private audience; all the livelong night
Rigid in thought, and motionless he stands,
Nor quits his theme or posture, till the sun
Disturbs his nobler intellectual beam,
And gives him to the tumult of the world.
Ed Mooney on Living One’s Own Life
I feel like I’m entering a wonderfully complex discussion, and fear I may be just muddying the waters, but let me just dive in. It’s surely correct that the self knowledge we seek is not informational, not a “knowledge that x”. We know Socrates knows himself because he’s steady in his living, and seems to ‘know what he’s doing’ in complex situations that could baffle an ordinary mortal. So knowing himself seems close to knowing how to be himself, or knowing what ‘living-as-Socrates’ must amount to. Now that knowledge is not observational (HE doesn’t conduct observations) and probably isn’t intentional: he doesn’t say to himself “I must try out living as Socrates today.” It may be retrospective: we can imagine him reflecting after a good bit of life is behind him on whether he’s happy with his comportment–has he been living a strange life, or his own life. That’s a funny question to ask, perhaps, yet people can get alienated from themselves, and regret that they’re “living-as-my-father-wants” rather than “living my own life.”
Prospectively, I think self knowledge is a “knowing how” that requires intimate acknowledgment of one’s desires, feelings, commitments and their weights, and so forth, and that sort of knowing how — knowing how to dig through all that — always questioning, always weighing, always proceeding in fear and trembling that one might be kidding oneself — is hard to share or expose or make public and will sound like a confession full of fits and starts and ill-formed thoughts. But along with that ‘reflective” and “confessional” side seems to be a willingness to pledge or promise, to stay true to something often only dimly apprehended. So Socrates remained true to things (say the assurance that the oracle was trustworthy, or that Diotima had something worthy to say) even while it’s hard to say what undergirds that pledge to honor a truth intrinsic to who one must be. “Living-as-Socrates”, knowing how to do that, is something Socrates has to work out for himself — we can’t guide him.
And if we LEARN from Socrates, how does that happen? Perhaps, as Kelly suggests, if I learn from a poem it may show up in my writing my own poem. If I learn ‘knowing how live out the unfolding self I am” by holding Socratic living in mind, that can’t mean Socrates has authority to tell me how to live. If I learn from him, it will not be that I learn how to “live-as-Socrates” (except in the most general way: for example, ‘think about what words you use in probing yourself’). Learning from him will be much more learning how to “live-as-me” — “learning” what can I pledge myself to, to give my life that sort of solidity and continuity that in the longer run I can look back (and my friends can look back) and say: “for all his (propositional, informational, doctrinal) ignorance he knew himself, he led his own life. And “learning what I can pledge myself to” is perhaps mostly just pledging-in-the-relative-dark: not ‘finding out” but “doing.”
This is a comment on a previous post, a comment by Ed Mooney. I have found it of so much interest that I wanted to station it in a more visible spot. I plan to write something responsive in the next couple of days. (The title here is mine, not Ed’s.)
Drama of the Soul in Exile: PI, (Yet) Again
Those who have been following the blog will recognize this as a both recapitulation and variation on earlier bits and pieces. It is from the essay I am working on.
The Objective Absorbed Back Into the Subjective
A…Socratic aspect of Kierkegaard’s thought is found in its instrumentalism, its consistently pragmatic character with reference to theory, expression, and practice. In this connection is it instructive to remember the difference between Socrates and Plato. The dialectic which in the hands of Socrates was an instrument to sweep away the cobwebs of illusion to make room for the human ideals, therefore a means of self-discipline and incidentally also a discipline of others, this dialectic was transformed by Plato, more or less clearly and consciously, into an end in itself, and the abstractions developed by this dialectic therefore naturally became the supreme realities. In short, Socrates was an existential thinker, to use Kierkegaard’s terminology, while Plato was a speculative metaphysician. What Kierkegaard especially admires in Socrates is that he had no objective result, but only a way, that that it is only by following the Socratic way that one can reach the Socratic result…
In this Socratic sense, Kierkegaard’s own thought was instrumental and pragmatic also. His objective thinking is everywhere absorbed–absorbed back into the subjective, the personality… –Swenson, “A Danish Socrates”
I’m not entirely sure the actual Plato (as opposed to the textbook Plato) is quite as far from Socrates as Swenson puts him, but I think the contrast a good one–even if the actual men contrasted do not stand in such contrast to one another.
Socrates, Kierkegaard and The Realistic Spirit? (David Swenson)
Our time has experienced a reaction from the intellectually aristocratic unreality of the post-Kantian idealists, which has thrown us into the arms of the plebeian unreality of the naturalistic philosophers, whose sense of reality is satisfied by the massive, the extensive, the numerical, the quantitative; and thus we have merely exchanged one abstraction for another. But just as in ancient times the career of Socrates furnished perhaps the best commentary upon what a sense for reality means, so in modern times the life and thought of Kierkegaard offer an illuminating commentary upon the philosophy of the real, or upon realism in philosophy.
Socratic Irony, Good and Bad
In his talk, “In Praise of Philosophy”, Merleau-Ponty begins his discussion of Socrates’ irony by considering his behavior at the trial:
What can one do if he neither pleads his cause nor challenges to combat? One can speak in such a way as to make freedom show itself in and through the various respects and considerations, and to unlock hate by a smile–a lesson for our philosophy which has lost both its smile and its sense of tragedy. This is what is called irony. The irony of Socrates is a distant but true relation with others. It expresses the fundamental fact that each of us is only himself inescapably, and nevertheless recognizes himself in the other. It is an attempt to open up both of us for freedom. As is true of tragedy, both the adversaries are justified, and the true irony uses a double-meaning which is founded on these facts. There is therefore no self-conceit. As Hegel well says, it is naive. The story of Socrates is not to say less in order to win an advantage in showing great mental power, or in suggesting some esoteric knowledge. “Whenever I convince anyone of his ignorance,” the Apology says with melancholy, “my listeners imagine that I know everything that he does not know.” Socrates does not know any more than they know. He knows only that there is no absolute knowledge, and that it is by this absence that we are open to the truth.
To this good irony Hegel opposes a romantic irony which is equivocal, tricky, and self-conceited. It relies on the power which we can use, if we wish, to give any kind of meaning to anything whatsoever. It levels things down: it plays with them and permits anything. The irony of Socrates is not this kind of madness. Or at least if there are traces of bad irony in it, it is Socrates himself who teaches us to correct Socrates…Sometimes it is clear that he yields to the giddiness of insolence and spitefulness, to self-magnification and the aristocratic spirit. He was left with no other resource than himself. As Hegel says again, he appeared “at the time of the decadence of the Athenian democracy; he drew away from the externally existent and retired into himself to seek the just and the good.” But in the last analysis it was precisely this he was self-prohibited from doing, since he thought that one cannot be just all alone and indeed, that in being just all alone he ceases to be just. If it is truly the City that he is defending, it is not merely the City in him but that actual City existing around him…It was therefore necessary to give the tribunal its chance of understanding. In so far as we live with others, no judgment we make on them is possible with leaves us out, and which places them at a distance.
For me, this is a Janus passage: it retrospects Reading “RM” 10 (as well as another recent post) and prospects Reading “RM” 11 (or it will, when I produce 11). –But for now I want to think about it just for Socrates’s sake. Montaigne I set aside. What interests me in the passage now is the contrast between good and bad irony. I agree that there is such a contrast and I agree in the main with Merleau-Ponty’s Hegelian understanding of it. Noting the contrast is important in reckoning with Socrates. (It is therefore important in teaching Socrates, as I now am. Students tend to react most strongly to the traces of bad irony in Socrates’ (good) irony and thus to treat his irony as (unalloyed) bad irony. Merleau-Ponty’s description helps me sympathize with the students when they react that way, without yielding to their reaction.) Socrates’ good irony hugs his ignorance, without crossing out that ignorance, rendering it merely apparent. As I have said in previous posts, Socrates targets double ignorance–thinking that you know when you do not know–and having that target makes irony all but unavoidable. Unlike simple ignorance–not knowing–double ignorance is not-knowing entombed in pride (self-conceit), coldly obstructed from the truth. Socrates’ good irony aims to disinter a person’s simple ignorance, and to bring a person to acknowledge that simple ignorance. Socrates’ good irony is, as Merleau-Ponty notes, a distant but true relation with others: distant–because if he comes too close he aggravates their pride, risks losing himself or approbates himself against their freedom; true–because genuinely hopeful and genuinely humble. Available, as I am now habitually putting it. Sometimes Socrates fails because he cannot maintain distance or maintain truth, and then he either misses irony altogether or he slips into some degree of bad irony. Good irony is Socrates’ way of making himself available to others without trespassing upon their freedom; it is also a way of targeting their pride, the pride that not only makes them unavailable to others, but makes them unhandy to themselves. Pride creates only the freedom to fall.
(A puzzle in Merleau-Ponty’s passage is its use of ‘distant’ and ‘distance’. Socrates’ irony is a “distant but true relation with others”, but Socrates will make no judgment on others that “places them at a distance”. I solve the puzzle this way: Socrates’ good irony does not place him at a judgmental distance from others. It is not a standing over and above them. In other words, Socrates can count himself among those he lives with, making no judgment on them that leaves him out, and which places them at a distance, even while his way of living among them is to maintain a distant but true relation to them. In fact, his ironic distance even aids his refusal to place others at a judgmental distance from himself: think of judgmental distance as a false relation to others.)
Reading “RM” 10: A Few Words on Montaigne, Socrates and Stoicism
After addressing Montaigne and Christianity, Merleau-Ponty turns to Montaigne and the Stoics. It will help us think about that relationship if we remind ourselves of a passage of Montaigne’s from Of Experience.
It is from my experience that I affirm human ignorance, which is, in my opinion, the most certain fact in the school of the world. Those who will not conclude their own ignorance from so vain an example as mine, or as theirs, let them recognize it through Socrates, the master of masters. For the philosopher Antisthenes would say to his pupils: “Let us go, you and I, to hear Socrates; there I shall be a pupil with you.” And maintaining this doctrine of the Stoic sect, that virtue was enough to make a life fully happy and free from need of anything whatever, he would add: “Excepting the strength of Socrates.”
Socrates trumps Antisthenes, even for Antisthenes; Socrates is master of masters. So he was for Montaigne too. This passage is one in which Montaigne signals his passage from the Stoics to Socrates.
Hamann dubbed Socrates the prophet of the Unknown God (thinking, of course, about St. Paul on Mars Hill). Merleau-Ponty notes of Montaigne that he invokes an Unknown God. But Montaigne also invokes, as Merleau-Ponty sees it, an Impossible Reason. Merleau-Ponty is driven to this phrase (and by the way, the capitalization is mine, not MMP’s) by Montaigne’s repeated strain of withdrawal, of preserving some piece of ourselves, some place in ourselves, from which we can see all that we do, all that we commit, all that we have committed to, as external–as something happening almost to someone else, as the vicissitudes of a role we play, but not of ourselves. This withdrawal, this holding back, this is what tempts Montaigne in stoicism. He can see that mixing in marriage, in love, in social life, in politics is to live according to others. Montaigne would rather live according to himself.
But, Merleau-Ponty argues, Montaigne cannot really hope to do what he would rather do. “He had described consciousness, even in its solitude, as already mixed according to its very principle with the absurd and foolish. How could he have prescribed consciousness dwell in itself, since he thinks it is wholly outside itself? Stoicism can only be a way-point.”
Montaigne knows that the world pulls us in, and does so not so much against our will as because of the nature of our consciousness. We will be mixed up with the world–that’s that. We cannot hole up in consciousness and let the world go by without touching it and without being touched. Socrates is the master of masters–in the world but not of it. Married with children, a soldier, an occasional (forced) politician, a man of conversation: he was decidedly mixed up with the world. But he somehow managed to avoid being mixed up by the world. In Porphyry’s Life of Plotinus, Porphyry marvels at Plotinus’ ability “to be present at once to himself and his friends”. Socrates had this ability; Montaigne could see it (as could Antisthenes: it is Socrates’ “strength”). Montaigne wants to find a way to live as Socrates did. He wants to understand how to live according to himself while he lives according to others. That could seem impossible–but Socrates realized the impossibility. So what are the “conditions and motives for this return to the world”, for this overcoming of Stoicism, this mixing with the world? That is the question Merleau-Ponty asks as he ends the section on Stoicism and prepares to begin the long final section of the essay–the answer to the question. Put the question this way: how can a person become disposable to the world, available to it, without becoming unhandy to himself?
The Socratic Fallacy
Platonism dogs me. I read the first pages of the Lysis early my freshman year of high school and decided that I would be a philosopher. When I started in college at Wooster a little later, my first class was a History of Ancient class, taught by Jim Haden, a most remarkable man. He was devoted to Plato, wholly devoted, and I became devoted in my own small way too. The next term I took a class taught by Jim and by Tom Faulkner (who taught Greek) on Socrates. That class left a mark. In between, Jim introduced me to Plotinus. I would eventually write my dissertation on Plotinus (with Deborah Modrak, a most remarkable woman). So, although most of my writing has been on other topics, Platonism has never stopped mattering to me, nattering at me.
This Fall, I begin my Intro to Phil class with Plato’s Theaetetus. That has become a central text for me and is wedded to Wittgenstein’s Blue Book. (My intro class ends with the Blue Book: the class’ subtitle is: The Flux.) Teaching those texts together makes Geach’s charge that Socrates’ “What is X?” question embodies a fallacy un-ignorable, since Geach’s charge is anchored in the Blue Book. What Geach says is that Socrates’ constraints on appropriate answers to the X-question are illegitimate, fallacious. Geach’s crucial point: we know heaps of things without being able to define the terms (i.e., answer the X-question thus constrained) in which we express our knowledge. Since we do, we need not engage in answering it. Without detailing any more of what Geach says (his discussion focuses on the Euthyphro; Geach’s paper is “Plato’s Euthyphro: An Analysis and Commentary”), I will simply assert that I have always found Geach’s charge convincing.
But the question for me is this: is the fallacy (indeed, it is a fallacy) really Socrates‘? In the past, I have pushed students to notice that although it is true that Socrates asks the X-question and constraints it, his interlocutor’s invariably accept the X-question and those constraints. We could say, in fact, that the question thus constrained seems (once Socrates explains it) to be the exact form of the interlocutor’s philosophical ambition, just the trick the interlocutor believes he can turn. In this way, the X-question thus constrained makes contact simultaneously with the interlocutor’s supposed knowledge and all-too-real pride. The interlocutor’s conviction that he can answer the X-question thus constrained can be seen as the Interlocutor’s Fallacy. Maybe, just maybe, we do not have to understand Socrates as taking the X-question thus constrained to be fully legitimate. Maybe he is up to something else.
Now, I am not advancing this idea; I’m just tinkering. But two things make the tinkering perhaps more than a mere pastime. (1) In the Theaetetus, after asking the X-question, rejecting Theaetetus’ list answer, and explaining the constraints, Socrates asks, “Or am I talking nonsense? (146e; Levett trans.) That can be read as a fidget–and it is true that Theaetetus responds, “No, you are perfectly right”–but it could also be read as a hint to Theaetetus (who certainly seems less proud than the typical interlocutor) to be on his guard, to wonder about the X-question and its constraints. (Unfortunately, he does not take the hint.) (2) More interesting, Bernard Williams, in his introduction to the Theaetetus, takes up the Geach’s charge (without naming Geach) and concedes that “the general point is well taken”. He then construes the three famous attempts at a definition of ‘knowledge’ (as Levett denominates them) instead as three suggestions about the nature of knowledge, and he contends that Socrates rejects Theaetetus’ list as an answer to the Knowledge-question because it does not “give any insight into the nature of knowledge.” On the other hand, the first suggestion, that knowledge is perception, while “certainly not a definitional formula” does hold out hope of providing insight into the nature of knowledge.
I want to register discomfort here. While I can see why Williams thinks that the list provides no insight, he himself notes that paying attention to the list reveals that the first suggestion had better be that, the first suggestion, and not the first definition, since the different skills or expert knowledges listed by Theaetetus imply the hopelessness of knowledge is perception as a definition. (Geach notes this too.) So, is it quite true that the list does not provide any insight into the nature of knowledge? And if this is no provision of insight, then how is the first suggestion supposed to be a provision of insight? It is true that the first suggestion may seem to open up a possibility of testing that is not as clearly open with the list, and we might hope, even expect,that the testing will reveal something about the nature of knowledge. I wonder: perhaps it is only when we offer a theory (of knowledge) that we seem to make progress in having a theory (of knowledge)–offering a theory opens up a problem space for work and in which suggestions about the nature of the theoretical object hold out the prospect of insight (and may provide it even if they are rejected, perhaps even in the rejection of them). If something along those lines is right (I am certainly not sure it is), then the problem with the list is that it seems to open up no problem space and so seems not to hold out the prospect of insight.
Williams’ complaint–the list answer provides no insight–resembles the complaint against procedures of Moore’s that they refute without insight. Is the complaint there that Moore’s refutations are not contributions to the theoretical activity to which they respond, and so they offer no insights into the theoretical object (the nature of time, perception, etc.)? –Need philosophical investigation provide insight? What of Wittgensteinian reminders, Platonic Recollections, Kierkegaardian qualitative dialectics–and so on? I do not deny that we can call each of these insights, but don’t we have to vary the sense of the term when we do? Isn’t each of these differently situated in or around the supposed problem space that surrounds the theoretical object?
Anyway, Williams judges his suggestion suggestion a way around Geach’s charge of Socratic Fallaciousness. Is it? We can express knowledge without having any suggestion about, any theory of, the meaning of the terms in which we express our knowledge. So why do I need to make a suggestion? From whence any compulsion to open up a problem space? The claim that I don’t know what I’m talking about without a suggestion can be shrugged aside.
How may a Socratic conversation begin?
Reading “RM” 9: Skepticism and Christianity
One of the most remarkable paragraphs in Merleau-Ponty’s essay on Montaigne is this, the final paragraph in the section on Montaigne’s religion, his Christianity.
What he retains of Christianity is the vow of ignorance. Why assume hypocrisy in the places where he puts religion above criticism? Religion is valuable in that it saves a place for what is strange and knows our lot is enigmatic. All solutions it gives to the enigma are incompatible with our monstrous condition. As a questioning, it is justified on the condition that it remain answerless. It is one of the modes of our folly, and our folly is essential to us. When we put not self-satisfied understanding but a consciousness astonished at itself at the core of human existence, we can neither obliterate the dream of an other side of things nor repress the wordless invocation of this beyond. What is certain is that if there is some universal Reason we are not in on its secrets, and are in any case required to guide ourselves by our own lights. ‘In ignorance and negligence I let myself be guided to the general way of the world. I will know it well enough when I perceive it.’ Who would dare to reproach us for making use of this life and world which constitute our horizon?
I am in almost complete agreement with this. (My disagreements should show through in what I am about to say.) One of the accomplishments of the paragraph is that it reveals Montaigne’s skepticism finally to be (what I am calling) Church-Man’s skepticism. Merleau-Ponty inscribes into the paragraph Montaigne’s lexicon of Church-Man’s skepticism: ‘ignorance’, ‘strange’, ‘our lot’, ‘enigmatic’, ‘monstrous’, ‘question’, ‘answerless’, ‘folly’, ‘secret’. Montaigne’s skepticism has an epistemic side, and so can avail itself of failures to know of a standard epistemic sort, and subsequently use those failures to humble our pretensions to certain (forms of) knowledge. This is one form of ignorance and one use of it relevant to Church-Man’s skepticism. But Church-Man’s skepticism centers on existential, not epistemological, ignorance: on not-knowing classified best as ‘alienation’ or ‘restlessness’ or ‘dissatisfaction’. This skepticism is not one that construes religion, Christianity, as providing solutions or as yielding a self-satisfied understanding. It construes religion as acknowledging mysteries, acknowledging our monstrous condition. Its questioning is justified, then; as questioning of a mystery, it remains answerless. (Not all answerless questioning need dehort.) This is Christianity’s vow of ignorance. For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known. A familiar passage; but not often enough reflected upon. It stresses asymmetry: I now see God’s face through a glass, darkly. God now sees my face, face-to-face free of any darkling glass. (A strange one-way mirror that has only one side.) Now I know in part, I know partly. God now knows in total, He knows totally. We long for symmetry. Our heart is restless until it finds its rest in thee.
And of course we will have to guide ourselves by our own lights—but we need remember that not every light we count as ours is one we lit or one we power. No one should dare reproach us for making use of this life and world. What else do we have, here under the sun? As the Church-Man says (in Ecclesiastes 3):
So I became aware that it is best for man to busy himself here to his own content; this and nothing else is his alloted portion; who can show him what the future will bring?
In my days of baffled enquiry, I have seen pious men ruined for all their piety, and evil-doers live long in all their wickedness. Why then, do not set too much store by piety, not play the wise man to excess, if thou wouldst not be bewildered over thy lot. Yet plunge not deep in evil-doing; eschew folly; else thou shalt perish before thy time. To piety thou must needs cling; yet live by that other caution too; fear God, and thou hast left no duty unfulfilled.
We cannot help but to orient ourselves, or to dream of orienting ourselves, on something above the sun, some other side of things to which we make constant wordless appeal. And so fulfillment, surely our own, perhaps not our duty’s, is denied us. What we find here under the sun is not valueless, but it’s value is not full. We live amongst valuable vanities. We are fools in the farce who eschew folly. We are wonders, mysteries, to ourselves.
Astonishing.
Quantum Est In Rebus Inane 