Tag Archives: Socrates

Hamann and the Tradition

July 31, 2012 By in Kierkegaard, Philosophy, religion Tags: , , , , 4 Comments

Hamann and the Traditon (Northwestern University Press) is just out.  My essay:  “Metaschematizing Socrates:  Hamann, Kierkegaard and Kant on the Value of the Enlightenment” is included.  The editor, Lisa Marie Anderson, did a nice job with the volume.  Lots of good stuff on Hamann—including especially an essay by my friend, John Betz, who is the Hamann guy (not that that’s all he is, by any means).

(I just noticed an annoying mistake in my paper, no doubt due to my faulty proofreading.  The final footnote should compare Socrates to St. John the Baptist, not to Saint Paul, as it does. )

Ed Mooney on Living One’s Own Life

May 1, 2012 By in Philosophy, Self-knowledge, Socrates, teaching, virtue and vice Tags: , , , , Leave a comment

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.)

The Objective Absorbed Back Into the Subjective

March 22, 2012 By in availability/disposability, Philosophy, Self-knowledge, Socrates Tags: , , , , 6 Comments

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)

October 4, 2011 By in Kierkegaard, Philosophy, Socrates Tags: , , , , , Leave a comment

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

August 25, 2011 By in availability/disposability, Merleau-Ponty, Montaigne, Socrates, virtue and vice Tags: , , Leave a comment

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” 8: Skepticism

August 7, 2011 By in Merleau-Ponty, Metaphilosophy, Montaigne, skepticism, Socrates, virtue and vice Tags: , , 4 Comments

In Bk III, Montaigne’s skepticism is not something he has, an acquisition; it is something that he is, a state of being.  Call it, if you will, a nisus (in F. R. Leavis’ sense of that term), a profound, unwilled set of Montaigne’s whole being.  Unwilled:  for there is no striving in it, no stretching, in particular no self-assertion or desire to exalt himself; it is ripe with a joyful tranquility.  It is a nisus toward the total truth.  But there is no hurry, no hurry; hurry would slow him down.  He fondly and patiently contemplates himself and his life and life.  Each essay is a new elucidation of our human being.  He writes out of a prodigious lucidity, exhibiting himself to himself (and so exhibiting us to ourselves) across a living width of aspects.

He writes under the sign of Socrates.  Socrates’ labor (think of the Oracle and of his understanding of it) is to dismantle double ignorance:  the state of those who think they know but do not know.  Simple ignorance, simply not knowing, typically need not be considered vicious.  Its remedy is most often obvious and requires only time and application.  Double ignorance is vicious; in it, simple ignorance teams with pride.  Socrates attacks double ignorance and scorns the consequences of attacking it, drawing wisdom and courage from unknown deeps in himself.   His highest hope is to attain to a genuinely humble mind–where the humility is simultaneously and wholly epistemological and moral.  He hopes this for his interlocutor as well.  Thomas De Quincy writes,

Without hands a man might have feet and could still walk:  but, consider it, –without morality, intellect were impossible for him; a thoroughly immoral man could not know a thing at all!  To know a thing, what we can call knowlng, a man must first love the thing, sympathize with it:  that is, be virtuously related to it.  If he have not the justice to put down his own selfishness at every turn, the courage to stand by the dangerous-true at every turn, how shall he know?  His virtues, all of them, will lie recorded in his knowledge.

Socrates’ elenchus targets unacknowledged ignorance; to accept aporia is to be humbled both epistemologically and morally.  Is accepting aporia enough to qualify as a skeptic?  Well, say what you will.  I deem there is no reason to refuse that title to someone who accepts aporia.  Notice that, like everything else, accepting aporia has its conditions.  Crucially, someone who accepts aporia recognizes that he has bottomed out, bottomed out in knowledge, bottomed out in pride, and is now ready to go on.   Aporia ends nothing, except perhaps an episode of conversation; in reality, it is a beginning.  Its valence is positive, not negative; the sun is rising, not setting.  Aporia marks the moment when we come to see that what we are contending with is a mystery, not a problem.   —If this be skepticism, what more can be said about it?  It is a skepticism that is turned against worldly wisdom, not a skepticism that is a form of worldly wisdom.  By the standards of worldly wisdom, Euthyphro knows and is rightly proud of what he knows.  By the standards of worldly wisdom, Callicles knows and is rightly proud of what he knows.  Socrates will not judge or be judged by those standards.

Montaigne’s Bk III essays are skeptical in this way, this Socratic way.  To read the essays is to become Montaigne’s interlocutor.  The essays are designed to create aporia in the reader, and to bring about its acceptance.  To almost quote John Berryman:

Wif an essay of Montaigne’s in either hand
We are stript down to move on

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