1.4 Socrates and the Unexamined Life

I had a brief philosophy meetup tonight as the last one for one group. I'll use it as an excuse to plug up the last hole in my introductory unit.

1.1 What is philosophy?
1.2 Is philosophy Christian?
1.3 Unexamined assumptions
1.4 Socrates and the Unexamined Life (this post)
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1. If I were to lead you on a journey through the primary sources of philosophy, I would probably start by having you read Plato's Apology. I always feel a little guilty about this because Socrates stands at the heart of the so-called "Western canon" of philosophical thought. What about China? For that matter, what about Proverbs?

Then again, the ancient Greeks were not Europeans. That's a historical paradigm of much later making. To me, Socrates is a great place to begin because of what he said at the time of his trial, not because he was Greek or "Western."

2. You may know the story. For decades, Socrates had made enemies of the rich and powerful in Athens. How? By embarrassing them in public. And how did he do that? By asking them questions they couldn't seem to answer and making them look like fools.

He was accused of subverting the youth by questioning the gods. In fact, he questioned everything. To be honest, I'm not sure his arguments were actually very good much of the time. He often committed the fallacy of equivocation by changing the meaning of words mid-argument. 

His philosophy was that there actually weren't answers to most of the questions he asked. [1] He reminds me of a friend I had in high school who always took the opposite side of any argument. I don't think it was always because they disagreed. They just liked to argue.

Socrates strikes me that way sometimes.

3. It is also difficult for me not to hear arrogance disguised as false humility in Socrates. It seems all too familiar. A friend goes to the Oracle at Delphi. She was the prophetess that everyone in Greece went to in order to get insight into the present and future. His friend asks, "Is Socrates the wisest man alive?"

It seems like a safe enough question for her. She often gave ambiguous answers like "Go to war and a nation will be overthrown." Of course, in a sense that would be true no matter who won. It reminds me of my parents' generation trying to follow a movie. "Who's that?" "What's happening there?" In the old days, they had to show a plane traveling on a map for the viewers to understand a change of setting, as the Indiana Jones movies mimic.

Socrates' response has always struck me as "What? Little ol' me? The wisest man? I'd better find out if this is true."

So, without really believing in the gods -- at least not the conventional gods of Athens -- he now considers himself to have a divinely-given directive to embarass all the leaders in Athens by showing them they're not really as smart as they think they are.

They probably had it coming to them. But it does make Socrates look like, well, let's say a very annoying person.

In the end, he says, "Well, what do you know? I must be the wisest person in town because I at least know that I'm not wise."

Despite questions over Socrates' sincerity, that is a key takeaway from The Apology -- true wisdom usually involves what I might call epistemic humility, a great awareness of what you don't know, not a strong sense of what you think you know.

4. Plato's Apology is also a great place to start a philosophical journey because of Socrates' great dictum that "The unexamined life is not worth living." I think that's a little bit much. There's also truth in the saying that "Ignorance is bliss." I suspect I would be a lot happier person if my life wasn't so self-examined.

However, all the same, I wouldn't trade my supposed self-awareness for obliviousness. So two caveats. I think it's acceptable for someone to say, "I'm not sure I could handle complete awareness. I think I'll just keep doing my thing over here." However, maybe don't try to make any important decisions for others, and don't post your opinions on Facebook. "The unexamined life is not worth posting."

The second is that I think I would rather live all the same, even if my life were unexamined. Socrates was found guilty of corrupting the youth and not believing in the gods. His enemies proposed death. He was allowed to offer a counter-proposal. The stubborn old git, did he counter-propose a fine? No. He proposed they give him a stipend to keep doing the very thing he was found guilty of. Idiot.

Of course, his proposal was rejected. So he has friends who offer to smuggle him out of Athens. "No, he stubbornly says. I've been found guilty. I must obey the law." He drinks the hemlock. It is sometimes said that he becomes the first martyr of philosophy. Nevermind that it's really his own fault in the end. It nevertheless secures his place in the pantheon of human philosophy -- with a lot of help from Plato.

5. Nevertheless, the unexamined life is often harmful to yourself and others. It can be very harmful if you live in a place where you get to vote on your country's future. In the end, I want to believe that a life oriented around the truth is a better life than one centered in ignorance. I want to believe that a life of self-awareness is a better life for those around you than obliviousness. Perhaps there are exceptions, but I would like to think that they are exactly that -- exceptions.

If you disagree, stop reading now. Go watch that entertaining Tic Tok or YouTube short. But try not to make any decisions that affect anyone but yourself.

[1] Like Jesus, Socrates never wrote anything down. We only know his teaching through the eyes of his followers. In The Apology, we probably come close to hearing the real Socrates. But we should also keep in mind that we are hearing Socrates through Plato's eyes. The further we go into Plato's writings, the more we are likely hearing Plato's ideas rather than Socrates'.
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1.1 What is philosophy?
1.2 Is philosophy Christian?
1.3 Unexamined assumptions
1.4 Socrates and the Unexamined Life (this post)

1. Socrates was an idiot.

This summer I am aiming to read some selections from the Great Ideas. To kick off the series, I read what I consider to be the beginning of the trail (at least in the Western tradition): Plato's Apology, which gives us the trial of Socrates. Here is a video version of this week's comments. I also have a Facebook group called "Summer Reading."

1. Socrates was sentenced to death in 399BCE. The charges against him were corrupting the youth and not believing in the Greek gods but coming up with his own. It was a mixed vote, with the citizens voting to put him to death. He willingly drank the hemlock, although he had options to escape.

He has been called the first martyr to philosophy. There are indeed very noteworthy things to consider in this piece, which of course is a "dialog" by Plato, not a transcript of the event. I'll get to the idiocy soon enough.

2. According to Socrates, it all began when a friend of his went to the oracle of Delphi and asked who the wisest person was. The oracle said it was he. So, as the story goes, he began to inquire of supposedly wise people in Athens. But what he found was that they were no wiser than him. Indeed, he at least knew he wasn't wise.

His final conclusion is thus that the oracle must, in a sense, have been correct. "The wisest of you is the one who has realized, like Socrates, that s/he is really worthless when it comes to wisdom" (23b). This is one of the great take-aways from this dialog. Wisdom means knowing not just what you know but how much you don't know.

Of course there are many circumstances where someone does know far more than others. Take the current pandemic we are in. I don't know as much as an epidemiologist. That doesn't necessarily mean that the epidemiologist is right on everything, but let's just say that Facebook and Twitter are filled with people who know almost nothing about pandemics and still are quite convinced they know what should be done.

3. I could be wrong (see what I did there), but I get the impression that Socrates was both right about Athenian leaders being ignorant and that he was a prat. There is a type of person that asks questions just to ask questions. There's really no point other than to show how smart they are. That's really the point.

And they may be. They may be smarter than most people. There are Christian "apologists" (defenders of the faith) whom I suspect are really this sort of prat. It's more about showing off than actually trying to lead anyone to faith. And of course there are atheist prats of this sort. In my opinion, Richard Dawkins is this sort of wise fool who is not nearly as wise on the subject of religion as he might think.

There is a time to be a "gadfly," something Socrates considers himself. There's a time to needle at the heels of power. There's a time for the whistle blower, the prophet, the warrior for truth and justice. There's also the prat who just likes telling people off. This sort of person may imagine that they are like Jesus or a prophet. But the argument came to Jesus. Most of the time he did not go looking for it.

Then there is the person who feeds on the conflict. Argument is sport for them. There is no point. "I assume you have prepared more insults for me?" This type of person, dare I say, is an idiot trying to disguise themselves as a smart person.

4. 399BCE was a bad time for Socrates. Athens had recently lost the Peloponnesian War to the Spartans. One of the people that had hung around Socrates at one point, Alcibiades, had turned traitor to Athens. You could see where people would be bitter about Socrates corrupting the youth, making them enemies of Athens.

And no doubt the politicians and "smart people" of Athens may have needed some push back. The Apology doesn't really give the impression that Socrates always approached this critique in a good way. Maybe he did. Maybe he was the media exposing their fakeness, and so they got rid of him.

For his part. you could see where he might be seen as corrupting the youth. He taught them to ask questions. One of the great quotes from the Apology is that "the unexamined life is not worth living." Now I'm not sure I totally agree with the statement in every circumstance for every person. For some people, "ignorance is bliss."

But I do, personally, prefer self-examination. I want to know my blind spots. I don't want to believe things that are false just because I don't want to be proved wrong.

We all grow up with unexamined assumptions. They are the water of the culture in which we swim. We learn them from our parents and families. We get them from media and movies. We get them from everyone around us. We largely do not even know we have these assumptions--they are unexamined.

So asking questions is a path toward reflectivity. It is a path toward seeing ourselves and our blind spots. We become aware that we are swimming in a certain water we didn't even know was there. Such education is a liberation, a moving out of ignorance. It is a move out of the cave (see Plato's Republic).

Now those who are unreflective will often find this movement dangerous. You begin to see traditions as traditions, not unexamined truths. There is a reason why education is often viewed with suspicion. Of course to be consistent, we must question our education as well.

5. We've mentioned a couple of the memorable quotes from the Apology: wisdom is knowing what you don't know and the unexamined life is not worth living. Socrates modeled what we call the Socratic method--learning by leading a person through a series of questions that leads them to discover the truth on their own. Plato's treatises are called "dialogs" because they follow this dialogical pattern.

The author of Acts arguably wanted his audience to think of Socrates in a couple of places. For one, Paul actually appears at the Areopagus before the Athenians in Acts 17. They accuse him, like Socrates, of inventing new gods. In Acts 4, when Peter and John appear before the ruling council, the Sanhedrin, Peter basically quotes Socrates--"You decide whether I should obey God or humanity." Acts arguably wants us to think of Socrates.

Plato's Apology is not the only ancient witness to Socrates. Xenophon was also there and has his own Apology. It of course is very similar to Plato's account, although with a few minor differences. Some thirty years earlier the playwright Aristophanes portrayed Socrates in a very negative light in the comedy The Clouds. Socrates is portrayed there very much like Anaxagoras, a natural philosopher who did believe that the sun was a stone and the moon a mass of earth. Plato may imply that the reputation Socrates acquired from this play contributed to his death.

6. I am grateful for the tradition of Socrates. I am grateful for the writings of Plato. Of course I think their brand of absolutism can be idiotic, even harmful. The number of issues on which we must never compromise is actually rather small. Those who champion, "no compromise"--on both liberal and conservative sides--sometimes harm society more than they help. They are good voices to have in the room. You really don't want to have one of them as the leader making decisions.

Socrates and Plato were also wrong in seeming to think that if we get our thinking straight, the rest will fall into place. "Right thinking leads to right action." This perspective seems to betray a glaring ignorance of human nature. There is a minority of people who aim to live by reason. It is not the majority of people and dare I say that those who most profess to live by reason often are those unwise about which Socrates warns. See Jonathan Haidt's The Righteous Mind.

So we honor Socrates for the good in him and for what he inspired, despite the possibility that he was quite idiotic at times. Platonism was inspired by him. Aristotelianism out of Platonism. The Stoics claimed him. The Cynics claimed him. The Skeptics claimed him. If he had avoided his death, philosophy as we know it might not even exist.

As an almost totally unrelated aside, my grandfather lived in Hemlock, Indiana in 1920.

Next week: Descartes' Meditations on First Philosophy.