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)

Philosophy: 1.5 Unexamined Assumptions

Last night I had one of my frequent philosophy meet-ups with a different group of students. This was a module 6 meet up on "epistemology" -- how do I know that I know what I think I know? To try to make it relevant, we usually talk about moving beyond binary thinking on most topics into what I call "spectrum thinking," which is realizing that there are usually more than two positions a person could take on any given issue.

Last week I thought I would start writing up snippets of a typical Ken philosophy class these days as I have these meetups. So here's a relevant piece below. It's a bit of a mixture of material from the first and sixth modules of my typical philosophy class.
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1.5 Unexamined Assumptions
1. I had a moment in high school where a thought hit me. "How amazing it is that I just happened to be born into a family that has all the right beliefs! What are the odds?"

I was totally serious. I suspect that most people who read such a comment would either laugh or think I was joking. Do you know how many different interpretations of even individual verses of the Bible there are? I have sometimes used a parable I created from the issue of baptism. [1]

Susie is born into a Roman Catholic family and is baptized as an infant by sprinkling. Then her family switches to a Greek Orthodox church where they rebaptize her still as an infant -- by immersion three times in the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.

Then she becomes a Baptist as a teen. They certainly insist she rebaptize now as a believer. None of those other baptisms count. Then she joins a Christian Church -- which of course they say isn't really a denomination. But they insist her baptism in the Baptist church didn't count all the same, so she gets rebaptized again.

Then she goes to a Lutheran church. They are horrified that she has now been baptized four times! They used to put people to death for rebaptism of that sort! Finally, she goes to a Friends/Quaker church. She's almost afraid to ask. But it turns out that they don't baptize at all.

2. We all start off our philosophical journey in life -- whether we're in a philosophy class or not -- with unexamined assumptions. These are things we not only assume are true -- but it's never even occurred to us that there could be another way of looking at them. 

"Of course you don't eat cat or dog!"

"But why?" 

"Because I said so."

There are plenty of newly married stories about things you never realized might be done differently. "Everyone knows," a husband once told his new wife, "that you roll toilet paper from the top." He was basically calling her stupid for doing something differently than the way he grew up. "Everyone knows you roll toothpaste from the bottom rather than squeeze it from the middle.

You don't know what you don't know.

Often on the first day of a philosophy journey, I will tell students that my goal is not necessarily to change their opinions on a particular issue. It is much more to help them to choose their positions more freely. Here's what I mean.

If you only know one position on an issue, then you have not chosen that position. You have inherited it. You have inherited it from your parents or from your culture or from the random workings of your brain. But since you don't know of any other options, you are a slave to that choice.

Philosophy means to help you to see that there are almost certainly other ways of looking at almost everything. Then, if you choose the same position, you have made a choice for it. Then, just maybe, you have freely chosen it rather than being forced to choose it without even knowing it.

3. There are a couple footnotes to insert here that are important for the contexts in which I normally teach. One is that I am not advocating for a sort of relativism here. With regard to the question of knowledge, relativism is a sense that all positions on issues are equally valid on a personal level. In other words, "subjectivism" is the name of the game.

Subjectivism basically says that there is no significant universal truth. Rather truth is more or less subjective -- what I think it is or want it to be. In other words, you have your truth and I have mine.

I don't actually think anyone could be a total relativist. After all, the claim "All truth is relative" is an absolute statement. And if you fall off a tall building, I don't think your beliefs on what will happen when you hit the pavement are relative. I can tell you what's going to happen.

The problem, in my mind, is not the question of whether something is true or likely true. The problem is that I have a screwy brain. For one, it's relatively small. It's finite. If we could catch a glimpse of the vastness of God's mind, we would realize how absolutely and completely stupid we all are, relatively speaking.

Second, my mind is "fallen." It does not work perfectly even on the level that it does work. Everyone makes mistakes. Even the greatest genius is not correct on every question. Indeed, individuals who think on the highest levels of logic can lack perspective in the most basic of ways.

So the problem is not with truth itself. It's with us as knowers of the truth. Later on, I'll discuss how the Bible does not eliminate this situation because we have to interpret it... with our brains. The story about baptism above gives you a glimpse of this problem.

Eventually, I'll share that I am a "critical realist." That means that I believe the world and truth is real. The goal is intact. It is worth pursuing it. In the thousands of years of human conversation, I hope we've made some leeway toward some good answers. We have the revelation of Scripture to help us, assuming you are a believer.

But we are stuck in our heads. Our view of the world is inevitably skewed in ways of which we are unaware. If we knew what our unexamined assumptions were, we probably would have examined them. The tentativity is not about truth itself. It's about ourselves.

4. The early Christians had a concept of believing on a path toward understanding. In the 1000s, Anselm coined the phrase, "faith seeking understanding" (fides quaerens intellectum). The search for knowledge never begins with a blank slate. It always begins with assumptions.

It is perfectly appropriate to begin the journey toward reflection with faith -- indeed, with the faith you have. Don't throw anything out to start the quest. Assume your faith is right. If you need to expand or tweak some things, do so cautiously.

But we all start off the journey "unreflective." [2] The philosophical journey is a journey toward greater awareness of myself as a knower of the world. It is a journey toward at least partial self-reflectiveness. (We can never be completely relective, because there will always be areas where we don't know what we don't know.)

It is a journey toward freedom.

[1] I used it especially in Who Decides What the Bible Means?

[2] Some have called this stage "pre-modern" thinking. I have come to find that language less helpful, though we will see it again later. 
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1.1 What is philosophy?
1.2 Can philosophy be Christian?
1.3 How do faith and reason fit together?
1.4 Unexamined assumptions (this post)
1.5 Socrates and the Unexamined Life
1.6 What is good thinking?

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.

What I think of Socrates...

I'm delighted to be at 12Stone Church this weekend. They just have a spectacularly blessed ministry down here. You can even watch an online 12Stone service 24 hours a day.

Dr. Steven Lennox and I drove down here today and had a great time with the OT and NT with the 12Stone Biblical Studies program. Last weekend, Bud Bence, Chris Bounds, and Dave Ward were down here doing church history, theology, and the book of Ephesians.

Last night was also my weekly philosophy class at IWU, and since there wasn't a lot of discussion on the R v. W post, I thought I would move the blog along. :-)
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Socrates is often portrayed by teachers as this great hero of thought, the "first martyr" of philosophy. I imagine anyone who would take a guess would imagine I would follow suit. "O great Socrates! O foolish Athens!"  Look at the way he was portrayed in Barefoot in Athens.

I actually picture Socrates as a jerk and an idiot, a true trouble maker. Here's a guy who spends most of his time going around annoying important people. One of his drinking buddies goes to the temple at Delphi and asks if he's the wisest person in the world. The oracle says yes.

So Socrates uses it as an excuse to make the most important people in Athens look like idiots. Yeah, that's smart.  In Plato's dialogues, Socrates' arguments seem rife to me with the fallacy of equivocation. He takes the words of the person he's interrogating and then changes the meaning of the words in his responses. You can't do this sort of thing for long and not find yourself on the wrong end of power.

Then there is Socrates' idea that if you get your thinking right, your life will follow suit. It sure would be nice if these two were in sync, but he has it the wrong way around. Humans more often come up with thinking that will fit with their sense of living. We come up with ideologies that fit our hearts. There are plenty of people who believe the right things but choose not to live accordingly.

Finally, of course, Socrates was an idiot when it came to his trial and death. When convicted, a person could propose a counter-penalty to what his or her opponents proposed. But Socrates, after he was convicted of corrupting the youth and not believing in the gods, didn't counter-propose a fine or something reasonable. The Athenians might have gone for that. Instead, he proposed that they pay him to keep doing what he was just convicted of. Of course they're not going to vote for that.

Even while awaiting his death, there were offers of escape. The King of Sparta would have put him up and treated him royally. Instead, he drank the poison himself on principle. He had been found guilty.

So, basically, there is little of Socrates I like. Yes, the Socratic method makes for good teaching. But Socrates himself was annoying. Yes, there is great wisdom in realizing how much you do not know, but I suspect Socrates too much enjoyed showing important people this fact.

Admire him? Only a little. Mostly, I suspect he was a jerk.

"To know the good is to do the good" - Socrates?

Off and on for the last several years, I have searched and searched in Plato for a quote, culminating in pretty much an all day search today as I'm dotting the jots and crossing the tittles of my philosophy book before publication.

At the beginning of the chapter on Socrates in Sophie's World, Gaarder says that Socrates said, "He who knows what good is will do good."  The heading of the section is, "The Right Insight Leads to the Right Action."  Of course it's a bunch of bunk--humans are irrational animals far more than rational, in my estimation.  But it's a key perspective and an idea a college graduate should have heard of so that they can later forget it.

Well I've done numerous Google searches.  I can find these quotes on the web (especially in online study notes over Sophie's World).  I even did a Google search in German thinking that some meticulous German would reference the quote.  I did indeed find, "Wer weiss, was richtig ist, wird auch das Richtige tun."  What I didn't find was a reference.

I did a number of Google searches on the complete works of Plato (who of course is the source for such Socrates quotes).  "know good do good" "knowledge" "good" "virtue" "ignorance" ... I looked through the index of my own hardback collection of Plato's complete works.

Indeed, I found several stressed out students (both in English and German) trying to track down this quote, which is the main reason I am making this post... for posterity and the future desperate.  And of course inviting thereby some elusive spirit from the ether who might disprove my conclusion.

My conclusion is that Socrates didn't give us a nice quote.  These are all fair expressions of what he thought, but he wasn't particularly good at sound bites on this occasion.  Here are some statements that come close:

1. "The man who has learned anything becomes in each case such as his knowledge makes him" (Gorgias 460b).

2. "No one voluntarily does wrong, but all who do wrong do so against their own will" (Gorgias 509e, but this is a question-the idea is that if a person truly knows what good is, he or she does it)

3. "Virtue is knowledge" (Meno 87c). This is what I'm going with.  The title of my post is a paraphrase, "To know the good is to do the good."  The problem is that at this point in the Meno, it is still a matter of debate and it isn't really Socrates' main point. Socrates does believe that knowledge is a guide to right action, but he doesn't believe it is the only guide. His final point is that virtue is ultimately a matter of divine inspiration--the gods give the knowledge or even right opinion that results in virtue.

4. "I never wrong anyone intentionally" (Apology 37a). Again, what is hiding behind this statement is Socrates' belief that all wrongdoing is based on ignorance because knowledge can only lead to right action.

So there you have it.  Unless someone corrects me from the ether, there is no silver bullet on a quote here.  Yes, this was Socrates' perspective. But he did not give us a nice, crisp quote to tweet.

Philosophical Paraphrases 1: Socrates

I'm tidying up some paraphrases of philosophers.  Here's the first from Plato's Apology, 37-38:
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Someone might say, “Surely if you leave the city, Socrates, you can spend the rest of your life in peace, minding your own business.”

It is really hard to make some of you understand my answer to this. If I tell you it would be disobedience to the god to do as you say, and therefore that I cannot mind my own business, you will not believe that I am serious. But if on the other hand I tell you to that the best thing you can do is to discuss virtue daily, along with the other subjects about which you hear me examining myself and others, if I tell you that the unexamined life is not worth living, you are even less likely to believe me.

Yet what I say is true, even if it is not easy to convince you.