We have met Socrates as he inquired into the nature of piety with Euthyphro (2.2.2). Euthyphro offered several promising definitions of the virtue, only to have them all refuted by Socrates. In the end, Euthyphro suddenly remembered a prior appointment and hurried off into literary oblivion, while Socrates was left pondering the same question. Many of the Plato’s Socratic dialogues follow this format, leading to aporia, a dead end or philosophical impasse. Yet Socrates, undaunted, continues his quixotic quest for enlightenment in the realm of moral philosophy. So what are we to make of this pursuit of truth?
We have met Socrates with his passionate but apparently futile pursuit of truth. We have discussed Plato, the rich young nobleman, the brilliant thinker and gifted writer, who is obsessed with the scruffy street philosopher. Why is Socrates so important, and why is Plato so fascinated with him? One thing at least makes an investigation into the odd couple of Greek philosophy: the burning question of what life is all about. What is the good life, and how can we live it? This is the question which has been the centerpiece of philosophy ever since, well, the time of Socrates, and almost absent from philosophy before his time. Socrates asked the ultimate question of human existence, and kept asking it to everyone who would talk to him. But he also seems to have made the question impossible to answer.
2.2.4.1 Socratic Paradoxes
Socrates seeks wisdom about the meaning of life from his fellow citizens, people like Euthyphro, some of whom claim to have special knowledge, as Euthyphro does of religion, others of whom claim no expertise. According to the story he tells in his trial speech, Socrates’ friend and follower Chaerephon went to the great Oracle of Apollo at Delphi and asked if anyone was wiser than Socrates. The god’s priestess returned the answer that no one was wiser. This answer disturbed Socrates, leading him to make inquiries of acknowledged experts and sages. When he asked his questions of them, he was disappointed to find that they too were deficient in the most important knowledge, and, to that degree, the oracle was vindicated. Socrates learned that he had one small advantage over other wise men, namely that he was aware of his own limitations: he knew that he had no special knowledge, and this made him wise in a small way.[1] The upshot of all of this is that Socrates had no special knowledge.
Socrates’ “Profession of Ignorance,” as it is known, is not surprising. Socrates is nothing if not methodical in his pursuit of truth. He has, however, only one method for pursuing truth. It is his practice of eliciting definitions and the examining them for their consistency. Does the proffered definition agree with other things that the interlocutor believes and is committed to? Invariably, Socrates finds conflicts and contradictions between the definition and other beliefs of the individual being tested. We find that the interlocutor cannot consistently accept the definition. The examination leads to a refutation. This method of examination is known as the elenchus, the method of refutation. It is not a positive but a negative method, which seems always to lead to a logical impasse, an aporia, as it did each time for Euthyphro.
Socrates does, however, have strong convictions of his own that come out in sometimes unexpected ways in Plato’s dialogues. Socrates holds that virtue is knowledge. There is one dialogue in which this view emerges clearly, the Protagoras. There, in his discussion with the sophist Protagoras, Socrates says, in offering for once his own definition of the virtue of courage, “So courage is wisdom about what is and is not to be feared, which is opposite to ignorance of these things?”[2] Protagoras agrees reluctantly, at the end of a long and increasingly contentious discussion. This is one of the few times in which Socrates offers his own views in a joint inquiry. But he offers many hints that seem to support this view.[3]
Aristotle, who was interested in the history of philosophy and was born after Socrates’ death but was a student of Plato’s, makes the following judgment: “Socrates … thought knowing virtue was the goal, and he inquired into what justice is, and what courage is, and each of the parts of virtue. And he did so with good reason. For he thought all the virtues were types of knowledge, so that knowing justice would coincide with being just.”[4]
The point that Aristotle makes, that knowing justice would coincide with being just, seems to reflect Socrates’ view. In a discussion of justice, Plato has Socrates show Polemarchus that the common description of justice as doing good to one’s friends and harm to one’s enemies cannot be right. For if so, justice would consist in part of making people worse, which is what harming them amounts to. But to make someone worse would be to make that person more unjust. And it is contrary to the nature of justice to make people more unjust.[5] In this and other discussions, it emerges that virtue is a kind of technē or craft in which knowledge produces the appropriate results, a kind of applied science.
Finally, however, we have strong evidence from the life of Socrates as recorded and reflected on by Plato and Xenophon that this “man, we would declare … was of those of his generation whom we knew the noblest, the wisest, and the most just.”[6] But this seems impossible on the basis of Socrates’ own beliefs:
- Socrates has no special knowledge.
- He has only a negative method of inquiry, the method of refutation (elenchus).
- He holds that virtue is knowledge.
- He holds that virtue is like a craft (technē) or an applied science.
- Socrates is impeccably virtuous.
Socrates makes many bizarre claims in the course of the dialogues, known as Socratic paradoxes, which are puzzling claims implying some sort of contradiction. This set of five statements provides a kind of central problem in understanding Socrates the philosopher. If he claims no special knowledge (in contrast to the sophists and other self-appointed experts like Euthyphro); if he has the tools to refute false proposition but not to validate true propositions; if virtue is really knowledge (but how does Socrates know that?); if this knowledge is like an applied science that ensures that the person with knowledge of virtue acts virtuously; how can Socrates himself be virtuous? And yet, his remarkable biography shows an almost preternatural ability to do the right thing at the right time, in the social, political, judicial, and military arenas, even at the risk of his own life and welfare.[7]
[1] Plato Apology 20e-23b.
[2] Plato Protagoras 360d.
[3] For instance, Plato Republic I, 351a.
[4] Aristotle Eudemian Ethics 1216b2-8; cf. ibid. 1230a7-10, Magna Moralia 1190b28-29.
[5] Plato Republic I, 335b-e.
[6] Plato Phaedo 118a; Xenophon Apology 34.
[7] Plato Apology 28e-29a; 32a-e; Crito.