Great Ideas of Philosophy

1. Socrates did not live in our technical world of microsurgery and pharmacology; thus, in Plato’sRepublic, he considers prisoners in the depths of a cave who have objects and events projected onsome parapet in front of them. They think they are experiencing reality, but this reality is no more thanmere shadows and illusion.2. What Socrates makes clear is that behind every experience, there is room for an interpretation of themeaning of that experience. It’s in the interpretation, the examination of what life amounts to, that infact, life becomes worth living. For Socrates, it’s not the sequence of passive experiences but theintegration of those experiences into some intelligible whole that constitutes a form of life, and onesubject to refinement through self-critical reflection.B. This returns us to the Delphic pronouncement: “Know thyself.” But how we can do this?1. We must know what it means to be a certain kind of being, in this case, what it means to be a humanbeing. The answer must reach toward something other than mere biology, which may be a way tounderstand a particular species but certainly can’t answer the question: “What kind of person am Iessentially?”2. Socrates’s life as a teacher was devoted to the question: “What kinds of beings are we?” Only afterreaching a defensible position on that question might we proceed to “How should we live our lives?What is the right form of government? What’s the relationship between the individual and the polis?”C. To know thyself presupposes the capacity to know anything. You may know many things and not “knowthyself” in the Socratic sense. But to know thyself is, minimally, to know. Thus, Socrates begins with thatcore problem of knowledge: How do we know anything?1. If the skeptics are right in that we can’t know anything for certain, then we certainly cannot knowourselves in any settled and certain way, and that means that one’s life is uselessly examined. Whatwould the examined life be? Simply a constellation of prejudices and self-deceptions.2. What must be defeated here is skepticism. We must come up with at least one kernel of truth that wecan settle on as true and that will answer the root epistemological question: Is it possible to knowanything? If we can settle on one thing that is true, then we can know that it is possible to know, and ifwe know the method by which we arrived at that truth, then perhaps we can use it to know otherthings.D. We begin to see that the Socratic agenda is a fairly broad one. First, one must do philosophical battle withskepticism and cynicism. One must also contend with the problem of conduct. What kind of life is right forbeings such as ourselves? Should we aim solely at happiness and pleasure? What of our values? Are theysimply reflections of our own prejudices, giving us no right or reason to impose them on others or expectthem to be shared?E. Finally, what of the problem of governance and the vaunted “democracy” of the Athenian state?1. The Athenians treasured the democratic character of the polis, and a philosopher could well expecttrouble when challenging its core precepts. Socrates raised grave questions about such precepts, whileothers, including Aristotle, defended them.2. Nonetheless, Socrates reserves to himself the right at least to raise the question: How should we begoverned? This question cannot be answered in the abstract. We can’t answer the question of how weshould be governed unless we have already established the right kind of life to live. And we can’tanswer that question until we’ve settled the question of what kind of beings we are and how we cancome to know as much.3. Until we have successfully defeated a skeptical position on knowledge as such, we can’t have adefensible position on ethics. And until we’ve handled the ethical dimensions of life, we can’t pinpointwhat the political organization of the polis should be.4. It is a credit to the lasting genius of Socrates that he understands the interconnectedness of thesequestions, that the problem of knowledge, the problem of conduct, and the problem of governance arevarious phases of the same problem: how we come to know ourselves and realize our humanity in thecourse of a lifetime. This, of course, will be the central agenda of the program of philosophy forcenturies to come.Recommended Reading:Robinson, D. N. An Intellectual History of Psychology, 3 rd ed. University of Wisconsin Press, 1995, chapter 2.18©2004 The Teaching Company Limited Partnership