Saint Socrates?

Why did Socrates write nothing? It’s a question that fascinates me. It’s not just that nothing in his own hand survives: we can be confident that he was wary of the written word, because it’s a suspicion with which Plato also struggled. So why? To us, the written word is the lifeblood of thought, and surely Socrates thought highly of that?

Socrates’ concern appears to have been that the written word distracts us from what was for him the primary focus of philosophy, namely life itself. He preferred to talk rather than to read, since conversation emerges out of you, whereas a text asks to be let into you. If your motto for life is ‘Know thyself’, then writing puts the cart before the horse. ‘Get thee a life’, Socrates might retort to the scholar stuck at a desk.

There’s another striking aspect to this aversion. We still remember Socrates. His presence persists in the way Western culture respects argument, principles, sacrifice and (more or less) philosophy. The historical centrality of Socrates, 2,400 years on, is so familiar as to be almost commonplace, which is remarkable, and doubly so when you think that he left no texts. Where would Freud be without The Interpretation of Dreams, Marx without The Communist Manifesto, or Joseph Smith without The Book of Mormon? They would have been forgotten had they not put pen to paper (and you might think the better for that). But Socrates did not write, and yet we remember him. How did he achieve that feat?

He shares this distinction with a tiny handful of others, Jesus and the Buddha being the two obvious examples. The Bible once records Jesus doodling in the sand, although the wind blew his words away. The incident is like a tease: what would Christians give to know the content of his scribbles? The Buddha’s sayings and talks were written down by his disciples, but he himself, following his momentous meditation under a bodhi tree, appears to have concluded that writing was a distraction. One wonders what Gautama Siddhartha would have made of the thousand embellishments that are now part of the Buddhist canon – hindrance or help?

Why we remember these three is no doubt partly due to the irregularity of history. Maybe there were others like the Buddha, Jesus and Socrates who were forgotten, although that doesn’t seem very likely when you think it through. They had converts and followers who could develop their message so that it informed and shaped civilizations. They led lives that possessed a spirit and energy which spoke of what humanity could achieve, and must have touched something deep in people. Conversely, they were prophetic enough to make enemies too – a sure sign they were onto something. All three ending up being rejected: India refused the Buddha’s reforms and remained Hindu; Jesus and Socrates were both executed by the state.

For the religious figures, life itself was primary, and the medium was the message. This is celebrated in the stories that are told and retold about the lives of these founding figures, and also of the saints and bodhisattvas who subsequently embodied the original charisma. So if such reverent biographies are thought extraneous to philosophy today, because it is not lives that are studied and honored, but logic, it was not always so. In fact, until the birth of modernity, the lives of the sages, not only the saints, were freely rehearsed alongside their systems of thought. Their qualities were captured in portraits; their stories portrayed in stained glass. “I consider the lives and fortunes of the great teachers of mankind no less carefully than their ideas and doctrines,” said Michel de Montaigne in the sixteenth century.

It started with the image of Socrates himself, particularly in the symbol of Socrates the martyr: unjustly condemned, bravely accepting the sentence, he confirmed the virtue of the powerless who similarly die nobly for their beliefs. Whether or not the image is justified is another question entirely – what happened when Socrates stood before the jury was contested from early on. This is presumably why Plato wrote not one but three dialogues exploring Socrates’ last days. But the appeal of the image of Socrates drinking the hemlock as he calmly discourses with his friends stems not from its historical accuracy. The image is archetypal. It speaks to a human ideal, which is why it sticks.

I welcome your comments

Heraclitus: The Greatest Philosopher?

If ‘philosophy’ means ‘the love of wisdom’, then the Greatest Philosopher is the person who loves wisdom most. But let us be clear that wisdom refers not to a storehouse of facts. If one wants answers, one should take care to avoid the true philosopher, for they are no provider of solutions. The true philosopher sees the world as something to be explained, but is aware also that we cannot give that sought-after final explanation: every answer submits to another question, truth is always beyond us. The true philosopher is also a visionary; one who sees possibilities, discovers new questions where answers have been placed. But the philosopher’s vision isn’t merely skeptical, aiming only to undermine and overturn: the philosophical vision involves being able to see the validity of opposing conclusions drawn from the same argument. So the philosophical vision is by nature paradoxical. The philosopher does not lead an argument, but follows it, and does not choose one way or the other on this journey, but transcends them both, setting forth heavy-headed down both paths, and recognizing that “the way up and the way down are one and the same.” The moment a thinker chooses one path, one direction, over another, philosophizing ceases, and the thinker falls into ‘dogmatic slumber’. The greatness of the true philosopher is not solely the possession of such vision, however. The ability to help others see with philosophical eyes is the other mark of wisdom. And there has been one thinker who kept under his gaze both thesis and antithesis, attracted not by either, but by both, and who has helped us to see this 'fluxed' world through the lens of his words: Heraclitus.

As always, I look forward to your comments

What is the Meaning of Life?

A problem with this question is that it is not clear what sort of answer is being looked for. One common rephrasing is “What is it that makes life worth living?”. There are any number of subjective answers to this question. Think of all the reasons why you are glad you are alive, and there is the meaning of your life. Some have attempted to answer this question in a more objective way: that is to have an idea of what constitutes the good life. It seems reasonable to say that some ways of living are not conducive to human flourishing. However, I am not convinced that there is one right way to live. To suggest that there is demonstrates not so much arrogance as a lack of imagination.

Another way of rephrasing the question is “What is the purpose of life?” Again we all have our own subjective purposes but some would like to think there is a higher purpose provided for us, perhaps by a creator. It is a matter of debate whether this would make life a thing of greater value or turn us into the equivalent of rats in a laboratory experiment. Why does there have to be a purpose to life separate from those purposes generated within it? The idea that life needs no external justification appeals to me. In the “why are we here?” sense of the question there is no answer. It would be wrong, however, to conclude that life is meaningless. Life is meaningful to humans, therefore it has meaning.

I look forward to your comments

How Can I Know Anything at All?

If you are to correctly claim to have knowledge about something, that knowledge must:

a) Be correct

b) Have been reached using a correct method (it can’t be a coincidence that you’re right).

The first obstacle to achieving knowledge is therefore that any information we receive though our imperfect senses could give an imperfect portrayal of the external world (see a). Secondly, our imperfect brains could process information incorrectly (see b). Therefore, a sufferer of schizophrenia might believe the ‘imaginary’ people he sees are real, or have a memory of something that never happened, and we too may have false perceptions of the external world, and even our own personal pasts. However, even the schizophrenic knows how things look and feel and sound and smell and taste to him. Like everyone, he has knowledge of his present sensations, his memories and his ideas. We are undoubtedly correct to say that we have knowledge of these things, because their reality doesn’t require existence of anything outside of the mind.

So, even though I can’t be sure that my perceptions give me a true picture of the external world, I do know what ‘the world to me’ is like. After that point, I don’t think it’s knowledge that is important, but reason. Reason allows us to take those bare bones of true knowledge and decide what they suggest about the world and how we should live in it.

Philosophy means ‘love of wisdom’. In Plato’s Republic, this is often referred to as ‘love of knowledge’, but I think this is incorrect. While knowledge has its own small (but crucial) role in achieving wisdom and understanding, it is really reason that does the hard work to determine how we live our lives.

I look forward to your comments