Philosophy and Living

Title page

Philosophy and Living

Ralph Blumenau

Copyright page

Copyright © Ralph Blumenau, 2002

First reprint: January 2003

Second reprint (with corrections): February 2005

2013 digital version by Andrews UK Limited

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The moral rights of the author has been asserted

No part of any contribution may be reproduced in any form without permission, except for the quotation of brief passages in criticism and discussion.

Originally published in the UK by Imprint Academic

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Originally published in the USA by Imprint Academic

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Dedication

This book is dedicated to my classes at the

University of the Third Age

in London

Introduction

There have always been parts of philosophy which have been highly technical and so abstruse that only specialists could understand them. These features have their own importance, but the title of this book is intended to show that it concerns itself mainly with those aspects of philosophy that have influenced people’s attitudes towards their lives, towards each other and their society, towards their God, and towards the ethical problems that confront them.

I am a historian by profession; I have taught history as a main subject, initially to sixth formers and now to retired people. I should describe myself as an amateur rather than a professional philosopher (as specialists in the subject may swiftly discover), but I have always taught philosophy as an important component of history. Although I have of course grappled with its technical matters as well as with the wider issues, it is the latter which have always interested me most, and it is not surprising that my classes have also shown the greatest interest in those aspects which touch on contemporary concerns. The students have not always immediately seen the relevance to contemporary issues of problems raised by philosophers in the past. So I have found that it has been helpful for me to have specifically raised this relevance.

This book is the result of that experience. I have selected mainly those aspects of the history of ideas which have something to say to our present preoccupations; and I have proceeded, as I do in my classes, in a chronological fashion. I am interested in all those figures who, in the past, have contributed to shape the thought of their time and of later ages; and I do not draw the sharp distinction that professionals do between philosophers, theologians, scientists, psychologists and even political propagandists. I set out to expound the ideas of a particular thinker; I then invite discussion of the material and especially of how it relates to issues that are still alive today. Over the last five years I have tape-recorded these discussions, and a special feature of this book is that my student’s reflections and mine - set in from the margin and in a different type - interrupt the exposition.

Another feature of the book are the many footnotes which refer the reader back to earlier, and forward to later, pages of the book. They are intended to serve the dual purpose of making the references easier to look up and to reinforce the idea that throughout the centuries philosophers have often grappled with the same problems, sometimes coming up with similar approaches and sometimes with radically different ones.

At the same time I have assumed that many readers will not be reading the book from cover to cover, but may read chapters in isolation. This accounts for the occasional repetition of arguments that I hope will not irritate unduly those who read the complete book in a relatively short time.

The topics I have chosen are selective, and the book does not purport to give a comprehensive account of the thinkers with whom I deal.

As a historian, I am well aware that it is dangerous to read present concerns into an interpretation of the past. I dare say that the same danger exists in philosophy: perhaps the thinkers of the past, were they alive today, would be puzzled by what I may have occasionally read into them. But philosophers, like other figures from the past, have no control over the effect their thoughts and actions have in later years. The historian must be interested not only in what an idea meant to a character in the past, but also in how that idea has been interpreted by later generations. I try to be fair to the original context of an idea, but I must admit that what fascinates me most is the potency of some ideas down the ages. If I have unwittingly falsified the former, I must crave the indulgence of the professional philosophers and theologians.

Acknowledgments

Much of this book is based on notes I have made on my reading over several decades, long before I had the idea that I might be writing a book. Although I have a comprehensive list of the books I have read (they are all on my shelves), it never occurred to me to include page references in my notes. I may occasionally have copied phrases or incorporated lines of arguments that came from these books, but it is impossible now to track all of these down. The bibliography at the end of this volume shows the range of authors to whom I have been indebted. If any of them feel that here and there parts of my text are very close to what they have written, I would apologize for any plagiarism they may suspect and ask them to accept that it was wholly unintentional.

I am very grateful to my editor, Keith Sutherland, for the encouragement he has given me throughout, and to Sandra Good and Bryn Williams for their proof-reading. In addition Bryn Williams has made many substantive comments that have caused me to make numerous changes to my text. Professional and specialist philosophers will undoubtedly find mistakes in this work of an amateur author. For these I must, of course, take full responsibility.

The other debt I am only too glad to acknowledge is to my classes at the University of the Third Age in London. Several of them had asked me to write such a book. Without the incorporation of their comments and the questions they have raised, this volume would have been very much shorter and much of its flavour would have been lost. It is to my students, therefore, that I dedicate the result.

Parts of chapters 13, 27 and 31 first appeared in the quarterly journal Philosophy Now: Free Will and Predestination in issue No.20 (Spring 1998); Aesthetics and Absolutes in issue No. 3 (Spring 1992); and Kant and the Thing in Itself in issue No. 31 (Spring, 2001).

PART ONE: GREECE AND ROME

1: The Greek Cosmologists

The earliest Western philosophers came from the Greek settlements on the coast of Ionia, what is today the western coast of Turkey. What made them philosophers was that they sensed that behind the ever-changing phenomena of this world there must be something that does not change. They originally thought that there must be some ultimate stuff - what the Greeks called arche and the Germans call Urstoff - of which everything is made; and they speculated on what this might be. In the sixth century BC they believed that it must be just one arche: Thales thought it was Water; Anaximenes thought it was Air; Heraclitus thought it was Fire because it can transform everything into itself. (He also had a more sophisticated idea: that whilst Fire was the ultimate stuff, there lay behind it something that was not a stuff at all, but was Reality itself. We will look at that idea more closely presently.) In the following century, the fifth BC, Empedocles, from Agrigento in Southern Italy, thought that material things were probably composed of a combination of more than one stuff: in his work, we come across the Four Elements (Earth, Air, Fire and Water) which combine in various proportions; but even that seemed unduly limited, and finally Democritus, the most famous of a group of philosophers from Thrace who were called Atomists, postulated the existence of innumerable tiny indivisible building blocks which combined and re-combined to make everything that was in this world. They called these building blocks atoms, from the Greek a + tomos, which means non-divisible. (The soul, too, was composed of atoms. Like the atoms making up the body, they dispersed on death. They did not perish, but recombined to form new souls: there could therefore be no such thing as individual immortality.)

The branch of philosophy which aims to explain how the material universe works is known as natural philosophy. It was later to separate itself off from the rest of philosophy and call itself physical science. The word science originally simply meant knowledge. It separated itself off from philosophy when it had developed its own techniques of experimentation and verification. These are largely specific to what we now call science. They are on the whole not the methods applied in thinking about, for example, religion or ethics or aesthetics, which are typically philosophical subjects. But, for many centuries before the so-called scientific method was developed, there was no demarcation between philosophy and science. Of course, the demarcation is not absolute today either: there is a branch of philosophy today which is called the Philosophy of Science, though that is philosophical in a way that what was called natural philosophy is not. Anyway, for those early centuries, we class thinkers who reflected about the nature of the physical universe among the philosophers.

One may smile at a natural philosophy which held there was just one stuff, or even a mere four elements, at the bottom of everything. In Democritus, however, we meet one of many prescientific thinkers who constantly astonish us by their intuitions. After all, they had no microscopes, and it was many centuries later that the existence of these tiny building blocks was actually scientifically demonstrated.

One of the most astonishing aspects of the Greeks was their intuition that the universe was not random. It is true, of course, that they could observe several separate regular phenomena: the cycle of the seasons, the movements of the stars, the processes of birth, growth and decay. Compared with the knowledge that modern man possesses, the Greeks possessed, as it were, only a few fragments of a gigantic jigsaw puzzle. Indeed, they could not even know that these fragments, a few of which they had managed to fit together here and there, were part of the same jigsaw puzzle. When the Greeks spoke of the universe, they described it as cosmos, and the original meaning of that word was Order. The first philosopher who applied the word Order to the Universe was Pythagoras, who, like the Ionian cosmologists lived in the sixth century BC. The belief that there is such an Order, that where there is one Order there must be one Law governing it, and that the more carefully man observed this world, the more he would find that more and more of the pieces would fit together and that the still missing pieces must somehow fit in with the overall plan and with the pieces of the jigsaw which we already have - all that was a stupendous and immensely fruitful leap of faith that made them unique in their time. Over the succeeding centuries that intuition, that faith, would be abundantly justified, so much so that it has governed the outlook of western man ever since. The assumption lies at the bottom of all scientific enquiry, which takes it for granted that we can constantly increase the area of the pieces that we have been able to fit together. Of course, a note of caution has been struck from time to time, especially by some religious people who have warned us to be humble and to remember that God moves in mysterious ways which we will never fathom; but even they believe that God has a plan, that there is a jigsaw, even if it is one that fallible mortals will never get anywhere near to completing.

We must now go back to Heraclitus, who made two further lasting contributions to the way we think today.

The first was that what appear to be opposites or contradictions, like illness and health, are really complementary: they not only need each other in order to define each other, but the tension between them is a necessary aspect of change and development.

The East has a very similar concept in the Yin and the Yang, whose symbol is a circle with a black and a white part like this:

It symbolizes that both parts are needed to make the whole, and the way each colour penetrates into the other’s semicircle symbolizes their interdependence and interpenetration.

Heraclitus says, We must know that war is common to all things, and that strife is justice, and all things come into being and pass away through strife. Opposites are parts of a reality that embraces them both, and within which they are both absorbed. To this Reality he gave the name Logos, whose original meaning was Reason; and he also called it the One.

The positing of the One is of course another form of that affirmation of that single universal order to which we have referred earlier. When Heraclitus speaks of all things passing away through strife, he may have meant this on several levels: it may be the strife of Life and Death, with Death always being the inescapable victor; or it may be defeat in conflict: the weaker will perish and the fittest will survive. But probably we have here the first seeds of the idea which would be most fully developed by Hegel at the beginning of the nineteenth century: that progress is the result of tensions and contradictions between ideas which are then put into practice in the material world. After a while the tensions are resolved, Hegel believed, not by the total defeat of one side, but by a higher synthesis between the two opposing ideas and their concrete materializations. The new synthesis will in due course generate its own opposite, and that new tension will be resolved by a still higher synthesis - and so on, until all tensions are resolved in the Absolute, which is Heraclitus’ One. We can surely think of plenty of situations in the history of thought where the earlier stages of this process have taken place. But we will leave examples of this until we come to consider Hegel.

Man’s own reason is a weak form of the Reason that governs the universe. It is the fiery element in him, which flickers upwards towards the Universal Reason and merges with it when it departs from the body, leaving the latter as a mere useless combination of earth and water.

This is another seminal thought, which will affect the religions of the West, and is also found in the religions of the East: that Man is a creature endowed with reason which can grasp, however feebly and partially, something of the Reason that governs the world. Moreover, human reason strives to grasp Divine Reason more fully; or, alternatively, the human soul strives to be united with God. Both strivings can only be achieved after death. Before then, we can only see through a glass darkly. We have here even the idea that the Soul is imprisoned in the body, is only liberated after death and leaves the body behind as the dross that it is.

Heraclitus made a further contribution to the history of thought. His senses told him that there was nothing permanent in the phenomena of this world: everything was constantly changing, was in a permanent state of flux: You cannot step twice into the same river. This of course fitted in with the idea we have already mentioned: that all things come into being and pass away through strife. He trusted what his senses told him.

However, two philosophers from Elea, Parmenides and his pupil Zeno, thought not only that our senses deceived us (and we can think of plenty of examples where they do, can’t we?), but that in particular they deceive us when they tell us that everything is continually changing. On the contrary, said Parmenides, his reason told him that change is impossible. This is how he argued it:

If anything comes to be, then it comes either out of being or out of not-being. If the former, then it already is - in which case it does not come to be; if the latter, then it is nothing, since out of nothing comes nothing.[1]

Similarly, Zeno’s reason told him that if Achilles and a tortoise have a race and if Achilles, because his speed is ten times that of the tortoise, kindly gives the tortoise a hundred metres start, he can never overtake the tortoise: by the time Achilles has covered the hundred metres start, the tortoise has covered ten metres; by the time that Achilles has covered those ten metres, the tortoise is a further metre ahead; by the time he has covered that metre, the tortoise is a tenth of a metre ahead, and so on ad infinitum. The tortoise leads by a smaller and smaller distance, but it always maintains its lead and therefore Achilles can never overtake it!

In another paradox, Zeno argued that at any one moment an arrow occupies a fixed position in space. A split second later it occupies a different fixed position. There is no moment between the two when it does not occupy a fixed position; therefore our perception that the arrow moves in flight must be a delusion.

From these two examples we can see that reason can lead one astray quite as badly as can the senses - and indeed how big the distance can be between the senses or reason on the one hand and common sense on the other. This has not stopped philosophers arguing for centuries on what exactly the relationship is between reason and the senses. Some philosophers, like Descartes, maintain that reason, properly handled, will never let you down. Others, like Hume, say that all our thoughts are in the last resort based on our sense impressions.

Is it true that reason, properly handled, will never let us down? And is the real tension not so much between reason and the senses - where certain techniques are available to solve the problem - as between reason and the emotions, where the techniques are rather less precise?

1 The formulation is that of Frederick Coplestone.

2: Pythagoras

Pythagoras (ca.530 BC) also came from Ionia originally, but he differed from his fellow Ionians in that his temperament was basically religious and metaphysical. He and his followers were members of an Orphic cult - so called after Orpheus, whose music was said to have embodied divine mysteries. Even people who know nothing about philosophy will know that Pythagoras was also a great mathematician. What schoolboy has not struggled with Pythagoras’ proof that the sum of the square of the hypotenuse of a right-angled triangle is equal to the sum of the squares of the other two sides?[1] Pythagoras also discovered that there are demonstrable mathematical relationships in music: for example, if you pluck two strings of equal thickness and tension, one of which is exactly twice as long as the other, the sound they produce are an exact octave apart. This led him to think that not only music embodies the divine, but that mathematics does also. From such experiences he concluded that all things are numbers, that numbers, in fact, rather than air, fire, or water, are the Urstoff of which the world is made. The contemplation of the beautiful mathematical order in the universe[2] was for him akin to a religious experience.

Here again we have an example of the uncanny intuition that the ancient Greeks possessed. How he would have rejoiced to know that one day sound waves could be measured and that it would then be found that these have an exact mathematical relationship with the length of the string that is being plucked! The more we have learnt about mathematics, the more wonderful the relationship between numbers and movement, numbers and gravity, numbers and the components of matter turns out to be. It was such relationships that led the twentieth-century scientist and philosopher A.N. Whitehead to exclaim, God must be a great mathematician.

Pythagoras thought that the mathematics we practise on earth (he was thinking particularly of geometry) can never achieve the absolute purity of mathematical ideals. The pure concept of a line does not allow for it to have any breadth; yet even the thinnest line we draw on paper has to have breadth, just as even the minutest point we mark on paper has a dimension which it ought not to have. So he drew a distinction between the concept of the Ideal and the Eternal on the one hand, and the imperfections in the way in which we express them here on earth on the other.

Mathematical truths are of course understood through the intellect, through reason; and if the contemplation of the beauty of mathematics results in religious experience, it means that the path to religious truth comes via the intellect and not in the way of the Dionysiacs, by fostering a deliberate abandonment of rational self-control through dance and rhythm and wine until ecstasy (literally standing outside yourself) is achieved.

Pythagoras here begins a debate which will run through the centuries. Some think that religion is not incompatible with reason and can indeed by strengthened by reasoning. Others believe that religion requires an emotional surrender to the Divine, and they tend to distrust reasoning as liable to undermine religious belief.

Mathematical relationships in music create harmony; harmony implies a certain balance, and therefore to achieve balance and harmony must be one of the aims of the philosopher. A harmonious life is a happier life not simply because it is more comfortable: it is more comfortable because in it is reflected the divine plan for what life ought to be. Balance in turn implies the injunction that there should be no excesses, that there should be, in Pythagoras’ words moderation in all things - an injunction that has become famous because it expresses what most people recognize as wisdom.

What about enthusiasm? The word comes from the Greek for being possessed by a god. There have always been people who are incapable of allowing themselves to be possessed by anything. Can enthusiasm be temperate? Moderate enthusiasm seems to be a contradiction in terms. Yet is not a life without enthusiasm, without the capacity to feel intensely, lacking something of value?

Perhaps Pythagoras meant that, even if we feel intensely, we should yet always act in moderation. But some people think that few causes are advanced with moderation. Does it need a degree of extremism in certain instances to move the world along? Is moderation often an excuse for inactivity and complacency? Or is it, on the contrary, a most difficult virtue to practise in the face of a disagreeable situation?

It was also requisite for good health that the elements within the body should be in proper balance. Empedocles, who lived in the following century, fixed these elements as four: earth, air, fire and water. Later, these were represented in the four humours. If one of these upsets the balance by being present in excess, then the body and the mind suffered from being either choleric (by having too much yellow bile), or sanguine (too much blood), or phlegmatic (too much phlegm) or melancholic (too much black bile).

Pythagoras and his Orphic friends rejected the traditional Greek idea that the souls of the dead have a wraith-like existence in Hades. Instead, they believed that the soul has a chance to ascend to Elysium or Heaven, but only if it has been purified by having been trained to virtue in life. (If it had not been so trained, it would migrate into another body, possibly a lower one like that of an animal.) It was therefore very important that the soul should be properly cultivated. For this purpose Pythagoras founded a school and a community, consisting of both men and women on a basis of equality. Its members were to lead a life devoted to virtue and high thinking (in which mathematics surely played a part), and to share all their goods in common.

We shall see later how great an influence the ideas of Pythagoras had on Plato: the necessity for the wise man to train his soul to understand something of the plan behind the universe; the importance of mathematics in this training; the necessity for this purpose to eschew personal property; the equality of men and women in the community of philosophers and the distinction between the perfect and eternal ideas on the one hand and the imperfect and transitory phenomena on the other.

The two men had something else in common: each of them had bad experiences in advising governments: Pythagoras and his community were driven out of Croton, a town in southern Italy which they had tried to govern; and Plato failed to turn Dionysius II, the Tyrant of Syracuse, into a Philosopher King.

1 Pythagoras’ Theorem is a beautiful example of deductive reasoning: you begin with a very few propositions and then draw conclusions from those. The opposite is called inductive reasoning: you begin by collecting a number of experiences and work out by experimentation what conclusions you could draw from them. You then test the conclusions to see whether the induction has been correct. Most Greeks favoured deductive over inductive reasoning (Aristotle is a striking exception). That tendency was reinforced by the teaching of Socrates, as we shall see below where we discuss some of the implications of privileging deductive over inductive reasoning.

2 It will be remembered that to describe the universe, Pythagoras used the word cosmos, whose original meaning is order.

3: Protagoras and the Sophists

As the Greeks extended their acquaintance with, on the one hand, the neighbouring advanced cultures of Persia, Babylon and Egypt and, on the other, the more primitive cultures of the Scythians and the Thracians, they became increasingly aware of the fact that different societies have different values. This led some of them to the conclusion that standards, values and truths are not absolute: they are shaped by each society and, for that matter, may be shaped by different groups or even different individuals within each society - in other words, that standards, values and truths are relative. In the words of Protagoras (ca. 481 to 411 BC), Man is the measure of all things.

In this saying Protagoras not only set Man against the gods or against some pure criteria of perfection laid up in Heaven, but also envisaged the possibility that any one man may entertain values which are not those of the society in which he lives. He accepted, however, that most individuals will accept the values of their society. Either they have never thought deeply enough about them to question them, or they think it is best for them as well as for the cohesion of the community that they should not too lightly challenge the codes of belief and behaviour which bind that community together. We must remember that most Greeks took it for granted that men function at their best only when they are integral members of the community, and that if their beliefs or practices were to cut them off too sharply from the community, they would become in some sense less than fully developed human beings. Good citizenship therefore requires certain norms of behaviour, an adhesion to society’s values even though these are relative and not absolute. So, although Protagoras had written a book showing that he was personally agnostic about the gods, he still thought that in practice men should accept the religious codes of their community.

If values and truths do not depend on divine revelation, then they are of course open to argument, and that in turn means that one needs to distinguish between good and bad arguments. Protagoras and his followers, who called themselves sophists (meaning teachers of wisdom)[1] therefore developed the art of rhetoric. Originally this word was not a synonym for what today we also call oratory. It meant skill in using words correctly - defining them precisely in the first place and then devising the rules of logic within which a sound argument is conducted. That, at least, was the idea. In practice, many sophists were thought to teach their pupils how to be able to argue for any cause and on any side, how to make the weaker appear the better cause when, for example, lawyers defended their clients in the courts. Plato accused them of doing just that; and in due course the words rhetoric and sophistry acquired the pejorative connotations they have today.

As we shall see later, Plato had other reasons for disliking the sophists: he believed that truths were absolute, and he thought that the sophists, with their debating skills and their relativism, undermined and corroded truth, morals and traditions.

The relativism of the sophists still speaks very powerfully to us today, as does the unease that their opponents felt. There have been periods in the history of thought when the sophists’ kind of relativism was treated as blasphemy or as heresy. The orthodox members of the three great monotheistic religions which arose in the Middle East - Judaism, Christianity and Islam - have been, and still are, particularly inclined to oppose relativism. Polytheistic religions have been more accommodating, and some Eastern religions, especially Hinduism, while believing in certain verities, teach that these can be approached in many different ways. Kipling, who had had so much experience of India, wrote, Many ways hast Thou fashioned, O Lord; and all of them lead to the Light. How far can a contemporary follower of a monotheistic religion accept this?

Between the time when the monotheistic religions established themselves and the eighteenth century, there was very little acceptance of relativism. In the course of the eighteenth century, the hold of religious orthodoxy weakened considerably, and relativism strengthened accordingly. From time to time, as religious orthodoxy declined, secular orthodoxies, both of the Right and of the Left, took their place. Like their religious forerunners, these, too, regarded any questioning as heresies to be rooted out. Liberal societies deplore such intolerance.

There is no doubt that relativism has made enormous strides during the last two centuries, and the question has often been asked by worried citizens whether it has not in fact damaged the fabric of society. Protagoras, as we have seen, believed that individuals only become fully developed human beings as members of a community. The concept of individuals being primary and society only secondary would never have occurred to him or his contemporaries. While they were aware that relativism could in theory undermine communal values, they did not think that this would happen widely in practice. Today, with individualism very much stronger than it was in the time of Protagoras, we are not so sure.

So the question that arises for us is this: if there are no absolute values, does that mean that there are absolutely no values? If it does not, what basis is there for value systems that do not purport to be absolute ones? We shall repeatedly be coming back to this question.

There is also a contemporary relevance in Plato’s concern that the Sophists taught their pupils how to make the weaker appear the better cause, especially in the law courts. Some people feel uneasy that defence lawyers have to put up the strongest case they can for their client, even in cases when it must be reasonably clear to them that their client has in fact committed the offence with which he is charged. We do of course consider it necessary that a defendant is entitled under all circumstances to the best defence possible, and that the defence lawyer is therefore fulfilling an important civic function. Is this a case where two philosophical principles clash?

1 Pythagoras was the first to have described his pursuit as philosophia, specifically describing himself as a lover of wisdom. He would have considered the name sophist, with the implication that its exponents knew what wisdom was, presumptuous.

4: Socrates

Socrates had all the dialectical skills of a sophist, but, like his pupil Plato, he intensely disliked the relativism in the service of which so many sophists deployed their abilities. We cannot be sure what absolute truths he espoused. Socrates left no written works behind, and the account we have of his views depends to a very large extent on Plato who, in his dialogues, makes Socrates his spokesman. It is difficult to disentangle what might have been the views of the historical Socrates from the opinions attributed to him by Plato but which were really Plato’s own. Socrates is reported as being brilliant at asking questions about concepts, definitions, and philosophical positions, but as having been reluctant to give any clear answers himself: I know that I do not know is one of the famous sayings attributed to him. The sophists, too, had claimed that they did not know the ultimate truth, but that was because they did not think an ultimate truth existed. Socrates, however, assumed that there was such a thing, however difficult it was to reach a full understanding of it. As Professor Myles Burnyeat has put it, at the end of a session with Socrates, you end up not with a firm answer, but with a much better grasp of the problem than you had before.[1]

Socrates had begun by studying natural philosophy, asking questions about motion, about atomistic theory etc., as the Greek Cosmologists had done. But he soon realized that what really interested him was not an understanding of material facts or of the origin of matter, but questions of values and ends, of ethics and of politics. These, he thought, were much more important.

This reversal of the priorities of the Cosmologists had a profound influence on European thought for many centuries. With the notable exception of Aristotle, philosophers for the next 1600 years or so were not very interested in the sciences and considered scientific pursuits as an inferior form of intellectual activity. A concern with ethics, religion and politics was the mark of an educated gentleman; experimentation and practical application in science were not. The classical education which the upper classes continued to receive until the early years of this century reinforced this social attitude; and although from the sixteenth and especially the seventeenth century onwards some gentlemen did a little experimental work in laboratories, that did not greatly increase the social status of those who engaged in applied science. The pursuit of Pure Science was somewhat more prestigious - and that, too, is part of the heritage of classical thought which tended to privilege universal principles over particular manifestations of them.

To what extent has this attitude affected the progress of science in Britain? in France? in Germany? in the United States? in Japan? To what extent does the progress of science depend on the cultural climate in the upper classes?

Certainly in our own time our society has paid more and more attention to the applied sciences. Does it still attach the same importance that Socrates did to the pursuit of values and ends? If not, why not? And if not, what have been and are likely to be the consequences?

Socrates (or perhaps it was Plato) believed that the knowledge of values was innate: the Soul had possessed it before it entered the human body; but that knowledge was then clouded or hidden. It was the task of the Socratic teacher, by skilful questioning, to bring it out of the clouded state back into consciousness. Socrates compared his task to that of a midwife. (His mother had in fact been a midwife). The teacher of philosophy is literally an educator: the word educate originally means to lead out, to bring forth.

The knowledge of values, in other words, is not something to be inculcated in the student, but is something to be elicited from him. That procedure is of course much more time-consuming, but many educators believe that the best education is one that forces students to work out answers for themselves, perhaps with the help of skilful questioning.

For the questioning one has to rely on the integrity and wisdom of the person who is asking the questions. The Socrates of the Platonic dialogues is often a little like a sheep-dog: by asking questions in a certain way, Socrates does not really leave the answer open, but herds the replies in the direction in which he wants them to go. A clever teacher, like a clever barrister, can abuse the inexperience of his pupils by asking loaded questions which the student does not recognize as such. The answers brought forth by that technique would then be a distortion of the innate knowledge that the pupil is said to possess.

Some educators are not so opposed to the inculcation of values, provided, of course, that they are the right ones. It does not disturb them that their critics may call that conditioning. They would answer that children, in particular, need to be given a firm framework of values at an early age. The young may not be capable of working values out for themselves and may not even be interested in trying. If asked to do so, they may merely become confused.

In fact, the pupils of Socrates were not children or early adolescents. They were young men whom he invited to work out values for themselves. What they were encouraged to draw out from within themselves for examination were ideas that were not really innate at all, but had been inculcated in them in their earlier years. We will see that the Socrates who is the spokesman for Plato’s educational ideas in The Republic will himself impose a drastic system of conditioning upon the very young.

Of course only a certain kind of knowledge can be elicited from within - namely the kind that Socrates thought the most important: knowledge about values and ends, ethics and politics. The technique will not be able to elicit factual knowledge, like the date of a battle or the composition of a chemical. That must be acquired from an outside source, which may be verbal or written or experimental. But we have already seen that Socrates did not consider that kind of knowledge particularly important.

The knowledge of the Good is to be found by the intellect: it is not handed down by the gods. Good is not good because the gods approve of it; the gods approve of it because it is Good.

Socrates was asking his young men to elucidate for themselves what is good rather than having it handed down by priests. The opponents of Socrates saw this as tantamount to questioning the role of the gods. One of the charges on which Socrates would be condemned to death was that he had not worshipped the gods of Athens. He therefore opened another debate which was to run for centuries: that between the exponents of free enquiry and those of orthodox intolerance.

A true knowledge of values enables one to be virtuous: the more one knows about them, the more virtuous one is. Indeed, Socrates goes as far as to say that knowledge is virtue, and that sin is the result of ignorance. He argues it in this way: a virtuous Soul is a healthy and therefore a happy soul; a vicious soul (which perpetrates vicious acts) is a damaged soul such as no one would want to have. Those who commit vicious acts, therefore, obviously have no knowledge of the damage they are doing to their soul. That harm is usually much more serious than the harm they inflict on their victims: the injury done to them is generally inflicted only on their bodies. Socrates concludes from this that evildoers are more in need of being taught where they have gone wrong than of being punished.

What about people who do something which they know is wicked?

Socrates believed that in such a case true knowledge, which shows that virtue is always ultimately more rational than vice, is being clouded by psychological impulses and weaknesses.

There is a modern parallel to this view: that wrongdoing is a kind of psychological illness for which people are not responsible. What wrongdoers need, so the argument goes, is not punishment but therapy, and the way that therapy works is to make the patient understand the source of his sickness and, by knowing it, enable him to control it.

Socrates agreed with this: the wise man must be aware of his impulses so as to be able to control them, and therefore one of his cardinal rules was that you should know yourself.

Self-knowledge is of course important, but is it sufficient? What happens if we know that we are poisoned by, say, envy, but find ourselves incapable of controlling it?

Does Socrates attach too much importance to intellectual knowledge as the basis of virtue? What about moral instincts? The forms that moral instincts take in each one of us are, we know, mostly conditioned by our environment, and they may or may not subsequently be refined by intellectual thought. Could this not often be a sounder basis for virtuous behaviour than pure intellect?

And what about the honourable behaviour of many people who are not very bright? Socrates accepted that a person may behave well - he may, for instance, show courage - but he did not regard a courageous individual as virtuous unless that person knew what courage is. Is there some unacceptable intellectual élitism here?

Socrates was certainly no egalitarian. He particularly disliked the idea that all Athenian citizens are equally capable of making sound judgments on political matters. Pericles, in his famous Funeral Oration (431 BC), had proclaimed: An Athenian citizen does not neglect the state because he takes care of his own household; and even those of us who are engaged in business have a very fair idea of politics. We alone regard a man who takes no interest in public affairs not as a harmless but as a useless character; and if few of us are originators, we are all sound judges of policy. The Athenians prided themselves on their happy versatility. But during the lifetime of Socrates, Athens was rent between the democrats who supported the Periclean ideal and the oligarchs. The oligarchs had twice briefly seized power from the democrats; but these were back in power in 403 BC. Among Socrates’ pupils were several who supported the oligarchs’ ideas and poured scorn on the democrats. Doubtlessly they availed themselves of the arguments of their teacher that knowledge is needed for good government; that knowledge required training, and that therefore it was absurd to believe that all Athenians were sound judges of policy. We will look at the arguments that supported the élitist idea of politics when we come to Plato. Here it suffices to say that the democrats held Socrates responsible for the views of his oligarchic pupils; he was accused, among other things, of corrupting the young with such ideas - and he was condemned to die. In the Apology, the famous last speech attributed to him by Plato, Socrates told his grieving friends that he did not fear death: it was either a dreamless sleep or else a happy after-life, but that in any case he died happy because all his life he had pursued the truth. (399 BC)

1 Discussion with Bryan Magee in The Great Philosophers, p. 16, BBC Books, 1987.

5: Plato

Plato was profoundly shocked by the death of his teacher Socrates. It reinforced his opposition to the democratic ideas in the name of which his teacher had been condemned to death. He fled Athens for a while, but returned in 395 BC. Twelve years later, in 387, he founded the Academy in Athens (so named because it was built on a plot of land which was said to have belonged to Academus, a minor character in the legend of Theseus.)

His teaching there has been handed down to us in the form of written Socratic dialogues, in most of which his mentor expresses ideas which were either those of Socrates or Plato’s own - it is not always easy to tell which are which. As some of them are successively refined or modified in the later dialogues, we may be sure that at that stage they represent not only Plato’s elaboration of Socrates but also ideas which Socrates had never taught.

There are thirty-six dialogues which, at some time or other, have been attributed to Plato. Scholars generally reject six of these as unauthentic, are not sure about six more, but accept twenty-four as undisputedly by Plato. For reasons that will become clear presently, perhaps the key dialogue is the Politeia, known in English as The Republic. The discussion which follows will centre on this work, supplementing its ideas, where appropriate, with material from other dialogues.

The Polis

The title Politeia tells us that the dialogue is about the polis. This word originally meant community. It came to be applied to what we call a city state, which, of course, is a community organized in the particular way and for the particular purposes that we now call political. The populations of the Greek city states were small, and the number of its citizens (free men as distinct from slaves, and men as distinct from women) was very much smaller still. So there was hardly a distinction between what we today call the community and what we call the state. In Athens, the whole public (i.e. all citizens as defined above) had an active share in deciding the affairs of the community. The communal interest was what the Romans would call a res publica, a public thing, from which the word Republic derives. So the title which is born by Plato’s most famous dialogue is not wholly inappropriate: a substantial section of it does deal with what we would call today the community’s political organization. But we should never forget the wider and less specifically political resonance that was carried by the word politeia.

When, therefore, Aristotle would define man as a political animal, he would mean that man is by nature a social, communal animal, who can only fulfill himself by living as part of a community. A hermit, for example, was living a life that was deficient, unfulfilled. It was only the community that made man’s life meaningful.

All Athenians accepted this idea, and so did Plato. Where he differed from his fellow citizens was that the latter had come to think in the political terms that had been given such a memorable expression by Pericles: that it was one aspect of a citizen’s full life to take an active part in communal decision-making, because if few of us are originators, we are all sound judges of policy.

Behind this lay the idea that a wise decision would emerge from the free discussion of matters in the agora, or market place, in Athens, where the citizens would assemble for public debate. Not all citizens could originate brilliant ideas, but they could all judge the ideas expressed by others. Ultimately, the good ideas would drive out the bad.

This is one of the classic liberal arguments for freedom of speech, memorably advanced in modern history by John Stuart Mill. Is it true? Are not assemblies frequently swayed by the arguments of demagogues who play on their emotions, often very ignoble ones? Of course, the more sophisticated an audience is (and the Athenians thought that they were very sophisticated) the less chance there is of being swayed by emotional arguments. Is that true? Are intelligent men in better control of their emotions, or do they sometimes simply find more sophisticated arguments to support their passions?

Are there better arguments than this to support freedom of speech and the right of all people to participate in public affairs - arguments that have to do with dignity, with the right to make mistakes, with the consequences that so often follow when free speech is suppressed?

Inequalities between People

Plato at any rate was sure that most men were unfitted to judge wisely about matters of policy. Men were not equal, either in intelligence or in aptitude. The human soul had three elements: the rational, the courageous and the appetitive. In only a few individuals are these three in harmonious and appropriate balance. Men (and women, too - Plato did not discriminate between the sexes, as we shall see) fall into three categories: the rational, who think primarily with their heads (and can control the other two elements), the courageous, who think primarily with their hearts, and the appetitive who think primarily with their stomachs. In another dialogue Plato says that, in rational people, reason is like a charioteer controlling the courageous and the appetitive passions. These are likened to two horses that often want to pull the chariot in the wrong or in conflicting directions. If the rational part is not in control, wrong actions result. Plato agreed with Socrates that knowledge is necessary for virtue, but his analogy avoided Socrates’ corollary, that sin is the result of ignorance: the rational knowledge is often there; but the rational part is too weak to resist the courageous or appetitive parts of the soul. In such a case, what is needed is training of the will rather than the removal of ignorance. But, as we shall see, Plato thought that only a few are capable of receiving such training. The rest will continue to be dominated by their courageous or appetitive nature.

Plato believed that men and women will be happy only if they do what they are best fitted to do: the rational types are happiest when they engage in intellectual pursuits, the courageous when they serve in the army, and the appetitive when they engage in activities that will enable them to earn a living and thereby to satisfy their bodily needs. Fit square pegs into round holes and you can only create unhappiness, discontentment, tension and injustice.

The argument has of course been put forward down the ages to justify a rigidly stratified society where everyone knows his place, accepts it contentedly, and does not aspire to improve his social status. Often those arguments have been accepted even by many of those in the lower strata, sometimes because they have been indoctrinated (especially, as Marx would say, by the churches) and sometimes because they are genuinely content or because they accept their limitations. But many in the lower strata have never accepted the argument. They are actually unhappy rather than content in the stratum in which they find themselves: they aspire to being upwardly mobile, whether they are fit for it in Platonic terms or not.

Plato, as we will see, devises an educational system that would not leave someone who is fit to think primarily with his head to be kept in the same stratum as those who think primarily with their stomachs. But do people who naturally think primarily with their stomachs not also often have aspirations to move outside the sphere that their nature appears to have allotted to them?

It follows that Plato not only challenges the concept of some kind of equality between citizens, but also abandons the concept of happy versatility, on which the Athenians had prided themselves, in favour of one of specialization. We will return to this aspect presently.

Justice, for Plato, is that state of affairs in which everybody fulfils his or her proper function. It therefore enshrines inequality, and not, as we affirm today, equality. A well organized polis will ensure that Justice in this Platonic sense prevails - not only for the good of the community, but also for the sake of its citizens.

The polis can do this only if it is led by those who know how to rule wisely - only if it is led by philosophers who have become Guardians or Philosopher Kings. Plato knew that even in an ideal society, it would help if those who are to be governed can be encouraged by a myth to accept the rule of the Guardians, and even the Guardians’ self-confidence might be boosted by it. He therefore suggested, somewhat shamefacedly, the propagation of the noble lie that when God fashioned mankind, he put gold into those who were capable of ruling, silver into the future soldiers, and iron and copper into those destined to be farmers and craftsmen.

Note how such useful myths would reappear in later centuries in the form of the Divine Right of Kings and the blue blood of the aristocracy!

The Guardians

The Guardians are specially trained for their task. Plato had Socrates ask: to whom would you go to have a pair of shoes made? A shoemaker, of course, because he has been specially trained to make shoes. Likewise, you would go to a doctor if you were sick, because he has been specially trained to deal with illness. Does it not then follow that you should ask a carefully trained specialist to undertake that most difficult and complicated task of guiding the community?

What do we think of the analogy with the shoemaker and the doctor? We will go to a particular shoe-maker so long as we like his shoes - the style, but particularly the comfort. Suppose we complain to the shoemaker about an uncomfortable fit, and he replies: There is nothing wrong with my shoe. It is expertly crafted; so the trouble must lie with your feet, which are far from perfect! Now we are not skilled enough to make our own shoes, but we would certainly not patronize that particular shoemaker again, and would choose a different one next time. So with our rulers: we vote them into office because we trust (shall we say) that they will make life more comfortable for us - perhaps lower taxation, good social services, no fear of unemployment. We may not be expert enough to know what has to be done to bring these results about, but if our politicians fail to deliver the goods, we turn them out at the next election and try a different lot of politicians. In other words, we claim that in the last resort it is the governed and not the governors who are the best judges, if not of economic principles, then at least of the effects of economic policy.

Is this a sound riposte to Plato? Might a country be better governed if the government were not forced by popular demand to produce economic policies which seem attractive in the short run but which are actually profoundly damaging in the long run even to those who demand them? We may get lower taxation, but can we then afford a decent system of publicly funded social services? Or alternatively, we may spend heavily on a generous system of social services, but can we then compete in the world effectively enough to prevent unemployment? Would not a government by experts be able to strike a healthy balance between all these competing demands? (Would it, indeed? Would the experts agree on what the proper balance is?)

Besides, does not handing over all decision making to experts - supposing that they really are experts - deprive the citizens of the dignity of being involved, of taking at least some responsibility? Might not people prefer the right to make mistakes - their own mistakes - to being ever so perfectly governed? Is that preference, as Plato would probably have said, quite indefensible on rational grounds because it is merely part of the emotional spasm that you would expect of people who think primarily with their stomachs? We are back with his contention that people are happy if they do only what they are best fitted to do; as we have seen, that is not always true.

The Importance of Education

By far the most important task that falls to the Guardians is to make sure that the educational system in the Republic is right. If it is, Plato believed, nothing else could really go wrong. The educational system first sorts out by a system of tests, spread out for some citizens over the best part of a lifetime, which role in the community they are best fitted for. It then gives them the training that is most appropriate for that role. Because everyone will be happy when they do what they are best fitted to do, there will be no need for force in a well-governed community. The use of force is already a sign that the society has failed, and there is no discussion of it in The Republic.

We must always remember that what Plato is sketching out in The Republic is the perfect, the ideal republic. We will consider the importance of the Ideal in Plato’s thought presently. For the moment it must be stressed that Plato believed that any actual republic must, by the very fact that it is an actual one, fall short of the Ideal. This would be Plato’s response to the frequent occasions on which we might criticize him on the ground that he is out of touch with practical realities, with what men and their societies are really like.

Towards the end of his life Plato set out how he thought an actual republic should be run (in the dialogue The Laws). He wrote this work in a fit of exasperation. Dionysius II, the Tyrant of Syracuse, had invited him to give advice on how he might become a Philosopher King. Plato soon realized how far short of his ideal either Dionysius or his subjects were. So, presumably in exasperation, he sketched The Laws, which will be discussed below. For the present, it suffices to say that the use of force plays a very prominent part in that dialogue.

In an ideal community, however, not only will there be no need for any force, there will also be no need to put any restraints on the powers of the Guardians, for that would be a confession of failure in their education. So there is no discussion in The Republic on the limits of the Guardians’ authority. The assumption is that in an ideal society the Guardians will deal with each occasion on its own merits. They will exercise their wisdom, and, unhampered by laws, customs, precedent or traditions which might restrict their freedom, they will act appropriately. The welfare of the society is entrusted to the judgment of wise men rather than to the letter of wise laws.

In all societies there is always the temptation to think that the law is an ass. Often we might wish that judges could be freer to exercise their compassion when sentencing someone who is guilty under the law and whom they must therefore sentence in accordance with that law. A striking example arises when, in societies which have not legalized euthanasia, the sufferings of an incurably ill person are terminated by a loving relative. Many, even those who do not think that killing is wrong under any circumstances, would be opposed to giving a judge the discretion to exercise more compassion than the law permits, as that might encourage unacceptable abuses of euthanasia. Is it necessary, therefore, that the law, and not the opinions of the ruler or