The Life and Teachings of Socrates by Leonard Peikoff, part 8 of 50

Now let us just say a few words before the break on, just so we can say we got started on our main subject for tonight and next week, Socrates and Plato. The two philosophers who set out to answer the sophists, to ground objective knowledge and objective morality. Between them, they founded the first complete philosophy, the first complete system, including an integrated presentation in metaphysics, epistemology, ethics, politics, aesthetics. So we finally passed the era of fragments and of simply background and reached the beginning of the new constructive era. And first, a few words about Socrates. His dates are 470 to 400 BC. It is very difficult to separate him from Plato because Socrates left no writings. He is known primarily through Plato's dialogues. And how much of those dialogues is historically accurate and how much are words that Plato put into Socrates' mouth after Socrates died, it's impossible to say exactly. You can find commentators and interpreters who range from one extreme to the other, who say on the one, some of them say there was no such person as Socrates. He was a myth invented by Plato and Xenophon. Other people say there was no such thinker as Plato. He was just a secretary who took down what Socrates had to say. But I think in this particular case, Socrates' moderation is the best policy. And I agree with the standard viewpoint, which is that the early dialogues of Plato, written when he was young, represent the historical Socrates on the whole. And the so-called middle and later dialogues of Plato represent Plato. But it doesn't really make any difference because if you want to get around this problem, call it the Socratic hyphen Platonic philosophy. And don't bother to apportion credit or blame. Now, but if we interpret Socrates in this way, his interest was basically in ethics rather than in metaphysics. He was the first major moralist of the Western world, Socrates. A champion of absolute objective ethics, an arch opponent of the sophists. Now, he did not have a complete system of ethics himself, but he had a number of characteristic ethical ideas and approaches, which were picked up and developed subsequently by Plato and by Aristotle in different ways. And next week, we'll look at some of these typical Socratic ethical tenets in connection with our discussion of Plato's ethics. But tonight, I want to say a few words about Socrates' method of philosophizing in order to acquaint you with a discovery of his, a very fundamental one, of an epistemological kind, which is indispensable background for Plato. Now, Socrates employed, obviously, the Socratic method. In other words, the conversational method, the question and answer method. In essence, he would call her some unsuspecting Athenian, usually of a pompous and ignorant kind, but who thought he knew a lot. He'd call her at his home or in the marketplace. He would engage the man in a philosophic conversation. He would ask what seemed to be perfectly innocuous questions and he would get unthought out, her apparently obvious answers, and then he would begin to reason and say, well, now, if you said this, wouldn't this follow, the man would say, yes. And then, wouldn't this follow, yes. And what about this? And the man begins to feel quite uneasy because he doesn't want to say that, but he doesn't see how he could get out of it, given what he said. And in not too long a time, the man was stopped completely. The tradition was he was rendered entirely speechless and couldn't utter a word. Now, Socrates' motive, apparently, was that he had a divine mission. His mission was to be a gadfly, a philosophical gadfly, to rouse people from their unthinking, complacent slumbers. He was not a skeptic, he was not a skeptic, but he was concerned to make people really think and question their hasty assumptions and their unthought out ideas and their conventional bromides and their sloppy formulations. His famous line in this connection is the unexamined life is not worth living. The result, unfortunately, of his method of procedure was that he was highly unpopular in Athens. He made many powerful enemies, particularly because a band of young men followed him around, eating up the spectacle of him demolishing the prominent citizens. One member of that band was Plato. Now, you probably know, you must know the consequences of it all. He was arrested, charged with corrupting the youth and worshiping false gods. He was brought to trial, famous trial. He was asked to defend himself and he refused to concede that he had done anything wrong at all. Custom of the time was that the prosecutor and the defendant were each to propose a penalty and then the court voted on which penalty should be given. The prosecutor demanded death. Socrates was asked, what penalty do you propose? And he said he thinks that the only appropriate result of his action was that he should be kept in luxury to the end of his days by the state for the service he has rendered them. Needless to say, the court voted for death by hemlock and that was subsequently administered. So he is the first philosophic martyr. If you want to read his story, it's contained in three dialogues of Plato. The Apology, which is his trial, Socrates' trial. The Crito, which is the episode in which a friend of Socrates comes and tries to get him to escape from the jail, which would have been possible after the sentence had been proposed but before it was carried out. And Socrates refuses on moral ground that this was the will of the people. And although he disagrees with them, he believes that he is morally obligated to obey the law of the people. And then the third dialogue, the Phedo, in which the last hours of Socrates are recounted and it ends with him drinking the hemlock and becoming paralyzed. Now the question is, what did he find in his philosophic method that was so crucial? Now, what did Socrates find out? Well, he found in the course of his discussions with people that the reason that people were so confused, so unclear, so chronically in disagreement and collapsing into subjectivism and skepticism was that their concepts were unclear, that their concepts were undefined. They would argue, for instance, is a certain man just or not? And they'd argue back and forth vigorously on this question without any definition of justice. And he asked, how could you possibly resolve this dispute objectively without a definition? The Sophists would say, well, it's a matter of opinion. For me, he's just, for you, he isn't. Socrates would say, you can't ask the question until you have a definition of justice. You have to know what is common to just men, just actions, just governments, that makes them just. Once you have this definition, then there's no difficulty in applying it in a particular case. Once we know the definition of our concepts, we can resolve all disputes in particular cases. And this, of course, is true not only of justice, but of all such cases. Is a given country a democracy? There's no use arguing until you know what is a democracy. And once you know, it's very easy to answer. Are you in love? No way to answer unless you know what is love, what is common to all instances of love. Once you know, easy enough to answer. And same for what is religion, what is courage, et cetera. In discovering the importance of the need for definitions, to that extent, Socrates is the father of definition. He did not use the term, he didn't give the rules, he simply discovered the urgent need of it. Now let us pursue this. What do you want when you ask for a definition? Well, you want a statement of the characteristics that are common to some class. You want those characteristics possessed by every member of the class, in virtue of which they're members of that class and not some other. When you define, you don't concentrate on one particular example. You don't try simply to describe it. What you do is concentrate on what's common to a whole group of particulars. So for instance, if you're trying to define triangularity, you don't make an exhaustive study of one triangle on the blackboard and say, well, it's white and it's three inches hypotenuse and it has a right angle and so on. You survey all triangles in your mind and you think, now what is it that's common to them all on the basis of which we classify them as triangles? Now to introduce terminology that didn't come into existence until later, but is appropriate here, you concentrate when you want a definition not on particulars, but on universals. Now by universal, we mean something very specific. We mean that set of properties which is common to every member of a class and which is the basis of a classification. We do not mean universal truths like the law of gravity. We mean universals in the sense of universal properties running through a class. Let me give you some examples. I point to one book, another book, another book. Those are three particulars. What is the universal? Well, that set of properties common to all books on the basis of which we call them books. If you want a single word for the universal, in English you have to usually put a suffix on it. You have to say like bookness or bookhood, which is pretty bad. If you want to use the way the Greeks talked about it, you would talk about the idea of book or the essence of book or the universal book. And the same, of course, applies to people. And it applies to every time you have a classification. For instance, I moved my hand. That is one particular in the realm of motion. And you moved your head, and that's another particular. And the earth moves around the sun, and that's another particular. What is the common, what is the universal? Motion. Or I point to this shade of green. That's a particular. And that shade of green is a particular. Particular quality. And what's common to them all? Greenness, that would be the universal. And it applies to relationships. This cup is on top of the desk. My body is on top of the stage. This floor is on top of the preceding one. And what is the universal? Well, if you wanted to point a grotesque word, you'd say it's on top of hood. The relation of one thing being above another. Now, what Socrates established was that the crucial problem of human knowledge was the knowledge of universals. Wherever we have a word, we have a universal, except for proper nouns. John Smith is not a universal, that's a particular. And this, we're using Smith to mean someone engaged in a certain occupation with a small s, and then, of course, it's a universal. Now, Socrates believed, and Plato believed, and Aristotle that the thing that made man distinctive from the animals, everything that was distinctive about him derived from his ability to grasp universals. They said that's what it means to say man is a rational being. He can abstract. He can grasp common denominators. He can conceptualize. He can classify. And therefore, he can generalize. He can grasp laws. He can apply to all the other particulars he's never encountered the information he gets from merely some particular. He can predict the future. He can satisfy his desires and control his environment. But if you take away that one crucial capacity, the ability to grasp universals, you're left with animals. You merely are able to perceive particulars and react to them, but can't abstract universals, and therefore, can't draw conclusions, can't formulate principles, and are comparatively helpless. A dog, for instance, likes a bone. He likes a number of bones. Now the question is, why doesn't it occur to him to start a bone store, or to start a science of bones, bonology, and find out where do bones come from and how do you get them? And the trouble is the poor dog can't get the idea of boneless. He gets this bone, and then the next one. He forgot the first one, and then the next one, and so on. And so his problem is he's enmeshed in the particulars, and he can't rise to universals. So Socrates, putting it in more modern terminology, was the one who really discovered for the first time in the West the importance of conceptual as distinct from perceptual knowledge. And conceptual knowledge is knowledge of common denominators, knowledge of universals. If we can validate knowledge of universals, said Socrates, then the sophists would be answered. We have no difficulty answering the sophists. The sophists go around arguing, what should this man do? What should he not do? They never solve the problem. They say it's all subjective. What's wrong? They don't ask, what is man? Man as such now. What kind of a being is he? What characteristics are common to all men and peculiar to them in virtue of which they are men? The sophists say, well, men vary. Circumstances vary. And it's true men vary, but man remains the same. And if we didn't restrict ourselves to simply perception of particulars, if we focused on the universal or the essence, which is essentially a synonym for the universal here, then we would have means to answer questions about individual meaning. In other words, human beings have to rise to the conceptual stage. Once we grasp universals, conceptual, and see particulars as simply instances or examples of them, we will have universal standards, universal definitions, and we'll end all our disagreements and our subjectivity. So to talk about validating human knowledge is to talk about acquiring knowledge of universals. That is essentially the legacy left by Socrates in epistemology, although he did not use any of that terminology. Universal particular definition, et cetera, are all later terms.