Section I, Chapter Two: Socrates, The First Egalitarian
While we have good reason to reject his absolutism, Socrates’ endorsement that morality was real and could be improved upon was a revolutionary change, and he knew it.
Note—this is a draft of Chapter Two of a book I’m writing. The book is going to cover humanity’s deepest ideas from philosophy, physics, epistemology, and economics. Each chapter is meant to be short and digestible. Most of the chapters will explain just one or two ideas. The first few chapters, though, set the stage with some history, too.
‘Chapter []’ indicates a future chapter that I’ve not yet written.
Section I, Chapter Two
Socrates: The First Egalitarian
Much had changed in the eighty or so years between Thales’ death (545/545 BC) and the birth of Socrates (469 BC). Following their victory over Sparta in the Peloponnesian War, Athens experienced a so-called Golden Age, during which the city-state embodied many of the cornerstones of an open society: philosophical optimism (see chapter []), cultural innovation, and free debate. It was in this intellectual environment that we find the character of Socrates, walking down the streets of Athens and chatting up his fellow citizens about philosophy.
Like Thales, Socrates leaves us with no writings of his own. We know of his life, pursuits, and interests through the work of his pupils, Plato and Xenophon, as well as the playwright Aristophanes, all of whom inserted Socrates in their fictitious dialogues and stories. Because these authors use the character of Socrates to further their own ideas and agendas, we don’t really know what Socrates actually thought, which of his quotes were the authors’ useful fiction and which were historically accurate.
Before the advent of Socrates, Greek philosophers were concerned more with questions of ontology and epistemology than with those of morality. As Paul Johnson writes in Socrates: A Man of Our Times, “[Greeks] tended to concentrate on the world, and the distant worlds—or whatever they were—in the sky. The Greeks called it the cosmos, and enquiry centered on how it worked, cosmology, and how it was originally created, cosmogony. As a young man, Socrates engaged in such questioning himself.”
But by the time he was in his early twenties, Socrates would take a turn from questions of how the world worked towards questions closer to a man’s heart—how he should live, what constitutes the good life, and how a society might live up to moral principles.
Nor did Socrates confine himself to solitary and abstract theorizing. He was very much a philosopher of the people, teasing out answers to moral questions by studying the actions of, and speaking with, his fellow Athenians. In his conversations, he employed what we now call the Socratic method in order to tease out the truth of the matter.
As Johnson writes, “He wants to show that on almost any topic—not least the big ones he tackles, like justice, friendship, courage, virtue as a whole—the received opinion is nearly always faulty and often wholly wrong. He asks a simple question, gets the usual answer, and then proceeds to show, using further questions springing from a vast repertoire of occupations, history both human and natural, and literature, that the usual answer not only fails to fit all the contingencies implicit in the question but also contradicts analytical reason at its highest or even common sense at its lowest. Socrates was always suspicious of the obvious, and he can nearly always show that the obvious is untrue, and the truth is very rarely obvious. The way he does this is the substance of the discussion and gives it its excitement and dynamism.”
The truth is very rarely obvious. While the content of his questions tended to focus on moral matters, the character of his Socratic method revealed an epistemological truth—that reality is under no obligation to conform to our intuitions. This idea is a precursor to fallibilism, the philosophical position that all human activity, institutions, and ideas are riddled with errors and therefore always subject to improvement. We’ll have much more to say about fallibilism in later chapters.
Although Socrates appreciated the difference between the artisan and the politician, between the planter and the builder, he may have been the first thinker to recognize that the merits of any idea are independent of its source. That is, the pursuit of knowledge is an egalitarian enterprise—whether one is rich or poor, male or female, slave or king, no one’s ideas enjoyed privilege over another’s for any reason other than that they contained superior arguments.
That anyone could acquire any knowledge was not just a truth that Socrates had recognized—he lived it in his philosophical-social adventures. As Johnson writes, “Happy among people, Socrates did not seek to turn them into pupils, let alone students. He was not a teacher, a don, an academic…He spurned a classroom. The streets and marketplace of Athens were his habitat. Unlike Plato and Aristotle, he founded no Academy or Lyceum. The university, with its masters and students, its lectures and tutorials, its degrees and libraries and publishing houses, was nothing to do with him. He was part of the life of the city—a thinking part, to be sure, a talking and debating part, but no more separated from its throbbing, bustling activity than the fishmonger or the money changer or the cobbler, its ranting politician, its indigent poet, or its wily lawyer [emphasis added]. He was at home in the city, a stranger on campus. He knew that as soon as philosophy separated itself from the life of the people, it began to lose its vitality and was heading in the wrong direction.”
Socrates would come to be vindicated in his emphasis on the significance of people in the grand scheme of things. In harping on people’s day-to-day issues and moral quandaries rather than the skybound questions of earlier philosophers, he was not falling prey to a naive romanticism. As we’ll come to see, Socrates was quite right that people–and the philosophical issues that pertain to them–are, in fact, cosmically significant (see Chapter []).
Finally, Socrates was one of the first thinkers to take moral realism seriously. There is, in fact, a difference between right and wrong, good and evil. Some choices, cultures, and actions are better than others.
Socrates proposed his own particular moral ideas, such as that retaliation was always wrong. He knew he was swimming against the tide but advocated this view regardless. Whereas Thales worked to overturn Greek mythological explanations of the world with a naturalistic account, Socrates wanted to overturn aspects of ingrained Greek moral accounts of how people ought to act. In both cases, improvements upon the status quo are possible by way of criticizing incumbent ideas and guessing new ones.
Socrates also channeled his inner Thales by guessing that morality consisted of absolute principles that ought never be violated. As Johnson writes, “To Socrates, morality was absolute or it was nothing. If an act was unjust, it was always and everywhere so and must never be done. Whatever the provocation, a man or woman must never act unjustly. A simple tradesman doing his business in the Agora at Athens, a statesman speaking to the Assembly on issues of peace or war, a general or admiral conducting an army or a galley fleet, or a teacher instructing the young were all subject to the same inexorable moral laws.
“Socrates rejected retaliation, however great the offense in the first place, as contrary to justice because it involved inflicting a wrong.”
While we have good reason to reject his absolutism, Socrates’ endorsement that morality was real and could be improved upon was a revolutionary change, and he knew it. “The body of Greek polytheism sweated moral relativism at every pore”, writes Johnson, “but Socrates would have none of it. He was too in love with civilization to allow it to make such a catastrophic error.
Socrates brought philosophy ‘back to Earth’ by bringing it to the doorstep of every Athenian he could. Although centuries of subsequent thought would appear to castigate the role of people to an ever-smaller corner of reality, we’ll see in Chapter [] that Socrates was entirely justified in his veneration of his fellow man, after all.
Thanks to Moritz Wallawitsch and Dennis Hackethal for early feedback.