Whatever occasion Plato has Alcibiades hinting at in the Symposium—the more mysterious since the drunken Alcibiades is supposedly spilling it all out, unfiltered and uncensored, confessing the most intimate and self-compromising details of his relations with Socrates—we know of one occasion when the author of the Symposium saw Socrates being serious and opening up, revealing himself as a thing godlike to the young man with the long aristocratic lineage. Out of the vision sprung an entirely new conception of what human beauty looks like. Ugly, odd-gaited Socrates, always sticking his snub nose into the business of who is sleeping with whom, assumes a grandeur that makes everyone else look stunted. The revelation may have taken place in the most public of spectacles, a trial before raucous Athenians trying to shout down the old man. But that didn’t make the experience any less intimate and transformative for Plato.
All through his intensely self-critical intellectual development, Plato will regard Socrates as a kind of portent. The way in which Socrates combined his authority with his absurdity, his godlike certainty with his human confusion, is a vision that Plato will contrive to keep alive almost until the end of his life. There is everything to learn from the man’s inconsistencies.
If the “early” Socratic dialogues can be historically trusted (a contentious proposition), drawing out the inconsistencies of a person’s beliefs might well have been Socrates’ go- to strategy. The elenctic method doesn’t tell a person what he or she is getting wrong, only that he or she is getting something wrong, since the premises asserted engender a contradiction.
If we go back and listen again to Socrates’ defense before the Athenians, it might seem that the elenctic method can be turned against Socrates himself. There seems a contradiction to be drawn.
Socrates maintains, in declaring that the unexamined life is not worth living, that
1. No one can live virtuously without knowledge of what virtue is.
Or as Plato rephrased it in the Myth of Er, virtue requires “the ability and the knowledge to distinguish the life that is good from that which is bad.” A person who accidentally lives out a life that avoids wrongdoing has been fortunate, but he has not achieved virtue. His virtuous life is a blessing that has befallen him, like good hair or a trust fund, rather than been achieved.
Socrates also maintains that
2. Socrates is virtuous.
He’s quite forthcoming, during his defense, about his own virtue. The quoted passages, in which he explains why he hadn’t partaken in the politics of Athens—the explanation being that his virtue itself prevented him—makes clear his high self-esteem, ethically speaking. Socrates in the dock isn’t putting on any false anything, including false modesty regarding the state of his own virtue.
But what about the state of his own knowledge? Socrates juxtaposes his affirmed belief in his own virtue with an avowal of his own ignorance. Avowals of Socrates’ ignorance occur often in the dialogues, but they are often attended by the suspicion of irony. “Irony” derives from the Greek for “feigned ignorance,” and it attaches naturally to Socrates. But I am working on the assumption that, if ever Socrates appeared without his characteristic irony, it was on that day in 399, when he was given his last chance to try to convince his fellow Athenians that they should be stirred to their depths by what he has to say. And it is a very strong statement of ignorance that he gives in the course of telling his story about the Delphic oracle, and his own incredulity at hearing it reported that none were wiser than he.2 The answer had set him off on a systematic search—among the politicians, the poets, and craftsmen—to find a counterexample:
As a result of this investigation, men of Athens, I acquired much unpopularity, of a kind that is hard to deal with and is a heavy burden; many slanders came from these people and a reputation for wisdom, for in each case the bystanders thought that I myself possessed the wisdom that I proved that my interlocutor did not have. What is probable, gentlemen, is that in fact the god is wise and that his oracular response meant that human wisdom is worth little or nothing and that when he says this man, Socrates, he is using my name as an example, as if he said: “This man among you, mortals, is wisest who, like Socrates, understands that his wisdom is worthless. (23a–b)
This gives us the last of Socrates’ beliefs, which, in conjunction with 1 and 2, seems to engender a contradiction.
3. Socrates lacks the knowledge of what virtue is.
How can we reconcile Socrates’ pronounced ethical swagger with his equally pronounced cognitive humility, given the added belief that virtue requires knowledge? A distinction that comes out of twentieth-century philosophy might offer some help: the distinction between “knowing that” and “knowing how.”
“Knowing that” is followed by a proposition, an assertion that is true or false (though if it is truly known, the proposition must be true). So, for example, I know that the distinction between “knowing that” and “knowing how” itself was first introduced by the early-twentieth-century philosopher Gilbert Ryle. I know that Ryle was under the sway of Ludwig Wittgenstein. I know that under the Wittgensteinian influence, many philosophers believed that the job of philosophy was to explain away the appearance of philosophical problems by means of analyzing language, and I know that it was in just such an attempt that Gilbert Ryle offered the useful distinction between “knowing that” and “knowing how.” Notice how each of my examples of “knowing that” is followed by a proposition.
When I say that I “know how,” in contrast, I don’t follow those words with propositions, but rather with reference to activities. I know how to bake bread, I know how to ride a bicycle, I know how to speak English.
Perhaps in the case of knowing how to bake bread I could translate my knowledge into at least a few propositions, consisting of one of the recipes I use. But these propositions will not exhaust what I know how to do in knowing how to bake bread. I know, for example, how to adjust for varying altitudes and variations in humidity by the feel of the dough on my hands, to say nothing of knowing how to get the flour out of the bag and into the bowl, or how to make my arms and hands move in the right way to count as “kneading.” And in the cases of my knowing how to speak English and how to ride a bicycle the “knowing how” could not possibly be rendered into sets of propositions. Knowing how to do these things is not tantamount to knowing propositions. I could know how to ride a bicycle, for example, without knowing the first thing about the physics of bicycle balancing. And, in the other direction, I could know the physics of bicycle balancing, but when you perched me on the confounded contraption for the first time, I wouldn’t know how to keep it from toppling. I know how to generate grammatical English sentences, putting words together in (generally) meaningful sentences, but I couldn’t translate all my knowledge of how to do this into a set of propositions. There are a handful of rules that I know and could recite, but those rules don’t add up to my knowing how to speak English. I probably know just as many rules for speaking French, and yet I don’t know how to speak French.
Socrates knew how—in both his opinion and Plato’s—to live a virtuous life, but he wasn’t able to render that knowledge as a set of propositions. In other words when it came to living virtuously, Socrates thought he knew how, even if he knew that he didn’t know that. How did he manage this trick? By appealing to the supernatural. Between his “knowing how” and “knowing that,” there was a gap, and filling this gap was his own personal oracle, his oft-mentioned daimōn, silently warning him whenever he was about to do something wrong.
There are scattered allusions to the daimōn throughout Plato’s dialogues.3 In the Phaedrus, which finds Socrates out in the countryside with the beautiful boy Phaedrus, Socrates is suddenly halted, after he has delivered a well-constructed speech against the erōs-maddened lover:
My friend, just as I was about to cross the river, the familiar divine sign came to me which, whenever it occurs, holds me back from something I am about to do. I thought I heard a voice coming from this very spot,
forbidding me to leave until I made atonement for some offense against the gods. In effect, you see, I am a seer, and though I am not particularly good at it, still—like people who are just barely able to read and write—I am good enough for my own purposes. I recognize my offense clearly now. In fact, the soul too, my friend, is itself a sort of seer; that’s why, almost from the beginning of my speech, I was disturbed by a very uneasy feeling. (242b–c)
In the Euthyphro, the very dialogue in which Plato articulates the inadequacy of religious grounds for ethical knowledge, the eponymous religious expert who is so oblivious to Socrates’ philosophical reasoning is sure that the charge of impiety against Socrates is motivated by the appeals Socrates makes to his daimōn: “I understand, Socrates. This is because you say that the divine sign keeps coming to you. So he has written this indictment against you as one who makes innovations in religious matters, and he comes to court to slander you, knowing that such things are easily misrepresented to the crowd” (3b).
The appeal to this voice, inaccessible to anyone else, raises epistemological flags: How is one to know whether this private voice, as peremptorily as it presents itself in the inner chambers of Socrates’ mind, is reliable? It feels reliable to Socrates, but so it always is with those peremptory inner voices. Socrates doesn’t accept Euthyphro’s peremptory inner voice, so why should we accept Socrates’? Are reasons of this sort—subjective, private, and non-generalizable, unavailable for objective scrutiny and evaluation by others—to be accepted as grounding knowledge?
The epistemological flag is hoisted in Plato’s mind, maybe even prompted by the mystery of Socrates’ certainty. In fact, the whole domain of epistemology is hoisted in Plato’s mind. In the Theaetetus, he will have his dialogic Socrates articulate the fundamental epistemological question, namely how to define knowledge in the first place: “Well, as I said just now, do you fancy it is a small matter to discover the nature of knowledge? Is it not one of the hardest questions?” (148c).
Plato not only puts the question on the table, but he makes the first few crucial incisions, distinguishing knowledge from mere true belief that doesn’t achieve the status of knowledge. There’s something haphazard about mere true belief or opinion that the concept of knowledge can’t tolerate. As with the proverbial broken clock that is correct twice a day, true belief can be induced by illicit methods, the sort of methods that are just as likely to produce false opinions as true.4 In the Theaetetus, Plato moves (though somewhat jerkily) toward the definition of knowledge as “true belief with a logos,” an account.5 This is a first approximation to a definition that philosophers would eventually give: knowledge is justified true belief.6 The same true proposition that is merely believed by one person can be genuinely known by another, and the difference lies in the reasons the believer has for believing. The reasons have to be good ones, providing justification for his belief, making it a rational belief. These are all evaluative notions. The definition of knowledge forces a further question: what counts as good reasons? All of these are questions that make up the field of epistemology, and they are questions Plato raised.
There is no evidence that the epistemological concerns that so occupied Plato, perhaps prompted by the epistemologically baffling figure of Socrates, ever occurred to Socrates himself.7 Socrates is never presented questioning whether the whispering of his daimōn is reason enough to believe. In the Apology, in which we encounter as sincere a Socrates as we ever will, his daimōn is brought out for one final and solemn appearance. After addressing some condemnatory words to those who have condemned him, he has this to say to those who have voted him innocent:
A surprising thing has happened to me, jurymen—you I would rightly call jurymen. At all previous times my familiar prophetic power, my spiritual manifestation, frequently opposed me, even in small matters, when I was about to do something wrong, but now that, as you can see for yourselves, I was faced with what one might think, and what is generally thought to be, the worst of evils, my divine sign has not opposed me, either when I left home at dawn, or when I came into court, or at any time that I was about to say something during my speech. Yet in other talks it often held me back in the middle of my speaking, but now it has opposed no word or deed of mine. What do I think is the reason for this? I will tell you. What has happened to me may well be a good thing, and those of us who believe death to be an evil are certainly mistaken. I have convincing proof of this, for it is impossible that my familiar sign did not oppose me if I was not about to do what was right. (40b–c)
Socrates is presented here as taking his “divine sign” very seriously, hazarding metaphysical speculations based on nothing more than the daimōn’s silence, which makes him come off as rather epistemologically insouciant. Plato, in contrast, was anything but epistemologically insouciant. What did he make of Socrates’ appeal to his daimōn? Socrates could provide no account that he could offer to others for the truth of his beliefs. What the appeal to a daimōn signifies, rather, is the absence of an account. I just hear it, I just see it, I just know it. There is an it, and that’s all that can be said about it.
If we wish to scrub Socrates’ appeal to his daimōn clean of supernaturalism, we can regard it as a fanciful way of speaking about a phenomenon that gets a lot of currency today, both in psychology and philosophy, under the name of “intuitions.” Intuitions are those subjective inner promptings about which one can say nothing to convince others who don’t share the intuition. One can’t offer a justification for them other than their peremptory announcement. Some intuitions are shared widely, and when this is true the sharing presents a datum that calls for an explanation. But offering an account of the sharing of an intuition isn’t the same as offering an account of the intuition itself, an account that makes the case for the intuition’s being rational to believe, known as opposed to merely believed, having a reason behind it that one can offer to those who themselves lack the intuition to convince them that they ought to cultivate it. Of course, once you can do that, you’ve no longer got an intuition but rather a defendable proposition. (And even a universally shared intuition is lacking a justification; it’s just hard to make out the lack when everyone else agrees with it.)
Socrates, whose life Plato deemed beautiful, seemed to know how to live. Somehow his intuitions led him to lead an exemplary life, but others’ intuitions, just as forceful, can lead to terrible lives. Is there any way to tell, from the inside, which intuitions are reliable and which aren’t, some inner quality of feeling? Or if there isn’t such an inner sign tagging the good intuitions from the bad, shall we only rely on intuitions that the majority of those around us accept? That’s not what Socrates did, and that’s not what many of the moral figures we most revere—such moral revolutionaries as William Lloyd Garrison, Frederick Douglass, Bertha von Suttner, Mahatma Gandhi, and Martin Luther King Jr.—did. They challenged the intuitions of their societies and, eventually, changed those societies so that intuitions themselves changed. But if there’s no way to tell, from either the inside or the outside, which intuitions can be trusted, why should we trust them at all? But then can we actually eliminate them? Aren’t we, at certain points of our reasoning, including our moral reasoning, required to fall back on intuitions?
All of these questions might well have been suggested to Plato by the baffling figure of Socrates, who seemed to perfectly know how to live while also, until the very end, forswearing all human wisdom.
THE CALL OF THE KINKY
Nothing quite so divided the soul of Plato as the issues entangled in Socrates’ appeal to his daimōn. These issues are various, and they all involve private, peremptory, possibly pathological but possibly inspired idiosyncratic experiences, which seem to carry intimations of truth—but then again, maybe they don’t. Perhaps these singular experiences are nothing more than the floating vapors of hallucinations, the emanations of diseased minds, even if they do sometimes result in visions of beauty, or even, as it was with Socrates, a life of beauty. Such beauty
exerts, for Plato, a degree of epistemological force. If something is beautiful, then, for Plato, there must be something, somehow, that is real or true or authentic about it. Beauty is struck deep into the structure of reality for Plato. His aesthetic realism is the linchpin of his realism, fastening together his mathematical realism, his metaphysical realism, and his moral realism. Any hint of beauty is what makes Plato turn back and look, and then turn back and look again, at convictions that cannot submit themselves to objective scrutiny to be carried out from more than one point of view, allowing for private kinks to come to light and be eliminated. Plato is keenly aware of such kinks, and though he regards most of them as pernicious, he also suspects that there are truths that can only be gotten to by way of the kinky.
Plato’s divided soul has come down to us through the millennia, its component parts segregated into two oppositional camps, glaring at each other with mutual suspicion. We see them configured on the contemporary battlefield that pits science against religion.
There are, on the one side, those whom we might call the “Reasonables” (the term “rationalists” having already been claimed in the history of philosophy8). Reasonables regard knowledge as—necessarily—an equal-access good. The kind of justification that counts, turning mere true belief into knowledge, is, in principle, accessible to all, which means it must be able to put its grounding in terms that can be replicated in other points of view, making itself open to many-minds scrutiny. There can be no epistemological privilege. So mathematical proofs, for example, are accessible to many points of view (differences in aptitudes can be ignored). So are empirical data. Finding the truth is a game that anyone can play. If it can be known, it can be shown.
Plato at the Googleplex Page 47