WWSD What Would Socrates Do?

What follows was my presentation given at the 2013 Fall Academic Awards at Western Reserve Academy.
 
Not too long ago, a former student of mine introduced me to a prestigious professor of neuroscience at an even more prestigious university.  In the course of our exchange he learned that I was a teacher of Latin, and a sometime teacher of philosophy and ancient Greek.  This professor, quite tactlessly, if you ask me, proceeded to express his surprise that schools continued to offer such subjects and that, worse yet, students enrolled in them of their own volition.  Partly in self-defense, and partly from genuine interest, I asked him to elaborate.  To which he replied, “In my estimation, the Humanities are a moribund and obsolete area of study.All the achievements of mankind are fully explicable in terms of, and are therefore reducible to, neurochemical activity.  It is consequently pointless to investigate such achievements any further, let alone celebrate or marvel at them."

To say the least, I found his remarks unsettling, not so much because of their implication in regards to my personal job security (though I must confess that thought did cross my mind), but rather because of what they intimated about the path down which we, as a culture, are headed.  Now, granted, this professor’s views are extreme; then again, it is nevertheless likely that they are illustrative of a general trend in higher education, particularly in light of how far liberal studies have fallen out of favor in recent years.  And so I thought, “This is getting out of hand; I must do everything in my admittedly quite limited power to stem the tide of such gargantuan stupidity.”  And here I stand before you.  

Oftentimes when I am faced with an intellectual dilemma, I turn to that most inveterate of all questioners, my patron saint, as it were, Socrates.  I wonder what Socrates would say about all this.  Curiously enough, he was born into a predicament very like our own.

The Death of Socrates, Jean-Louis David

There he is, the paradigmatic philosopher himself.  As much as I love this painting, however, it misrepresents Socrates in two important respects.  First of all, there’s no way Socrates was that buff; he spent his days badgering people, not pumping iron.

This is in all likelihood the more accurate representation.

Second, his hand gesture, index finger pointing heavenward, suggesting that soon after he drinks the contents of the profferred goblet, that’s where he will go, belies one of the most fundamental – if not THE most fundamental – of his teachings.  You see, Socrates is distinct among philosophers of the Western world in that he never once made a positive claim about the nature of reality or the human condition.  He spent all of his time investigating, asking the big questions, if you like, and although he unmasked many a pretension to wisdom among his fellow Athenians – that was, in fact, why they executed him, for being an indefatigable pain in the butt – he never himself provided answers to those questions.  Indeed, he saw it as his gods-given mission to upset the stagnant complacency of those with whom he came into contact every day, to be, as he himself articulated his role, the buzzing, biting, and relentlessly annoying gadfly to Athens’ steed.  This explains at one and the same time why the elder citizens of Athens by and large hated him, and why the young adored him.  Socrates had a unique talent for making pompous men look like idiots, and young people universally relish the humiliation of their elders.  And while many believed Socrates had the answers to the questions he was asking, the fact is, he didn’t.  For this reason, to represent Socrates as convinced of the immortality of his soul misses the mark.  In his defense-speech, in fact, he said to those who would have had him acquitted, that to fear death is to construe it as an evil and therefore to pretend to know what one cannot know.  It may well be that upon death the soul will transmigrate; but it’s every bit as likely, he urged, that death is a complete cessation of consciousness, that we flicker out of existence in the manner of a candle’s flame.  We’ll just have to wait and see, or, not see, as the case may be.

But in what way or ways was the situation in Socrates’ day akin to our own?  Socrates’ cleverest and most formidable opponents were the Sophists.

He seems to have objected to them on three counts.  First, the very name, Sophists, which in Greek simply means “wise ones,” made them a manifest target for Socratic dialectic.  Second, they appear one and all to have adopted a relativistic understanding of truth.  Relativism – not to be confused with relativity – is the conviction, albeit a highly paradoxical one, that truths are always and everywhere specific to a given culture, or, more radically, a given individual.  Protagoras, for instance, one of the more famous Sophists, was quoted as saying “Man is the measure of things.”

And although it may seem at first blush that Socrates, ever the skeptic, would have found relativism congenial, relativism is, in the end, a logically untenable position, and Socrates was never one to suffer illogic gladly.  After all, the relativist would presumably maintain that the relativity of truth is true, and in this way, relativism is always doomed to undermine itself.  And the third thing Socrates found objectionable about the Sophists was their presumption in claiming that they taught their students arete, another Greek word, which can be translated rather loosely to mean “virtue” or “excellence.”  The Sophists presumed to be teaching their students how to be excellent human beings.  But above all what they really taught was rhetoric, the art of speaking persuasively, a practice that was at least consistent with their relativism.  At the end of the day, nobody knows what it means to be an excellent human being, least of all the Sophists, who really just taught their students how to achieve wealth, power, and prestige – none of which connects, even remotely, with human excellence.  And since the Sophists pretended to know and care about the education of the young, arguably the most important endeavor of all, their offense was especially egregious.

So, if we take a comparative look at our own day, we see on a larger scale much the same predicament as that of Athens in the 5^th century B.C.  (Actually, I would contend we’re quite a bit worse off than the Athenians, but that’s a topic for another speech.)  Our education becomes more and more vocational with each passing decade, if not each year, presumably because we have deemed the purpose of education one of teaching the young how to go about acquiring the greatest share possible of money and influence.  And most of us in this day and age take relativism for granted, although our relativism is even sillier than that of the Sophists, since it’s motivated by the absolute value of tolerance.  That is to say, we mistake multiculturalism for relativism, somehow overlooking the obvious contradiction in our belief that it is wrong – absolutely wrong – to judge one culture superior to another.

And what of the Sophists themselves?  Where shall we find our latter-day Sophists?  They’re all over the place, actually, but at the moment some of their most vociferous incarnations are the popular scientists, folks like Richard Dawkins and Daniel Dennett, folks like our socially inept professor of neuroscience.  Some dismiss the Humanities as obsolete, but others, recognizing that the questions traditionally raised and addressed by the Humanities will never go away, have tried to subsume those questions under the general purview of science.

But there’s a problem here, a big one.  The nineteenth-century German philosopher, Friedrich Nietzsche, once said, “If I have my ‘why’ of life, I can put up with almost any ‘how’.”  He meant to suggest that human beings by their very nature evaluate existence.  What makes us distinctive as a species is the fact that we give meaning to our lives.  Indeed, so inherent is this trait in us that without meaning, we can’t survive.  The meaning is our “‘why’ of life.”  Now, if we look to science for that ‘why,’ we’ll encounter nothing but a resounding silence.  To be sure, science has given us a very convincing ‘how’ of life in the doctrines of Big Bang and evolution.  But it would be utterly futile to look to these doctrines for an answer to the question ‘why.’  In fact, they would seem to rule out the very possibility of a ‘why.’  According to these doctrines, we are merely the product of a cosmic accident, and our level of sophistication is nothing more than the consequence of eons of random mutation and natural selection.  The gold they’re peddling, these pop-scientists, is fools’ gold.

But let me be clear.  I don’t mean to attack the great and important work of science.  What I do contest is the flippant dismissal of the Humanities on the part of an industry, which doesn’t even have the insight to recognize the contradictions embedded in its very core.  That, my friends, is Sophistry of the highest order. 

So, who will be our Socrates, bringing us the hope of redemption?  Well, that’s your job, you intrepid truth-seekers of Western Reserve Academy.

So long as you and the generations that follow you continue to hold aloft that torch, bringing to light the ubiquitous sophistry of our culture, the Humanities will remain a vital, indeed the most vital, part of our education.  You really do have that power, the power to save our souls.