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PLATO'S MORAL REALISM
The Discovery of the Presuppositions of Ethics
By JOHN M. RIST
The Catholic University of America Press
Copyright © 2012 The Catholic University of America Press
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8132-1980-6
Chapter One
RELIGION, SOCRATES, AND THE PLATONIC SOCRATES
Socrates was born in 470 B.C. and died in 399, victim of a judicial murder at the hands of an Athenian democracy restored to power after a brief period of oligarchic tyranny in which some of Plato's relatives had played a prominent role. His father was a stonemason, and Socrates belonged to the middle class of Athenian society, able therefore to serve as a "hoplite" infantryman, as he did with distinction during the Peloponnesian war. He had, however, many friends among the aristocracy and the political élites, was endlessly fascinating to bright young men, and became sufficiently well known to the Athenian public at large to be fit subject for caricature by the comic playwright Aristophanes. In The Clouds the poet was able to represent Socrates as a typical "sophist": atheist, freethinker, charlatan, skilled "to make the worse argument appear the better." Entertaining and unfair though the portrait is, it sheds light on Socrates' fame as in some sort a representative of the new enlightenment, as well as on the popular view of that enlightenment. It is normal for satirical writers to present themselves (when it suits) as conservatives, defending the good old days and ways, but there can be little doubt that in portraying Socrates as subversive, Aristophanes was touching a chord with his Athenian audience. In the Apology Plato himself, who would later depict a very sympathetic Aristophanes in the Symposium, has Socrates tell the jury at his trial that The Clouds had considerably damaged his reputation, indeed had hindered his chances of obtaining a fair hearing on charges revolving round blasphemy and "atheism."
Scholars agree that it is immensely difficult to be precise on what Socrates' views (as distinct from those of the "Platonic" Socrates) actually were, but all accept the testimony of Aristotle that a major effect of his career was to direct thinkers of the age away from natural science to ethics. In confirmation of this, it is as moral philosopher that he is portrayed in the other principal contemporary witnesses to his life: Plato himself and the historian Xenophon, the latter no close member of the Socratic circle and composer of a portrait of Socrates so banal that one would be mystified as to how such a person would be considered a dangerous subversive, even by the philistine demagogues who ran Athens after the Peloponnesian War.
I have no wish to construct yet another account of the moral thought of the historical Socrates. This is a book about Plato and what Plato took to be the outcome of reasoning in a Socratic spirit. I shall assume that Plato considered himself the true heir of Socrates and that his own ideas burgeoned at the point where he came to think Socrates had left off or failed. That means that in Plato's portrait of Socrates it will be impossible to determine exactly where the historical Socrates ends and the idealized Socrates takes over. For my present purposes that is unimportant, even irrelevant. Plato built upon Socratic ideas and could claim to have improved them; his portrait of Socrates reflects that development, though the growth of his own thought was a gradual process, and I have here no full-scale scheme of demarcation to propose. Nevertheless, it will become clear—at least on some issues—roughly how I would construct such a scheme.
Socrates' philosophical life spanned the end of the Sophistic period of Greek thought, so we must first look at those aspects of that movement with which he was concerned and determine why, in general, he was critical of the Sophists while recognizing the philosophical importance of many of the ethical problems they raised. Fifth-century Greeks had become aware of the diversity of religious, cultural, and social practices, not only among their own cities, but in the wider world. No longer content simply to assume superiority to their "barbarian" (that is, non-Greek-speaking) neighbors, they began to ask whether their own cultural habits and beliefs were necessarily so much more advanced, and if so, why—and in terms of the history of philosophy, that led to ethical relativism. But relativism, the idea (in one variant) that "when in Rome one does what the Romans do," was not the only possibility. Perhaps beneath the variety of local conventional behaviors there lies some law of nature to which these local variants may approximate, or to which they should yield if one finds such a law's superior claims compelling. So in addition to relativism there is now the possibility of what we should think of as a universal "naturalism." what is this naturalism? Does it depend on the gods? or should the gods themselves be subject, not only to fate (as in the poems of Homer), but to morality? Then to whose or to what morality? with the old certainties under scrutiny—as Aristophanes, Euripides, and others loved to present them—who is to determine which, if any, moral laws should regulate the behavior of men and gods?
In earlier days Xenophanes had castigated Homer for portraying the gods as criminals and adulterers, and Herodotus had explained that Homer and Hesiod had invented them some four hundred years before his own time; now Critias, Plato's uncle, was urging that they were the construction of a sophisticated tyrant who supposed that religious belief affords a weapon for himself and his like with which to frighten the weak into doing what they are told, for fear of being caught out in thought-crime by the omniscient divine policeman. Meanwhile Protagoras, the most influential of the Sophists, had proclaimed that man is the measure of all things—within which proclamation he included his conviction that mankind in general determined the distinction between right and wrong, just and unjust—though, as Plato and no doubt others would come to realize, he had opened the door to the more radical interpretation that each and every man is "the measure of all things."
Moral nihilism—or ideas approximating it—was widely available. In his "Melian dialogue," Thucydides presents Athens telling the inhabitants of the island of Melos that justice is intelligibly invoked only when antagonists are of equal strength; when they are not, the stronger has no need of it and should only consider his advantage, while the weaker would do well to think only of their own survival (History 5.89). The gods, however, were not yet dead. In his Antigone Sophocles had shown his heroine advocating that family ties, backed by immemorial religious custom, may take precedence over the decrees of powerful rulers, and as ready to die for this claim. Yet when Socrates was young, the traditional norms of Greek, and especially Athenian, society—along with veneration of the good old days of those who fought at Marathon (as populists put it)—were under critical review. Few of the Sophists were Athenians, but their influence and the debates they provoked were brought to the attention of the Athenians by their playwrights Sophocles, Euripides and Aristophanes, and by their own historian, the former politician Thucydides. Athens was the epicenter of democratic movement in the Greek homeland, and the ability to speak—the ability, as some said, to make the worse argument appear the better—was a prerequisite for success in the even murderous rough-and-tumble of the Athenian Assembly and the highly politicized law-courts.
Athens, led through the central years of the fifth century by Pericles, had become rich and attracted the best Sophists money could buy. Plato, speaking through Socrates' mouth in the Gorgias, was to castigate Pericles and the other democratic imperialists for filling the city with "arsenals and shipyards and defensive walls and that sort of garbage" (519a) instead of encouraging their fellow citizens to live virtuously, to care Socratically for their souls. He had Socrates himself claim to be the only serious "politician" (that is, public figure) among the Athenians (521d). For Plato had come to believe that the highly paid professors encouraged by the ruling élite were the source of philosophically puzzling but morally and socially corrosive ideas. Whether Socrates himself was as clear about this we do not know, but the questions he put to the trendy Sophist-bred generation of young men in the dramatic years of the Peloponnesian war certainly imply an intense suspicion, not, perhaps, of the motives, but of the effects—and above all the intelligibility—of the new enlightenment.
It is commonly if conveniently forgotten that Socrates was devoutly religious. Both Plato himself and Xenophon bear witness to that. In Plato's dialogues he is regularly shown deferring to the gods and to "divine destiny" (theia moira), and that it is from some sort of religiously fortified belief that he derives what Plato would later call true opinions about morality and the need to look after one's soul (as also the souls of brilliant if dangerous and potentially sinister young men like Pericles' would-be successor Alcibiades) is confirmed by another of Socrates' followers, Aeschines of Sphettus (fr. 12 Nestle). Socrates patently thought of himself as a gadfly providentially sent to the Athenians to keep them morally awake. He feels constrained by a "divine sign" if he may be about to act unjustly or misguidedly, yet he cannot give an account of its admonitions. At his trial he relies on this sign for assurance that his coming death is no bad thing (Apology 40a ff.), an attitude he maintains at the end of the Crito (54e), insisting that it would be wrong for him to attempt to escape from prison: for he has been so guided by God.
Even Socrates' accusers argued not that he was an atheist, but that he worshipped gods other than those the city worshipped—in other words, that he was unpatriotic and only in that Pickwickian (or we might say "established") sense irreligious. His questioning of contemporaries was, according to the Apology, spurred on by the desire to understand the response of the god at Delphi to a question of his friend Chaerephon, to whom the oracle had proclaimed Socrates the wisest of the Greeks. Socrates himself maintained that he knew nothing, so what could the oracle, which must be believed, have in mind? one of Socrates' more paradoxical beliefs—that it is better to suffer wrong than to do it—is also rooted in a religious appeal, namely that "it is against divine governance (ou themiton) for a better man to be harmed by a worse" (Apology 30d1). In the Crito Socrates is represented as believing himself treated unjustly, but unwilling to respond to injustice with the wrongful act of disobeying the law. Yet civil laws can and should be broken if they enjoin us to disobey god's command—the view Sophocles had attributed to Antigone. Socrates is therefore unwilling to disobey the divine call to philosophize (Apology 29b ff.). He has no doubt that God's commands and the results of his own hard thinking will be in harmony.
Plato would remember Socrates' religious concerns and their close connection with his philosophy until the end of his life. In his last work, the Laws, apart from devoting much space in book ten to an analysis of different varieties of atheism, all in varying degrees undesirable in a well-run state, he returns to the Protagorean dictum that man is the measure of all things (4.716c ff.). only that measure, he insists, is no transient and changing power, but the unchanging and eternal God. Yet in tracing the continuity of religious thought from Socrates to Plato we can also discern a change. Socrates, the man who claimed to know only his own ignorance, affirmed his sense of the divine and providential goodness; Plato, after decades of thought, believed that he knew a good deal about the nature of the divine. Not only did he sense and experience this higher level of reality; he believed he had good reasons to posit its existence and its nature. He could give an account of what many men—and all good men—"know" instinctively. Where Socrates claimed knowledge only of his own ignorance, the Platonic Socrates has come to know a great deal more. It must be our concern, therefore, to investigate how that change came about, reflecting as it does an advance from Socrates' albeit preliminary exposure of the moral confusion of layman and professor alike to the first, if underdeveloped, presentation of what remains the only basis for a significantly objective morality.
In following "Socrates'" road, and the subsequent road on which Plato at times allows others to guide us, we shall notice that the elaborate metaphysical construction by which he views morality as underpinned is designed less to replace than to restore and justify moral intuitions deeply rooted in human nature. In a prephilosophical society—or at least a society in which moral beliefs are unchallenged and largely bereft of philosophical reflection, such as at least Plato and Aristotle supposed existed in Greece before the Sophists and Socrates—our moral intuitions will often work themselves out in crude, inconsistent, even barbarous conclusions. For they are as yet unexamined and, as Socrates says in the Apology (38a), an unexamined life is unworthy of a human being. Prephilosophical ethics will be crude because not yet subjected to the scrutiny of reason, and its teachers—who are often the poets—will literally not know what they are talking about. (This is argued, we shall see, in the Apology, as also in the slightly later dialogue named after Ion, a professional reciter of Homeric verse). After the Sophists, however, such primitive morality is no longer intellectually respectable, and may even cause social confusion. Yet in criticizing the difficulties of earlier moral beliefs—while at the same time as "literary" specialists making selective use of convenient ideas and techniques of the traditional culture—the likes of Protagoras (who in the dialogue named after him is prepared to use a poem of Simonides for his own purposes) have thrown away the baby with the bathwater. In challenging instinctive and culturally governed ideas they have given the impression—even where they have not actively promoted it—that all must be scrapped and that our native and collective sense of an objective good is part of a primitivism now to be outgrown. That similar views are widely held in our own day is an indication of the importance of following in Plato's Socratic footsteps. For Plato saw that mere reaction is inadequate; moral purity, like virginity, once lost, cannot be merely reasserted. And enlightenment must not be simply rejected, but transcended: its gains must be preserved while the disastrous social and philosophical consequences of its unthinking acceptance of (at best) wishful thinking in ethics must themselves be dissolved by the power of right reason—of what Plato was eventually, if un-Socratically, to term dialectic.
Chapter Two
SCRUTINIZING CHARACTER, SCRUTINIZING MORAL PROPOSITIONS
Socrates' major insight, which he derived from reflecting on the enigmatic judgment on his own wisdom pronounced by the oracle at Delphi, was that most people, if not everyone, do not know what they are talking about when they pronounce on ethics. The need to examine that insight more carefully goes far toward explaining why he is insistent that his interlocutors say exactly and truthfully what they think, and why they are thanked if they do so (Crito 49de; Gorgias 495a). For if they do not know they are ignorant, they do not know who they are—and the oracle also prescribes self-knowledge. That becomes particularly clear to Socrates (and to us) when he cross-examines people who—really or apparently—exhibit moral virtues. We can see it if we look at some of Plato's earlier dialogues: the Apology, Charmides, Laches, and Euthyphro; indeed the Charmides specifically links knowledge of what knowledge is with knowledge of oneself.
But the rot goes deeper than ignorant or deluded individuals and permeates approaches to education. The poets, represented by Ion, and the Sophists, represented by Hippias in the Hippias Minor and later by Protagoras himself in the dialogue named after him—those, that is, who purport to teach us both in the old style and in a new, more "sophisticated" version—are ignorant either of the nature of what they are teaching or of whether it is teachable, or of both. In an extreme case, that of Gorgias, the influential rhetorician who professed to teach his skills to aspiring politicians, it becomes clear in the dialogue bearing his name that he understands neither what rhetoric is, nor whether there are beneficial and harmful versions of it, nor even that he himself is faced with a moral problem if some of his followers do not know the difference between right and wrong. His comment on this last point is not reassuring: If they don't know the difference between right and wrong, I'll teach them that too! (460a)
The Gorgias does more than puncture sophistic vanity. In presenting the possibly fictional figure of Callicles, Plato indicates the nature of the moral confusion confronting his society. Socrates defeats both Gorgias himself and his young and impetuous disciple Polus, a would-be Machiavellian, by turning their residual acceptance of parts of conventional morality against their radical political "realism." Callicles too is eventually trapped in similar fashion, and thus defeated ad hominem, but he holds out longer, since he is clear that traditionally acceptable behavior is a subservience to convenient "moral" conventions that there is no reason to uphold if one is "strong" enough to get away with ignoring them. Thus Callicles advocates the use by the strong of all available means to get what they want and calls such behavior "natural." Plato indicates thereby that moral nihilism—though as a believer in the law of nature, Callicles would not call it that—is not to be defeated by unreasoned conventionalism; indeed, if advocated by a more skillfully radical thinker than Callicles, it might seem the only rational way forward. If that conclusion is to be defeated, something more philosophically persuasive than conventionalism is required. Any version of "man is the measure of morality" can always be collapsed into possessive individualism: the Hobbesian struggle of all against all, in which, Callicles thinks, the strong will naturally (and therefore in some sense rightly) prevail.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from PLATO'S MORAL REALISM by JOHN M. RIST Copyright © 2012 by The Catholic University of America Press. Excerpted by permission of The Catholic University of America Press. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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