Author: Ranganatha Sitaram
About 2400 years ago a man was sentenced to death for asking too many questions! Although there were many philosophers before him (e.g., Heraclitus, Pythagoras) Socrates is credited for being the patron saint of philosophy in the west. The field of philosophy and later all the natural sciences that originated from it came to prominence in the western world due to Socrates.
According to accounts, Socrates was considered in appearance to have been snub-nosed, podgy, shabby and strange to others, and generally did not confirm to the contemporary ways of the time. However, he had a brilliant mind and a great charisma. Some people in Athens thought that he was quite unique, while to others he came across as quite annoying. People had mixed feelings about him: some loved him while others thought of him as a dangerous influence.
As a young man, he was a soldier who fought against the Spartans and their allies. In his middle age he wandered around the Athenean marketplace, stopping people from time to time to ask questions. The questions seemed to be simple and straight forward, but turned out to be difficult to answer when Socrates questioned them further on their responses. For instance, he asked a person called Enthydermus whether being deceitful is immoral. The person was quick to answer that it was. However, Socrates gave an example of a situation when it not so obvious: “what if your friend is depressed and want to kill himself, and you his knife”? Is that deceit? The act is deceitful, of course, but it is not clear if it is immoral! Here, Socrates used a counter-example to demonstrate that strongly held beliefs and assumptions could be and should be questioned.
In this manner, Socrates frequently asked questions about things that people had assumed to be true.
Another example: A soldier of or a military commander would start a conversation with Socrates with what courage meant, but after Socrates penetrating questions would end-up not being sure anymore about the topic.
“Socrates loved to reveal the limits of what people genuinely understood” (Warburton 2011). However, it is perhaps much better to realize how little you know than be under the false assumption that you understand something when you actually do not.
During Socrates time in Athens, rich people sent their children to study under the ‘Sophists’, who taught the children to speak well, i.e., in the art of speech-making, and charged a large sum of money for their services. However, Socrates achieved more by not charging any money.
Funnily enough, though, and quite surprisingly, Socrates claimed that he did not know anything. This seemed to attract more students! At least, it did not stop people coming from to him for discussions. But, this of course, annoyed the Sophists.
While Socrates himself always stated that he knew so little, he was always engaged in asking people questions, enquiring about the nature of the world. He realized that although people were good at specific things (e.g., carpentry, cooking, craft etc.), very few were “wise”. Many times they did not know what they were talking about.
The word philosophy is formed out of the Greek words leading to the meaning “love of wisdom”.
The western tradition of philosophy is known to have spread from ancient Greece to other parts of the world (e.g., Warburton 2011, Magee 2001). This is highly debatable, as we will see later that philosophical forms of thinking existed in different other parts of the world, such as in China, India, and in the middle eastern and far eastern countries in different forms and traditions. However, unlike the western tradition of philosophy, those other thinkers and their schools of thought came to their questions and realizations not under the banner of philosophy or anything similar, but rather closely knit with religious tenets, and where religion and philosophy mixed in one undistinguishable manner, with concepts of devotion, morality and wisdom being considered together (e.g., in Hinduism and Buddhism).
In later chapters and articles, we will take a closer look at the some of the philosophical or religio-philosophical traditions of the other parts of the world, and compare and contrast them with the western tradition. Our enduring aim would be not so much as to ‘split the hair’, so to speak, as to which tradition amounts to philosophy and which tradition not, but more as to why and how philosophy helps us understand the nature of the world, life, ethics, and so forth. We will also see how philosophical thought led to the sciences that we know as physics, chemistry, biology, psychology, neuroscience of today. Further, religio-philosophical traditions from the east and middle east spread to the west too, and cross-fertilized the western tradition.
The western philosophical tradition is based on questioning, arguments and reasoning. Philosophy requires that you enquire about things based on reason and evidence about issues of the world but not because, somebody as an authority, saint, guru or another philosopher told you so. If whatever said is reasoned out, supported by facts and logic then you would accept it.
What is actually wisdom then? It is not just the knowledge of lots of facts, procedures, or skills to do something. It is actually about understanding the nature of our existence and why the world is as it is. It is knowing about how we receive and obtain knowledge, and what its limits are. How we should live? What is the nature of reality?
Professional and academic philosophers as well as novice philosophers follow the same approach now asking hard questions, and using evidence and reason to understand the world and answer the above question. The field of philosophy has become, of course, more nuanced and detailed, wit ha number of subquestions and specializations.
Socrates was an enigma. Socrates did not write about his enquiries and philosophy, unlike the later philosophers. He preferred talking, asking questions and debating, to writing. It is said that each age and each intellectual turn produces a Socrates of its own. His thinking and his steadfast approach to rational thought have been much admired by generations of thinkers and intellectuals ever since. His main method was that each should identify the goodness in oneself through questioning and debate to reveal one’s potential as well as false beliefs and ignorance.
Socrates was known for his question-and-answer mode of probing serious matters. He was reputed for his ‘irony’ which meant that he repeatedly said he was ignorant of knowledge but by debate somehow he seemed to always keep an upper hand in his debates. Also, he did not align himself with any of the prevailing political and social leadership of the period, but supported and opposed them on different matters. This supposed approach of Socrates left other later philosophers to wonder what his real views were.
If not for Socrates’ disciple Plato who wrote down a series of conversations and debates that Socrates was supposed to have had with other people, we would perhaps have not known about Socrates at all. Few philosophers, other than Thomas Aquinas, Aristotle, Kant and Wittgenstein, are known to have the breadth and depth of philosophical thought and brilliance of writing as Plato. However, it is not clear now whether Plato’s writings were about his own ideas in the name of a fictional character called Socrates or whether Socrates did indeed exist and Plato was his disciple.
Idea, a philosophical concept that is attributed to Plato but not Socrates is that reality is quite different from appearance (By the way, this notion of reality being different from appearances is also an important concept in Hinduism and to some extent Buddhism too). Most people think that the world is as it appears to us. However, by reason philosophers and later scientists have come to realize that appearances may detract and delude us from reality.
To give an example, Plato described an imaginary cave in which people are chained to stare at the cave walls where shadows of objects existing behind them are displayed. The men believe that shadows are the real objects until one of them breaks free of the chains and looks back at the objects from which the shadows were cast. He walks outside to see the world beyond the cave. Plato used this analogy to show that philosophers are like the man who broke free from the chains of illusion and appearance, and understood that reality is beyond appearances.
The idea of reality as exemplified in the discussion above is related to Plato’s Theory of Form. An example he used to explain this theory is the “idea of a circle”, in which every point on the circumference is equidistant from the center. However, real circles drawn by hand or machines on paper or other material are not perfect circles after all as there are minute but substantial differences in the distances of points on the circumference from the center. A layperson would be distracted by these real world differences, according to Plato, but a philosopher can retain the idea and work with the idea of the Form of the circle.
In his major work, The Republic, Plato proposed a form of governance based on the ideas of the Form. In this government, philosophers would be the rulers, subordinated by soldiers who defended the state, and below them were the workers and farmers. In this hierarchical society, everything would be controlled from the top, by edicts, in a way quite in contradiction to the democratic setup of Athens at that time (5th century BC). This sort of governance is now known as Totalitarianism, the kind that existed during the Nazi and Fascistic eras. Artists would have no place in Plato’s republic as they would be considered to produce different “appearances” and not the ideal Form. However, 5th century Athens was relatively more democratic than what Plato proposed in his Republic. Although women and slaves were not allowed to vote, all other citizens were considered equal before the law.
While the people of Athens admired Plato, not all of them were so fond of Socrates. They considered him uncouth, unwashed and annoying with his questions. They also considered him dangerous, and to be deliberately scheming against the government and criticizing it. In 399 BC a man named Meletus challenged Socrates in the courts that he was teaching people to go against the Athenian gods by inventing his own gods, and was goading the youth of Athens to oppose the government. These charges were very grave. More than half of the jury believed that these charges were true and voted against Socrates to be sentenced to death. Socrates was made to drink Hemlock, a poisonous plant that paralyzed the body. Socrates drank the poison in front of his students and died. He would rather die than be forced to not enquire, question, reason and debate. Socrates has ever since been an inspiration to philosophers, to courageously question, reason and clarify illusions and non-truths (this is especially important in the “Post-truth era” which we plan to consider in a later section).
In Plato’s dialogues, Socrates has lived on. Plato continued to teach and debate in the spirit of Socrates. His most famous disciple was Aristotle was quite different from his predecessors and teachers, Plato and Socrates. Philosophy continues as an important discipline as the “mother” and originator of many natural sciences such as physics, chemistry, logic, ethics, philosophy of mind, philosophy of science and several other related topics.
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Eclectic Musings by Ranga Sitaram 