The Consolations of Philosophy Read online

  2. The rule of common sense

  Many found the questions maddening. Some teased him. A few would kill him. In The Clouds, performed for the first time at the theatre of Dionysus in the spring of 423 BC, Aristophanes offered Athenians a caricature of the philosopher in their midst who refused to accept common sense without investigating its logic at impudent length. The actor playing Socrates appeared on stage in a basket suspended from a crane, for he claimed his mind worked better at high altitude. He was immersed in such important thoughts that he had no time to wash or to perform household tasks, his cloak was therefore malodorous and his home infested with vermin, but at least he could consider life’s most vital questions. These included: how many of its own lengths can a flea jump? And do gnats hum through their mouths or their anuses? Though Aristophanes omitted to elaborate on the results of Socrates’ questions, the audience must have been left with an adequate sense of their relevance.

  Aristophanes was articulating a familiar criticism of intellectuals: that through their questions they drift further from sensible views than those who have never ventured to analyse matters in a systematic way. Dividing the playwright and the philosopher was a contrasting assessment of the adequacy of ordinary explanations. Whereas sane people could in Aristophanes’ eyes rest in the knowledge that fleas jumped far given their size and that gnats made a noise from somewhere, Socrates stood accused of a manic suspicion of common sense and of harbouring a perverse hunger for complicated, inane alternatives.

  To which Socrates would have replied that in certain cases, though perhaps not those involving fleas, common sense might warrant more profound inquiry. After brief conversations with many Athenians, popular views on how to lead a good life, views described as normal and so beyond question by the majority, revealed surprising inadequacies of which the confident manner of their proponents had given no indication. Contrary to what Aristophanes hoped, it seemed that those Socrates spoke to barely knew what they were talking about.

  (Ill. 3.3)

  3. Two conversations

  One afternoon in Athens, to follow Plato’s Laches, the philosopher came upon two esteemed generals, Nicias and Laches. The generals had fought the Spartan armies in the battles of the Peloponnesian War, and had earned the respect of the city’s elders and the admiration of the young. Both were to die as soldiers: Laches in the battle of Mantinea in 418 BC, Nicias in the ill-fated expedition to Sicily in 413 BC. No portrait of them survives, though one imagines that in battle they might have resembled two horsemen on a section of the Parthenon frieze.

  (Ill. 3.4)

  The generals were attached to one common-sense idea. They believed that in order to be courageous, a person had to belong to an army, advance in battle and kill adversaries. But on encountering them under open skies, Socrates felt inclined to ask a few more questions:

  SOCRATES

  : Let’s try to say what courage is, Laches.

  LACHES

  : My word, Socrates, that’s not difficult! If a man is prepared to stand in the ranks, face up to the enemy and not run away, you can be sure that he’s courageous.

  But Socrates remembered that at the battle of Plataea in 479 BC, a Greek force under the Spartan regent Pausanias had initially retreated, then courageously defeated the Persian army under Mardonius:

  SOCRATES

  : At the battle of Plataea, so the story goes, the Spartans came up against [the Persians], but weren’t willing to stand and fight, and fell back. The Persians broke ranks in pursuit; but then the Spartans wheeled round fighting like cavalry and hence won that part of the battle.

  Forced to think again, Laches came forward with a second common-sense idea: that courage was a kind of endurance. But endurance could, Socrates pointed out, be directed towards rash ends. To distinguish true courage from delirium, another element would be required. Laches’ companion Nicias, guided by Socrates, proposed that courage would have to involve knowledge, an awareness of good and evil, and could not always be limited to warfare.

  In only a brief outdoor conversation, great inadequacies had been discovered in the standard definition of a much-admired Athenian virtue. It had been shown not to take into account the possibility of courage off the battlefield or the importance of knowledge being combined with endurance. The issue might have seemed trifling but its implications were immense. If a general had previously been taught that ordering his army to retreat was cowardly, even when it seemed the only sensible manoeuvre, then the redefinition broadened his options and emboldened him against criticism.

  In Plato’s Meno, Socrates was again in conversation with someone supremely confident of the truth of a common-sense idea. Meno was an imperious aristocrat who was visiting Attica from his native Thessaly and had an idea about the relation of money to virtue. In order to be virtuous, he explained to Socrates, one had to be very rich, and poverty was invariably a personal failing rather than an accident.

  We lack a portrait of Meno, too, though on looking through a Greek men’s magazine in the lobby of an Athenian hotel, I imagined that he might have borne a resemblance to a man drinking champagne in an illuminated swimming pool.

  (Ill. 3.5)

  The virtuous man, Meno confidently informed Socrates, was someone of great wealth who could afford good things. Socrates asked a few more questions:

  SOCRATES

  : By good do you mean such things as health and wealth?

  MENO

  : I include the acquisition of both gold and silver, and of high and honourable office in the state.

  SOCRATES

  : Are these the only kind of good things you recognize?

  MENO

  : Yes, I mean everything of that sort.

  SOCRATES

  : … Do you add ‘just and righteous’ to the word ‘acquisition’, or doesn’t it make any difference to you? Do you call it virtue all the same even if they are unjustly acquired?

  MENO

  : Certainly not.

  SOCRATES

  : So it seems that justice or temperance or piety, or some other part of virtue must attach to the acquisition [of gold and silver] … In fact, lack of gold and silver, if it results from a failure to acquire them … in circumstances which would have made their acquisition unjust, is itself virtue.

  MENO

  : It looks like it.

  SOCRATES

  : Then to have such goods is no more virtue than to lack them …

  MENO

  : Your conclusion seems inescapable.

  In a few moments, Meno had been shown that money and influence were not in themselves necessary and sufficient features of virtue. Rich people could be admirable, but this depended on how their wealth had been acquired, just as poverty could not by itself reveal anything of the moral worth of an individual. There was no binding reason for a wealthy man to assume that his assets guaranteed his virtue; and no binding reason for a poor one to imagine that his indigence was a sign of depravity.

  4. Why others may not know

  The topics may have dated, but the underlying moral has not: other people may be wrong, even when they are in important positions, even when they are espousing beliefs held for centuries by vast majorities. And the reason is simple: they have not examined their beliefs logically.

  Meno and the generals held unsound ideas because they had absorbed the prevailing norms without testing their logic. To point out the peculiarity of their passivity, Socrates compared living without thinking systematically to practising an activity like pottery or shoemaking without following or even knowing of technical procedures. One would never imagine that a good pot or shoe could result from intuition alone; why then assume that the more complex task of directing one’s life could be undertaken without any sustained reflection on premises or goals?

  Perhaps because we don’t believe that directing our lives is in fact complicated. Certain difficult activities look very difficult from the outside, while other, equally difficult activities look very easy. Arri
ving at sound views on how to live falls into the second category, making a pot or a shoe into the first.

  (Ill. 3.6)

  Making it was clearly a formidable task. Clay first had to be brought to Athens, usually from a large pit at Cape Kolias 7 miles south of the city, and placed on a wheel, spun at between 50 and 150 rotations per minute, the speed inversely proportional to the diameter of the part being moulded (the narrower the pot, the faster the wheel). Then came sponging, scraping, brushing and handle-making.

  (Ill. 3.7)

  Next, the vase had to be coated with a black glaze made from fine compact clay mixed with potash. Once the glaze was dry, the vase was placed in a kiln, heated to 800 °C with the air vent open. It turned a deep red, the result of clay hardening into ferric oxide (Fe2O3). Thereafter, it was fired to 950 °C with the air vent closed and wet leaves added to the kiln for moisture, which turned the body of the vase a greyish black and the glaze a sintered black (magnetite, Fe3O4). After a few hours, the air vent was reopened, the leaves raked out and the temperature allowed to drop to 900 °C. While the glaze retained the black of the second firing, the body of the vase returned to the deep red of the first.

  It isn’t surprising that few Athenians were drawn to spin their own vases without thinking. Pottery looks as difficult as it is. Unfortunately, arriving at good ethical ideas doesn’t, belonging instead to a troublesome class of superficially simple but inherently complex activities.

  Socrates encourages us not to be unnerved by the confidence of people who fail to respect this complexity and formulate their views without at least as much rigour as a potter. What is declared obvious and ‘natural’ rarely is so. Recognition of this should teach us to think that the world is more flexible than it seems, for the established views have frequently emerged not through a process of faultless reasoning, but through centuries of intellectual muddle. There may be no good reason for things to be the way they are.

  5. How to think for oneself

  The philosopher does not only help us to conceive that others may be wrong, he offers us a simple method by which we can ourselves determine what is right. Few philosophers have had a more minimal sense of what is needed to begin a thinking life. We do not need years of formal education and a leisured existence. Anyone with a curious and well-ordered mind who seeks to evaluate a common-sense belief can start a conversation with a friend in a city street and, by following a Socratic method, may arrive at one or two ground-breaking ideas in under half an hour.

  Socrates’ method of examining common sense is observable in all Plato’s early and middle dialogues and, because it follows consistent steps, may without injustice be presented in the language of a recipe book or manual, and applied to any belief one is asked to accept or feels inclined to rebel against. The correctness of a statement cannot, the method suggests, be determined by whether it is held by a majority or has been believed for a long time by important people. A correct statement is one incapable of being rationally contradicted. A statement is true if it cannot be disproved. If it can, however many believe it, however grand they may be, it must be false and we are right to doubt it.

  The Socratic method for thinking

  1. Locate a statement confidently described as common sense.

  Acting courageously involves not retreating in battle

  .

  Being virtuous requires money

  .

  2. Imagine for a moment that, despite the confidence of the person proposing it, the statement is false. Search for situations or contexts where the statement would not be true.

  Could one ever be courageous and yet retreat in battle?

  Could one ever stay firm in battle and yet not be courageous?

  Could one ever have money and not be virtuous?

  Could one ever have no money and be virtuous?

  3. If an exception is found, the definition must be false or at least imprecise.

  It is possible to be courageous and retreat

  .

  It is possible to stay firm in battle yet not be courageous

  .

  It is possible to have money and be a crook

  .

  It is possible to be poor and virtuous

  .

  4. The initial statement must be nuanced to take the exception into account.

  Acting courageously can involve both retreat and advance in battle

  .

  People who have money can be described as virtuous only if they have acquired it in a virtuous way, and some people with no money can be virtuous when they have lived through situations where it was impossible to be virtuous and make money

  .

  5. If one subsequently finds exceptions to the improved statements, the process should be repeated. The truth, in so far as a human being is able to attain such a thing, lies in a statement which it seems impossible to disprove. It is by finding out what something is not that one comes closest to understanding what it is.

  6. The product of thought is, whatever Aristophanes insinuated, superior to the product of intuition.

  It may of course be possible to arrive at truths without philosophizing. Without following a Socratic method, we may realize that people with no money may be called virtuous if they have lived through situations in which it was impossible to be virtuous and make money, or that acting courageously can involve retreat in battle. But we risk not knowing how to respond to people who don’t agree with us, unless we have first thought through the objections to our position logically. We may be silenced by impressive figures who tell us forcefully that money is essential to virtue and that only effeminates retreat in battle. Lacking counterarguments to lend us strength (the battle of Plataea and enrichment in a corrupt society), we will have to propose limply or petulantly that we feel we are right, without being able to explain why.

  Socrates described a correct belief held without an awareness of how to respond rationally to objections as true opinion, and contrasted it unfavourably with knowledge, which involved understanding not only why something was true, but also why its alternatives were false. He likened the two versions of the truth to beautiful works by the great sculptor Daedalus. A truth produced by intuition was like a statue set down without support on an outdoor plinth.

  (Ill. 3.8)

  A strong wind could at any time knock it over. But a truth supported by reasons and an awareness of counterarguments was like a statue anchored to the ground by tethering cables.

  Socrates’ method of thinking promised us a way to develop opinions in which we could, even if confronted with a storm, feel veritable confidence.

  4

  In his seventieth year, Socrates ran into a hurricane. Three Athenians – the poet Meletus, the politician Anytus and the orator Lycon – decided that he was a strange and evil man. They claimed that he had failed to worship the city’s gods, had corrupted the social fabric of Athens and had turned young men against their fathers. They believed it was right that he should be silenced, and perhaps even killed.

  The city of Athens had established procedures for distinguishing right from wrong. On the south side of the agora stood the Court of the Heliasts, a large building with wooden benches for a jury at one end, and a prosecution and defendant’s platform at the other. Trials began with a speech from the prosecution, followed by a speech from the defence. Then a jury numbering between 200 and 2,500 people would indicate where the truth lay by a ballot or a show of hands. This method of deciding right from wrong by counting the number of people in favour of a proposition was used throughout Athenian political and legal life. Two or three times a month, all male citizens, some 30,000, were invited to gather on Pnyx hill south-west of the agora to decide on important questions of state by a show of hands. For the city, the opinion of the majority had been equated with the truth.

  There were 500 citizens in the jury on the day of Socrates’ trial. The prosecution began by asking them to consider that the philosopher standing before them was a dishonest man. He h
ad inquired into things below the earth and in the sky, he was a heretic, he had resorted to shifty rhetorical devices to make weaker arguments defeat stronger ones, and he had been a vicious influence on the young, intentionally corrupting them through his conversations.

  Socrates tried to answer the charges. He explained that he had never held theories about the heavens nor investigated things below the earth, he was not a heretic and very much believed in divine activity; he had never corrupted the youth of Athens – it was just that some young men with wealthy fathers and plenty of free time had imitated his questioning method, and annoyed important people by showing them up as know-nothings. If he had corrupted anyone, it could only have been unintentionally, for there was no point in wilfully exerting a bad influence on companions, because one risked being harmed by them in turn. And if he had corrupted people only unintentionally, then the correct procedure was a quiet word to set him straight, not a court case.

  He admitted that he had led what might seem a peculiar life:

  I have neglected the things that concern most people – making money, managing an estate, gaining military or civic honours, or other positions of power, or joining political clubs and parties which have formed in our cities.

  However, his pursuit of philosophy had been motivated by a simple desire to improve the lives of Athenians:

  I tried to persuade each of you not to think more of practical advantages than of his mental and moral well-being.

  Such was his commitment to philosophy, he explained, that he was unable to give up the activity even if the jury made it the condition for his acquittal: