The love of wisdom

A puzzling verdict

In 399 BC an Athenian jury of several hundred citizens (the number is not recorded) heard a seventy-year-old man defend himself against the charges of impiety and of corrupting the young. His name was Socrates, and the speech he gave, as Plato wrote it down in the Apology, begins with a story about an oracle. A friend of his, Chaerephon, impetuous in whatever he undertook, had once gone to Delphi, the sanctuary of Apollo, and asked the priestess there, the Pythia, whether anyone was wiser than Socrates. She answered that no one was. Chaerephon was dead by the time of the trial, but his brother was in court, Socrates says, to confirm the tale (21a).

Most people would have framed the verdict. Socrates did the opposite. He knew, he says, that he was not wise “either much or little,” and a god cannot lie. So he set out to find someone wiser, to prove the oracle wrong. (This is Socrates’s own story, as Plato tells it. Xenophon, another follower, tells the oracle differently: in his version the god says that no man was freer, juster, or more sensible than Socrates. Nothing outside Plato and Xenophon confirms the episode, so treat it as the story Socrates told, not as a recording.)

The test

He went first, he says, to a politician, a man with a great reputation for wisdom, and questioned him. The man did not know what he claimed to know, and Socrates concluded: “I, as I do not know anything, do not think I do either” (21d). So, in one small matter, he was wiser than this man. Then he went to the poets, who, he found, compose “not by wisdom, but by nature” and inspiration, like seers who say fine things without understanding them (22c). Then to the craftsmen, who really did know things he did not, but who, because each practiced his craft well, thought himself wise in other and larger matters too, and that error spoiled their real skill (22d). (Retellings sometimes add musicians and farmers, and a survey that took “a month”; Plato names politicians, poets, and craftsmen only, and gives no duration.) He calls the search his “Herculean labors.” He did not become popular.

At the end, Socrates reads the god’s answer. The god, he decides, is really wise, and in saying “Socrates” was using him as an example: human wisdom is worth little or nothing, and the wisest person is the one who, like Socrates, recognizes that, as far as wisdom goes, he is worth nothing (23a–b). It is an interpretation, in his own words, and it does not make him a pure skeptic. In the same speech he says he does know that doing wrong and disobeying one’s better, god or man, is bad (29b), and that the god has ordered him to spend his life in philosophy, examining himself and others (28e). “The unexamined life is not worth living,” he says (38a). Cicero later summed up the effect: Socrates was the first to call philosophy down from heaven, setting it in cities and homes, and making it ask about life and morals, good and evil (Tusculan Disputations 5.10).

Medicine for the soul

A line the Greeks and Romans repeated says what philosophy is for: it is a medicine of the soul. The metaphor is real and old. “There is, certainly, a medicine of the soul, and it is philosophy,” writes Cicero in the Tusculan Disputations (3.6, about 45 BC): and its help, he adds, is not to be sought from outside, as in bodily illness, but by every means we have, so that we can cure ourselves. A saying credited to the Epicureans makes the same comparison: vain is the word of a philosopher by whom no human suffering is healed, since medicine is no use if it does not drive disease out of the body, and philosophy is no use if it does not drive suffering out of the mind. (Porphyry, writing about AD 300, preserves it and attributes it to Epicurus, who died in 270 BC; scholars debate whether it is his own wording. A popular retelling has Francis Bacon repeating it as a pupil of Epicurus; that is garbled, since Bacon was born in 1561, and the real Bacon line that sounds similar is about natural philosophy as a medicine for superstition.) Even earlier, in Plato’s Charmides (155e–157c), Socrates says the soul is treated with “charms,” and the charms are fair words, by which temperance is born in it.

That is a clue about how this course will talk. If philosophy is medicine, then it is not first of all a set of conclusions. It is something that is done to a person, and that a person does. We come back to that in Lesson 4.

A word for loving

The Greek word philosophia is built from philos, “friend” or “lover,” and sophia. The second half meant something humbler than “wisdom” at first. In the poems of Homer and his successors, sophia is skill: the ship’s carpenter in the Iliad (15.410–413), taught by Athena, who knows every part of his craft, is sophos. Only later did the word widen to cleverness in poetry, in public life, and then to wisdom. “Philosopher” appears in the fifth century BC in scattered uses. Herodotus (about 430 BC) has King Croesus tell the Athenian lawgiver Solon that he has heard how Solon traveled over much of the world, philosophizing and looking, as the sentence goes (1.30). Thucydides has Pericles say that the Athenians “philosophize” without growing soft (2.40.1). A line attributed to Heraclitus, around 500 BC, says that lovers of wisdom must be inquirers into very many things, though scholars debate whether the word “philosophers” is Heraclitus’s own or a later paraphrase.

Who coined it? A famous story, which Cicero retells from the lost work of Heraclides of Pontus (a pupil of Plato’s circle), has Pythagoras meet the ruler of a town called Phlius and call himself, when asked what craft he practiced, a philosopher. Lesson 3 tells the story in full. Many historians doubt it: the German scholar Walter Burkert argued in 1960 that the idea in it, of a person who lacks wisdom but loves it, is thoroughly Platonic and was put in Pythagoras’s mouth by Plato’s circle. A few scholars, among them Christoph Riedweg, think Pythagoras or his school may still have started the word, and Christopher Moore has argued that it began as a mocking label, later adopted proudly. So the honest answer is: we do not know, and the story is probably legend.

What we can read is Plato’s use of it, and there the meaning is exact. In the Symposium, a dinner party set at the house of the poet Agathon in 416 BC by convention, Socrates reports a speech he says he heard from a wise woman of Mantinea named Diotima. Love, she says, is neither a god nor a mortal, but a great spirit between the two: the child of Poros, “Resource,” and Penia, “Poverty,” always in need and always scheming to get what he needs. Gods, she says, do not philosophize, because they are already wise; and the ignorant do not, because they think they are fine as they are. The philosopher is in the in-between: someone who knows he lacks wisdom and wants it (203e–204b). In Plato’s Lysis (218a) and Phaedrus (278d) the same idea appears: to call yourself “wise” is too much, and “lover of wisdom” is the modest name. (It is sometimes said that the philosopher is a go-between linking mortals and gods; in Plato that role belongs to Love, and the philosopher resembles him by being in between wisdom and ignorance.)

This is the point this course takes as its first thesis: philosophy is defined by what it lacks. It is a love of wisdom, not the possession of it, and that is a large part of what separates it from a tradition that claims to hold wisdom already.

What reason can do

Philosophy, on this picture, uses one part of us: reason. Plato gives the classic division in the Republic, Book IV (435–444): the soul has a reasoning part, a spirited part, which wants honor and fights for it, and an appetitive part, which wants food, drink, and sex. A person is just, in the individual sense, when each part does its own work, with reason, “which is wise, and has the care of the whole soul,” in charge. Aristotle makes the same point from a different angle in the Nicomachean Ethics (1.7): plants share growth with us, and animals share perception, so what is peculiarly ours is an activity of soul that follows a rational principle. In the Politics (1253a) he calls the human being the animal that has logos, speech and reason.

A correction is needed to a common version of Plato’s view, that the just person is one who finds the task matching his nature. That is the principle Plato uses for the city in Book IV (433a–b), where each class does the work it is best fitted for. He then calls it only “a shadow of justice” (443c), since true justice, he says, concerns the inner person, and the inner harmony of reason, spirit, and appetite under reason’s rule.

Reason on trial

If everything depends on reason, then the next question is what reason can do. In this reading, much of the history of Western philosophy after the Greeks is reason cross-examining itself. The sharpest case is Immanuel Kant, who published the Critique of Pure Reason in 1781 and revised it in 1787. Reason, he says in the preface, needs a tribunal, a court to secure its legitimate claims and dismiss its baseless ones. “Critique” here does not mean tearing down: it means judging, from the Greek krinein. Kant wanted to find where knowledge stops, and he admits he does so to make room for faith and morality (B xxx). His 1784 essay “What Is Enlightenment?” took the motto Sapere aude, “dare to know.”

A twentieth-century case is Ludwig Wittgenstein. His Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (German 1921, English 1922) says that philosophy is not a body of doctrine but an activity of clarifying thoughts (4.112), calls its own propositions senseless once used, like a ladder you climb and throw away (6.54), and ends with: “Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.” The popular version, “philosophy ends in silence,” is a simplification, and the later Wittgenstein disowned much of the early book. In the Philosophical Investigations (1953) he described philosophy as a battle against the bewitchment of our intelligence by means of language. Both men are examples of the same habit: reason keeps asking what it is entitled to say.

The midwife

Back to Socrates. He wrote nothing, so we know him through three witnesses: Aristophanes, who lampooned him in The Clouds in 423 BC, Xenophon, and Plato. In Plato’s Theaetetus (148e–151d) he explains his method with a family trade. His mother, Phaenarete, was a midwife, and he practices the same art, on men, tending “souls in labor,” and testing whether what the young person brings forth is real or, as he puts it, only a “wind-egg.” He adds, with a straight face, that he himself is barren of wisdom: the god compels him to act as midwife but has forbidden him to give birth (150c). That is the “spiritual midwife.” The method has a name, elenchus, “cross-examination”: someone states a view; Socrates gets agreement to other claims that clash with it; the view falls. Aristotle remarks that Socrates used to ask questions but not answer them, since he confessed he did not know (Sophistical Refutations 34).

The usual result is called aporia, being at a loss. It sounds like failure, and Plato thinks it is progress. In the Meno (80a) the young man compares Socrates to a torpedo fish that numbs whoever touches it; Socrates asks, about a slave boy he has just made doubt his answer, whether he has harmed him, and decides not: now the boy will search gladly, “as lacking knowledge” (84b). In this reading, that is the point: the philosopher takes people out of false certainty and into real inquiry. The Theaetetus itself ends with no answer to its question, what knowledge is, but with Socrates promising that if the young man conceives again he will have better thoughts, and if not, he will at least have the wisdom not to think he knows what he does not know (210b–c).

This course takes one more step, its second thesis: if you ask for a solution, you are doing science; the philosopher’s task is to ask the next question, and then the next, up to the final question. That is a bold way to draw the line, and Bertrand Russell drew a version of it in The Problems of Philosophy (1912): as soon as definite knowledge about a subject becomes possible, he wrote, the subject stops being called philosophy and becomes a science, as astronomy and psychology did. But, he added, philosophy is to be studied for the sake of the questions, not for definite answers.