Some Dangerous Methods

Social, individual, and "innate" use of categories

Over the past three weeks we’ve been obliquely exploring a radical idea: that our most basic mental and logical operations — things like grouping and dividing, deduction, and categorizing — are neither innate nor universal, but emerged through long and painful socio-historical processes.

In “Durkheim and Classification,” we looked at the idea that logic may be not innate. Then, in “The Birth of Logic,” we learned that that logic has a history. And last week, I discussed the development of two different Socratic methods. The first is elenchus (cross-examination), and the second is collection and division, which we saw in the Phaedrus, with Socrates seeking to establish a new method as a “systematic art.”

Also last week, Kevin Bowers drew attention to Socrates’ claim to “know nothing” and his willingness to “undermine his seeming surety about abstraction and categories.” Today I’ll try to tie this aspect of Socrates into the broader narrative.

A Brief History of Socrates

Socrates (~470–399 BC) was a real historical person who lived in Athens and founded Western moral philosophy. In 399 BC, Athenian jurors democratically voted to have him executed for impiety and for corrupting the youth. He wrote nothing, and seems to have opposed writing. But he spoke a lot, and his students Plato (~428–348 BC) and Xenophon (~430–355 BC) both wrote down some of what he said.

The Death of Socrates (French: La Mort de Socrate) is an oil on canvas painted by French painter Jacques-Louis David in 1787.

In some of Plato’s dialogues, for example the Euthyphro, Apology, and Crito, Plato depicts Socrates as he most likely was, i.e., the way he was as a real historical person. We mainly think this because one other writer (himself an important writer), Xenophon, also wrote an Apology which largely coincides with the facts in Plato’s description of the events, though Xenophon’s interpretation differs. (Both Apologies survive.)

These dialogues are traditionally called the “Early” or “Socratic dialogues.” In these dialogues, Socrates claims to “know nothing,” usually in passing. He does this in Apology, Cratylus, Hippias Minor, and others. Sometimes this seems to be a matter of principle, as in the Apology; in other places, it seems to be a rhetorical strategy used to evade or pre-empt possible attacks, as in the Hippias Minor. In these dialogues, Socrates also employs the technique of “elenchus” (logical cross-examination).

Many readers first encountering Socrates in the so-called Socratic dialogues will feel disappointed — as I myself felt, and as this article describes. Socrates seems more aggressive, less humble, and less open-minded than we might have hoped. He often appears to have clear conceptual goals in mind, forcing his interlocutors through predetermined logical steps against their stated will. He claims to be following his own god (or “daimon”) who instructs him to seek out people who say they know something. This god orders him to show them that they, in fact, know nothing, which, unsurprisingly, turns out to be an unpopular move.

The overriding impression that I get while reading the dialogues is that Socrates does not work with many of his interlocutors, but against them. In the cases where he is working with them (as in the “midwifery” of the Theaetetus), he still comes off as condescending and motivated by a desire to attack, and not by a desire to understand.¹

I think it’s worth quoting Socrates at length in one of the earliest dialogues, the Apology, which as we’ve seen, is most likely to be close to the historical Socrates, and which is also attested by Xenophon. Here he is, on trial, defending his actions in as close to his own words as we’re able to get:

Socrates, in the Apology (21c):

Then, when I examined this man […] my experience was something like this: I thought that he appeared wise to many people and especially to himself, but he was not. I then tried to show him that he thought himself wise, but that he was not. As a result he came to dislike me, and so did many of the bystanders. So I withdrew and thought to myself: “I am wiser than this man; it is likely that neither of us knows anything worthwhile, but he thinks he knows something when he does not, whereas when I do not know, neither do I think I know; so I am likely to be wiser than he to this small extent, that I do not think I know what I do not know.” After this I approached another man, one of those thought to be wiser than he, and I thought the same thing, and so I came to be disliked both by him and by many others.

[…(22e)]

As a result of this investigation, men of Athens, I acquired much unpopularity, of a kind that is hard to deal with and is a heavy burden; many slanders came from these people and a reputation for wisdom, for in each case the bystanders thought that I myself possessed the wisdom that I proved that my interlocutor did not have. What is probable, gentlemen, is that in fact the god is wise and that his oracular response meant that human wisdom is worth little or nothing, and that when he says this man, Socrates, he is using my name as an example, as if he said: “This man among you, mortals, is wisest who, like Socrates, understands that his wisdom is worthless.” So even now I continue this investigation as the god bade me — and I go around seeking out anyone, citizen or stranger, whom I think wise. Then if I do not think he is, I come to the assistance of the god and show him that he is not wise.

In short, Socrates appears to have a single motivation, with a few different aspects. The first is to seek wisdom, which is what he remains famous for to this day. The second is to find people whom others consider wise, and show to them and others that they are not wise (or, sometimes more generally, that human wisdom is limited). This he does through logical procedures, which we’ll look at today, and not through any practical assessment of their wisdom. The third, though not captured by these quotes, is to improve others; but again, this is through enforcing consistency and rational procedures.

Some Dangerous Methods

In addition to the frustration of his interlocutors, these early dialogues sometimes end in “aporia,” which is the state of mental perplexity where no satisfactory answer can be reached by Socrates or any of the other speakers. Traditionally, aporia is seen as “cathartic,” which is understood to cure its readers of the certainty they have in their knowledge. In this reading, it destabilizes concepts and possibly opens readers up, creating space for genuine inquiry. But this can only work if one accepts Socrates’ unstated but fundamental premise: that abstract concepts have stable, definable meanings.

On the basis of my own lived experience of words, I reject this act of reification itself. I regard it as dangerous to discuss topics as broad as “piety” without getting into the specifics — and Socrates seems actively disinterested in people’s lived experience. For example, in what is thought to be one of the earliest dialogues, the Euthyphro, when Euthyphro tries to define piety in terms of his specific case, Socrates responds by saying that he is only interested in the definition of piety, not the individual case at hand. This seems particularly insensitive, to me, because Euthyphro is talking about the current trial, where he is prosecuting his father for impiety.

SOCRATES: Bear in mind then that I did not bid you tell me one or two of the many pious actions but that form itself that makes all pious actions pious, for you agreed that all impious actions are impious and all pious actions pious through one form, or don’t you remember?

If you want to test whether aporia works for you, you can try reading the Euthyphro and see what you get out of it. Here’s the Grube translation PDF. Sample:

SOCRATES: This is the kind of thing I was asking before, whether where there is piety there is also justice, but where there is justice there is not always piety, for the pious is a part of justice. Shall we say that, or do you think otherwise?

Such a question presupposes that “piety” and “justice” are stable categories with unambiguous meanings when used outside of any experiential context — precisely what Durkheim will bring into question. To reach aporia in the traditional manner, you will need to be able to read and countenance such questions in the Socratic dialogues.

To me personally, this use of abstraction seems like a dangerous method which could (and did) lead to conflict and violence. I’m open to Buddhist “noting” meditative practices which use words to overload the linguistic capacity and land us back outside language. And I do think that, in principle, long back-and-forth dialogues could lead to non-linguistic insights. It’s just the specific way Socrates leads his interlocutors, and his use of categorical abstract nouns that I find dangerous. Because, as I’ll later argue, with the Buddha and Pyrrho of Elis, abstraction itself is a dangerous tool.

Plato’s Socrates

Both “elenchus” and “aporia” appear in the early dialogues. But in later dialogues,² Plato’s depiction of Socrates changes substantially. As John M. Cooper notes in his introduction to the definitive Plato: Complete Works (1997), this later Socrates “takes and argues directly for ambitious, positive philosophical positions of his own.” He has, evidently, stopped knowing nothing. If the traditional dating is correct, it’s perhaps unsurprising that the character Socrates develops over this timespan — Plato may have written them as much as thirty years after Socrates’ death.

In these Middle Dialogues, Socrates becomes a mouthpiece for Plato’s own views, abandoning his previous claim of having no views. Cooper notes that, alongside Socrates ceasing to claim that he knows nothing, it is in the Middle Dialogues that Plato develops the aforementioned Theory of Forms. And Socrates’ method changes from elenchus (cross-examination) to collection and division. And it’s actually in the Phaedrus, which we looked at last week, that the Theory of Forms begins to shift. Here’s Cooper:

On the other hand, Phaedrus, despite Socrates’ use of the classical theory in his second speech on erōs, foreshadows the revised conception of a Form as some sort of divided whole — no longer a simple unity — known about by the method of ‘collection and division’ that the late dialogues Sophist, Statesman, and Philebus set out and employ at length.

So the Theory of Forms, itself once a unity, is starting to split apart, as is “the Socratic Method.”

Let’s take a closer look at the Phaedrus. In it, as we saw, Socrates says there are “two kinds of things the nature of which it would be quite wonderful to grasp by means of a systematic art.”

Which two things?

SOCRATES: The first consists in seeing together things that are scattered about everywhere and collecting them into one kind, so that by defining each thing we can make clear the subject of any instruction we wish to give. Just so with our discussion of love: Whether its definition was or was not correct, at least it allowed the speech to proceed clearly and consistently with itself.

In other words, Plato’s “Middle” Socrates wants to make a systematic art which consists in collection and division. This is a pivotal moment in Western thought, a first attempt to systematize the classification of concepts into clear, non-overlapping, hierarchical categories. But remember that it has apparently developed from a social technique: namely, Socrates’ habit of cross-examining interlocutors in spoken dialogue (elenchus).

Collecting and Dividing My Thoughts…

There’s a tension here, because Socrates seems to be proposing collection and division as a new art, but at the same time, he presumably thinks this training must rely on innate capacities. As with the virtues, Plato seems to think that there exists some innate capacity, but that it must be practised.

So we see a development in three stages within three of the cornerstones of Western philosophy:

1. Socratic elenchus, which is an embodied social practice. It involves talking to people and showing them that, because their understanding of concepts is inconsistent, they know nothing.

2. Plato’s Middle Socrates, who proposes collection and division; we can safely say that this is Plato building on Socrates’ method into a “systematic art.” This depends on innate traits, but requires a lot of practice. It also seems less social than the practice of elenchus, potentially something one could do by oneself. And it seems to lead to knowing something rather than nothing.

3. Aristotelian logic, which depends on the method of collection and division to be a basic part of nature. The knowledged gleaned in this way has come to seem innate.

See where this is going?

Socrates starts in conversation. Plato moves into thinking. Aristotle takes the results of this method of thinking, and makes these results into something apparently innate, what I will term (borrowing from Althusser) “obviousnesses.” In short, though the method of collection and division is contingent and has a social history, it has quickly come to seem an obvious part of how the mind works. The sense is: “This is just the way things are.”

And, as we’ll see next week, this series of developments from a social conversation, to an individual practice, to “innate,” precisely reflects Durkheim’s observations.

Once again, the question might arise: “But aren’t you yourself using abstraction?” I am indeed. I’m identifying three different phases in the development of Greek categorical structure. But I do not regard what I have done as an act of discovery so much as an act of creation. I have allowed my attention to be drawn by Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle, and, later, by Kant, Nietzsche, and Durkheim, to the way we use concepts themselves — a kind of cognitive archaeology.

But unlike the tradition I am examining, I see this as a human, creative act of meaning-making, fundamentally about connecting to other minds — in this case, with your mind, as my reader. I am not engaging in an abstract apprehension of eternal truth. Nor do I seek to escape abstraction, which cannot be done so long as we use language. Instead, I seek to use abstraction more consciously and carefully, maintaining awareness of both its powers and its dangers.

As always, I’d love to hear from you in the comments.

Best,

Bryan

Past Entries

1. I’m not alone in finding Socrates unhelpfully confrontational. If you’d like to read other sources, let me know in the comments, and I’ll find some resonant perspectives.

2. Cooper disputes the terminology “Early,” “Middle,” and “Late,” because he thinks some of what others call the “Early” dialogues, and which he calls the “Socratic,” dialogues might actually be written later. He proposes a different categorical grouping. But though the chronology is disputed, the philosophical progression I’m describing is unaffected by this dispute.