For many Socrates is great but for almost as many he is ultimately a failure. Upon the completion of his album Various Positions the boss at Columbia Records listened to the first track and told Leonard Cohen that they knew he was great but they didn’t know if he was any good. The album was rejected. The same is applicable for Socrates, many know he was great but no one knows if he was any good. When reading the Platonic dialogues it is often hard to distinguish between Socrates and Plato so here’s a crude synopsis. If it offers answers it is Plato and if it is only asking questions it is Socrates.
The Socratic method is deeply studied but the results are often erroneous. He gets patted on the back for his attempts and Plato and others get the reverence. In Tractatus Logico-philosophicus Wittgenstein says that what is in his book is all you need to know about anything, case closed and even one of my most esteemed fellows Spinoza explains how things are, especially in relation to emotions. This emotion and this context equals this emotion and yet one of the great problems in philosophy, physics, literature, psychology, sociology and so forth is that the work is ultimately superficial. Theories and explanations are given of how things are, as in how they appear. However, how things appear and what they truly are is often very different.
The Socratic method is almost scientific in its nature. Socrates essentially proposes a hypothesis and then attempts to test it from one angle. When that angle fails to show the true nature of whatever he is hypothesising he then approaches it from a different angle and so on and so forth, ultimately showing that what the thing truly is is not how it appears as is shown from many different angles each with a different interpretation. Plato, it seems, found this approach limiting and attempted to go further by offering theories which went beyond what is perceived but explained some of how it was perceived as it is. The most famous example is of the world of forms where there is the perfect, for example, cow which explains why all cows look similar and yet are not identical.
For this one must go into the realms of thing which cannot be known and is still built upon a model based in the finite world. There are three cows, they look similar, why? Also it is important to note that Plato was a poet and playwright until his 27th birthday when he met Socrates and burnt his works to go off and become a philosopher and he is often disparaging of poets and artists, however, his work and some of his theories, such as the world of forms/ideas are clearly those of a poet/playwright and so can be seen as a poetic attempt to explain the finite world and what is known. Socrates, however, with his ‘the wisest man is the man who knows that he knows nothing’ approach to philosophy can be seen as one of the few thinkers who actually was a success. One thing many crave is certainty not realising that certainty is simply ignorance of ignorance for to say you are certain is to show that you are unaware of your own ignorance. This is something which Socrates avoids by concluding either there is something there or there isn’t, however, how things appear is rarely, if ever, how they truly are.
This is a lesson we can all learn from and is evidence that Socrates was both great and a great (sigh) success.
‘till next time
thegreaterfool2016 