Author: Louis-André Dorion
Year: 2006 (2005)
Publisher: Alhambras Pocketencyklopedi
Language: Swedish (translator Jan Stolpe)
It was one
of those golden late Friday afternoons in spring, when the very air seems to dictate
idleness, that my supervisor and I were walking hurriedly through the corridors
of the Department of Social Anthropology at Free School Lane hoping to not be
late for the weekly senior seminar. We arrived just in time to spare ourselves
the indignity of bursting in on the introductory remarks of the usually highly
regarded external guest and mumbling our apologies while trying to hunt down
some empty seats, which would invariably be located in the very centre of the room.
As I was still catching my breath after the brisk walk, my supervisor leaned
over to me and said “Listen carefully to this man. I don’t agree with a word he
says, but given the assumptions he makes, his conclusions are absolutely
brilliant.”
Now, almost
two decades later, his words come back to me as I read Louis-André Dorion’s
short but useful introduction to one of the ancient world’s most famous
thinkers: Socrates.
In a famous
event in Socrates’ life, a friend of his asks the Oracle of Delphi who the
wisest man in Greece is. The Oracle, with that mischievous cruelty peculiar to
divinities, indicates Socrates. On hearing this, Socrates, knowing very well that
men parading their wisdom usually possess little more than gilded ignorance, concludes
that the single thing that makes his wisdom superior to theirs is that he is
aware of his lack thereof. “I know that I know nothing”*. Armed with this
paradox, he sets off to enlighten his fellow Athenians by convincing them that
they, too, know very little.
His foremost
instrument was the dialogue, famously reproduced (and undoubtedly embellished) by
his student Plato, and he is generally credited with establishing the most
inconvenient of arts: critical thinking. This process of dialectic reasoning,
whereby questions and answers in concert lead to the truth, demands above all
else, definitions; for if words are not universalised they remain woefully
parochial, and no philosophy can thrive in a provincial setting. This type of
truth-seeking by dialogue is known as “elenchus” or simply The Socratic Method.
A century later, Aristotle distilled this principle down to his famous syllogism**
“All men are mortal. Socrates is a man. Therefore, Socrates is mortal.”
The ability
to disentangle opinion from reason was in essence the whole of Socrates’
mission. And the lesson my supervisor wanted me to learn from the guest
lecturer at Cambridge. Socrates is sometimes thought of as a midwife, possibly
inspired by his mother’s profession, who helps to deliver other men’s logical
conclusions that they may not have been able to reach without him, but which had
dwelled unrecognised inside of them all the time. By this analogy, Socrates
would never place his own thoughts in the heads of others, but merely help them
clarify their own. This would be consistent with three important points Socrates
is claimed to have made about himself:
1. His famous declaration that he knows
nothing. If you have no thoughts of your own, you have nothing to put inside
someone else’s head;
2. His insistence that he never tutored
or lectured anyone. If you know nothing, you will be hard pressed to deposit
any knowledge into someone else’s mind;
3. His claim that his activity was commanded
by the gods. Since the Oracle had proclaimed him the wisest of all men, it is
implied that keeping this wisdom to oneself would be inconsistent with the will
of the gods.
Dorion
makes the interesting observation that Socrates seems to have played both
midwife and prosecutor depending on the level of vanity in his victim. The modest
man he offered gentle assistance, coaxing from him thoughts he scarcely
suspected himself capable of possessing. To the self-satisfied loudmouth he administered
a more invigorating treatment puncturing his inflated ego with surgical
precision. Curiously, the tender midwife-inspired Socrates does not appear
until comparatively late in Plato’s writing, which leads Dorion to the conclusion
that the Athenians during Socrates’ lifetime may not have perceived him quite as
noble and benevolent as the idealised image that posterity has created of him
might suggest.
Few writers could be more qualified than Louis-André Dorion to write an introduction to Socrates. He is Professor of Ancient Philosophy at the University of Montreal specialising in Socrates’ dialectic refutation and the Socratic writings of Xenofon, second only to Plato in recording Socrates’ life and deeds. Normally pocket-sized introductions to ideas or celebrities offer little more than the most conventional and uninspired basics. Yet Dorion being the enthusiast incapable of mediocrity, cannot help putting some well-needed meat on the bones, turning this modestly dimensioned volume into something as refreshingly surprising as a digest that actually requires digesting.
* The
correct quote from Plato is actually “For I was conscious that I knew
practically nothing”
** Not to be confused with Hegelian dialectics
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