The Life of the Mind (25 page)

Solon himself was well aware of the difficult nature of such deceptively simple propositions. In a fragment that ties in very well with the story told by Herodotus, he is recorded as saying: "Most hard it is to perceive the hidden (
aphanes
) measure of judgment, which nevertheless [even though it does not appear] holds the limits of all things."
⁹³
Here Solon sounds like a predecessor of Socrates, who also, as they said later, wanted to bring philosophy down from the sky to the earth and hence began to examine the invisible measures by which we judge human affairs. When asked who is the happiest among men, Solon responded by raising the question, And what if you please is happiness, how are you to measure it?—in the same way that Socrates was to raise the questions, What are courage, piety, friendship,
sōphrosynē,
knowledge, justice, and so on?

But Solon gives a kind of answer, and this answer, rightly understood in its implications, even contains what people today would call a whole philosophy in the sense of
Weltanschauung:
the uncertainty of the future makes human life miserable, "danger is inherent in all works and deeds, nobody knows how a thing begun will turn out, one who does well fails to foresee what ill fortune may befall him, while a god gives good luck in everything to the evildoer."
⁹⁴
Hence, the "No man can be called happy while he is still alive" actually means: "No man is happy; all mortals on whom the Sun gazes are wretches."
⁹⁵
This is more than a reflection; it is already a kind of doctrine and as such un-Socratic. For Socrates, confronted with such questions, concludes virtually every strictly Socratic dialogue by saying: "I have failed utterly to discover what it is."
⁹⁶
And this aporetic character of Socratic thinking means: admiring wonder at just or courageous deeds seen by the eyes of the body gives birth to such questions as What is courage? What is justice? The existence of courage or justice has been indicated to my senses by what I have seen, though they themselves are not present in sense perception, and hence not given as self-evident reality. The basic Socratic question—What do we
mean
when we use this class of words, later called "concepts"?—arises out of that experience. But the original wonder is not only not resolved in such questions, since they remain without answer, but even reinforced. What begins as wonder ends in perplexity and thence leads back to wonder: How marvelous that men can perform courageous or just deeds even though they do not know, can give no account of, what courage and justice are.

To the question What makes us think? I have been giving (except in Solon's case) historically representative answers offered by professional philosophers. These answers are dubious for precisely that reason. The question, when asked by the professional, does not arise out of his own experiences while engaged in thinking. It is asked from outside—whether that outside is constituted by his professional interests as a thinker or by the common sense in himself that makes him question an activity that is out of order in ordinary living. And the answers we then receive are always too general and vague to have much sense for everyday living, in which thinking, after all, constantly occurs and constantly interrupts the ordinary processes of life—just as ordinary living constantly interrupts thinking. If we strip these answers of their doctrinal content, which of course varies enormously, all we get are confessions of a need: the need to concretize the implications of the Platonic wonder, the need (in Kant) of the reasoning faculty to transcend the limitations of the knowable, the need to become reconciled with what actually is and the course of the world—appearing in Hegel as "the need for philosophy," which can transform occurrences outside yourself into your own thoughts—or the need to search for the meaning of whatever is or occurs, as I have been saying here, no less generally, no less vaguely.

It is this helplessness of the thinking ego to give an account of itself that has made the philosophers, the professional thinkers, such a difficult tribe to deal with. For the trouble is that the thinking ego, as we have seen—in distinction from the self that, of course, exists in every thinker, too—has no urge to appear in the world of appearances. It is a slippery fellow, not only invisible to others but also, for the self, impalpable, impossible to grasp. This is partly because it is sheer activity, and partly because—as Hegel once said—"[as] an abstract ego it is liberated from the particularity of all other properties, dispositions, etc., and is active only with respect to the general, which is the same for all individuals."
⁹⁷
In any case, seen from the world of appearances, from the marketplace, the thinking ego always lives in hiding,
lathe biosas.
And our question, What makes us think?, is actually inquiring about ways and means to bring it out of hiding, to tease it, as it were, into manifestation.

The best, in fact the only, way I can think of to get hold of the question is to look for a model, an example of a thinker who was not a professional, who in his person unified two apparently contradictory passions, for thinking and acting—not in the sense of being eager to apply his thoughts or to establish theoretical standards for action but in the much more relevant sense of being equally at home in both spheres and able to move from one sphere to the other with the greatest apparent ease, very much as we ourselves constantly move back and forth between experiences in the world of appearances and the need for reflecting on them. Best suited for this role would be a man who counted himself neither among the many nor among the few (a distinction at least as old as Pythagoras), who had no aspiration to be a ruler of men, no claim even to be particularly well fitted by his superior wisdom to act in an advisory capacity to those in power, but not a man who submitted meekly to being ruled either; in brief, a thinker who always remained a man among men, who did not shun the marketplace, who was a citizen among citizens, doing nothing, claiming nothing except what in his opinion every citizen should be and have a right to. Such a man ought to be difficult to find: if he were able to represent for us the actual thinking activity, he would not have left a body of doctrine behind; he would not have cared to write down his thoughts even if, after he was through with thinking, there had been any residue tangible enough to set out in black and white. You will have guessed that I am thinking of Socrates. We would not know much about him, at least not enough to impress us greatly, if he had not made such an enormous impression on Plato, and we might not know anything about him, perhaps not even from Plato, if he had not decided to lay down his life, not for any specific belief or doctrine—he had none—but simply for the right to go about examining the opinions of other people, thinking about them and asking his interlocutors to do the same.

I hope the reader will not believe that I chose Socrates at random. But I must give a warning: there is a great deal of controversy about the historical Socrates, and though this is one of the more fascinating topics of learned contention, I shall ignore it
⁹⁸
and only mention in passing what is likely to be the chief bone of contention—namely, my belief that there exists a sharp dividing line between what is authentically Socratic and the philosophy taught by Plato. The stumbling block here is the fact that Plato used Socrates as
the
philosopher, not only in the early and clearly "Socratic" dialogues but also later, when he often made him the spokesman for theories and doctrines that were entirely un-Socratic. In many instances, Plato himself clearly marked the differences, for example, in the
Symposium,
in Diotima's famous speech, which tells us expressly that Socrates does not know anything about the "greater mysteries" and may not be able to understand them. In other instances, however, the line is blurred, usually because Plato could still reckon on a reading public that would be aware of certain enormous inconsistencies—as when he lets Socrates say in the
Theaetetus
⁹⁹
that "great philosophers ... from their youth up have never known the way to the marketplace," an anti-Socratic statement if ever there was one. And yet, to make matters worse, this by no means signifies that the same dialogue does not give fully authentic information about the real Socrates.
¹⁰⁰

No one, I think, will seriously dispute that my choice is historically justifiable. Less easily justifiable, perhaps, is the transformation of a historical figure into a model, for there is no doubt that some transformation is necessary if the figure in question is to perform the function we assign to it. Etienne Gilson, in his great book about Dante, wrote that in
The Divine Comedy
"a character ... conserves ... as much of its historical reality as the representative function that Dante assigns to it requires."
¹⁰¹
It seems easy enough to grant this kind of freedom to poets and to call it license—but worse when non-poets try their hand at it. Yet, justified or not, that is precisely what we do when we construct "ideal types"—not out of whole cloth, as in the allegories and personified abstractions so dear to the hearts of bad poets and some scholars, but out of the crowd of living beings past or present who seem to possess a representative significance. And Gilson hints at least at the true justification of this method (or technique) when he discusses the representative part assigned by Dante to Aquinas: the real Thomas, Gilson points out, would not have done what Dante made him do—eulogize Siger of Brabant—but the only reason that the real Thomas would have declined to pronounce such a eulogy would have been a certain human weakness, a defect of character, "the part of his make-up," as Gilson says, "which he had to leave at the gate of the
Paradiso
before he could enter."
¹⁰²
There are a number of traits in the Xenophonian Socrates, whose historical credibility need not be doubted, that Socrates might have had to leave at the gate of Paradise.

 

The first thing that strikes us in Plato's Socratic dialogues is that they are all aporetic. The argument either leads nowhere or goes around in circles. In order to know what justice is, you must know what knowledge is, and in order to know that, you must have a previous, unexamined notion of knowledge.
¹⁰³
Hence, "a man cannot try to discover either what he knows or what he does not know. If he knows, there is no need of inquiry; if he does not know ... he does not even know what he is to look for."
¹⁰⁴
Or, in the
Euthyphro:
in order to be pious you must know what piety is. The things that please the gods are pious; but are they pious because they please the gods or do they please the gods because they are pious?

None of the
logoi,
the arguments, ever stays put; they move around. And because Socrates, asking questions to which he does
not
know the answers, sets them in motion, once the statements have come full circle, it is usually Socrates who cheerfully proposes to start all over again and inquire what justice or piety or knowledge or happiness are.
¹⁰⁵
For the topics of these early dialogues deal with very simple, everyday concepts, such as arise whenever people open their mouths and begin to talk. The introduction usually runs as follows: to be sure, there are happy people, just deeds, courageous men, beautiful things to see and admire, everybody knows about them; the trouble starts with our nouns, presumably derived from the adjectives we apply to particular cases as they
appear
to us (we
see
a happy man,
perceive
the courageous deed or the just decision). In short, the trouble arrives with such words as
happiness, courage, justice,
and so on, what we now call concepts—Solon's "non-appearing measure" (
aphanes metron
) "most difficult for the mind to comprehend, but nevertheless holding the limits of all things"
¹⁰⁶
—and what Plato somewhat later called ideas perceivable only by the eyes of the mind. These words are part and parcel of our everyday speech, and Still we can give no account of them; when we try to define them, they get slippery; when we talk about their meaning, nothing stays put any more, everything begins to move. So instead of repeating what we learned from Aristotle, that Socrates was the man who discovered the "concept," we shall ask what Socrates did when he discovered it. For surely these words were part of the Greek language before he tried to force the Athenians and himself to give an account of what they and he meant—in the firm belief, of course, that no speech would be possible without them.

Today that is no longer so certain. Our knowledge of the so-called primitive languages has taught us that the grouping together of many particulars under a name common to all of them is by no means a matter of course; these languages, whose vocabulary is often so remarkably rich, lack such abstract nouns even in relation to clearly visible objects. To simplify matters, let us take a noun which to us no longer sounds abstract at all. We can use the word "house" for a great number of objects—for the mud hut of a tribe, for the palace of a king, the country home of a city dweller, the cottage in the village, the apartment house in town—but we can hardly use it for the movable tents of some nomads. The house in and by itself,
auto kath'auto,
that which makes us use the word for all these particular and very different buildings, is never seen, either by the eyes of the body or by those of the mind; every imagined house, be it ever so abstract, having the bare minimum to make it recognizable, is already a particular house. This other, invisible, house, of which we must have a notion in order to recognize particular buildings as houses, has been explained in different ways and called by different names in the history of philosophy; with this we are not concerned here, although we might find it less hard to define than such words as "happiness" or "justice." The point here is that it implies something considerably less tangible than the structure perceived by our eyes. It implies "housing somebody" and being "dwelt in" as no tent, put up today and taken down tomorrow, could house or serve as a dwelling place. The word "house" is the "unseen measure," "holds the limits of all things" pertaining to dwelling; it is a word that could not exist unless one presupposed thinking about being housed, dwelling, having a home. As a word, "house" is shorthand for all these things, the kind of shorthand without which thinking and its characteristic swiftness would not be possible at all.
The word
"house"
is something like a frozen thought that thinking must unfreeze
whenever it wants to find out the original meaning. In medieval philosophy, this kind of thinking was called "meditation," and the word should be heard as different from, even opposed to, contemplation. At all events, this kind of pondering reflection does not produce definitions and in that sense is entirely without results, though somebody who had pondered the meaning of "house" might make his own look better.