V. Socrates (1954)
Two Lectures By Heinrich Blücher
New School For Social Research
Lecture I: (In Two Parts) April 30, 1954
Lecture II: May 7, l954
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Lecture XII (S-II) 4-3O-54 [Lecture 1, Part 2]
II
Whatever we think, whatever we do, there are beliefs underlying it. To believe in such a thing as the quality of man is to have made a definite decision that changes everything. In the Jewish as well as in the Christian religion, all belief is anchored in one principle: The absolute transcendent God who is separate from nature and man, but in order to show that this God Creator is an absolute transcendent Other it was also necessary to show that man is superior to nature, in other words, the distinction between man and nature is drawn too sharply. The negative consequences of this can clearly be seen in the theology of the Jews. In order to set man above nature, in order to insure that nature will never be turned into an idol for men (and the Hebrews hated nothing more than idols), they assigned nature over to man as something absolutely unimportant and with no rights in itself. The Christians did exactly the same, only more so.
The Greeks, in so far as we shall consider then, did not. Heraclitus in creating his three logoi: Namely, law, meaning, and being, assigned a law to nature, an infinite though not absolute meaning to man, and a being in man. According to his theory, which is also the theory of Socrates, we can always distinguish ourselves from nature by our larger and more meaningful logos which is infinite. We can also work with nature and turn the processes of nature to our benefit but we can never feel that nature is our slave or that it belongs to us. We must always respect certain inherent laws in nature and not try to break them.
With Descartes, who is one of the founders of modern science, everything changes. The philosophy of science he gives to us really comes out of Christian belief, but unconsciously so, or better yet instinctively so, because now the opposition of man and nature is turned into an absolute where man, so to speak, is either the slave of nature or the tyrant of nature. Science becomes a battlefield between man and nature, a battle that is being fought to the death, a battle where man must prove really and finally (and this is the dream of all modern science) that he can rule nature, the whole of physical being, by one mathematical formula. Magic! We are back into magic and with the help of mathematics one can come into magic too.
This philosophic error though it was a productive error was avoided by the Greeks. Socrates moved entirely away from any consideration of nature at all, and his mocking of Anaxagoras and the great natural philosophers of Greece belongs to the irony of his death, because even his death was tragic and ironical. The irony of it is that in his Apology he was forced to say to his judges:
"You mix me up with Anaxagoras and accuse me of inquiring into the heavens and into what is down in the earth. I never did such a thing,"(3)
and he didn't. Rather he attacked Anaxagoras and the other materialistic philosophers of Greece. This comes out clearly in the Phaedo where he says:
"I occupied myself with those things for a certain time when I was young, because I heard someone reading from a book of Anaxagoras that nous (Mind or Spirit) is the creator of all things. So I studied with Anaxagoras and discovered that he was really not talking about that at all. He was talking about matter ... he was saying that the sun is a stone and that it is composed of elements, but that is entirely unimportant to me, because I wanted to hear something from him that would teach me how to conduct my life and I discovered that nothing of that kind could be found there, so I became disinterested in it".(4)
Yes, he became entirely disinterested in it and he is the only Greek who was. This is a miracle that has yet to be explained.
We have seen what a tremendous event was this discovery of the scientific creativity of man in the Greek time. It was this discovery that enabled Herodotus to make the statement that lies at the very foundation of historical science: Namely to say:
"I want to write so that all shall remember and, none forget the great deeds of the Greeks and barbarians alike",
and he means by that all great deeds and nothing else. No subjectivity was to be brought into it. Heraclitus believed that man (in so far as he considered himself to be matter) could (if he abstracted from himself) discover the great laws of natural science and hence the logos of nature. All of the Greeks were enthusiastically engaged in science, because science was (with the exception of poetry) the greatest event of that time. It must have been a tremendous event, the discovery of this capability, which inspired Aristotle to bring forth the first scientific system and Plato to place his famous inscription above the entrance to the Academy:
"Let no man enter here who does not know geometry".
As we said before, Socrates didn't have the slightest thought about science. It was settled for him. How is it that a Greek, living during that time, could make such a decision? We know that if he had not made that decision he would never have been able to find his way into pure philosophy and hence would never have been able to set science apart from philosophy. He would have gotten mixed up exactly as Plato got mixed up and as every other Greek philosopher got mixed up including Heraclitus (although Heraclitus can be pardoned for that, because he discovered science as a human possibility through philosophical means). The others were just mixed up. To them, science and philosophy were indistinguishable.
Socrates was not mixed up. We know, through Mr. Taylor, that Socrates must have been a tremendously educated man before he started his own philosophy--- that he could have assimilated the teachings of all of his predecessors, and hence of Heraclitus as well. Now Heraclitus had shown that the logos of nature is a limited logos which is why the laws of nature can be discovered by men. But the logos of man is of a different order: Namely, it is an infinite logos which is self increasing. So on this basis Socrates could have drawn the conclusion:
Well, we have a clear field before us now. The whole of nature is left to science, because science has the means by which the laws of nature can be discovered, so why should I occupy myself with this? There is a much more interesting thing for me to occupy myself with and that is this doubtful and infinite logos that Heraclitus ascribes to the human soul (that is, to the person that man is), and to find out what is this infinite logos of man?
To approach this logos only by means of a finite logos, that is, only by what we know according to the laws of nature would be crazy, because how can one approach the question of an infinite law solely by means of finite laws finitely given? It will never do. There must be a specific method for approaching this infinite logos which is man.
Heraclitus gave to man the specific method by which he can approach nature. He also discovered the specific reason why man could not approach God (the highest principle) because God is unapproachable. All of these things Socrates also accepted and he could have gotten them from Heraclitus. Now, there is really only one thing left, and that is the task of finding a principle of action to approach this infinite logos of man, and that apparently is what Socrates set out to do. First, negatively, by rejecting the natural approach (by saying I am not concerned with whether or not the sun is a stone or a god) and second, positively, by looking into himself (into his most immediate experience) because that is the moat immediate experience a human being can have. In other words, he approached the question "Who is man"?, by first approaching the question "Who am I myself"? This is exactly what Heraclitus had already done, but with far different results. There is a saying of Heraclitus:
"I searched into myself".(5)
And he had searched into himself. Through his discovery that the logos of nature and the logos of man are not the same he made the first decisive distinction between man and nature, however he did not succeed and could not succeed in finding the logos in man no matter how much he searched into himself. He could not go on with this procedure. He was stopped, and quite understandably so, however we do not have the time to explain why it is that a one-sidedness or certain directedness of philosophical thought excludes other directions. We could prove this right out of the context of Heraclitus but it is too difficult for us to attempt here. We will only say that Socrates took up, so to speak, where Heraclitus left off, and so he must have shared and apparently did share the contempt that Heraclitus had for the other Greek philosophers, especially Pythagoras. Heraclitus hated Pythagoras once saying of him that "the learning of many things did not teach him understanding" and that his inquiry did not give him wisdom but merely "a knowledge of many (particular) things" that was "an art of foolishness".(6) He had nothing but contempt for all of them including Homer (although there he was wrong) and he speaks mockingly of them when he says:
"No one of those Who all think they are so wise in the Greek things understands that the Absolute is absolutely apart".(7)
Pythagoras tried to approach the Absolute by creating a sect and through mystical experiences. Out of this school of thought came Empedocles who even believed that he had once been a god, then became a bird, then a man, and finally that he would become a god again. Heraclitus would have, laughed at that. Rather he said:
"The most beautiful ape is uglier than the ugliest man"(8)
meaning that the most beautiful man is also uglier than the ugliest god. He wanted these three absolute realms distinct. He would never have moved in order to become a god.
Pythagoras and Empedocles were very much under the influence of oriental thinking which was also Greek to a very large degree, and which was absolutely rejected (not by Plato) but by Aristotle, Socrates, and Heraclitus. Aristotle was much too sober, much too interested in science to take up such a thing, and as to Socrates and Heraclitus, both were absolutely of the opposite opinion and that means also absolutely opposed to the philosophically muddled Hebrew and Christian idea that man has something divine in him. Man has nothing divine in him. The infinite logos of Heraclitus (which is man) has nothing to do with the idea of an infinite transcendent God, because his infinite logos is not an Absolute. Man is alive, man is a mysterious being that can be, man is a creative creature, but he remains a creature, and since he has nothing divine in him he cannot give up his soul to God after death. His soul does not go back into the substance of God, returning back home, so to speak, after having been initially parted from God's substance. Oh no! What is meant by the soul in the sense of Heraclitus: Namely the human person, is something absolutely different from God or from gods. No substantial inner equality or partnership is allowed. Rather on this one basic thought of Heraclitus, Socrates' own thought starts to move.
He makes the same distinctions with the one exception that he concentrates on the logos of man, searching really into himself, following the saying that was inscribed on the temple at Delphi: Know Thyself. He tried nothing more than to know himself, to find out about himself in order that he might find out about man and especially about the human qualities of man. He has been called an ethical philosopher, the founder of western ethics, but Socrates did not speak about ethics, only Aristotle did. He was not that narrow. He did not create a discipline, he did not want to become an ethical scientist or the founder of the science of ethics (whatever that might be). He just wanted to discover the principle of action in man, what is the source of this creative principle, and how we can use it? This is the central question of pure philosophy and that is what he was after --- the possible answer to this question which he was the first to raise.
If we reflect back for a moment we seem to have proceeded so far that we have philosophers for almost everything. At long last we have a philosopher of science in Heraclitus and now even, a philosopher of philosophy: Namely, Socrates, and there is such a thing as the philosophy of philosophy. It means the power of reflective judgment. We cannot know what science is except philosophically, we cannot know what art is except philosophically, and we cannot know what is except philosophically. All other human creative capabilities are non-reflective except this one. That means they cannot reflect upon themselves. In order to find out what they are we have to ask philosophy. It is a philosophical question what science is! How science proceeds is a scientific question. But what science is in so far as man is concerned, what it is as a human creative capability, what are its limits and what are its sources, are questions that can only be answered by using reflective judgment and judgment is available as a procedure only in philosophy, and it is available only because the judgment of judgment is possible in philosophy. This is the reflective capability of man, where one can philosophically reflect on a thing called the power of judgment (which is the real action principle of philosophy) and determine its limits. Philosophy is that capability of man, the only one, which can know its own limits. Which can find those limits on the basis of reasoning. All the others cannot, except either through practice or through catastrophe.
The clashes are unavoidable. Science must strive to go over its limits, art must strive to go over its limits, religion must, all human capabilities do and must, because otherwise they cannot move. In order to show them their limits and to know about their limits, judgment must be applied. An equilibrium of forces has to be brought into existence and this can only be done philosophically, because philosophy is able to not only know its own limits but also to design them. Otherwise the capability of philosophy would not be a capability of judgment
This might seem complicated but it is quite logical in its structure, because judgment would not be possible if judgment could not be critical of judgment We have in this central capability of man the same miracle that we have in man himself and that is why philosophical inquiry has to start with man himself, with man looking into himself, and reflecting upon himself. That I am an I and a possible You in myself. If I weren't I could not even think. This possible existence is a precondition for thinking. The most refined thinking, the most pure thinking, like philosophy, moves exactly according to the same conditions that man moves. It is also capable of self reflection and that is the real content of the power of judgment which is given to man, and which does not mean wisdom. There are no wise men. Wisdom --- sophia, which is Socrates transcendent absolute, can be approached, because we have the power of judgment and we can exercise that power rightly. We can make the decision for freedom and be certain that we will become wiser and wiser without ever becoming wise, because we can never have wisdom although we can lead ourselves in the direction of wisdom.
So the power of reasoned judgment (what Heraclitus called the infinite logos that is in man) is Socrates' formula, and it is this infinite logos which he tries to analyze and move towards step by step in philosophical practice. To "practice" is one of his main terms. To have telos, to set possible aims and to be able to reason out these possible aims in community with other human minds. Never alone, never trying to be the big shot over everybody, the expert, but always trying it out. From here Socrates goes on to design his own life and the way in which he will proceed in his life. So we will have to see the next time how he unfolded this procedure and what the results were. How he came to his death, how his death is bound up with those results, and finally, why his death, like the death of Jesus of Nazareth, was so unforgettable. Because here he succeeded in doing as Jesus succeeded in doing the greatest thing any human being can achieve: Namely, to make their own death the highest expression of their life and to design their death in such a way as it becomes the pinnacle of their life and the ultimate triumph of their life.