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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These are all ideas with him and according to Socrates man is a maker of ideas. He does not say, like Plato, that there are eternal ideas and man tries to participate in them. No! Man is always a free maker of ideas, an inventor, and this is exactly what Socrates discovers. Men live by ideas. They are permanently producing ideas. Let us not address ourselves solely to the quality of those ideas but also to the fact that men are permanently producing them. They are idea producing beings and that makes for their transcendence. The only question is how are these ideas to be produced? They can be produced reasonably or they cannot. They can be great ideas and wise ideas or they can be foolish ideas and small ides. The criterion is just this discussion of reason. If we move according to philosophic reason (not merely according to rationality for rationality is not reason) always keeping in mind that we can have it out with each other, always looking for the best reason, always asking ourselves if it brings more freedom, more justice, more beauty, and more meaning into the world? Because if it does, if it contains a deeper meaning in itself, them it might approach absolute meaning, and if so, then let us do that, let us follow it. This is the simple thing that he discovers. This capacity of reasoning things out together in order to create meaning by making ideas and approaching truth by going in the direction of truth. Truth means here only the capability of bringing a deeper and higher meaning into things and the world. To make things just, to make matters just, to behave more justly, more freely, and more truly. That is the way to approach absolute truth and we all have this knowledge in ourselves. That is what Socrates tries to prove. The knowledge given to man is just this restricted knowledge. Not the absolute knowledge of the gods but the logos by means of which we can approach the Absolute. He does not mean goodness (although he himself sometimes calls it goodness). He means wisdom, he means truth.
Now Socrates and Abraham are especially related to each other in their thinking. Abraham was a man of pure faith (not pure conviction, which we should call philosophic faith but rather what we usually call faith, religious faith). So being a man of pure faith and a great religious thinker he makes this absolute concept of a God Creator which gives us the most reasonable religion possible and that has yet shown up. His God reasons with him. The power of judgment that is possible in every man is already practiced by Abraham. It remained only for Socrates to discover that this was the central capability of man (and not just of the few exceptions), and in discovering this central capability of man, this capability of moving according to reason, of moving towards truth and wisdom, he discovered another thing. He discovered that the practice of reason leads to faith. First, to philosophic faith, which is not really faith but rather the conviction by which every man convinces himself that there is a meaning to Being and that every other person has the power of judgment, because if a man begins the practice of philosophizing he cannot avoid becoming convinced that he and every other person has this power. If man can create meaning then there is not the slightest doubt any more that there is a meaning to Being because how else could man create meaning? This proof of Socrates is absolute so when Jaspers speaks today of philosophical faith he is still a little muddled as are most philosophers on this issue. There is no faith required in philosophy. Only the courage of Socrates to take upon oneself the absolute uncertainty of man and then go the way of pure thinking and start philosophizing. As soon as this courage (or what I called the decision for freedom) is there and is made then the conviction that there is a meaning to Being grows and can never be entirely rejected. Socrates did this for us. He wanted us all to go the way of judging and philosophizing because he was convinced that every human being should be a philosophical being. Otherwise he cannot become a free human self. He did not teach philosophy. He practiced philosophy and he wanted us to practice philosophy. In going this way he gains faith or at least he approaches faith. He comes so close that if he were to take another step he would leap right into faith (which, if he ever doubted divinity although he says he never doubted divinity, would be quite possible). He approached philosophy in this way and as his life went on his faith became even stronger although he still takes the skeptical precaution of the philosopher never to talk about. Rather he does a much better thing.
Friedrich Nietzsche once said that if we were to consider the Homeric and Orphic religions as well as all of the other cults that prevailed in Greece, there was one thing that struck him most about them when compared to all of the other religions in the world and that was the tremendous ingrained gratefulness and gratitude of the Greeks.(9) This gratitude for having life, for having been given life, under whatever conditions was best manifested in Socrates. Plato thought it was necessary to at least say there is a life after death and a place where the souls will be judged and transformed. Socrates does not speak about the transformation of souls or even of souls. He says (and it sounds rather skeptical although it is also joyful, because it is spoken in the manner of the ancient Talmudists with which Greek thinking at its best has much in common):
"if there is a life after death that is fine, because then I can carry on forever this important discussion about what truth is, what justice is, what courage is, and what freedom is. I will be able to do it with more enlightened men then myself, with Heraclitus and Homer and all of the heroes and wise men of former times. They will all have to answer me."
That means he intends to be a gadfly in heaven too. Not only just to have died in Athens and no longer have the opportunity to be that cursed gadfly which he always was, telling the people "You are not wise, you only think you are wise", showing them, provoking then, trying to wake them up to the realities of the inner human and creative life; but also to be that gadfly in heaven and this is the only way he can think of heaven.
Or, he says:
"I die and everything is over. Everything is forgotten, and that is fine too, because I have had such a tremendous labor in my life that it will be a good sleep."
It all sounds very ironical but let us just for a moment translate it into religious language and see how it fits. In that sense, he says:
"I thank you God for having given me life regardless of the conditions, be it so or be it so. With life hereafter or with no life hereafter, it has been good."
Then, it becomes one of the greatest religious confessions that has ever been made. And what he says contains this confession in its ironical form but there is a condition to it and also an allowance. Because if divinity grants him life after death he is not as ambitious as Plato. Even after death he does not ask to become divine or to be anything more than what he has been created to be.
After death he wants and expects only to be Socrates-
again, a human being philosophizing under better conditions perhaps, but not a god, not something divine. Even THEN he doesn't want to become superior, he doesn't want to have another quality, and this also belongs to his inherent gratitude. This is his religious confession, the best one a philosopher has ever made, and it adds to the absolute quietness with which he meets death. He designs for himself within this situation a death that could not have been designed better and he designs it consciously. You can see it clearly in those three dialogues. First, he meets his death halfway and then, he shakes hands. By that he confesses to say:
This is the right moment for me to die because this is my highest deed. Once more I can give meaning to life and manifest truth.
So he really diem happily and he is about the only person we know of historically who can convince us that he really did die happily.
I cannot see how anyone can avoid this conclusion if he reads the Platonic dialogues. The death is so completely described as having been creatively designed by the person himself. He has looked into himself, he has questioned himself and tried to know himself, and finally he has found himself which means he is happy, because Socrates definition of happiness (which ironically he took up from all of the common people) is only to be able to live with oneself but to do that one must first have found oneself. You can see how ironically he handles all of those who say to him that they want to be happy. How he shows them that they don't know what they want because they don't have the slightest conception of what happiness is and that they will change their mind about what they think will make then happy every day. That even if,they could be made happy in the way they now wish it they might in the end become most unhappy, because the gods are very ironical. I think all of that is true and it has been experienced by everybody. But Socrates had a very definite opinion about what happiness can be because he discovered the Self. The creative Self that every man can become: Namely, Man, and every man is not Man but can only become Man. He can BECOME this absolute Self as God had intended it to be, and he can become it by making peace with himself and by creating a living peace within himself. If a man can show that he is able to live a long life with himself, that he can endure himself, that both he and himself can come to have a liking for each other, then that is the greatest achievement a man can have, and this achievement is happiness. Happiness is the harmony with oneself, not just the peace, but the harmony and this harmony has been reached by Socrates and that is his testament to us that we can also reach it.
We cannot reach it by only conversing with ourselves psychologically. We have to converse with others and that means really converse, not just discuss, because all of these are matters that can never be known but only approached. But if we can approach them in thought and deed, because in philosophy thought and deed are the same, then we will have accomplished our creative work. From there all of the other creative work of man can be lightened, can be related to it, because there is no other creative work possible either in science, art, or love without this central knowledge. Here is the source that nourishes all of them.
Socrates had come to the center and found this source, and from the center a constellation became possible. At first it was an artificial constellation, a metaphysical one, so we have had to go back to the center and hold on to it in order to find possible ways of creating a new constellation. Without Socrates no step would have been possible in that direction. This is what he did for us.
Next we will discuss Jesus of Nazareth, the late comer in our row of original thinkers, who would have been impossible without Socrates, because after the discovery comes the joy, and after the power of judgment which is the central power of the human mind comes the power of the human heart, or what Pascal called the "reason of the human heart". It could only be a late-coming development. Everything else, so to speak, had to be there before this last message of joy could be heard. All of those in whose footsteps we have been following were messengers of joy, but none perhaps greater than Socrates, who could die so gladly, so quietly, and so peacefully, because he knew that from that moment on man could not forget himself entirely any more, because he had looked into himself and found his greatest capability.