Showing posts with label Greek Philosophy. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Greek Philosophy. Show all posts

Sunday, October 24, 2010

Socrates's Defense



Greek philosopher Socrates (ca. 469 B.C.E. - 399 B.C.E.)


Mental and ethical traits such as intelligence and virtue are what make up a person’s character. Personality is a unique set of behavioral and emotional traits and shows in a person’s actions. Reputation is public knowledge and value of an individual. It is important to know the difference because they may not always reflect each other. A person may not always do as their conscience tells them. Here, personality does not reflect character. Reputation is based on others’ knowledge of an individual’s personality, which is subject to change.

Socrates is concerned with his accusers’ conceptions of character, personality, and reputation because he feels that some of the charges against him are based on his reputation among the citizens as an annoying man who has corrupted the youth. The so-called “crimes” of being a “curious person” and a “busybody” are more personality traits than tangible actions that are either just or unjust. Thus, they do not warrant government intervention or punishment. Socrates asks the jury to “concentrate your attention on whether what I say is just or not.” He tells Meletus, “You… have avoided my company and were unwilling to instruct me, but you bring me here, where the law requires one to bring those who are in need of punishment, not of instruction.” Socrates believes that his accusers were rash in their recommendation of punishment when a simple conversation would have been more enlightening to both parties. It is probable that the accusers would have been too annoyed by Socrates or threatened by his argumentative skill to confront him.

Socrates asks his hypothetical interlocutor, “…are you not ashamed of your eagerness to possess as much wealth, reputation and honours as possible, while you do not care for nor give thought to wisdom and truth, or the best possible state of your soul?” Socrates believes that when he examines the people he meets, he is fulfilling his “divine mission” as “a gift of the god to the city” to improve people’s souls by determining whether they have the wisdom they are reputed to have.

The Oracle revealed that there was nobody wiser than he, although he did not believe himself to be wise, so he was confronted with a paradox. He concluded that to begin any argument by admitting ignorance is to start from a neutral perspective so that he may be open to the many different possible truths, while using reason to discern what possibilities are false. Socrates accuses his accusers of lying, slandering him, contradicting themselves, and trying to deceive the jurors. He shows that Meletus contradicts himself in accusing Socrates of both atheism and believing in gods other than those endorsed by the state. He begins by making it clear that he is different from the depiction of him in Aristophanes’s play “The Clouds,” which helped give rise to his reputation as a person concerned with the sky.

Socrates also tells the jurors that they were influenced by that depiction at a young age and that it is unfair for that past event to have such a great influence on jurors’ opinions and he regrets that it is something he is unable to cross-examine. He reasons that if he were truly a corruptor of the youth, then the youth or their families would have brought charges against him instead of Meletus, Anytus, and Lycon. Socrates says, “Someone might say, ‘Are you not ashamed, Socrates, to have followed the kind of occupation that has led to your being now in danger of death?’” and proceeds to argue that there is greater shame in knowing what is virtuous and not doing it because of fear.

Heraclitus would characterize Socrates as a person with more potential for understanding than his accusers. Heraclitus says, “Much learning does not teach insight.” and “Men who are lovers of wisdom must be inquirers into many things indeed.” Socrates’s ability to admit he knows nothing enables him to consider whatever opinions he encounters, and argue against them not based on what he has been taught, but whether the opinion his interlocutor presents makes sense logically.

The mathematikoi is more similar to the Socratic method than the akousmatikoi because the akousmatikoi were more concerned with memorizing Pythagoras’s sayings and were not allowed to interpret, add to, or argue about them. The mathematikoi emphasized understanding and insight and were encouraged to think for themselves about the substance of what was being said. Like the mathematikoi, the Socratic method encourages deliberation instead of mere acceptance and memorization of unproven sayings.

There are two accusations that Socrates must refute with regard to spirituality. He says, “It goes something like this: Socrates is guilty of corrupting the young and of not believing in the gods in whom the city believes, but in other new spiritual things.” Socrates begins by leading Meletus to say something very similar to “not believing in the gods in whom the city believes;” Meletus claims that Socrates does not believe in any gods at all. Socrates insists that he believes the sun and moon to be gods, which Meletus refutes by telling the jury that Socrates believes them to be stone and earth, and since stone and earth may not be gods, Meletus may be right. Then Socrates begins leading Meletus to his logical contradiction. Socrates asks him whether anyone believes in spiritual activities who does not believe in spirits, and Meletus says no. Socrates states that Meletus has said that Socrates believes in spiritual things and that “if I believe in spiritual things I must quite inevitably believe in spirits” and he asks Meletus “Do we not believe spirits to be either gods or the children of gods?” Meletus responds affirmatively, which proves that Socrates believes in spirits, so he believes in gods, so he cannot be an atheist.

The goal of the elenchus is to find logical contradictions in the interlocutor’s argument and to conduct the conversation in a way that exposes that contradiction. In this elenchus, Socrates is faced with two accusations that can be shown conflict with each other as long as he can prove Meletus believes a third thing about Socrates. Socrates is accused of believing in some false gods or spirits, but he is also accused of not believing in the city’s gods. Once Socrates can get Meletus to say that Socrates teaches the youth about spiritual things besides the gods that the state endorses, and also that Socrates is an atheist, then he can go about proving to Meletus, that he has contradicted himself, through a reductio ad absurdum. At the end of this, Socrates says, “Socrates is guilty of not believing in gods but believing in gods” and ridicules the statement.

Although at first glance it might appear that Socrates is leading Meletus into a trap, Socrates makes it clear that Meletus is among those making the accusations. So when Socrates leads Meletus to say that Socrates doesn’t believe in any gods at all, Meletus and the other accusers’ assertion has fallen through. Socrates has brought up a new accusation, but has disproved it and two other accusations simultaneously.


Originally Written in October or November 2007 as a college essay
Originally Published on October 24th, 2010



For more entries on justice, crime, and punishment, please visit:
http://www.aquarianagrarian.blogspot.com/2010/10/thrasymachus-support-for-justice-being.html
http://www.aquarianagrarian.blogspot.com/2014/04/social-policies-for-2012-us-house.html

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Aristotle’s Criticisms of Plato’s Form of the Good

                  

Greek philosophers Plato (ca. 427 - 347 BC) and Aristotle (384 B.C.E. - 322 B.C.E.)


The categories are Aristotle’s attempt to place the senses of being into ten classifications. They are substance, quantity, quality, relation, place, time, position, state, action, and affection.

Aristotle argues against the Platonists’ view that there is such a thing as the “form of the good.” Aristotle believes that good is not a single, common universal because what it is to be good is particular to the essence of the individual; that is, what makes something good varies depending on what the thing is.

Aristotle defines what goodness is with respect to each category of being. For example, he says the good place is the right situation, the good relative is the useful, and the good time is the opportune moment. He says that if good were a common and single universal, it would be spoken of in only one of the categories and not in them all.

To describe two different individuals as “good” is to assign them a homonymous quality. They are both called “good,” but what it is to be good is different for the two individuals. For example, what it is to be a good master is different from what it is to be a good slave because different properties define each individual and different properties define what makes each individual good. Were a slave to try to be a good slave by partaking in that which makes his master a good master, he would either cease to be good, cease to be a slave, or both.

Aristotle says that “good” is the same as “good itself” because they both have the same account of “good” in the same way that “the human being itself” and “human being” have the same account of “human being”. To argue this is to disagree with the Platonic idea that “good” and “human being” are individuals that partake of the forms “good itself” and “the human being itself.” To add the word “itself” to an idea is to suggest that the idea is a form that is dependent upon the things that partake of it.

Aristotle also says, “good itself will be no more of a good by being eternal; for a white thing is no whiter if it lasts a long time than if it lasts a day”. Aristotle means that just because some individual may have a quality that is thought of as a perfection, it does not mean that that individual is any more perfect with respect to what makes that individual what it is. In other words, if an individual (“f”) has a perfection (“p”), its “f-ness” is not affected.

Next, for the Platonist who would respond to his criticisms by distinguishing goods which are good in their own right from goods which are merely useful, Aristotle poses a dilemma. He asks, “is nothing except the Form good in its own right, so that the Form will be futile?” He then says that if practical wisdom, pleasures, and honors are goods in their own right, and if there is a Form of good, then the same account of good turns up in all of them. He says those three things have different and dissimilar accounts, so “the good is not something common corresponding to a single Form”.

When Aristotle says that good “is not like homonyms resulting from chance,” he means that it is not due to chance that one definition of “good” shares something with another. “Good” has many meanings depending on the nature of the individual to which it is applied. This is why the idea “good” can be represented in a single word; for each individual, there exists a property or a set of properties required for the individual to be called “good.”

Aristotle also asks whether good is spoken of by analogy. This may be so, as when two individuals each have the set of properties that respectively make them good, the goodness of one individual is analogous to the goodness of the other with respect to what the individuals are and what makes them good, even though the properties that make them good may be in completely different categories.

Aristotle says that in trying to determine whether there is a Form of the Good, we are looking for “the sort of good which a human being can possess or achieve in action.” He says, “If there is some one good predicated in common, or some separable good, itself in its own right,” that is not the sort of good that we can possess or achieve. He disagrees with the proposition that if we have a view to the Form of the Good “as a sort of pattern, we shall also know better about the goods that are goods for us, and if we know about them, we shall hit on them.”

Aristotle says it is useless for a craftsman to know good itself because the craftsman has nothing to gain by knowing it. What makes a doctor or a weaver or a carpenter useful is his understanding of the work he practices; not simply knowing good itself and thus being able to partake of it.

It may not be the case that the “possess and achieve in action” argument is an argument against Plato at all. What is probable is that it was not intended as an argument, but rather as a rationalization. In this section of the text, Aristotle is not using his statement about the uselessness of understanding the Form of the Good to mankind to argue against its existence, but  rationalizing the difficulty of determining, once and for all, the answer to the question of whether there exists a Form of the Good.

Aristotle’s weakest argument against Plato is the argument that “good itself will be no more of a good by being eternal, for a white thing is no whiter if it lasts a long time than if it lasts a day”. Aristotle is trying to say that if an individual “f” has a perfection “p”, the “f-ness” possessed by “f” is no greater. This statement seems true, as it does not contradict Aristotle’s assertion that for an individual to have a superfluous characteristic in a state of perfection does not make that individual any more “good.” However, the first statement makes it necessary to ask, What does Aristotle think is the property that allows for goodness itself to be good?

Aristotle’s strongest argument against Plato is the argument that good is spoken of as an analogy. If two individuals are described as good, a Platonist would take that to mean that both individuals partake of the same thing, goodness. Aristotle, on the other hand, understands that the individuals are good with respect to what it is for each individual to be good. He rejects the idea that their goodness is the same, but he also rejects the idea that they are both called good for no reason whatsoever. Instead, he sees goodness as something abstract and difficult to define, proposing that the goodness possessed by the individuals are analogous with respect to what makes the individuals what they are. This argument is fair to Plato in that it seems to reconcile that notion with Plato’s position that the Form of the Good exists as something that encompasses all different types of good.



Originally written in November or December 2007 as a college essay






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Thrasymachus’ Support for Justice Being the Advantage of the Stronger

 Greek sophist Thrasymachus of Chalcedon
(ca. 459 - 400 B.C.E.)


In Book I of Plato’s Republic, Thrasymachus claims that “the just is nothing other than the advantage of the stronger.” Asked by Socrates to explain the statement, Thrasymachus says that in each city that is ruled tyrannically, democratically, or aristocratically, the ruling group is master. He says, “each ruling group sets down laws for its own advantage; a democracy sets down democratic laws, a tyranny, tyrannic laws; and the others do the same. And they declare that what they have set down… is just for the ruled, and the man who departs from it they punish as a breaker of the law and a doer of unjust deeds.” He says, “in every city the same thing is just, the advantage of the established ruling body. It surely is master, so the man who reasons rightly concludes that everywhere justice is the same thing, the advantage of the stronger.”

While Socrates examines Thrasymachus’ point of view, he gets Thrasymachus to say that it is just to obey the rulers, and also that rulers sometimes makes mistakes, setting down some laws correctly and some incorrectly. Thrasymachus agrees that a law that sets down what is advantageous for the rulers is correct, and the law that sets down what is disadvantageous for the rulers is incorrect.

Socrates tells him that, according to his argument, “it’s just to do not only what is advantageous for the stronger but also the opposite, what is disadvantageous”. Thrasymachus defends his statements by saying, “I suppose that each [the doctor and the calculator]…, insofar as he is what we address him as, never makes mistakes.” He says, “The man who makes mistakes makes them on account of failure in knowledge and is in that respect no craftsman.” and “…the ruler, insofar as he is a ruler, does not make mistakes; and not making mistakes, he sets down what is best for himself.”

Socrates and Thrasymachus agree that the doctor is one who cares for the sick and not primarily a money-maker, and that the pilot is a ruler of sailors and not primarily a sailor. They also agree that the art, whether it is medicine or ruling sailors, is “directed toward seeking and providing for the advantage of each”. Socrates says “there isn’t ever anyone who holds any position of rule, insofar as he is a ruler, who considers or commands his own advantage rather than that of what is ruled and of which he himself is the craftsman; and it is looking to this and what is advantageous and fitting for it that he says everything he says and does everything he does.”

Here, Thrasymachus, rather than agreeing, tells Socrates that he thinks that shepherds, cowherds, and rulers only take care of their subjects as it relates to how they themselves, the rulers, will benefit, and that he thinks that Socrates would disagree. Thrasymachus reasons that “the just man everywhere has less than the unjust man”, and he speaks of situations in which the just man suffers more than the unjust. He says there is more advantage in being unjust than there is in being just, and that “injustice… is mightier, freer, and more masterful than justice”, reiterating that the just is the advantage of the stronger, and adding that “the unjust is what is profitable and advantageous for oneself.” He thinks that injustice rules the just, that people who serve make their rulers happy but do not make themselves happy. Socrates responds to this by suggesting that Thrasymachus thinks of the shepherd as primarily a money-maker and not a shepherd, and argues that “art surely cares for nothing but providing the best for what it has been set over”.

They agree that rulers rule willingly, though not voluntarily, as they demand wages. Socrates says, “the benefit the craftsmen derive from receiving wages comes to them from their use of the wage-earner’s art in addition.” Thrasymachus agrees with Socrates that if the craftsman were not paid, he would derive no benefit from practicing his craft, and so Socrates says that “no art or kind of rule provides for its own benefit, but… it provides for and commands the one who is ruled, considering his advantage – that of the weaker – and not that of the stronger.” He says that decent men rule because they fear being ruled by a worse man were they to choose not to rule, and so they rule out of necessity, and the ruled “choose to be benefited by another rather than to take the trouble of benefiting another.”

Thrasymachus maintains that injustice is more profitable than justice, and says that justice is high-minded innocence and injustice is good counsel. He says that “those who can do injustice perfectly… and are able to subjugate cities and tribes” are good and prudent. He says that injustice is among virtue and wisdom, and justice is among their opposites. Socrates says, “if you had set injustice down as profitable but had nevertheless agreed that it is viciousness or shameful… we would have something to say… But as it is… injustice is fair and mighty, and, since you also dared to set it down in the camp of virtue and wisdom, you’ll set down to its account all the other things which we used to set down as belonging to the just”, and Thrasymachus agrees.

When Socrates asks Thrasymachus whether the just man and the unjust man would want to and would claim they deserve to get the better of each other, he says yes. He also says that “the just man is like the wise and good, but the unjust man like the bad and unlearned.” He says that the good and wise man will want to get the better of the unlike, while the bad and unlearned man will want to get the better of both the like and the unlike. Socrates says, “the just man has revealed himself to us as good and wise, and the unjust man unlearned and bad”, and Thrasymachus uneasily agrees to this.

Socrates says, “if justice is indeed both wisdom and virtue… it is also mightier than injustice, since injustice is lack of learning”. Thrasymachus tells Socrates that justice is not wisdom, and therefore a city that enslaves another does so with injustice, but if justice is wisdom, it does so with justice.

Thrasymachus agrees that injustice produces quarrels, justice produces friendship, and that if a group of people with some common unjust enterprise would be more able to accomplish something if they didn’t act unjustly to each other. Likewise, Thrasymachus agrees with Socrates’ assertion that if injustice should come into being within one man, that man will cease to be of one mind with himself, and he would be an enemy to himself, to just men, and to gods.

Socrates and Thrasymachus agree that there is some work and some virtue that belong to a horse, and to eyes and ears. Socrates asks if things could do their work if their virtue were to be replaced with vice, and Thrasymachus says that they would work badly. They agree that the soul must have some virtue, and that it would not accomplish its work were it deprived of its virtue. Socrates reiterates that the virtue of the soul is justice, and argues that this means that the just man and the just soul will have a good life, and that “it is not profitable to be wretched; rather it is profitable to be happy”, and also that “injustice is never more profitable than justice.” Thrasymachus ends the discussion by saying that he does not know what the just is, nor whether it is a virtue or whether a just man is happy or unhappy.


Originally Written in October or November 2007 as a college essay



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Aristotle and Rousseau on the Natural Political Association of Men

    
Aristotle (384-322 BC) and Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778)

While Rousseau and Aristotle both understand that labor creates a need for self-sufficiency, the two authors’ views on what is natural, what relationships are natural, how to view natural skills, and the division of labor differ greatly. Rousseau’s arguments are supported better than Aristotle’s.

Aristotle claims that “man is by nature a political animal” “in a higher degree than… other… animals,” and that the political association “completes and fulfills the nature of man… and he is himself ‘naturally a polis-animal.”

Aristotle sees language as a method of signifying perceptions of pleasure and pain, good and evil, and the just and the unjust to one another, and to declare what is advantageous. He believes that associations between people communicating what things they think are advantageous is what “makes a family and a city.” He says that a “final and perfect association, formed from a number of villages” “may be said to have reached the height of full self-sufficiency,” coming into existence for the sake of life and “for the sake of a good life.”

Aristotle’s asserts that “master and slave have accordingly a common interest,” which he supports by saying that an intelligent person whom can exercise forethought “is naturally a ruling and master element” while a person whom can use his bodily power to do physical work “is a ruled element.”

Aristotle agrees with Rousseau that the master / slave relationship is, or at least should be, one that exists for the mutual benefit of both, although Rousseau would not consider such a relationship “natural.” Rousseau believes that our reciprocal dependence on each other is what makes it necessary for each of us to do some work for the benefit of all of society, and that to enslave someone is to create in him dependence on others.

Rousseau thinks that political inequality is established or authorized by the consent of men, whom afford each other different privileges. He believes that slavery did not exist in the state of nature. He says, “since the bonds of servitude are formed only from the mutual dependence of men and the reciprocal needs that unite them, it is impossible to enslave a man without first putting him in the position of being unable to do without another; a situation which, as it did not exist in the state of nature, leaves each man there free of the yoke, and renders vain the law of the stronger.”

We must take into consideration the way our authors think of nature. Aristotle says, “Nature… makes nothing in vain,” and “Nature… makes each separate thing for a separate end; and she does so because the instrument is most perfectly made when it serves a single purpose and not a variety of purposes.” He believes that "every city exists by nature; the ‘nature’ of things consists in their end or consummation.”

Rousseau believes that in the state of nature, “all things move in… a uniform manner… the face of the earth is not subject to those brusque and continual changes caused by the passions and inconstancy of united peoples.” He considers the moment  at which  humans  left the state of nature “the moment when, right taking the place of violence, nature was subjected to law; to explain by what sequence of marvels the strong could resolve to serve the weak, and the people to buy imaginary repose at the price of real felicity.”

People attempt to get out of the state of nature by seeing nature and subjecting it to law, according to Rousseau. He claims that the “first source of inequality among men” is the perfection and deterioration of some individuals whom acquire diverse qualities “which were not inherent in their nature.”

When Aristotle writes that an intelligent master whom can exercise forethought in order to enslave a person suited to physical work, he calls the master a “naturally… ruling… element.” Aristotle thinks the master/slave relationship is a natural one, while Rousseau disagrees. Since, according to Rousseau, we leave nature by subjecting it to law, he would be likely to say that we could end what Aristotle considers “natural” slavery (although Rousseau himself would not share in that designation) by incorporating a system of justice, law, and equality into slavery, and ensuring that neither slave nor master takes advantage of the other without willingly giving something of himself.

If Aristotle thinks that “the ‘nature of things consists in their end or consummation”, then it would be reasonable to expect him to think that the nature of human political society is one that is complete; a polis which is all the villages of the world united. On the contrary, Aristotle thinks that some people are naturally suited to rule, and some are naturally suited to work and be subject to rule. His view that “Nature…  makes each separate thing for… a single purpose and not a variety of purposes” seems problematic because this is to suggest that a person who is born a slave shall never become free or even a master. Aristotle’s view that a master will always be a master and a slave will always be a slave will certainly not bring about a polis of all united villages because there will always be those who claim they have authority over other people, and the master / slave relationship will often be subject to abuses.

Rousseau’s view that men leave the state of nature by observing it and imposing upon it a system of law is better supported than Aristotle’s argument. Rousseau believes that reciprocal dependence makes work necessary, but he does not use this to justify the taking of slaves. He understands that mutual dependence causes people to work together, performing different tasks at different times, so that all tasks may be accomplished simultaneously and the benefits accorded equally to all members of society.

Aristotle’s view of nature suggests that he would not want people to have diverse job training, as “Nature… makes each separate thing for… a single purpose and not a variety of purposes.” Believing in such a statement would seem likely to contribute to disorder and undermine the cause of societal self-sufficiency, because it would make a farmer idle in the winter, as he would have no crops to tend to.




Written in April or May 2008



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