Posted by:
Ikari
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Date: December 09, 2016 05:52PM
I appreciate your response, as I had the same concern as Human above and agree with them concerning the way that Socrates is portrayed in Plato’s dialogues.
Unfortunately with this response you have not answered the question that Human posed. They asked for quotations demonstrating and acting as evidence of your evaluation of Socrates’ character. This is precisely what you have avoided stating. This is important so as to avoid misunderstanding and misrepresenting another’s words.
First, Plato is the author of the Republic, and Socrates is one of the characters within the dialogue. Socrates himself wrote nothing; the accounts that we have of his life and words come through the intermediary of others, in this case through Plato. In this part of the Republic, Socrates’ interlocutor is Glaucon (Plato is not present as a character within the dialogue), and they are discussing the idea of justice and the organization of the state. The story of the cave comes about in response to a question concerning education (and thus fits within the context of the dialogue as a whole; “This whole image, Glaucon, must be fitted together with what we said before” (517b); and especially with the two images that brianberkeley mentions in the OP) that “Education isn’t what some people declare it to be, namely, putting knowledge into souls that lack it, like putting sight into blind eyes.” Rather, “education takes for granted that sight is there but that it isn’t turned the right way or looking where it ought to look, and it tries to redirect it appropriately.” Furthermore, this conversion is concerned with “turning the whole soul until it is able to study that which is and the brightest thing that is, namely, the one we call the good” (518c, d). I find this to be a powerful teaching, especially as an educator, which does not locate knowledge within myself as the instructor that can then be poured into and dispensed for students, but rather that the power and capacity for knowledge is within them and that my goal as an instructor is not to simply report accumulated facts or share pieces of information or knowledge, but to help develop the kind of critical thinking that will allow them to examine the world as well as their lives so as to live with dignity and responsibility. In this sense I see absolutely no “contempt for the ignorant, brutish cave dwellers who don’t accept the philosopher as the enlightened source of light and knowledge he considers himself to be.”
Furthermore, Socrates is distinguishing between two kinds of knowledge, between the sensible on one hand and the intelligible on the other, which indeed he considers the latter to be superior to the former. Your comments seem to reduce this difference to a “greatly expanded knowledge of true reality,” a formulation that is certainly not Plato’s and I must confess I don’t understand what that means. Plato shows the difficulty of what he is trying to convey by using this illustration of the cave and the comparison of two ostensibly sensible things (i.e. the difference between the shadows on the wall and the objects themselves, as well as the fire in the cave and the sun) to represent the difference between what we perceive and the world of the forms. This is the difference which he will leverage in many of different dialogues, for example in the Euthyphro wherein he asks Euthyphro to not only give him an example of piety, but rather to tell him what piety itself is (“Bear in mind then that I did not bid you tell me one or two of the many pious actions but that form itself that makes all pious actions pious… tell me then what this form itself is, so that I may look upon it, and using it as a model, say that any action of your or another’s that is of that kind is pious, and if it is not that it is not” (6d, e)), a task to which Euthyphro, as well as pretty much all of Socrates’ interlocutors, find themselves unequal to following the questions that Socrates’ will pose to them after their attempts at a definition. This is Socrates’ genius, and the mistake that he will claim that others make is to impute to him possession of the knowledge that he demonstrates through his questioning that the other does not have. This is the assumption that he vehemently contests in the Apology, wherein he describes the kind of human wisdom that he might be said to possess. After questioning one of those in the city considered wise and finding they did not possess the knowledge they professed, he thinks “I am wiser than this man; it is likely that neither of us knows anything worthwhile, but he thinks he knows something when he does not, whereas when I do not know, neither do I think I know; so I am likely to be wiser than he to this small extent, that I do not think I know what I do not know” (21d). If this can be interpreted as arrogance then it certainly differs in character from the kind that boasts and claims to know something that another does not, and does not resemble one “who is condemned by the rich yet ignorant because he tried to share his greater knowledge with them.” Indeed, Socrates qualifies his speech when explaining the allegory of the cave by stating that “whether it’s true or not, only the god knows” (517b).
You state that “instead of rejoicing in the tiny glimpse of a bigger world than the cave, using that as a motivation to explore and learn more he decides to go enlighten the cave dwellers with his superior newfound knowledge.” This seems to ignore the process whereby one becomes adjusted to seeing things outside the cave, where “at first, he’d see shadows most easily, then images of men and other things in water, then the things themselves. Of these, he’d be able to study the things in the sky and the sky itself more easily at night, looking at the light of the stars and the moon, than during the day, looking at the sun and the light of the sun” (516a). Furthermore there is no point in which the one who has been outside (who in Socrates’ telling is as if “someone dragged him away from there by force” (515e)) decides to return and tell the others; Socrates indeed speculates concerning the situation of the one who has seen beyond the shadows, but nowhere does that person take it upon themselves to “enlighten” others.
To say that “we humans around in the 21st century understand that Socrates and Plato really weren’t that knowledgeable or enlightened” is in my opinion an incredible dismissal and repudiation of some of the greatest and most influential thinkers to have ever lived. The questions that they posed are ones that we still grapple with today when we ask such questions as “what is justice?” “what is truth?” or “what is the good life?” Any meditation on these issues or those surrounding them, even if it disagrees with what Plato lays out, still has to consider and respond to the way that he takes them up. And while certainly one may object to what Plato has to say, I think that such objections should be done in reference to what he actually has to say and not a caricature or misrepresentation of them; it is on that basis that I think fruitful discussions can be had.