Socrates

Socrates said the very first thing that has to happen for any true knowledge to be gained and to truly be educated was the admission of ignorance, and that's one of the hardest things for any of us to admit, that we are ignorant about anything. But Socrates said once the person admits that he or she is ignorant, now the possibility is opened to lead them to a deeper understanding of truth. Even if you've never taken a course in philosophy before, many people are somewhat familiar with the name Socrates, and perhaps also what is known as the Socratic method of dialogue or discovering truth that he developed. Welcome to the Thursday edition of Renewing Your Mind. I'm Nathan W. Bingham.

Today, R.C. Sproul will introduce us to Socrates, his view of education, and set the context of what life in Athens was like for Socrates, a society that shares many parallels with our day. Here's Dr. Sproul. In the 19th century, one of the most important philosophers in Europe was Søren Kierkegaard, and though we're not going to be looking at Kierkegaard today, I just want to mention in passing that he was known affectionately as the Danish gadfly. That little expression gadfly refers to somebody that kind of stirs the pot by flittering around from group to group engaging people in serious discussions and thought. Well, the first philosopher in history that was known as a gadfly was Socrates. Socrates was called the gadfly of Athens because of the controversy in which he was engaged by trying to provoke people to think more deeply than they were accustomed to doing. Socrates is famous for initiating the phrase, the unexamined life is not worth living. And his passion was to get people to do just that, to examine their lives, to examine their thinking, not to just accept ideas uncritically because they were in vogue or because they were popular, but he wanted to lead them to a kind of self-critical analysis to challenge assumptions that were accepted just by the transfer from one generation to the next. And he lived at a critical period in history, not only for the history of the Greek world but for the history of Western civilization. In fact, some people have argued that ancient Greek civilization was at such a critical moment when Socrates appeared on the scene that he not only saved the civilization of his own nation but that he was the at least temporary savior of Western civilization in his time.

Now, to understand that kind of an evaluation, we have to take a step back and look at some of the background. Socrates was born approximately in the year 468 B.C. Now, I don't mean by that that he was approximately born.

He actually and truly was born. But we don't know exactly what year it was, but it was probably 468, 469 B.C. And that was a very important time in Greek history because Socrates grew up in Athens and lived, in the first instance, during the period of the highest success and power of the Greek nation up until that point and particularly the greatest success of Athens. But it was also during his life that the wars came to pass between the city-state of Athens and the city-state of Sparta. You remember the adage that the Spartans had who trained their young men to be warriors, and when they would go off to war with their shields, the maxim that was given to the young soldier was, you come back with your shield or on it.

That is, you fight to the death. Well, what happened during Socrates' life was that Sparta defeated Athens, and what followed that war was a period of unraveling of Greek culture and a period of great skepticism and disillusionment that gripped the citizens of Athens. Now, it wasn't simply the political and military circumstances that brought this malaise to the culture of Athens, but if you recall in our last lecture, we saw the impasse that arose between the two great thinkers prior to Socrates, Parmenides and Heraclitus. And in simple terms, what many of the common people were saying was, wait a minute, what about this whole endeavor of searching for ultimate truth and for ultimate reality?

It seems like a fool's errand to us. Maybe the skeptics are right that such truth is beyond the scope of our ability to discover it. And they would think like this if the titans of intellectual inquiry like Parmenides and Heraclitus can't agree on ultimate issues. How can you expect us to sort all of these complex metaphysical questions out? So what happened with the decay in the military power, economic power, and political power of Athens coupled with this sense of frustration of trying to gain ultimate truth? The culture kind of disintegrated and grew inward in its attention and began to focus their thinking on this world, on concrete practical matters.

We can't figure out these ultimate questions of truth, but we're still faced with the daily questions of how do we make a living, how do we face the necessities that life imposes upon us from day to day. So we have really the birth of ancient pragmatism. And I might also say it was the birth of ancient humanism, and there was also a disillusionment about religion.

The gods had let the people down. And so now we have a kind of pre-Socratic period of secularism. Now I use those particular descriptive terms for a reason because when we step away from the Greek age and look at our own culture today, many of the critics describe our own culture at the end of the 20th century as humanistic, as secular, and as pragmatic.

And so it's important for us if we can look at an ancient culture that mirrors so many of the life situations that we encounter in our own civilization today, maybe we can learn something from it. But into this vacuum of the decline of Greek civilization stepped a group of teachers who became very important, and they were called the sophists, the sophists, which is a word that comes from the Greek word sophia, which is the word wisdom. In fact, the very word philosophy means phileo sophia, the love of wisdom. Now, the sophists considered themselves, as the word suggests, stages. They were learned people, and at the beginning of the movement of the sophists, there was a certain respectability and dignity to their endeavors. But with the decline of the civilization came also the corruption of the sophist movement. Now I have to say, just as a little parenthesis, as an aside, we don't have a lot of first-hand information about the sophists themselves. I mean, we're not totally in the dark about it, but so much of the information that we have about the sophists in antiquity come to us through those dialogues of Plato that have survived to this day.

And Plato in his day had an extremely negative view of the sophists, so when we consider ancient sophism, we're looking at them through the eyes of one who was sharply critical of them, and so we have to keep that in mind as we analyze them. The sophists, as I say, were professional teachers. What I mean by professional teachers is that they charged fees for their pedagogy, and they were itinerate teachers. That is, they went from village to village and from town to town to give their courses and their teaching.

And so now we have a culture where the art of public speaking now is at a premium because those who are most articulate and most persuasive, who can move the passions and the emotions of the people, have the best chance of becoming the elected officials and hence the governors of the populace. But now the sophists in their teaching, as I said, were concerned with practical matters. They were pragmatists. The truth is defined not by some metaphysical ultimate correspondence to reality, but the truth is discerned by what works, what works in practical terms in the marketplace where we live.

They were the original Madison Avenue ad men whose test for their effectiveness in advertising was not whether the claims for the product actually were true, but rather how effective they were in getting people to purchase the product. So truth was not their interest. Persuasion was their interest. And the school that they developed most significantly was that of rhetoric. Now, we still have rhetoric in our own culture today and we identify it with the art of public speaking. But for the sophists, again, the artfulness of rhetoric focused on the ability of the speaker to move the emotions of the hearer so that they would be persuaded in a certain direction.

Now, we still care about persuasion. I tell my students in the seminary when they come into my courses, I say, you're studying theology here and I think you need to be forewarned when you step into my classroom that I'm not interested simply in transferring historical information from my notebook to yours. I'm out to get your mind. I want to persuade you of the truth of these principles. I'm engaged in apologetics. I'm trying not only to explain these principles, but I'm trying to defend them and to capture your minds in the sense of proving to you that these are sound principles and principles that you ought to embrace and live by. Now, we're still trying to persuade, but in that case, the goal ultimately is to persuade people to acquiesce to truth, not just to persuade them for vested interests, for personal interests, for economic or political aims.

But what had happened with the sophists is their whole focus on persuasion was for mean, pragmatic ends. We think of Demosthenes, the famous orator who practiced his speeches by filling his mouth with pebbles so that he could train his lips and his tongue to be super articulate in the task. Now, it's also at this time that we find the advent of a very important pre-Socratic philosopher whose name was Protagoras, and Protagoras is often considered to be the father of humanism because he gave us the Latin phrase homo mensura, homo mensura, man the measure. And what he was saying is that man is the measure of all things.

Now, again, calling attention to focusing our attention not on some never-never land philosophical speculation of metaphysics, but to concentrate our interests in the welfare of human beings in the here and now. Another important philosopher at this time was a man whose name was Gorgias. Now, that was his whole name. It wasn't Gorgias George, and it wasn't gorgeous in the sense of pretty. His name was Gorgias, and he was important because he was one of the early skeptics. And he said that the good, that which is good or that which is right is that that men perceive to be that which works for their own vested interests.

Let me say it again. The right or the good is defined in terms of what advances your own agenda, your own vested interest. Now, think of this in terms of modern self-interest groups, lobby groups, and all the rest where we just say, well, everybody has a right to advance their own concerns, and we have reduced the very concept of the good or the right to human preferences.

In an age of relativism that says there are no absolute goods or there's no absolute right or wrong, it's however you perceive it, whatever you prefer it to be, that has roots way deep in Western history with the skeptical philosophy of people like Gorgias. Now, it's into that venue, into that environment that Socrates stepped. He was passionately concerned that what was going on around him would be fatal to science, to the pursuit of truth in any arena, to the dignity of the court system, and of the political structures themselves. And at the very heart of his concern was what he perceived to be the wholesale loss of virtue. We are facing the same kind of disintegration in our culture today, a fundamental loss of virtue.

And Socrates was not satisfied to accept this as the fate of Athens. And so he went about the city engaging students, engaging people in deep conversations, trying to awaken them to the deeper questions of truth and the great issues that faced the nation of his day. He wasn't content simply to examine his own life, but he wanted to get other people to begin challenging the assumptions of their culture and to begin examining their own premises and their own thinking. And so he's famous for several things, not the least of which is that he is the one, of course, who invented what we call the Socratic method. And the Socratic method of discovering truth is the method of dialogue. He would engage people in dialogue and ask them probing questions. And as the person would respond, Socrates would help them move along in their own self-examination by asking more questions and deeper questions. In other words, he didn't just stand in the middle of the town square and preach and deliver lectures.

He was more like Lieutenant Colombo, you know, saying, do you mind if I ask you a personal question? And he would then engage people in dialogue. And you see the value of that method of teaching when you see the vast corpus of writings that his most famous pupil wrote, Plato.

When we think of Plato and his writings, what do we call them? The dialogues of Plato, where there's an issue that is introduced at the beginning of the dialogue. And then he moderates a discussion that goes on between representatives of different schools of thought.

And then finally, Socrates comes in the dialogue and unravels the mystery of whatever issue it is that they are discussing. And so, Socrates thought that by forcing people to think, he could move them from that superficial plane of sophism and get them into a more deep consideration of truth. He was, what we might say, the original paradigm of education. His goal was to educate, and that word educate means literally to lead out of. Il duce, the leader, remember?

And ed, or the e at the beginning, means from or out of. Il duce, educate, to lead out of. To lead out of what? To lead out of ignorance. Well, Socrates said the very first thing that has to happen for any true knowledge to be gained, for anyone to ever become knowledgeable, to gain an understanding of virtue, and to truly be educated, was the admission of ignorance.

And that's one of the hardest things for any of us to admit, that we are ignorant about anything. But Socrates said once the person admits that he or she is ignorant, now the possibility is opened to lead them to a deeper understanding of truth. Now again, his principal concern was to come to an understanding of virtue, virtue being the good or the right. And he believed this not only in an abstract way, but in a very concrete way. He believed that how we act, how we behave, is in the first analysis a matter of proper knowledge.

He didn't embrace a biblical concept of original sin as we would, but what he was saying is that part of the problem that we have with our behavior is that we don't know what right behavior is. Before we can possibly act in a good way, we have to first understand what a good form of behavior is. And so he focused his attention on helping people understand virtue. What is honesty?

What is industry? What is justice? And he would push them beyond the idea of vested interests or self-interest to come to the deeper understanding of these concepts by which human life, human virtue, and the virtue of a society stand or falls. Now, one could look at Socrates and say that his life was a failure. He was executed. He was charged with being an atheist because he rejected the pagan deities of the city, but more seriously with corrupting the youth of Athens because he was challenging their ideas, and he was forced to drink the hemlock. And Plato was his most famous student, and Plato presumably attended the execution of Socrates and met with Socrates in his cell and discussed his impending death with him and was overwhelmed by the remarkable calmness and confidence that Socrates had with respect to life after death. Well, as I said, Socrates, to our knowledge, didn't write anything. Virtually what we know of his thinking and we know of his ideas comes through the speeches put in his mouth by his most famous student, Plato, whom we will examine in our next session. Modern society looks very similar to the Athens of Socrates' day with its focus on self and secularism, but thankfully you and I have the truth of God's word and the gospel to proclaim to a lost and dying world.

You're listening to Renewing Your Mind, and that was R.C. Sproul introducing us to Socrates from his series, The Consequences of Ideas. This series is one of our most requested, and we have a special edition DVD set with bonus material that can be yours for your donation of any amount at renewingyourmind.org.

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So perhaps there's someone you'd like to share the DVD set with while still maintaining digital access for yourself. You can make your donation today at renewingyourmind.org. We met Socrates today, and one of his students was Plato, a man whose thinking has had a dramatic impact on how people view the world, even some in the church. So don't miss meeting Plato and the consequences of his ideas tomorrow, here on Renewing Your Mind. Thank you.