The Life of the Mind (27 page)

 

What I called the "quest" for meaning appears in Socrates' language as love, that is, love in its Greek significance of
Eros,
not the Christian
agape.
Love as Eros is primarily a need; it desires what it has not. Men love wisdom and therefore begin to philosophize because they are not wise, and they love beauty, and do beauty, as it
were—philokaloumen,
as Pericles called it in the Funeral Oration
¹¹⁶
—because they are not beautiful. Love is the only matter in which Socrates pretends to be an expert, and this skill guides him, too, in choosing his companions and friends: "While I may be worthless in all other matters, this talent I have been given: I can easily recognize a lover and a beloved."
¹¹⁷
By desiring what it has not, love establishes a relationship with what is not present In order to bring this relationship into the open, make it appear, men want to speak about it—just as the lover wants to speak about the beloved. Because thought's quest is a kind of desirous love, the objects of thought can only be lovable things—beauty, wisdom, justice, and so on. Ugliness and evil are almost by definition excluded from the thinking concern. They may turn up as deficiencies, ugliness consisting in lack of beauty, evil,
kakia,
in lack of the good. As such, they have no roots of their own, no essence that thought could get hold of. If thinking dissolves positive concepts into their original meaning, then the same process must dissolve these "negative" concepts into their original meaninglessness, that is, into nothing for the thinking ego. That is why Socrates believed no one could do evil voluntarily—because of, as we would say, its ontological status: it consists in an absence, in something that is not. And that is also why Democritus, who thought of
logos,
speech, as following action in the same way that the shadow accompanies all real things, thus distinguishing them from mere semblances, counseled against speaking of evil deeds: ignoring evil, depriving it of any manifestation in speech, will turn it into a mere semblance, something that has no shadow.
¹¹⁸
We found the same exclusion of evil when we were following Plato's admiring, affirming wonder as it unfolds into thinking; it is found in almost all Occidental philosophers. It looks as though Socrates had nothing more to say about the connection between evil and lack of thought than that people who are not in love with beauty, justice, and wisdom are incapable of thought, just as, conversely, those who are in love with examining and thus "do philosophy" would be incapable of doing evil.

Where does this leave us in regard to one of our chief problems—the possible interconnectedness of non-thought and evil? We are left with the conclusion that only people inspired by the Socratic eros, the love of wisdom, beauty, and justice, are capable of thought and can be trusted. In other words, we are left with Plato's "noble natures," with the few of whom it may be true that none "does evil voluntarily." Yet the implied and dangerous conclusion, "Everybody wants to do good," is not true even in their case. (The sad truth of the matter is that most evil is done by people who never made up their minds to be or do either evil or good.) Socrates, who, unlike Plato, thought about all subjects and talked with everybody, cannot have believed that only the few are capable of thought and that only certain objects of thought, visible to the eyes of the well-trained mind but ineffable in discourse, bestow dignity and relevance on the thinking activity. If there is anything in thinking that can prevent men from doing evil, it must be some property inherent in the activity itself, regardless of its objects.

 

Socrates, that lover of perplexities, made very few positive statements. Among them are two propositions, closely interconnected, that deal with this subject. Both occur in the
Gorgias,
the dialogue about rhetoric, the art of addressing and convincing the many. The
Gorgias
does not belong among the early Socratic dialogues; it was written shortly before Plato became the head of the Academy. Moreover, its very subject matter is an art or form of discourse that would seemingly lose all sense if it were aporetic. And yet, this dialogue is still aporetic, except that Plato concludes it with one of his myths of a hereafter of rewards and punishments which apparently—that is, ironically—resolve all difficulties. The seriousness of these myths of his is purely political; it consists in their being addressed to the multitude. Yet the myths, certainly non-Socratic, of the
Gorgias
are of importance because they contain, albeit in a non-philosophical form, Plato's admission that men do commit evil acts voluntarily, and the additional implied admission that he, no more than Socrates, knew what to do philosophically with that disturbing fact. We may not know whether Socrates believed that ignorance causes evil and that virtue can be taught; but we do know that Plato thought it wiser to rely on threats.

The two positive Socratic propositions read as follows. The first: "It is better to be wronged than to do wrong," to which Callicles, the interlocutor in the dialogue, replies as all Greece would have replied, "To suffer wrong is not the part of a man at all, but that of a slave for whom it is better to be dead than alive, as it is for anyone who is unable to come either to his own assistance when he is wronged or to that of anyone he cares about."
¹¹⁹
The second: "It would be better for me that my lyre or a chorus I directed should be out of tune and loud with discord, and that multitudes of men should disagree with me rather than that I,
being one,
should be out of harmony with myself and contradict me."
¹²⁰
Which causes Callicles to tell Socrates that he is "going mad with eloquence," and that it would be better for him and everybody else if he would leave philosophy alone.
¹²¹

And there he has a point. It was indeed philosophy, or, rather, the experience of thinking, that led Socrates to make these statements—although, of course, he did not start his enterprise in order to arrive at them, any more than other thinkers embarked upon theirs in order to be "happy."
¹²²
(It would be a serious mistake, I believe, to understand these statements as the results of some cogitation about morality; they are insights, to be sure, but insights of experience, and as far as the thinking process itself is concerned they are at best incidental by-products.)

We have difficulty realizing how paradoxical the first statement must have sounded when it was made; after thousands of years of use and misuse, it reads like cheap moralizing. And the best demonstration of how difficult it is for modern readers to understand the thrust of the second is the fact that its key words, "
Being one
" (preceding "it would be worse for me to be at odds with myself than in disagreement with multitudes of men"), are frequently left out in translation. As to the first, it is a subjective statement; it means: it is better
for me
to suffer wrong than to do wrong. And in the dialogue where it occurs, it is simply countered by the opposite equally subjective statement, which, of course, sounds much more plausible. What becomes apparent is that Callicles and Socrates are talking about a different I: What is good for one is bad for the other.

If, on the other hand, we look at the proposition from the point of view of the world, as distinguished from those of the two speakers, we would have to say: What counts is that a wrong has been done; and for this, it is irrelevant who is better off, the wrong-doer or the wrong-sufferer. As citizens, we must prevent wrong-doing because the world in which we all live, wrong-doer, wrong-sufferer, and spectator, is at stake; the City has been wronged. Our law codes, with their distinction between crimes where indictment is mandatory and transgressions that pertain only to the private affairs of individuals who may or may not want to sue, take this into account. We could almost define a crime as that transgression of the law that demands punishment regardless of the one who has been wronged; the wronged one may feel like forgiving and forgetting, and there may be no danger for others if it can be assumed that the wrong-doer is altogether unlikely to do wrong again. Still, the law of the land permits no option because it is the community as a whole that has been violated.

In other words, Socrates is not talking here in the person of the citizen, who is supposed to be more concerned with the world than with his self; he talks as the man chiefly devoted to thinking. It is as though he said to Callicles: If you were like me, in love with wisdom and in need of thinking about everything and examining, everything, you would know that if the world were as you depict it, divided into the strong and the weak, where "the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must" (Thucydides), so that no alternative exists but to either do or suffer wrong, then it is better to suffer than to do. But the presupposition is of course:
if you are in love with wisdom and philosophizing; if
you know what it means to examine.

To my knowledge there is only one other passage in Greek literature that, in almost the same words, says what Socrates said. "More unfortunate
[kakodaimonesteros]
than the wronged one is the wrong-doer,"
¹²³
reads one of the fragments of Democritus, Parmenides' great adversary, who probably for this reason is never mentioned by Plato. The coincidence seems noteworthy because Democritus, as distinguished from Socrates, was not particularly interested in human affairs but he seems to have been quite interested in the experience of thinking. It looks as though what we are tempted to understand as a purely moral proposition actually arose out of the thinking experience as such.

And this brings us to the second statement, which in fact is the prerequisite for the first one. It, too, is highly paradoxical. Socrates talks of being one and
therefore
not being able to risk getting out of harmony with himself. But nothing that is identical with itself, truly and absolutely
One,
as A is A, can be either in or out of harmony with itself; you always need at least two tones to produce a harmonious sound. Certainly when I appear and am seen by others, I am one; otherwise I would be unrecognizable. And so long as I am together with others, barely conscious of myself, I am as I appear to others. We call
consciousness
(literally, as we have seen, "to know with myself) the curious fact that in a sense I also am for myself, though I hardly appear to me, which indicates that the Socratic "being one" is not so unproblematic as it seems; I am not only for others but for myself, and in this latter case, I clearly am not just one. A difference is inserted into my Oneness.

 

We know of this difference in other respects. Everything that exists among a plurality of things is not simply what it is, in its identity, but it is also different from others; this being different belongs to its very nature. When we try to get hold of it in thought, wanting to define it, we must take this otherness (
altereitas
) or difference into account. When we say what a thing is, we must say what it is
not
or we would speak in tautologies: every determination is negation, as Spinoza has it. Touching on this matter, the problem of identity and difference, there is a curious passage in Plato's
Sophist
that Heidegger has pointed to. The Stranger in the dialogue states that of two things—for instance, rest and motion—"each one is different [from the other], but itself
for itself
the same"
(hekaston heauto tauton)
.
¹²⁴
In interpreting the sentence, Heidegger puts the emphasis on the dative,
heauto,
for Plato does not say, as we would expect,
hekaston auto tauton,
"each one itself [taken out of context] is the same," in the sense of the tautological A is A, where difference arises out of the plurality of things. According to Heidegger, this dative means that "each thing itself is returned to itself, each itself is the same for itself [because it is] with itself.... Sameness implies the relation of with/ that is, a mediation, a connection, a synthesis: the unification into a unity."
¹²⁵

The passage Heidegger is examining occurs in the
Sophist's
final section about the
koinonia,
the "community," the fitting and blending together, of the Ideas, and especially about the possible community of Difference and Identity, which seem to be contraries. "What is different is always so called with reference to other things" (
pros alia
),
¹²⁶
but their opposites, things "that are what they are in themselves"
(kath' hauta),
partake in the "Idea" of difference insofar as they "refer back to themselves"—they are the same with or for themselves, so that each
eidos
is different from the rest, "not by virtue of its own nature, but because it partakes of the character of Difference,"
¹²⁷
that is, not because it has a relation to something else from which it is different (
pros ti
), but because it exists among a plurality of Ideas, and "every entity qua entity harbors the possibility of being looked upon as different from something."
¹²⁸
In our terms, wherever there is a plurality—of living beings, of things, of Ideas—there is difference, and this difference does not arise from the outside but is inherent in every entity in the form of duality, from which comes unity as unification.

 

This construction—Plato's implication as well as Heidegger's interpretation—seems to me erroneous. To take a mere thing out of its context with other things and to look on it only in its "relation" to itself
(kath' hauto),
that is, in its identity, reveals no difference, no otherness; along with its relation to something it is
not,
it loses its reality and acquires a curious kind of eeriness. In that way, it often appears in works of art, especially in Kafka's early prose pieces or in some paintings of van Gogh where a single object, a chair, a pair of shoes, is represented. But these art works are thought-things, and what gives them their meaning—as though they were not just themselves but
for
themselves—is precisely the transformation they have undergone when thinking took possession of them.