Socrates engages in near-constant flirtations with skeptical positions and sophistic manipulations.
The most basic reading of this would attribute to him strangely modern presuppositions: either that morality can undergird manipulations/bad arguments with exculpatory/ulterior motives or that in the absence of accessible truth/definitions still virtue/education/good-faith must be preserved by Socratic figures.
Is there anything to the similarities we are finding between Socrates and the Pyrrhonians/Sophists/Pyrrhonists? Perhaps a pragmatic turn, an intentional divide, or a satirical mirroring?
It would appear that Socrates is the ideal Pyrrhonian--he doesn't ever seem to advance a thesis, which even the Pyrrhonians fell victim to ("It is not even possible to know whether or not it is possible to know..." etc., is still a proposition, after all). In some ways, Socrates seems to have abandoned the project of epistemic knowledge altogether and devoted his time to developing the faculties of others.
ReplyDeleteI'm hesitant, though, to draw a direct relationship between Socrates and the Pyrrhonists. We should probably read the manipulations and rhetoric of the character as trying to outflank the arguments of the skeptics by accepting some tacit assumptions (i.e. the only conclusions are aporetic) but changing the nature of argument and persuasion itself. The greatest distinction between Socrates and a true Pyrrhonian is that Socrates is, fundamentally, a teacher, while the Pyrrhonian has only a doctrine to spout, and perhaps this is where we identify the pragmatic turn.
I agree, especially to your last point. Socrates is aware of the difficulty of knowledge, but his main concern is character, and that we must attend to whether settled knowledge is accessible or not.
DeleteI've been wondering the same thing. I think this it is Socrates being more pragmatic because of the historical context (30 oligarchs) and I think Plato actually believed a lot of these things (particularly the idea that not everyone is capable of critical thinking).
ReplyDeleteOr it could be that Plato is trying to show how rare a skill critical thinking is by showing people like Glaucon getting swept away by Socrates arguments even though they are full of fallacies.
That's an interesting thought. The ability/disposition to think critically might indeed have seemed rarified in the fourth century, as it was in some sense newly invented (literacy was rare and specialize then, too, and perhaps it would have been hard to imagine how widespread it could later become).
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