Ancient Philosophies as a Way of Life: Socrates

[Music] Stanford University so my name is John Hennessy and I'm the current president of Stanford University were delighted to have you here for the Tanner lectures I can't help but mentioning that we're gathered here in the Elliott conference hall Elliott Leventhal conference hall Elliott Leventhal was a long distinguished devoted member of the faculty in engineering who had a great fascination for the humanities and the role he managed who recently passed away but I think it's one of the remarkable things we have on this campus a broad interest in in intellectual pursuits from all members of the campus community I'm pleased to welcome you to the first of two Tanner lectures on human values that will be given this year by Professor John Cooper his topic is ancient philosophies as ways of life and as John just mentioned to me you can tell there's lots of interest in the history of philosophy and it's wonderful to see that it's an honor to be able to offer the Tanner lectures at Stanford they were established in 1978 by Obert Clarke Tanner and the lecture series gives us an opportunity to invite nationally and an internationally acclaimed speakers whose work explores fundamental human problems from a range of perspectives Ober Tanner was an industrialists and legal scholar who studied philosophy at Harvard and Stanford and later served as a member of the Stanford Faculty in religious studies and he's established this lecture series at eight other institutions in addition to Stanford before I introduce professor Cooper I'd like to take just one minute to recognize the people who helped organize this year's lectures please join me in thanking the members of the Bowen McCoy family center for ethics in society and the Tanner lectures steering committee for their time and efforts in putting the lecture together thank you now let's turn to today's lecture we're honored to have professor Cooper here for this lecture when professor Tanner originally established the lecture series he said I hope these lectures will contribute to the intellectual and moral life of mankind I see them simply as a search for a better understanding of human behavior and human values and there is no question that professor Cooper's thoughtful examinations of ancient philosophy have stimulated important discussions and deep into our understanding of the human experience over the course of his academic career John Cooper has challenged students and colleagues to reflect on the arguments of classical philosophy and consider their implications on contemporary ethics professor Cooper is an author of a number of highly regarded books among them reason and emotion essays on ancient moral psychology and ethical theory a collection of twenty three essays described by one reviewer as philosophical scholarship at its best Stanford professor Chris Babinec described his essay the essays in Cooper's book knowledge nature and the good essays on ancient philosophy as seminal contributions to the field and the American Philosophical Association awarded his book reason and human good in Aristotle with the Franklin Matt Jette prize his forthcoming book pursuits of wisdom ancient philosophies as ways of life will be published later this year indulge more deeply into the topics they will raise in these two lectures born in Memphis Tennessee professor Cooper earned his undergraduate and doctoral degrees from Harvard University he then to many pages he then studied as a Marshall scholar philosophy at Oxford University he was a member of the faculty at Princeton University for three decades professor Cooper is the Henry Putman University professor of philosophy and chair of the program in classical philosophy at Princeton he also survived six years as chair of the philosophy department that's a memory of you can a distinguished scholar he is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and an honorary fellow of Corpus Christi College at Oxford he has also been recognized for his considerable skills as a teacher in addition to Princeton he has taught at Harvard Cambridge and the University of Pittsburgh and we were fortunate to have him here at Stanford as a visiting professor in the winter and spring of 1977 more recently in 2004 he was a visiting earthscan fellow at the University of Canterbury Christ Church New Zealand and last year in May June he was the John Locke lecturer at All Souls College in Oxford in 2003 the McGraw Centre for teaching and learning presented him with the Graduate mentoring Award for his work with graduate students and the following year Princeton honored him with the Howard Berman award for distinguished achievement in the humanities weathering discussing plato's theories of justice or Aristotle on friendship pleasure and desire and Epicurious or Greek philosophers on euthanasia and suicide professor Cooper brings his considerable analytical skills to bear on important philosophical problems Dorothea freed at Hamburg has described him as having a gift of making problems accessible to non-specialist a characteristic that I particularly appreciated when he was nominated to be this year's lecture tomorrow at 10:00 a.m. professor Cooper will participate in the discussion seminar on the subject with several discussants including professor Sarah Brodie from the University of st. Andrews and Allen code of Stanford later in the day at 5:30 in this same place he will continue his discussion about ancient philosophy focusing on Plato and that will be followed by a discussion that the next morning with Professor Anthony Wong from the of California Berkeley and history professor Jackson Jocelyn Maxwell from Ohio now please join me in giving a warm Stanford welcome to Professor John Cooper [Applause] Thank You president president LZ for such a nice introduction it's a great pleasure to be at Stanford again as John said and I spent one academic year actually in Stanford teaching as a visiting professor in the Department for two quarters so it's a kind of return to Stanford life that I'm enjoying sorry okay that I'm enjoying in giving these lectures you should all have a handout which you will need to refer to in order not that's not to make me lose you more than I inevitably will do as I begin to to get through the talk if is this gonna be alright to anyone familiar with current philosophy it must sound quite strange that philosophy itself as a whole or any philosophy a set of philosophical views however comprehensive could all by itself constitute for its adherence a total all-consuming way of life by philosophy here I mean rigorous academic philosophy as opposed to works of advice and uplift including ones that are often properly spoken of as works of philosophy or ones that are said to contain and advocate a quote philosophy of life by contrast philosophy in the strict and narrow usage that I intend both nowadays and all the way back in a continuous history to the earliest philosophers of Greek antiquity is an enterprise of rigorously disciplined reasoned analysis and argumentation and in most of this history philosophers have professed as something essential to what philosophy is to be aiming in their work always at discovering through disciplined philosophical reasoning the real truth about the topics that philosophers investigate even if knowing important philosophical truths or thinking you do may alter even radically your orientation to life how could that knowledge all by itself produce and constitute for you your total all-inclusive way of life how could knowing all the philosophy might teach put you in the position that simply in and by knowing it while of course baring it constantly in mind you would or even could make your total Phil sorry make your philosophical understanding and your philosophical views somehow become your total way of life apart from the fact that philosophy as we know it today doesn't seem even to say anything about some of the questions that arise in pretty much anyone's life isn't there an inevitable gap between knowing or thinking you know how you want to live your life in all aspects or how it is best to live and actually living your life yet in a thousand year long tradition of philosophy in antiquity beginning with Socrates and continuing without break through part eNOS and his predecessor plate lists of the 3rd to 6th centuries of the Common Era philosophy was indeed so conceived and so studied for these philosophers philosophy and their very individual philosophies were ways of life in the very strong sense that I've indicated in today's lecture I'm going to explain how ancient philosophies were ways of life for their adherents as we will see they made philosophy psychologically and morally something much deeper than anything we might meet in contemporary philosophy in the second part of the lecture I'll illustrate this concretely by discussing Socrates's philosophy and the Socratic way of life in the second lecture turning from this origin of philosophy as a way of life to its final stage I will discuss the very different way of life provided in the revived platonism of Late Antiquity first then I want to explain what as I've come to understand it philosophy conceived as a way of life and not just an intellectual discipline actually amounted to when viewed from within the ancient philosophical tradition itself I'll be talking about the idea that philosophy is or can and even ought to be a total way of life in this I'm following in the footsteps of the eminent French scholar of Platonists and Platonism the late Pierre Abdo whose work along these lines burst on the English speaking intellectual scene in the mid 1990s however as you'll see as I proceed my understanding of ancient philosophy conceived as a way of life differs greatly and in fact in fundamental ways from a doze I'll remark briefly at the end of the lecture today on those differences but for most of the lecture I'll just proceed to explain in my own way and to discuss how those ancient philosophers who presented their philosophies as ways of life understood what they were doing and what within their views about human nature and the psychological basis of human life made it possible and brought them to conceive philosophy in just that way it's important to emphasize that despite Eidos claims to the contrary not every ancient philosopher thought of philosophy in this way but beginning I argue with Socrates a long series of Greek philosophers following Socrates is lead did so conceive it Plato Aristotle Epicurus and his followers stoic philosophers from Zeno and chrysippus onward even the peroneal skeptics of the first century BCE to the time of sexist empirical three centuries later and late platanus including notably Platonists and his successors down to the death of pagan philosophy altogether in the 6th century all belong in this camp if you look on handout 1 you'll see some names and dates which illustrate what I've just summarized my focus today will be on the central unifying ideas about philosophy and about human life that this whole tradition shares as an inheritance from Socrates I will go into details only about Socrates who on my account is the one who first got even the idea of making philosophy a way of life his ideas about philosophy and its role in our lives if they were to be well lived defined and sustained the whole later tradition vastly different from the Socratic way of though each of the ways of life defined by these later philosophies certainly were by that means I hope to make concrete by means of talking about Socrates in particular in some detail I hope to make concrete what for the first part of the lecture it will be a rather abstract account so I'm going to be talking about Socrates in the second half of the lecture and then give me the general account rather abstractly I'm afraid at the beginning I began with some further remarks about recent and contemporary philosophy about how it relates to and compares with ancient philosophy nowadays of course philosophy is really only a subject of study no one thinks of serious philosophy has carried on in an academic setting even as defining in detail much less as somehow constituting a total way of life in this philosophy is just like all the other established specialists specialties in contemporary higher education colleges everywhere have departments of philosophy offering undergraduate degrees in the subject just like degrees in mathematics or engineering or French language and literature these departments are staffed with lecturers and professors with advanced degrees certifying their preparation as professional philosophers as people who pursue philosophy who pursue research in the field and write articles and books of philosophy and on philosophy just as physics lecturers do physics and write on physics or anthropologists do and write on anthropology still even as a subject of study philosophy is different in one way from all those others this concerns ethics or moral philosophy as one part of philosophy and one component of the philosophy curriculum in our tradition since the Renaissance philosophy has been conceived as composed of three branches natural philosophy metaphysical philosophy and moral philosophy you can look at handout number two for these four that list more common nowadays is the threesome of metaphysics epistemology and ethics of course other contemporary specialties not easily brought under any of these principle headings are recognized as well logic philosophy of language philosophy of art and so on similarly in ancient philosophy from the time of the Stoics and the Epicureans at any rate there was a standard threesome to dialectic which included logic philosophy of language and epistemology philosophy of nature physics as they called it and ethics what stands out in all these three divisions of the subject is the enduring presence of ethics or moral philosophy as one of the three principal components of philosophy taken as a whole the presence of ethics as a branch of philosophy really does as I would like to claim set philosophy even contemporary and modern philosophy apart from what goes on in the other college and university departments it is true of course that in the ancient scheme ethics or in Greek eighth Ek meant something rather different from what it means today it meant quite precisely the philosophical study of human moral character good and bad the study of character had the central place because one's character was thought of as what determines for each of us the structure of our individual lives one's character in turn is one's particular outlook on human life psychologically settled and effective for the way when leads one's life your character is based on your conception of the differing weight and worth in a human life of the enormous Lea varied sorts a valuable thing that the natural and human world make available to us thus through their character people weigh and balance everything that they see as good for human beings and in human life insofar as those become objects of concern for them in their own lives and through it they live and act accordingly contemporary moral philosophy or ethics is different as a result of the long development of human cultures since antiquity and correspondingly of changed bases for philosophical reflections upon our human circumstances as well as as a result of changed conceptions internal to philosophy itself as to what philosophy can and cannot reasonably hope to accomplish in general one can say that by contrast our contemporary ethical theory that is what is called normative ethics concerns centrally and primarily right versus wrong actions and how to explain and perhaps justify assigning this or that action to one or the other of those classifications ancient moral philosophy then starts from and it focuses instead on goodness and badness of character good and bad ways of being a person certain actions follow from the sort of person you are of course but for the ancients actions are a secondary matter secondary to character nonetheless despite these differences between modern and ancient philosophy ethics is one is the one of the three members of my three divisions of philosophy in two parts that is found throughout the history of philosophy since Socrates it's divided since Socrates that fact establishes the difference that I said a moment ago I wanted to claim between philosophy as a subject of study and any of the other areas of specialized study offered in our universities in modern or contemporary philosophy one might be trying to arrive at a satisfactory result concerning the basis for deciding which actions are morally right and wrong that is for thinking about what we all owe to one another simply by living in the world together in ancient philosophy one might be thinking and learning about good human character as grounded in correct judgments concerning what is valuable in life in either case moral philosophy deals with questions about how anyone ought to live since everyone has a life to live this subject at least professes to concern everyone and not in some incidental way or in some way that can be left to others to experts to see to other subjects may and indeed do have much to teach that can have much practical value but those questions may or may not be a particular interest or concern to different individuals given how they are placed in life by contrast normative moral theory takes as its subject something that necessarily concerns everyone directly it is inherently a practical subject at least in part and one that engages directly with universally applicable questions of how to live and what to do or not do whereas it seems none of the others has such a status of mandatory universal personal concern still ancient philosophy is distinctive in one crucial way connected to what I said a moment ago about how modern and ancient ethics construct themselves by and large you could say that nowadays normative ethical theories or normative political theories attempt to tell us what we should do or not do personally or politically where questions of what we owe to one another arise but only there so philosophical argument analysis and theory of a highly intellectual and to a great extent abstract kind is offered as guiding us to correct practical decisions and actions telling us about certain actions or policies as right or wrong and on that basis as to be done or enacted or not however in antiquity beginning with Socrates philosophy was widely pursued as the best guide to life as I've already emphasized as a whole not just to questions of right and wrong action are severely limited however important part of anyone's life but moreover as I'll attempt to explain philosophy was pursued as both the intellectual basis and guide and the psychologically motivating force for the best human life in the motto of the u.s. undergraduate Honor Society Phi Beta Kappa even if Phi Beta Kappa never understood it in quite this way for ancient for ancient philosophers philosophy is itself the best steersman or pilot of a life be you kubernetes over most of the thousand years of philosophy in ancient Greece and Rome philosophy was assiduously studied in average duration by many ancient philosophers and their students as the best way to become good people and to live good human lives one must have become good not as a mere result a philosophical study by however this might come about putting into effect what philosophy tells you but precisely in and through once philosophical reasoning and understanding of the world of what is valuable in life and of what is not so valuable one was supposed to structure one's life moment by moment as when leaded and to keep oneself firmly motivated to live it one was to live one's life from not just as one could put it in accordance with one's philosophy your philosophy didn't just guide your life it steered your life directly from its implanted position in your mind and character so in antiquity philosophy in our Western tradition realized to the fullest extent all that moral philosophies combination of theory and practice might involve living your philosophy in the ancient way goes beyond living your philosophy in the way that say Peter Singer a utilitarian is said to do in following his philosophical principles and giving 1/10 of his annual income to relieve poverty in the third world ancient philosophies did include that kind of seriousness and conformity of one's life to one's philosophical beliefs or principles but beginning with Socrates ancient philosophers made philosophy thee and the only authoritative foundation and internal steersman for human life for these thinkers only reason what reason could discover and establish as the truth could be an ultimately acceptable basis on which to live a human life and for them philosophy is nothing more but also nothing less than the art or discipline that develops and perfects the human capacity of reason insofar as that capacity is regarded as a power enabling us to reach the ultimate truth about reality and not merely as a pragmatic tool for achieving specific given objectives no one they argue can lead their life in a finally satisfactory way without philosophy and the understanding that ideally anyhow when finally successful and complete only philosophy can provide philosophy not religion not cultural tradition no other authority at all as the standing needed to show and declare what sort of life is best for us that is what sort of life fully suits us given our nature and our natural relationship to surrounding nature at large including the divine nature all the ancient philosophers agreed that there is a God and to speak positively when one does possess a completely grounded philosophical understanding of the full truth about how to live by living one's life through that understanding and only by doing so one achieves the finally and fully satisfactory life for a human being it wasn't this way that philosophy itself became a way of life in the ancient sense as we will see socrates made the activities of philosophizing philosophical discussion and argument central and indispensable ones of that best life thus he championed the philosophical life in the sense of the phrase comparable to the life of any professional a doctors or physicists or more generally a professor's life in the ancient tradition philosophy was indeed a subject of study with basic principles and theories and arguments and analyses and refutations of tempting but erroneous views and so on and philosophers like doctors or physicists could find the activities of such philosophical work deeply satisfying and could assign it a central place in their ongoing lives but the whole body of knowledge that when finally worked out fully would constitute the finished result of such philosophical investigations was also not only for the ancient the best guide to living your whole life by telling you how to live what to do what not to do in any circumstance not only where modern ideas of moral right and wrong are concerned philosophy was the very basis in your psychology on which the best life would then be led that philosophical understanding would permeate and shape your character and hold together all aspects of the life you would then lead from philosophy your philosophy would be the steersman of your whole life as I put at the moment ago by being lodged deeply in your mind philosophy conceived as a way of life encompassed if not for Socrates for reason special to his own philosophical worldview to which I'll come back in a few moments then certainly for his successors the whole subject not only philosophies moral part all the major sacred thinkers in this tradition regarded the subject of philosophy in all its parts and gave good reasons for so doing as a completely integrated mutually connected and supporting unified body of knowledge the morrow part was not something separable and could not be fully comprehended except along with the philosophy of nature including the theory of the divine logic the theory of knowledge philosophy of language and above all metaphysics or the theory of being itself each of the philosophies of antiquity Aristotelian ism stoicism and so forth proposed a whole philosophical worldview as the context necessary in order to understand and fully ground their theories about the best way of leading a human life each of the ancient ethical theories expresses its own particular moral outlook on the basis of its particular philosophical worldview different ones for each of them in important regards each ancient ethical Theory presents a certain conception of the place and role in human life of the whole vast array of different sorts of goods and Bad's or more generally of things of positive and negative value that our nature as human beings makes available to us the playtest worldview differs from the Aristotelian and both differ from the stoic from the epicurean and from the sceptic and accordingly their moral outlooks differ too in each case the morrow outlook expresses in the respective ethical Theory expressed in the respective ethical Theory derives in crucial ways from that overall philosophical worldview for that reason it is entirely appropriate to speak as Socrates and others in this tradition all did of philosophy as they conceived of it and not instead only of moral philosophy or ethics is not only proposing but constituting a way of life let me now that's my general statement of what the damn thing was and and now what I try to do is to fresh this out by going into some details about Socrates so let me now shift to discuss specifically just Socrates and Socrates is philosophy and the Socratic way of living since we're talking about philosophers and their philosophical views we need to see what Socrates is and the others philosophical reasons were what their philosophical arguments were for holding all of the underlying assumptions about philosophy and about human life that I've been summarizing I can't in half-an-hour do much to work out in detail the arguments that led Socrates to his conclusions but I can I hope give you a philosophical sketch of them I'll focus especially on Plato's apology but will rely also on others of Plato Socratic dialogues including especially the Protagoras and youth además Plato of course wrote a lot of dialogues where Socrates is a main character including the Republic and Phaedo which do of course have things to say about philosophy and ways of life in speaking of Socrates however I am concentrating on the character Socrates as he appears in the apology and in some other philosophically closely related dialogues and not the Socrates of the Republic or Phaedo all the way back to antiquity philosophers who read Plato's work have distinguished between his so-called Socratic dialogues ones in which he is giving us his own idealized intellectual and personal portrait of the man he knew studied with and admired very greatly however much at the same time proposing a critical evaluation of his philosophical views and other works in which Plato goes onward from there to develop his own Phyllis theories the Republican Phaedo belonged to that second group in any event I should emphasize that it's speaking of Socrates as the founder of the ancient tradition of philosophy as a way of life and what I'm now going on to say about Socrates his own philosophy I am talking not so much about the historical Socrates as he really lived and breathed and talked and did philosophy as about the character Socrates in Plato's Socratic writings and in to a lesser degree related writings of Xenophon and others who also knew Socrates and talking especially about the character Socrates in the apology maybe the real Socrates was somewhat different from this fictive one of Plato's and others idealized devising we don't know we do know the Socrates of Plato's Socratic dialogues and he is the one who presents suck presents philosophy as a way of life constructs a philosophy of his own and it's presented as living by and from it his ideas the fictive Socratic Socrates is about philosophy as a way of life were in fact the pattern for all the later tradition Plato's apology is Plato's rendition of how Socrates is speech to his jury of five hundred and one male Athenian fellow citizens might ideally have gone when Socrates was on trial at the age of 70 on charges of having violated the Athenian law against impiety this law was start important to the Athenians because they thought their own city's success and the prosperity of the Athenian people individually and as a social and political entity depended crucially on the favor of the Olympian gods Zeus hero Athena Apollo and so on anyone who violated this law in any large visible public way was courting danger for the city and the society and had to be stopped these gods might or might not take umbrage at private impiety but they sure did if it was publicly flaunted socrates was charged with violating this law in just such a public way the claim was that he a prominent public figure flagrantly did not show the Olympians the honor that they demanded in return for their favor instead he trusted to his own private Damania nor voice that warned him from time to time against some action that he might be contemplating it was also claimed that this that his philosophical discussions with the young men who surrounded him as he talked philosophy all day long every day in the public spaces of the city in fact corrupted them morally immorality is offensive to the Olympian gods and so in publicly corrupting the young Socrates was calling divine disfavor down on the whole city now though this was not explicitly said what Socrates is accused as surely had in mind here was that Socrates encouraged his young men to think for themselves on questions of morality and value and life and that his accusers thought was a corruption they were outraged as parents whose sons were getting uppity and demanding reasons for everything we Athenians they thought under the aegis of our gods already know in our well established traditions how we ought to live at least we a theme Ian's awful live our traditions including our religious traditions are the correct basis for life and we don't want our young people to start questioning them looking for reasons why they are correct ways of living and behaving or of course perhaps not in Socrates is speech to the jury in response to these charges we get Plato's defense of Socrates and of Socrates in his life as a philosopher so we can turn to what the character Socrates says in the apology about himself to get a broad explication of Socrates as philosophy as Plato presents it Socrates presents himself as having been devoted over many years to what seems to be full-time engagement in discussions with various fellow Athenians and visitors to Athens some of them were young men who flocked around to listen to him interrogating these other people but some of them were adult persons with settled positions and reputations in Athenian society these discussions were philosophical and character they consisted of questions Socrates would ask about some matter of importance for human life to get the discussion started what do you think courage actually is that's the organizing question of the dialogue lay keys or what do you think modesty is the question of the karma DS or friendship the lysis or justice Republic one or is virtue one thing or some number of separate and distinct things that's the question of the Protagoras is our Torico skill a good thing what even is it what does it do the gorgeous he was then after asking that initial question and getting an answer to it from somebody he would then direct further questions to the respondent about his initial answers seeking his reasons for thinking what he thinks and asking for a reason defense of those reasons in the apology socrates connects this work of his as a philosopher to claims for his own self-improvement and that if everyone else involved in it he famously maintains that one's soul and its condition whether good or bad which for reasons I will explain in a moment he thinks is improved by such discussions is the most important thing for anyone that he says is when he's gone about the city of Athens all his life trying to convince his fellow citizens of both old and young this preeminence and value of the soul is the crucial claim on which Socrates is philosophy and the Socratic way of life is grounded it became a foundational principle for the whole later tradition of ethical philosophy among the ancients for a summary of Socrates as philosophy see I hand out number three it became for Socrates the soul is vastly more important than any of the other valuable things for human life that one might mention health and strength psychological vigor wealth the pleasures of sex or food and drink a good reputation political power good personal relationships of friendship and love fun and so on indeed the soul is vastly so much more important than it makes each of these other goods not just pale by comparison but become in their very value totally dependent upon it when your soul is in its good you have something of unconditional value Socrates claims whereas all other goods money pleasure good relationships with others power over them whatever it might be our only conditionally good their value for you depends on how they are used how they are fit into your life they are dependent as goods upon and make a contribution a positive contribution to our lives only because of what we ourselves make of them how we regard them how we react how we react to having or lacking them and what we do with them that's because the soul is that with which we live our active lives our assessments of value our decisions our desires our choices all these depend essentially and directly upon it so long as the soul is in its good condition which Socrates calls its virtue whatever more precisely that may be or include that remains to be considered we will live well because if we have this most importantly valuable thing in good condition all other potential or commonly agreed values wealth health good social connections and so forth even bodily pleasure become actually valuable for us with a good well conditioned soul we can make proper and good use of these other valuable things and so we can live good lives lives to which their own goodness the goodness of these additional things makes a real contribution by contrast with a bad soul we will have bad desires make bad choices miss value and misuse others such other potential Goods and as a result we make them bad for us and make overall a bad life for ourselves moreover for Socrates this good condition of the soul is ultimately entirely a matter of developing and maintaining a firm grasp and understanding of fundamental truths about human nature and as a consequence of those about the nature of what is valuable for a human being the reason why if you possess virtue in your soul you will live a good and happy life is that you will then know the true value of every possible sort of thing you might want to have in comparison and in relationship with all other things similarly of value you will in other words know the truth of Socrates is own claim about the preeminent value of the soul and about the merely conditional value of money position power personal relationships bodily pleasure and all the rest since you will never value anything else more highly or even at anywhere close to the same level as the state of your soul you will never value it more than their true worth either external goods such as possessions social position and the like or Goods of the soul other than virtue such as a good memory or sense of humor or native friendliness or psychological figure and self-confidence nor yet goods of the body such as health strength bodily pleasure physical ease beauty or good looks all of which are good things the true worth of such potential goods is that of something to be used virtuously and none of them have any value apart from what accrues to them through that good use this is so even if when they are present in a life and used virtuously their own separate value for example that of a bodily pleasure enjoyed and in that sense used well becomes an added good increasing the overall goodness in that virtuous life above the total good and some other ones as Socrates once puts it in the apology quote virtue makes wealth and everything else good for human beings both individually and publicly accordingly whether or not you are lucky as regards other goods whether or not you have plenty of set traditionally highly valued resources for life you will find that your soul of good condition will govern your real life that is your active life consisting in your choices actions reactions to and evaluations of what happens to you in such a way as to make the life happy and fulfilling pains and failures as we are these external in bodily goods and the various superficial goods of the soul do not diminish the front define quality of your life at all the value for you in your life is achieved solely through the actions that make it up these are either good or bad and virtually guarantees that they will be good hence if you are virtuous you will live in a way that fulfills your nature and makes you happy even if you suffer disappointments pain and losses of conditional goods of various kinds your life is not made in any way in any way worse or less good by the presence in them of these conditional Bad's they are bad always but only if present in a morally bad person's life for Socrates then whatever else it may include or implied virtue is wisdom virtue the good condition of the soul is the state of mind in which when firmly grasps and understands the full system of human values in comparison and relationship with one another with wisdom he maintains one will always live and act on the basis of that system of values and so one will live completely happily and fulfilled that implies of course that understanding the truth about what is good or bad for you inevitably and necessarily leads you to act in the way that is indicated in that knowledge in whatever your current circumstances may be with their prospects for the future and relationship to the past with wisdom and understanding you will always act in what is in fact the right way moreover the fullness of your understanding will enable you to give good and sufficient reasons why what you did what you do or did is in fact the right thing to do in those circumstances given what could be known about them even a wise person isn't clairvoyant knowledge knowledge of values that is knowledge of what is good and what is bad for a human being and in what way it is either good or bad has then and extreme power according to Socrates if you have it it'll not just unwaveringly and irresistibly govern your life but it will make it a good and fulfilled one too Socrates explains and defends this claim about wisdoms power it's a philosophical claim about human psychology in Plato's Protagoras it isn't that Socrates thinks all possibly countervailing psychological powers powers in the soul with possible influence on your choice of which action to do or refrain from in any circumstance will miraculously disappear once you become wise he recognizes the power of pleasure and pain or sexual and other states of passion as possible influences even on the actions and choices of the wise person pleasure and pain or their prospect or anger or fear or sexual arousal and so on can alter the way things appear value wise to any agent and so in principle also to the wise person however Socrates argues this power of appearance to mislead us about values is always weaker than the power of value knowledge if that is we really do possess this knowledge fully and are completely wise how so here we meet a fundamental insight or assumption of Socrates one which some subsequent philosophers including both Plato and other dialogues than his Granick ones and Aristotle will oppose even if they accept Socrates his claim for the power of knowledge others most notably the Stoics will strenuously agree with him and accepting this assumption it belongs to human nature Socrates thinks that when we are grown-up and in charge of our own lives any and every action we do is done with and from the thought that it is the best thing taking into account everything it occurs to you to take into account for you to be doing then you may be ambivalent or uncertain to some extent as you at first reflect on the situation if you reflect at all but when you act you necessarily are committed in your thinking to the idea that this despite whatever you see that may count against it is the best thing to do quite simply if your mind remained unmade up you would not yet act this follows from the fact which Socrates thinks belongs to human beings by their nature as rational animals that we can only act on reasons that we accept at the time when we act on them as sufficient to justify the action or at least make it the thing to do only the acceptance of such reason can possibly move an animal with a rational nature to action our power to see and give ourselves reasons for acting is the only psychic source of motivation within us that can actually set us upon the movements that constitute or produce our actions with their particular goals and nuance or merely gross and under one's depreciations of what we may be doing thus possessing a rational nature entails for Socrates acting always in a sense rationally we always act subjectively rationally that is we always act for what we take to be adequate reasons as Socrates puts it in the conclusion of his analysis in the Protagoras quote no one goes willingly toward the bad or what he believes to be bad neither is it in human nature to want to go toward what one believes to be bad instead of to the good in quote many people may regret what they have done immediately after doing it just as they may waver and be uncertain just before acting but everyone in acting does what they are then holding to be best because otherwise given our rational natures we would do nothing at all we would not even refrain from acting now from this thesis about human psychology Socrates is claimed of the power of value knowledge follows directly value knowledge gives its possessor and unfailingly complete basis for evaluating situations and circumstances as one becomes aware of them this leads to a clear apprehension of the best thing to do under the current conditions as one understands them to be if if it is part of human nature always to do if anything at all what one thinks is best such a person will always an only what at the precise time when they act they think is best and because knowledge makes those who possess it always write about what is best they always live well happily and fulfilled in the way I described above other people ones not possessed of this knowledge will very frequently be governed by the power of appearance it is a second fundamental feature of human nature to be constantly bombarded by value appearances due to emotions and other feelings including bodily sensations just like the wise person they will always do what they then at the moment of action think is best but the power of appearance can affect them so that because of anger or sexual passion or the presence of prospect of pleasure or pain in the near future they form the temporary opinion that something would be an overall good thing to do that in fact is not due to the power of appearances that such states of feeling can induce they may even act against their considered judgment a while about what is best a considered judgment that might be correct but that when one is enthralled to the appearances when over emotionally displaces with the judgment based on the appearances none of this can happen to a wise person even the wise may still be subject to appearances that present the options to their consciousness differently from the way they know them to be because of angry feelings or some other emotional distortion but their value understanding is so complete and in that sense so deep and strong that these contrary appearances and the feelings that give rise to them cannot affect their action in any way knowledge value knowledge will save our lives Socrates thinks and says and nothing else could reliably do so here is where philosophy and Socrates is emphasis on the value to himself and his interlocutors of his discussions comes into the picture philosophy is the pursuit of wisdom so for Socrates philosophical discussion philosophical analysis concerning human nature and human values philosophical theory Rd road to wisdom and so to a fulfilled and happy human life now in fact as you know Socrates was pretty sure that neither he nor anyone he had met or heard of actually had yet succeeded in fighting their way in argument through to wisdom one could reach as he had done a lot of rationally supported strongly supported ideas as I've just been reporting ideas about human nature about human values about how human action is motivated through the positing of reasons in favor of the action and so on but you shouldn't claim to know these ideas to be true you can be pretty convinced for defensible and very good reasons and you can shape your life on the basis of them but you can't say that holding to those ideas as true as you do makes you wise and so makes your life happy there are always further considerations about the matters that you have not yet gone through before you could claim to have won your way through to wisdom and to happiness so for Socrates you can never stop philosophizing you can never stop doing what he himself says in the apology he did every day towards the end of his defense Socrates says that he will never stop his philosophical discussions no matter what because quote it is the greatest good for a person to discuss virtue every day and those other things about what you hear me conversing and testing myself and others for the unexamined life is not worth living for human beings in quote if you are not wise the next best and crucially important thing for the good of your soul and so for your own good is to devote your daily life as much as possible to concentrated efforts to keep on pursuing wisdom through doing philosophy of course you have other things to do too you have to eat and drink have sex do a job if you have one to do raise your children be to be with your friends and lots of other things too citizen lis duties aiding others in need seeing to what we all owe to one another you have a rich full life to construct for yourself as to all those other concerns the grasp that philosophy has given you of the whole realm of human values even if you cannot claim to know any part of it to be beginning with the preeminent value of your soul and it's good condition we'll give you all the guidance you need you will live from your philosophy that is from your philosophical understanding of values so far as you've advanced in that understanding up to then as we have seen your life will be one in which the activity of self-improvement through philosophical study and talk plays a huge and central role in this activity your soul the thing of most importance for your life attains or keeps on moving toward its own fullest perfection but philosophy will also occupy your life when you are not sitting around reading or talking philosophy your philosophical understanding of values will be what forms and sustains your moral character as you go about every aspect of your daily life thus philosophy will play all three of the following roles in your life the three are listed and handout number four one philosophy tells you how to live what to do and what not to do with what thoughts in what spirit in every aspect of your life philosophical understanding lodged in your mind steers your whole life by directly and on its own and on its own moving you to every choice in action making up your life third one thing that philosophy tells you is that philosophical study discussions etc is a very good thing and should be included in your life if you're up to it or can find time for it some people are excluded for external circumstances so much then for the Socratic philosophy as a way of life as I've said Socrates set the pattern for the rest of the Greek philosophical tradition all the subsequent ancient Greek philosophy philosophical ways of life fit this same basic pattern in them philosophy serves the same three functions philosophizing itself is accorded an especially high value among all the other activities of your life philosophy gives overall guidance to your life as to what to do and not do and in what ways to do these actions and most interestingly philosophy lodged in a person's mind their life in all its aspects to conclude so that's what I want that's my account of Socrates's philosophy and the way of life which derives from it now I want to conclude as I said by saying a few things about Edo so I want to say a few words about how my account of philosophy as a way of way of life relates to the well-known work of Pierre a tome add those extensive work on ancient philosophy as a way of life was translated into English in two books a decade or so ago that as I'm sure many of you know attracted quite a lot of enthusiastic attention one of his books was entitled in fact just philosophy as a way of life the other is called what is ancient philosophy and those work brought the topic of philosophy as a way of life to prominence not only in connection with the ancient philosophical tradition which at though and others have linked to Michel Foucault as concerns in his last writings on the care of the soul but with selected later philosophers tomb reading his work gave part of my own impetus to work on this topic myself so I admire his work very much much of the enthusiasm for Eddowes books among english-speaking philosophers and others in humanities fields came from a doze interest in what he saw as ways in which the ancient philosophies to him resembled religions he emphasized to my mind greatly over emphasized the role in ancient philosophies as ways of life of what he called Spiritual Exercises a term that he got from st. Ignatius Ignatius of Loyola the 16th century Spanish founder of the Jesuit Order according to a doe such things as daily examinations of conscience carried out in a devotional spirit imaginatively inspiring meditation not of course as with st. Ignatius on Christ's life but on that of the founder of one's philosophical school or other famous Paragons of the school's way of life prayers in short devotional and spiritually purifying exercises of all sorts according to eddo were for the ancient philosophers philosophers essential means of strengthening one's moral and philosophical resolve to live according to the precepts of one's philosophy Spiritual Exercises belongs IDO to the essence of ancient philosophy Anto wanted to say that these practices were essential because they were necessary he thought in order for anyone actually to live their philosophy through the resolve and uplift that spiritual exercises could impart he suggested that this had always been so in the ancient philosophical tradition even for the very early philosophers like Parmenides the logician annette a physician who lived two generations before Socrates ad those book what is ancient philosophy treats and callosity itself and as a whole as a special kind of philosophy that unlike our own or medieval kinds of philosophy was a way of life however what had no had to say about devotional exercises absolutely did not apply for Socrates or Plato or Aristotle or the classical Stoics or even earlier playtest of late antiquity like Latinas in the third century what was crucial for philosophy as a way of life all the way through from Socrates to platini's is that what was to keep you going and keep you living your philosophy was nothing more than your fully developed philosophical understanding of what you thought was the truth about human beings and their place in the world you did that need spiritual uplift and purification and it would indeed be a serious distraction in most of the ancient philosophical lives it is that sort of life one growing out of and deriving from exercises of philosophical reason that I have emphasized in this talk in fact no quasi religious devotional practices such as IDO describes had or even could have anything essential to do with living a life of philosophy given what philosophy itself both in antiquity and in fact in its whole history is and exercise of reason you can't strengthen your rational grasp of truths except quite incidentally by any such external spiritual self manipulations that strength comes only through increased rational understanding it is true that as pagan philosophy declined to its death over the last centuries of its existence plateless philosophy in its effort to remain efforts to remain relevant in an age of spiritual crisis and discontent borrowed from religion both pagan and Christian the sort of devotional exercises that a dose speaks of as well as religious rituals of various other kinds as ways of achieving union with the plateless philosophers God the one that is beyond being which is the ultimate goal of platanus philosophy Union which I will say something about that in the next lecture but that was a crisis time in ancient culture and Adler was badly mistaken to take features of philosophy as a way of life at that culminating point of the tradition and read them back onto the tradition itself from the beginning the result is a badly distorted account of what ancient philosophy was and of how unlike most of philosophy over its long history since the end of antiquity the ancient philosophy has managed to be ways of life for their adherents thank you [Applause] for more please visit us at stanford.edu

Channel: Stanford

Views: 98,059

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Keywords: philosophy, humanities, human, aristotle, life, application, thought, analysis, way of life, knowledge, understanding

Id: 0UnGApiy08s

Length: 60min 52sec (3652 seconds)

Published: Thu Mar 01 2012