‘I have tried to show how the philosopher retains his prophetic character. He relies for his vision of divinity and of the real nature of things on the assumed identity of his own reason with a portion of the cosmic consciousness . . . The intuitive reason replaces that supernormal faculty which had formerly been active in dreams and prophetic visions; the supernatural becomes the metaphysical . . . It would have been a miracle if the wise men of the sixth century . . . should have swept their minds clean of all mythical preconceptions.’
This question arises extremely sharply for Parmenides and Zeno of Elea, authors of some of the most notorious arguments in antiquity. Parmenides produced an abstract argument to a conclusion that nobody could accept: namely, that there is really only one object we can think of or refer to, which cannot without absurdity be said to be pluralized, qualified or divided. Thus our experience of a varied and changing plurality of objects is totally misleading. Zeno produced many arguments reducing to absurdity our everyday assumptions about plurality and change. The problem here is that the arguments are hard to fault, but the conclusions cannot be accepted. This creates a discomfort about reasoned argument: what do we do when its results conflict with our beliefs?
Responses to this differ. Some thinkers continue to produce big explanatory theories of the world, taking on board the point that their theories undermine common-sense beliefs. Anaxagoras of Clazomenae tells us that ‘the Greeks are mistaken’ in saying that things come into and go out of existence; in terms of his theory what emerges was there already. Similarly Empedocles of Acragas and the Atomists Leucippus and Democritus of Abdera produce theories which revise our commonsense beliefs about reality and change in accordance with their own hypotheses. None of them doubt that their reasoning has the power to do this. None of them deal adequately with the question of how we get to their theories from the beliefs we all start with – indeed Democritus. recognizes a problem in that we get from our experience to the deliverances of reason, which then devalues our experience.
Other thinkers, however, including some of the sophists, fasten on the point that there is something suspicious about the way that philosophical reasoning leads by arguments that you can’t fault to conclusions that you can’t accept. Cleverness in argument becomes something to be feared and envied, and seen as a technique in its own right. Seen this way, there is little distinguishing philosophical reasoning from the amoral cleverness of the effective speaker in politics or the law courts.
This situation can reasonably be seen as rather a mess, and goes some way to explain why these philosophers have come to be called ‘Presocratics’, implying that Socrates is the crucial reference point. Whatever their individual accomplishments, they do not clearly belong within a unified tradition in which reasoning has a clear philosophical role. That begins with Socrates.
At first sight, as we have seen in Chapter 4, Socrates seems an unlikely figure to characterize the philosophical tradition. He is the perpetual amateur, who refuses to do any of the things which philosophers of his time did. Moreover, he utterly despises all these things – producing theories of the world, giving displays of oratory, winning debates – as being a pretentious waste of everybody’s time. So what made him such a founding philosophical figure?
Socrates, as we have seen, argued against the views of others, showing them by their inability to withstand his arguments that they lacked understanding of what they were talking about. To have understanding of something, it emerged, you have to be able to ‘give an account’ of it, where this means giving reasons, and ultimately a rational account of what the subject in question is. But this will not be possible until you have rigorously asked yourself what reasons there are for the belief you hold. Thus, when you ask someone what reasons they have for what they say, you can show that they lack understanding if they have none, or have reasons that are confused or inconsistent. But, particularly if you are good at this sort of questioning (as Socrates undoubtedly was), you will realize that the same applies to you; you may have developed views, but you cannot be said to understand them, and hence have the right to put them forward authoritatively, unless you can withstand the challenges of others by giving reasons for them.
From Socrates on, reasoned argument is the lifeblood of philosophy because it is only in the give and take of argument that we achieve understanding of the positions we hold and want to put forward to others. (Understanding, as we have seen, is a kind of knowledge, and we can know only the truth; hence philosophy can also be characterized as the search for truth.) Hence the emphasis on reasoning and arguing that we find in all schools of philosophy. Now we find emerging a clear sense of philosophical reason and argument, distinguished from merely arguing others down and linked to the search for truth and understanding.
From the outside, then as now, all the arguing can seem aggressive and unattractive, and to those with no gift for philosophy it can seem pointless. (There is a story of a Roman bureaucrat who summoned all the Athenian philosophers and offered conflict mediation so as finally to settle all their disputes.) But from now on the importance in philosophy of reasoned argument lies in its crucial role for understanding. Figures who dismiss argument – like the Pythagoreans, who reverence their Master and want only to treasure his words – are always seen as philosophically marginal. And Epicurus’ relative de-emphasis of argument led to criticism by other philosophical schools.
Plato has a claim to be the first philosopher to establish philosophy as a subject. He did so by taking over from Socrates two elements: argument as crucial for understanding, and positive views on a variety of matters. Plato added three other important elements. One is system, a variety of ideas seen as holding together. A second is seeing philosophy as self-consciously demarcated from other ways of thinking. And a third is the institutionalization of philosophy as a subject for study.
In the ancient world Plato was seen as a pivotal figure, the first philosopher who was concerned to systematize his ideas and thus to hold views on a wide variety of topics as holding together in a mutually supportive way. It is unclear whether it is quite fair to see Plato as the pioneer here – Democritus the Atomist also had views on a range of topics – but Plato is certainly the first to do it whose works we have. Later writers ascribed to Plato the honour of being the first to see philosophy as a system of ideas with three parts – logic, ethics and physics. This is anachronistic, but it is true that Plato held positions over most of the range that later thinkers were to cover.
Plato does not tell us how his positive systematic ideas relate to the need for understanding to be grounded by argument. But he shows us clearly enough, in writing dialogues in which he is personally never a speaker, thus detaching himself from the positions put forward, that what matters is not just having the right position, but holding it in the right way – understanding it on the basis of reasoned argument. For it is up to the reader to think about the positions put forward and test her own understanding of them. Plato, even where it is clear that he believes a position strongly, never puts it forward authoritatively. If the reader accepts it on Plato’s authority, she is missing something crucial. It has to be tested and argued for before she understands it.