In Plato’s Meno, Socrates was again in conversation with someone supremely confident of the truth of a common-sense idea. Meno was an imperious aristocrat who was visiting Attica from his native Thessaly and had an idea about the relation of money to virtue. In order to be virtuous, he explained to Socrates, one had to be very rich, and poverty was invariably a personal failing rather than an accident.
We lack a portrait of Meno, too, though on looking through a Greek men’s magazine in the lobby of an Athenian hotel, I imagined that he might have borne a resemblance to a man drinking champagne in an illuminated swimming pool.
(Ill. 3.5)
The virtuous man, Meno confidently informed Socrates, was someone of great wealth who could afford good things. Socrates asked a few more questions:
SOCRATES
: By good do you mean such things as health and wealth?
MENO
: I include the acquisition of both gold and silver, and of high and honourable office in the state.
SOCRATES
: Are these the only kind of good things you recognize?
MENO
: Yes, I mean everything of that sort.
SOCRATES
: … Do you add ‘just and righteous’ to the word ‘acquisition’, or doesn’t it make any difference to you? Do you call it virtue all the same even if they are unjustly acquired?
MENO
: Certainly not.
SOCRATES
: So it seems that justice or temperance or piety, or some other part of virtue must attach to the acquisition [of gold and silver] … In fact, lack of gold and silver, if it results from a failure to acquire them … in circumstances which would have made their acquisition unjust, is itself virtue.
MENO
: It looks like it.
SOCRATES
: Then to have such goods is no more virtue than to lack them …
MENO
: Your conclusion seems inescapable.
In a few moments, Meno had been shown that money and influence were not in themselves necessary and sufficient features of virtue. Rich people could be admirable, but this depended on how their wealth had been acquired, just as poverty could not by itself reveal anything of the moral worth of an individual. There was no binding reason for a wealthy man to assume that his assets guaranteed his virtue; and no binding reason for a poor one to imagine that his indigence was a sign of depravity.
4. Why others may not know
The topics may have dated, but the underlying moral has not: other people may be wrong, even when they are in important positions, even when they are espousing beliefs held for centuries by vast majorities. And the reason is simple: they have not examined their beliefs logically.
Meno and the generals held unsound ideas because they had absorbed the prevailing norms without testing their logic. To point out the peculiarity of their passivity, Socrates compared living without thinking systematically to practising an activity like pottery or shoemaking without following or even knowing of technical procedures. One would never imagine that a good pot or shoe could result from intuition alone; why then assume that the more complex task of directing one’s life could be undertaken without any sustained reflection on premises or goals?
Perhaps because we don’t believe that directing our lives is in fact complicated. Certain difficult activities look very difficult from the outside, while other, equally difficult activities look very easy. Arriving at sound views on how to live falls into the second category, making a pot or a shoe into the first.
(Ill. 3.6)
Making it was clearly a formidable task. Clay first had to be brought to Athens, usually from a large pit at Cape Kolias 7 miles south of the city, and placed on a wheel, spun at between 50 and 150 rotations per minute, the speed inversely proportional to the diameter of the part being moulded (the narrower the pot, the faster the wheel). Then came sponging, scraping, brushing and handle-making.
(Ill. 3.7)
Next, the vase had to be coated with a black glaze made from fine compact clay mixed with potash. Once the glaze was dry, the vase was placed in a kiln, heated to 800 °C with the air vent open. It turned a deep red, the result of clay hardening into ferric oxide (Fe2O3). Thereafter, it was fired to 950 °C with the air vent closed and wet leaves added to the kiln for moisture, which turned the body of the vase a greyish black and the glaze a sintered black (magnetite, Fe3O4). After a few hours, the air vent was reopened, the leaves raked out and the temperature allowed to drop to 900 °C. While the glaze retained the black of the second firing, the body of the vase returned to the deep red of the first.
It isn’t surprising that few Athenians were drawn to spin their own vases without thinking. Pottery looks as difficult as it is. Unfortunately, arriving at good ethical ideas doesn’t, belonging instead to a troublesome class of superficially simple but inherently complex activities.
Socrates encourages us not to be unnerved by the confidence of people who fail to respect this complexity and formulate their views without at least as much rigour as a potter. What is declared obvious and ‘natural’ rarely is so. Recognition of this should teach us to think that the world is more flexible than it seems, for the established views have frequently emerged not through a process of faultless reasoning, but through centuries of intellectual muddle. There may be no good reason for things to be the way they are.
5. How to think for oneself
The philosopher does not only help us to conceive that others may be wrong, he offers us a simple method by which we can ourselves determine what is right. Few philosophers have had a more minimal sense of what is needed to begin a thinking life. We do not need years of formal education and a leisured existence. Anyone with a curious and well-ordered mind who seeks to evaluate a common-sense belief can start a conversation with a friend in a city street and, by following a Socratic method, may arrive at one or two ground-breaking ideas in under half an hour.
Socrates’ method of examining common sense is observable in all Plato’s early and middle dialogues and, because it follows consistent steps, may without injustice be presented in the language of a recipe book or manual, and applied to any belief one is asked to accept or feels inclined to rebel against. The correctness of a statement cannot, the method suggests, be determined by whether it is held by a majority or has been believed for a long time by important people. A correct statement is one incapable of being rationally contradicted. A statement is true if it cannot be disproved. If it can, however many believe it, however grand they may be, it must be false and we are right to doubt it.
The Socratic method for thinking
1. Locate a statement confidently described as common sense.
Acting courageously involves not retreating in battle
.
Being virtuous requires money
.
2. Imagine for a moment that, despite the confidence of the person proposing it, the statement is false. Search for situations or contexts where the statement would not be true.
Could one ever be courageous and yet retreat in battle?
Could one ever stay firm in battle and yet not be courageous?
Could one ever have money and not be virtuous?
Could one ever have no money and be virtuous?
3. If an exception is found, the definition must be false or at least imprecise.
It is possible to be courageous and retreat