KNOWLEDGE, Bikramdutt

KNOWLEDGE, Bikramdutt

Socrates' idea, the thesis which was to become celebrated under his name throughout the history of moral philosophy, is that virtue consists in knowing and in thinking well. The virtues are all sure and true knowledge, sciences: "He thought that all the virtues were sciences," says Aristotle. All sinners are ignorant. One is not wicked because one wills evil, but because one does not know the good.

 

We find here a remarkable example of an intuition of central importance wrongly conceptualized. What Socrates saw in a decisive fashion, the truth, then quite new, that everything revealed and recalled to him, was the rational dignity of the human being, and the essential rationality inherent in the good act. And he had also that insight -- which I express here in a thoroughly banal fashion but which in itself is capable of filling a heart and making a man give life to a missionary task -- that we all want to be happy, that we wish for true happiness, but that we do not know where it is. Stumbling against all the obstacles, we all seek the reality which delivers and the true meaning of our existence and in our ignorance we grope blindly along, and in place of what we are seeking we grasp phantoms.

 

           But the practical had to have its revenge. It is a question of knowing. But of knowing what? What is the content of this knowledge? In order to make us discern what our comportment ought or ought not to be in the concrete, what principle of determination does it grasp, what criterion of the good and proper and virtuous? At this stage of philosophical reflection, no other criterion than utility. Socrates aimed too high -- the world of essences. Coming back to earth he has nothing in his hands, as implement of his theoretical knowledge and his speculative judgment concerning the occurrences of conduct, but the calculation of utility. In the end it is utilitarianism which gets the upper hand. Socrates himself and the essential inspiration of his thought are nowise utilitarian. There was nothing of Bentham in him; he did not die like a utilitarian. The idea that happiness consists in having a good soul is as little utilitarian as possible. But in its application, or rather in its philosophical explication, he was caught in the trap of the "science" he was searching for. The only instrument of "science" at his disposal is the notion of that which serves expediently, of the means proportioned to its end. A transcendent utilitarianism no doubt, since that end is to have a good soul and goes beyond our moral existence. But how are we to know how or why this or that is conducive to making the soul good? When Socrates comes down to explications and reasons, to talking about various particular examples of virtue, he descends to the commonplaces of the immediate utilitarianism of popular morality.

No doubt Socrates himself had an experiential knowledge of the virtues he spoke of prior to any conceptualization or explanation - a knowledge "by inclination" or "by connaturality", which had nothing to do with these commonplaces. From another point of view, his recourse to the platitudes of popular morality must have been in large part a sort of outer camouflage well designed to afford him secret amusement