One of the questions that I have to answer in the chapter I’m currently working on is what the motivations of the philosopher are. The philosopher acts a certain way - he investigates certain questions, he investigates those questions in certain ways, and he has certain traits of character that are exhibited as he goes about his investigations. But he is also motivated by certain things or for certain reasons. Indeed his motivations go a long way, I believe, in explaining his actions. It is because he is motivated for certain reasons that he investigates those questions that he believes will help him attain that knowledge, and does so with persistence and courage and intellectual honesty, and does so in a way to ensure that the question is being examined systematically and so forth.

So I want to get clear on just what motivates the philosopher in the aporetic dialogues.¹

How does one go about this? Unlike some other dialogues (the Republic and the digression of the Theaetetus most particularly, but also to a lesser extent the Phaedo, Sophist and Statesman) the aporetic dialogues don’t give us an explicit characterization of the philosopher.² So instead we have to look for implicit evidence. And the best way to do this is to look at Socrates himself. In the Apology Socrates calls himself a philosopher and claims that he is living a philosophical life. And so we can, and should, look at Socrates - his nature, his actions, the questions he investigates, the nature of the investigations he undergoes - to get evidence of the nature of the philosopher.³

So far, so good. So when interested in the question of what motivates the philosopher in the aporetic dialogues, we should think about what motivates Socrates in those dialogues. And we get quite a bit of evidence about this, particularly in the Apology. I think we see Socrates motivated by (at least) two different things: (1) a desire for truth and love of wisdom and (2) divine command. The evidence for the second is probably most clear in the Apology. At 33c Socrates says that to question others who claim to have knowledge “has been enjoined upon me by the god, by means of oracles and dreams, and in every other way that a divine manifestation has ever ordered a man to do anything.” Earlier Socrates says that “the god ordered me…to live the life of a philosopher, to examine myself and others…” (28e). But I think that even had he not ever been commanded by the god to live a philosophical life Socrates would, nonetheless, have been motivated to be a philosophy because of a love for truth and desire for wisdom. At 38a Socrates declares “it is the greatest good for man to discuss virtue every day and those other things about which you hear me conversing and testing myself and others, for the unexamined life is not worth living for men…”⁴ This is not a statement about what the gods command him to do but an observation of the effect of examination and inquiry on one’s life. Further evidence (?) for this may well be that Socrates was already well aware of his ignorance prior to the Pythia’s declaration and, presumably, had already spent much of his life in inquiry.⁵

What motivates Socrates has implications for what he is motivated to do. So, for example, Socrates’ love of and desire for wisdom motivates him to acquire that wisdom. And doing that will lead him to, say, inquire after others who claim to have that wisdom. But a love for the truth need not motivate him to make others better men or point out their ignorance. Divine command, though, can certainly act as an adequate motivator for exhorting others to virtue. And it seems (?) that it is precisely that that motivates Socrates to be Athens’ gadfly. I’ll get back to this connection between what motivates Socrates and what he’s thereby motivated to do at the end.

OK. Well all that is just a lot of lead-up to my real question/worry. See, I’m interested in Socrates’ motivations because looking at his motivations can tell us something about the philosopher’s motivations. So in addition to thinking about what motivates Socrates we must also ask what motivates Socrates qua Socrates and what motivates him qua philosopher. Or, to put it another way, we see that Socrates is motivated for at least a couple of reasons. What motivations are motivations that the philosopher does (or must?) have and what motivations are motivations that are unique to Socrates, are motivations that Socrates has but one need not have in order to become a philosopher?

And here’s a bald assertion: Socrates’ love of wisdom and the truth is a motivation he has qua philosopher but his recognition of a divine motivation is something that is unique to Socrates.⁶ When thinking about the nature of the philosopher, then, we should focus not on Socrates’ divine motivations (and the actions that stem from that motivation) but instead on his love and desire for wisdom.

Is there evidence for this assertion of mine? I think so. Let me put forward a few considerations that support my claim:

Socrates as a gift to Athens
In the Apology (at 30e-31a) Socrates says “I was attached to this city by the god” and “another such man will not easily come to be among you.” The reason for this is not that there will not be any further philosophers⁷ but because it seems contrary to human nature to neglect one’s own affairs so thoroughly and endured neglect on account of concern for others’ virtue.⁸

Depictions of the philosopher in other dialogues
In the Republic and the Theaetetus we see depictions of the philosopher that do not at all depict the philosopher as devoted to the virtue of the entire city. In both the Republic and Theaetetus the philosopher in non-ideal circumstances⁹ minds his own business, keeps his head down and focuses on his own affairs. There’s much more to say about this, and I do not at all think that the characterizations in either the Republic or the Theaetetus necessitate a disdain for or avoidance of exhortation to virtue¹⁰. But it’s also quite clear that the characterization of the philosopher (in non-ideal circumstances) does not at all point to an all-encompassing attempt to exhort others to virtue.

Hippias Minor369d
There, Socrates says:

But it is always my custom to pay attention when someone is saying something, especially when the speaker seems to me to be wise. And because I desire to learn what he means, I question him thoroughly and examine and place side-by-side the things he says, so I can learn. If the speaker seems to me to be some worthless person, I neither ask questions nor do I care what he says. This is how you’ll recognize whom I consider wise.

This passage portrays Socrates as motivated by a desire for the truth. So motivated, Socrates seeks out those whom he can learn from. If the speaker seems worthless he doesn’t question him at all. Socrates the gadfly would, presumably, wish to question both the fools and those proclaiming wisdom, though. After all, as a gadfly Socrates is trying desperately to make those who are worthless realize their ignorance and act to fix it. In this passage, then, we see that Socrates, when motivated by a desire for the truth, is not motivated to do the same things as when he is acting in accordance with his divine mission to exhort others to virtue.

Socrates’ exhortations to others
Finally, when we look at Socrates’ exhortations to others, we don’t (I don’t think) see him exhort others to ensure that the rest of the citizenry is virtuous. To be sure we see him exhort individuals to be concerned with their own virtue and the virtue of their immediate family (and close friends?). We also see him very concerned with the question of whether those who claim to teach virtue actually make their students virtuous. But we don’t, so far as I can recollect, see him exhort his interlocutors to the same mission that he declares for himself. Nor does he say that his divine mission is, or ought to be, the mission of anyone who aspires to be a philosopher. But if this were a motivation of the philosopher qua philosopher, then we might expect Socrates to exhort others not simply to care of the state of their soul, and the soul of those closest to them, but to care for the state of everyone’s soul.¹¹

If this evidence is convincing, then I think we should indeed be careful to distinguish between what motivates Socrates qua philosopher and what motivates Socrates for reasons peculiar to him. Not everything that motivates Socrates need motivate every philosopher of the aporetic dialogues. And if this is true, then we can ask what activities was Socrates motivated to do qua philosopher (motivated by a love and desire for wisdom) and what activities was Socrates motivated to do qua Socrates (motivated by divine command to have a care for the virtue of his fellow Athenians)? If there are activities that Socrates is motivated to do in virtue of his divine mission then we need not think that these are activities that the philosopher qua philosopher is motivated to do.

This is long enough for one entry, though.¹² Far more scholars focus on the question of just what Socrates is motivated to do than the question of what motivates Socrates. I’m going to turn next to the question of what Socrates (and then Socrates qua philosopher) is motivated to do.

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1. There are actually two related questions: (1) what motivates the philosopher and (2) what is the philosopher motivated to do. Clearly these questions are related to one another. I’m going to start with the first question and will address the second question later…probably in another entry…which may or may not actually materialize from the aether.↩
2. In the Republic, for example, the motivations of the philosopher qua philosopher are made explicit in book six.↩
3. We should also look at Socrates’ exhortations to others about how to act and investigate as Socrates thinks others, too, should become philosophers…↩
4. This is put in a conditional (if they hear him declare the above, they will not believe him), but directly after the above quoted passage Socrates says “what I say is true” and, I believe, he is referring back to this statement. We should not think that the conditional nature of the statement distances Socrates from the view put forward.↩
5. There are various texts that can testify to this. Consider also Socrates’ intellectual autobiography in the Phaedo.↩
6. Obeying a divine command is something that every philosopher would do insofar as obeying divine commands is a component of virtue; but only Socrates was given the divine command to exhort others to virtue. (?) ↩
7. which would itself be a striking statement given (1) Socrates was frequently exhorting individuals to be philosophers and it would be striking if he did this while being aware that it was quite unlikely to happen, and (2) Plato wrote the Apology and it would be, I don’t know, strange if Plato wrote that Socrates thought there would not likely be another philosopher in Athens after his death.↩
8. And how about Socrates’ daemonic sign? I’ve got no idea.↩
9. So not the philosopher of Kallipolis; but we see just about as many portrayals of the philosopher in non-ideal circumstances as portrayals of the philosopher in Kallipolis in the Republic↩
10. A claim I defend (particularly with respect to the Theaetetus) in a chapter of my dissertation↩
11. To be honest I’m afraid I’m overlooking some quite obvious passages where Socrates does just this.↩
12. That’s my problem…I don’t write many philosophy entries and when I do they tend to be entirely too long.↩

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In the last few weeks I’ve read the Protagoras, the Hippias Major and Minor, the Charmides, the Laches, the Lysis, the Ion, the Alcibiades, the Euthydemus, the Menexenus and the Clitophon. (And I really should read Republic 1 and the Euthyphro)

And right now I think it would be really good for me to sit down and spend the next couple of weeks rereading them. I’m going to resist this temptation. Sadly.

Generic warning that I usually give: this is basically me thinking aloud. So (1) please forgive clunky language. (2) I realize I’m making all sorts of assumptions and I fail to explain various points, and so forth. And, (3), as is usual, this is my thinking about things prior to reading most of the stuff that I should, and will, read.¹ And with that rousing endorsement of what’s to come… :)

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I’m currently working on my chapter on the philosopher in the aporetic dialogues.² One claim I hope to make in the chapter I’m currently working on is that we see an important connection between the use of elenchos and Socrates’ use of techne as the relevant model of knowledge.³ Of course if I want to claim that there is a connection between the elenchos and techne as the model of knowledge I’ll need to be able to give some picture of (1) the method of elenchos and (2) what techne as knowledge consists in. At the moment I’m most interested in giving some sort of account of what it means to talk of knowledge as a techne. I think that we’ve got some great evidence that Socrates thinks that it is a techne (in particular he likens knowledge of virtue to knowledge of clear technai like medicine, housebuilding, lyre playing, and so forth), but I think it’s not at clear what it means to say that knowledge, and in particular moral knowledge, is a techne.

I’m at the stage of my reading and thinking about matters where I’ve got far more questions than answers. For today I just want to articulate a few of the questions that are bothering me the most. I don’t promise to answer them. In fact I’m not even going to attempt to answer them right now. I’ve got a stack of papers and book chapters to read that are relevant to the topic at hand (and I’m open to suggestions for others if you’ve got them!). But eventually I’ll have to be able to offer answers to them. Anyways. Here are the questions:

How does one learn?

If virtue is a techne (or moral knowledge is a techne?), how do you go about learning the techne from an expert? What does learning about virtue involve? Practice and habituation? Simply hearing (and believing and knowing) the correct account? Something else?⁴
Here’s another way (the original and more long-winded way) to ask the question: Socrates throughout the aporetic dialogues denies he’s a teacher and says that instead he’s looking for a teacher⁵. And one of the ways that Socrates is looking for this teacher is by going to people who say that they’re experts and talking to them.⁶ Unfortunately he doesn’t find anyone who is able to demonstrate his expertise by successful engagement in elenchus and so he finds himself teacherless. But what if he *did* find someone with that expertise? What if he found his moral expert? What would he do? OK. So he’d become his student. But what would he do as his student?

(1) Would he sit down and listen to the lecture or two (or three or four) that the moral expert would give? And, if so, how active a role would he take in his education? Would he act like a jar just waiting to be filled up with the knowledge of the expert? Would he have to work for that knowledge? And if he has to work for that knowledge, how would he do that? Would he be taught using something akin to the Socratic method?

(2) The prototypical technai that Socrates points to as an example are of skills or crafts - medicine, housebuilding, playing the lyre, and so forth. You don’t learn how to build a house just by reading a book. You’ve got to practice. So is there some sort of practice that Socrates would have to perfect in order to become a moral expert? And what would that be? Virtue clearly relates to the soul. So just as the doctor, to become a doctor, must learn how to treat the body, does Socrates have to learn how to treat the soul in order to be virtuous? If so, what does it even mean to ‘treat the soul’? Is this just learning (and practicing??) the ways of moral education?

(3) Related to the second option, perhaps it’s something more akin to Aristotle’s account of being virtuous? Namely to be virtuous you need to develop the appropriate habits and dispositions with respect to virtue. And so you must practice being virtuous until that behavior becomes dispositional.

(4) Maybe there’s some combination of all of these? There is both an intellectual/account element of the techne (A doctor will have knowledge of how and why the body works as it does; the moral expert will now the what, why, and how of the virtues) but also a practice/habituation element of learning and perfecting the technai as well?

Now, clearly it can’t be *just* (2) or (3) as it seems clear that one must have (articulable) knowledge of the nature of the thing he’s got knowledge/expertise of. And the knowledge of the nature will involve being able to give the definition of the thing and offer an account of how/why it is as it is. So it has to be either (1) or (4), I take it. Or, to put it slightly different: there is clearly an intellectual requirement for coming to have moral wisdom/expertise. Is there also some practical (or practice-driven) requirement? If you’re smart and capable, could you pick up a book that had the account of, say, courage, and come to be an expert in courage just by reading the book? If not, why not?⁷

Having a teacher as sufficient for having the techne?

There are many places throughout the dialogues where it looks like having a teacher is sufficient for having the expertise that the teacher has imparted. Consider Laches 185b:

How would we investigate if we wanted to find out which of us was the most expert with regard to gymnastics? Wouldn’t it be the man who had studied and practiced the art and who had good teachers in that particular subject?

If you want to find an expert, you find the person who has been taught by an expert. ⁸

But, well, doesn’t this just seem wrong? Simply being taught by an expert does not at all seem to guarantee that one thereby learn the necessary skills and/or knowledge. To be sure the expert must be able to teach⁹, but you can be a true expert and wonderful teacher and yet not be able to teach a particular student because that student lacks the intellectual capacities or character necessary to learn what is being taught.¹⁰ So it seems blatantly false that being taught by a moral expert is sufficient to confer moral wisdom on the student. This is especially the case if wisdom requires more than just sitting and listening to a few lectures.

Perhaps we should say:

(a) That the student isn’t really a student if he doesn’t successfully learn?
or
(b) That the teacher isn’t really a teacher (or isn’t acting qua teacher) if he doesn’t successfully teach?

I don’t really like either of these options. If a doctor tries to treat an illness and acts in accordance with his knowledge throughout, but is unable to treat the illness because the illness is untreatable, it seems false to claim (a) that the patient isn’t really a patient if he isn’t healed or (b) that the doctor isn’t really a doctor if he doesn’t heal the patient.¹¹

So I just don’t understand why Socrates would think that having a teacher is sufficient for having a techne. Maybe we should just deny that the passages quoted above that seem to indicate that it is sufficient. I’m inclined to think this, actually.

Can I actually say what I want to say?

So I would really like to argue that a (the?) central reason why we see the elenchus being employed in the aporetic dialogues is because Plato is working with techne as a model of knowledge. And techne - expertise, skill - is primarily something that you learn from someone else. If I wanted to be a potter, the most effective way to learn is to go learn it from someone who already has the expertise. I would go learn from an expert potter. And how will I know who is an expert potter? Well, for one I’ll be able to look at her products and see whether they’re expertly crafted. But I should also be able to talk with her and ask her questions about pottery (why use this method? why have the clay at this consistency? Why mix these ingredients?) and she should be able to tell me. This - the ability to answer my questions - is even more important in those technai that don’t have such a clear product. So if I’m looking for an expert in, say, morality, then presumably I’ll first go to those who claim that their experts. Rather than take their word for it, though, I’ll talk to them and see whether they can speak about the subject in which they profess expertise.¹²¹³

So far so good. But here’s the problem: learning from an expert is not the only way you can come to have the expertise. In the Laches Socrates asks Laches and Nicias to tell everyone “whether you acquired your knowledge of the art [techne, of virtue] from another person or found it out for yourselves…” (186e). Earlier, Laches asks Socrates, “Haven’t you ever noticed that in some matters people become more expert without teachers than with them?” (185e) And Socrates agrees. But they must not take the purported expert’s word for it but instead must examine their products. The purported expert must “show which of the Athenians or foreigners, whether slave or free, is recognized to have become good through his influence” (186b).

From this I’ve got a couple of questions:

(1) How do you learn an expertise without a teacher? Through experience and discussion? Through divine inspiration? (Though if you’re divinely inspired I suppose you can’t be said to have wisdom.) So if it’s experience and discussion, is the idea that experience will lead to some insight which will then allow you to formulate the true account of the nature of x [courage, justice, virtue, piety, what have you]?

(2) If you’re an expert, you’ll have products to show for it. So why must Socrates engage in elenchus at all? Why can’t he simply look for those who have been made good by the purported experts as confirmation of their expertise? Is it that he doesn’t know what a successful product would be, given that he doesn’t know the virtues themselves…so that confirmation procedure isn’t open to him? (If I don’t know what courage is, how will I know that this individual is demonstrating true courage, after all.) Or perhaps the way to confirm that the student actually has the wisdom from his teacher is to question the student (as in the Charmides), and so elenchus is used, even if the teacher can point to a successful product?

OK, that’s enough for now. I should get on actually developing answers to these (and other) questions.

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1. I figure I should come up with my own views of the matter before reading others’ views. If I’m reinventing a couple of wheels, so be it.↩
2. I work with a distinction between aporetic and productive dialogues in my dissertation, instead of dealing with the more traditional early/middle/late distinction. Aporetic dialogues are dialogues where the interlocutors, and particularly Socrates, engage exclusively (or almost exclusively) in inquiry rather than exposition of any positive account. So the Theaetetus is an aporetic dialogue even though it’s traditionally thought of as a middle/late dialogue.↩
3. This ties into the larger thread of the dissertation because I want to say that we see a shift both in method and models of knowledge in, say, the Meno and the Republic and that shift corresponds to a shift in Plato’s account of the characteristic activity of the philosopher.↩
4. I should note that I think this question is answered in the Republic…but in the Republic the model for knowledge has changed to mathematics and the way one comes to learn and have knowledge is by learning certain subjects and methods of mathematics that are then applied to questions of virtue. I’m interested in what it is to learn, and come to have moral wisdom, when the model of knowledge is techne.↩
5. Laches 201a, others↩
6. It’s not the only reason Socrates questions people, of course. I take it he thinks that there is a therapeutic element to elenchus.↩
7. I have a suspicion that Socratic intellectualism may play a role in the answer to this question.↩
8. See also Euthyphro 16a, Meno 90b, and Gorgias 514ac, all of which offer similar evidence…though I think the evidence in the Laches is strongest. I got this list of citations from Woodruff’s paper “Plato’s Early Theory of Knowledge”; I hesitate to include the Meno on that list because it’s not clear what the model of knowledge is there…and I have general questions about just how to classify/think about the Gorgias.↩
9. And ability to teach seems to be a necessary (or sufficient?) condition of being an expert↩
10. One need teach logic only once to experience this phenomenon firsthand.↩
11. And this is compatible with both the Euthydemus (280ab) and Republic 1 passages. You can do everything right and still not be successful. What is necessary is that, as an expert, you perform your expertise correctly.↩
12. The Laches and Charmides are both good examples. Also the Protagoras.↩
13. Another way to put this is like this: we see that Socrates uses the method of elenchus. And (presumably) he does this not simply as a therapeutic procedure to ‘cure’ people of their false beliefs but as a method of inquiry in hopes of coming to have knowledge of those things that he investigates. BUT, if you’re interested in coming to have knowledge of x, why engage in the method of elenchus? Why not use some other method of inquiry? One reason could be (?) because elenchus (or something like it) is the way that one determines whether a purported expert is truly an expert.↩

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