An Apology for Socrates

What Platonism Gets Right

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Last week we gave old Socrates a thrashing. He revolted against tradition, offered mostly critique, and what positive doctrines he did offer paved the way for atheism, which the classical world did in fact suffer.¹ The Greeks regarded him as a subversive ironist bent only on deconstruction. They put him to death, and he deserved it.

But is there anything the old ironist got right? Can we give the devil his due? Sure we can. It turns out that Socrates got something immensely important right. The philosophers before him began with metaphysics, and if they got around to ethics at all,² it came fairly late in the chain of reasoning. Socrates says that morality is first philosophy.

This seems really strange. How can you not begin with metaphysics? One indication that you can is that through almost all of human history, people did. We have very little in the way of metaphysical speculation before the classical Greeks, maybe nothing, depending how you slice it. One could argue that the Egyptians had metaphysics in the form of the Onomasticon of Amenope, but this was simply a hierarchical list of everything that exists in the world. Not exactly Manly P. Hall’s Secret Teachings of All Ages, is it?³ They of course had myth. They also had a conceptual schema embedded in their language. Both contain what we might call implicit metaphysics, which we’ve discussed elsewhere without using that term. You don’t begin with a theory of existence, but the theory can be gleaned from religious exegesis or linguistic analysis. Suffice it to say though that this theory is the result, rather than the source, of the lore and the language.

Socrates of course does eventually come around to metaphysical speculation. But apart from only a few dialogues, the old ironist is interested above all in reforming people’s moral understanding. The metaphysics is usually just a means; the cultivation of virtue is the end. There is great wisdom in this, much more than even Socrates himself guessed.

But for us to squeeze all the juice out of this lemon requires that we understand exactly what’s going on when we make a moral statement.