Thoughts as Expressions of the Soul

ADEIMANTUS: … But you yourself, Socrates, do you say the good is knowledge or pleasure, or is it something else altogether?

SOCRATES: What a man! You made it good and clear long ago that other people’s opinions about these matters would not satisfy you.

ADEIMANTUS: Well, Socrates, it does not seem right to me for you to be willing to state other people’s convictions but not your own, when you have spent so much time occupied with these matters.

SOCRATES: What? Do you think it is right to speak about things you do not know as if you do know them?

ADEIMANTUS: Not as if you know them, but you ought to be willing to state what you believe as what you believe.

SOCRATES: What? Haven’t you noticed that beliefs without knowledge are all shameful and ugly things, since the best of them are blind? Do you think that those who have a true belief without understanding are any different from blind people who happen to travel the right road?

ADEIMANTUS: They are no different.

SOCRATES: Do you want to look at shameful, blind, and crooked things, then, when you might hear fine, illuminating ones from other people? (Republic Book 6 506b-d)

There is something interesting and powerful in the way that Adeimantus exhorts Socrates to say what he believes: “you ought to be willing to state what you believe as what you believe.” The latter part of this exhortation feels new and surprising, yet it is easily glossed over. Adeimantus is not asking Socrates merely to say what he believes; he is asking him to be conscious of saying what he believes as what he believes. He isn’t asking Socrates merely for a definition of the good, but a statement of belief about the good made as a statement of Socrates’ own belief. Why double up on the term belief (doxa)? Why insist that his definition reflect what he believes? I don’t think this is an accident for Plato or his English translator (C.D.C. Reeve). I think it is a deliberate phrasing that is indicating something relatively new in the relationship between beliefs and speech. Specifically, in the double use of belief, there is a level of abstraction Adeimantus is asking for from Socrates. Adeimantus wants Socrates to take up a position to his own words and his own beliefs that is at the heart of Plato’s practice of philosophia. By making Socrates verbalize his definition as his own belief, Adeimantus is asking Socrates to own his words personally. He is asking Socrates to speak his beliefs and to simultaneously and intentionally declare them as his own as he speaks.

In this meditation, I want to spend time internalizing for myself the importance of belief and its relationship to knowledge in Plato’s practice of philosophy. Much of his practice is packed into Adeimantus double use of “belief” (doxa) in his exhortation to Socrates. To be clear, Plato was always far more concerned about beliefs than knowledge. In my reading of Plato thus far in my life, the main function of knowledge (episteme) is to modify our beliefs. The pursuit of knowledge has little or no value unless it comes to rest in our beliefs. This is what he meant in the Meno when he used the metaphor of tying down our beliefs through a pursuit of knowledge. This also is present in the passage cited above: Adeimantus is turning the tables on Socrates by making him say what he believes about the good so that, ultimately, the good can inform Adeimantus’ own belief about the good. To put it succinctly, the pursuit of knowledge only has value so long as it reforms our beliefs and therefore our actions.

To be able to say what you believe as what you believe makes us encounter belief in at least two ways in Adeimantus’ exhortation. On the one hand, thoughts can and should be verbalized. We take this for granted, but the fact that Socrates (and others, see the opening lines of the Laches) insists on this throughout Plato’s work suggests that both philosophers thought it was important enough to make a centerpiece in their ethics. It actually has a Greek term, parrhesia, that encapsulates the requirement, which is often translated as “saying what you think” and “speaking frankly.” On the other hand, thoughts need to be verbalized as what the speaker thinks is true. It is not just that Socrates needs to offer a definition of “the good,” he needs to be conscious and intentional that what he is saying is something that he believes. This double movement — saying what you think and being intentional that what you say is an accurate representation of what you believe to be true — requires an abstraction from one’s own thoughts that is multifaceted. I want to try to untangle the relationship between belief, knowledge, truth, and speech that is Plato’s ethical innovation. Untangling this, I think, will expose something new and innovative in what Plato was doing through the character of Socrates.

I will untangle these one thread at a time. First, to “state what you believe as what you believe” requires a form of speaking that makes one’s words transparent to their thoughts. The contrast here is to a kind of speaking that is intended to influence the listener. This is what the sophists do — not just in the preceding lines of The Republic but throughout Plato’s work. They use words to win arguments. The objective of speech for a sophist is victory. This is very different than using words to reveal thoughts. The difference is where the speaker places his/her attention. To “state what you believe as what you believe” is to put your attention onto yourself and to try to make your chosen words conform to your thoughts as they flow. This is why, throughout Plato’s Socratic dialogs, we see interlocutors struggling not just with words, but with the way words don’t match up to their thoughts. Let’s take Laches as he struggles to articulate a satisfactory definition of courage:

LACHES: I am ready not to give up, Socrates, although I am not really accustomed to arguments of this kind. But an absolute desire for victory has seized me with respect to our conversation, and I am really getting annoyed at being unable to express what I think in this fashion. I still think I know what courage is, but I can’t understand how it has escaped me just now so that I can’t pin it down in words and say what it is. (194A-B)

Here Plato acknowledges speech as motivated by a desire for victory, but he turns the tables on how one wins in the game of Socratic speech. Laches’ frustration has to do with wanting to win the conversation on Socrates’ terms, but this frustration is expressed as the inability to make a match between his words and his beliefs about courage. Laches’ victory would not be a victory over Socrates, but a victory over himself if only he could make his words conform to what he thinks. It is a beautiful passage that pokes at the conventional Athenian valorization of rhetoric as effective use of words to win public arguments. The fact that Laches “is not accustomed to arguments of this kind” emphasizes that Plato’s Socrates is introducing something new in the relationship between words and thoughts to his Athenian readers.

To put a point on it, the Platonic innovation with respect to words and thoughts is to insist on a form of attention that makes the speaker focus on his own thoughts as his own thoughts. The speaker’s attention is away from the audience and toward him/herself as a thinker who is speaking his thoughts. This innovation shouldn’t be glossed over. It is a profound moment in the history of the Western world: at this moment in the early dialog of the Laches, we see the birth of language as personal expression and not simply rhetoric as a techne for winning arguments.

This leads to the second thread to untangle: language as expression of personal beliefs means beliefs are now personal possessions. To require someone to “state what you believe as what you believe” is to ask the speaker to own their thoughts. Even more than that: it is to label that ownership as belief. Again, this is the opposite of the typical speech of a sophist or a politician who speaks in order to convince. In those speeches, there is no necessary connection between what the sophist or politician says and what they authentically believe to be true. They are just trying to win more votes than their competitors. Belief, in other words, becomes a way of tying the individual to his thoughts such that he becomes responsible for them as their owner. The origin of those beliefs matters not at the moment of speaking. All that matters is the willingness to own one’s own thoughts as your own beliefs about the topic at hand.

Third, belief is the fundamental ground of human thought and action for Plato’s Socrates. One can never be rid of beliefs; one can only make them true or false. We are inextricably tied to our beliefs. It is a mistake to think that Plato (or Socrates) saw human beings as fundamentally rational creatures. We are believing creatures. This, I think, is what gets missed in popular representations of Plato’s Socrates. All of human action comes down to the quality of our beliefs as the drivers of our actions. When Socrates urges his fellow citizens to “take care of their souls,” he is urging them to be conscious and deliberate about what they are willing to believe.

I want to spend some time on this because it seems like a disingenuous reading of Plato to make him (and Socrates by extension) into a tyrannical rationalist and a proponent of Nietzsche’s ascetic ideal as the absolute denial of our thymos — the spirited part of our souls. The tripartite soul elaborated in Book 4 should tip us off that Plato’s thought is more complex than this. Plato definitely wants the rational part of the soul to rule. However, this rule is not the rule of an ascetic priest — it is not a rule of denial and repression of the other parts. It is a kind of authority that harmonizes the parts. This cannot be underestimated. For Plato, this rule is expressed as balance and harmony and beauty. The ideal city of Book 4 is not a rational city, it is Kalliopolis, a beautiful (kalos) city. Harmony, grace, balance, beauty — these are the experiential characteristics of the good. These are the virtues we strive for when we seek order in our souls and order in our community. This is an aesthetic order as much as it is a rational one. The two seem to me to be inseparable in a close reading of Plato.

But this harmonic balance is easily corrupted. What is the nature of this corruption? It is a corruption of imbalance among the parts of the soul. Here I want to stray a bit from the canonical reading of Plato that would see this as a corruption of the rational part of the soul by the thymos and the appetites. Rather, I want to argue that belief is at stake in this corruption because belief is how the soul expresses itself in words and actions. Action as the expression of belief is fundamental to Plato’s Socrates. One cannot understand Plato unless one understands this: no one of us ever does anything that we don’t believe is good. We always do what we think is good. There is no room for evil motivations in Plato’s Socrates. However, our beliefs about what is good can be mistaken. This is different than saying that they originate from evil as an opposing force to the good. I may over indulge in drinking and eating but this is only because, at the moment I am over indulging, I believe that this is better than not doing it. My rational part is still active, it’s just over-influenced by the appetites and the thymos. I’m not over indulging because I have some self-destructive desire to explode like Mr. Creosote in Monty Python’s The Meaning of Life. Nor am I over indulging because an evil force is driving me to this self destruction. I take pleasure in food and drink because I think that pleasure is good for me to indulge. I am mistaken in this belief, not evil.

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Side note: In English translations of Plato, we’ll sometimes find the use of the term evil. But we should not read this as an opposing force to the good. It more often represents a problem of culture, education, and therefore character. Evil in this sense means that the corruption of the soul has been so systematic and relentless that it could appear as an opposing force. It is not. It is just a mistaken education that has embedded these mistakes so deeply in the soul that the character of the individual is thoroughly corrupted.

……….

This is crucial for Plato’s Socrates because it is this implicit desire for the good that Socrates will exploit when he engages with an interlocutor. Embodied in all of our desires, whether driven primarily by thymos or bodily appetites, is the desire for the good. This is the province of wisdom. Thus our souls are never fully cut off from the good. It remains in us as a desire embedded in the rational part of the soul. The function of philosophical education is to draw out that desire and make it self-reflective.

This self-reflection must be activated however. Plato needs philosophical concepts that are at one and the same time practical and metaphysical. And this is where we arrive at the fourth thread to untangle in Plato’s concept of belief. It would be easy to look at key concepts like recollection (Meno, Phaedo) and the Forms to see how they function primarily as practical-metaphysical concepts that activate self-reflection. But for the moment, I want to focus on something even more fundamental in Plato’s articulation of self-reflection: Socrates’ dialectical technique is to separate belief from truth and truth from knowledge. This separation is a stretching out of the soul across these different terms. The interlocutor first experiences this separation as a powerful form of doubt about the veracity of his beliefs. But because beliefs are expressions of the state of our souls, this doubt goes beyond simply doubting the veracity of abstract thoughts. It is self-doubt that gets at the root of identity. This is why aporia, when it occurs, can be so emotional for the interlocutor. Nicias put it famously in the Laches:

NICIAS: You [Laches] don’t appear to me to know that whoever comes into close contact with Socrates and associates with him in conversation must necessarily, even if he began by conversing about something quite different in the first place, kept on being led about by the man’s arguments until he submits to answering questions about himself concerning both his present manner of life and the life he has lived hitherto. (187E, emphasis added)

The elenchus moves from abstract topics to crises of identity as the interlocutor undergoes a self-transformation that makes him see his actions as tied to his flawed beliefs. This is the experience of aporia. The moral journey of Nicias, as he goes onto say, is that this experience of aporia has actually become part of his own life and has ceased to become existentially disturbing: “I take pleasure in the man’s company, Lysimachus, and don’t regard it as at all a bad thing to have it brought to our attention that we have done or are doing wrong” (Laches, 188A). He actively seeks it from Socrates because the experience is self-transformative, which he has come to love.

The moral danger for both the individual and the city is when beliefs are never allowed to be stated as beliefs, and self-doubt is never encouraged far enough to become aporia. This is the force of the echo chamber passage that I looked at in a previous meditation. The sophists reinforce the beliefs of the masses (hoi poloi) as true knowledge. This is accomplished by preventing the stretching out that separates beliefs from knowledge. This is the danger of the sophists: they make popularly held beliefs appear to be true simply because they are popular beliefs. The soul is never stretched out to look at its beliefs through philosophical techniques like recollection and Forms and elenchus. Instead, sophists encourage a look inward that reinforces one’s intuitive beliefs as true because they are intuitive. The masses are encouraged through the rhetorical techniques of the sophists to lean into their thymos-driven emotions and whip them up:

None of these private wage-earners — the ones these people call sophists and consider to be their rivals in craft [techne] — teaches anything other than the convictions the masses hold when they are assembled together, and this he calls wisdom. (493a, emphasis added)

The wisdom-seeking part of our souls is thus enslaved to the thymistic part through the craft (techne) of the sophist. The soul, and by extension the city, is out of balance. Harmony and justice and beauty are the victims.

All of this emanates from our beliefs according to Plato. We should not lose sight of this fundamental ground. To state beliefs as beliefs, then, is to make the individual own them at the same time that s/he is asked to doubt their veracity. All of this leads us to perhaps the moment in The Republic where modern philosophy is born. It is the moment where Plato’s Socrates, in a single sentence, launches us into a modern world where the individual and the collective are tied together in a continuum. The transformation of the one is tied to the transformation of the other in a virtuous or vicious feedback loop. Harmony is at stake as the balancing of all the parts of the soul, but this balance is achieved by the dominance of reason:

SOCRATES: Then isn’t it appropriate for the rationally calculating element to rule, since it is really wise and exercises foresight on behalf of the whole soul; and for the spirited kind to obey and be its ally? (Book 442a)

Is this the birth of the “tyranny of reason” as Nietzsche would formulate it many centuries later? Possibly, but only if we let it be so. It equally is the birth of the modern will that can abstract itself from its beliefs, and in doing so it can evaluate them, modify them, and in turn modify long-term behavior. “Character” becomes a powerful and effective concept: it can be developed. Self-transformation has become possible as transcending our knee-jerk beliefs passed onto us by culture. This is a powerful insight by Plato: culture inhabits our souls before we are in a position to evaluate it. The elenchus is driven by this insight, and the aporia is inseparable from this insight. We must embrace a power of stepping back from our beliefs that we have inherited but not chosen.

Must we accept Plato’s version of this transformation wholly and completely? Must we whole-heartedly and authentically believe in recollection and Forms and all the ontological and epistemological baggage that enabled the birth of this human will? No. But we must believe in some mythology that breaks us free of a purely technical notion of self-transformation. The rational part of the soul reduced a calculator cannot dominate itself or the other parts. The parts must be in balance. This is the challenge of AI today: if it remains stuck in a knee-jerk Platonism as a tyranny of calculation, we are doomed to a permanent nihilism of the rest of ourselves. Or are we? If we offload the calculating part to machines that are better calculators than us, does that free us to pursue the beauty and harmony that is Platonic justice? Only if the calculating part is rebalanced and re-integrated into the desire for harmony as the desire for the good as the just and the beautiful.

Yet this too is dangerous. Plato’s English translators indicate this danger when harmony is expressed as essentialized hierarchies where each part must know itself as a limited part and thus know its role in the whole. We can never aspire to be anything other than our conformity to our place in the hierarchy. If this is beauty and the good, then we are in serious trouble. Self-transformation becomes a self-limiting discipline of the kind Emerson and Foucault warned us about in their different ways. We see this danger in Plato when he makes statements that indicate that the rational part of the polis must rule and “bind” the other parts together. When does this binding become violent? The solution is not anti-hierarchy as the other side of the binary. This would be anarchy as the nihilistic lack of imagining hierarchy as anything other than everyone finding their place and mistaking a stultifying conformity as transcendent self-transformation. All that will result are new forms of violent and conformity-driven hierarchies discussing themselves as non-conformity.

This is Plato’s legacy to us. He is the first — at least the first in the Western world that we have access to — to systematically show us that self-transformation is possible and that the work of philosophy (as the love of wisdom) is to help each of us break free of forms of truth that make us take our anger as self-validating knowledge. He taught us how to step back from these moments and look at our beliefs — and look at what we are being asked to believe by the “wage earners.” Yet, we must not swallow the whole of his worldview as our medicine. I am not a believer or a follower of Plato. Yet I need not throw out the baby of transcendent self-transformation with the bathwater of stultifying conformity.