Sociological Approach

Socrates
Socrates (470-399) was the son of a sculptor and a midwife, and served with distinction in the Athenian army during Athens’ clash with Sparta. He married, but had a tendency to fall in love with handsome young men, in particular a young soldier named Alcibiades. He was, by all accounts, short and stout, not given to good grooming, and a lover of wine and conversation. His famous student, Plato, called him “the wisest, and justest, and best of all men whom I have ever known” (Phaedo).
He was irritated by the Sophists and their tendency to teach logic as a means of achieving self-centered ends, and even more their promotion of the idea that all things are relative. It was the truth that he loved, desired, and believed in.
Philosophy, the love of wisdom, was for Socrates itself a sacred path, a holy quest -- not a game to be taken lightly. He believed -- or at least said he did in the dialog Meno -- in the reincarnation of an eternal soul which contained all knowledge. We unfortunately lose touch with that knowledge at every birth, and so we need to be reminded of what we already know (rather than learning something new).
He said that he did not teach, but rather served, like his mother, as a midwife to truth that is already in us! Making use of questions and answers to remind his students of knowledge is called maieutics (midwifery), dialectics, or the Socratic method.
One example of his effect on philosophy is found in the dialog Euthyphro. He suggests that what is to be considered a good act is not good because gods say it is, but is good because it is useful to us in our efforts to be better and happier people. This means that ethics is no longer a matter of surveying the gods or scripture for what is good or bad, but rather thinking about life. He even placed individual conscience above the law -- quite a dangerous position to take!
Socrates himself never wrote any of his ideas down, but rather engaged his students -- wealthy young men of Athens -- in endless conversations. In exchange for his teaching, they in turn made sure that he was taken care of. Since he claimed to have few needs, he took very little, much to his wife Xanthippe’s distress.
Plato reconstructed these discussions in a great set of writings known as the Dialogs. It is difficult to distinguish what is Socrates and what is Plato in these dialogs, so we will simply discuss them together.
Socrates wasn’t loved by everyone by any means. His unorthodox political and religious views gave the leading citizens of Athens the excuse they needed to sentence him to death for corrupting the morals of the youth of the city. In 399, he was ordered to drink a brew of poison hemlock, which he did in the company of his students. The event is documented in Plato's Apology.
Socrates' final words were "Crito, we owe a cock to Asclepius (the god of medicine). Pay it and do not neglect it."
Plato
Plato (437-347) was Socrates’ prized student. From a wealthy and powerful family, his actual name was Aristocles -- Plato was a nickname, referring to his broad physique. When he was about twenty, he came under Socrates’ spell and decided to devote himself to philosophy. Devastated by Socrates’ death, he wandered around Greece and the Mediterranean and was taken by pirates. His friends raised money to ransom him from slavery, but when he was released without it, they bought him a small property called Academus to start a school -- the Academy, founded in 386.
The Academy was more like Pythagorus’ community -- a sort of quasi-religious fraternity, where rich young men studied mathematics, astronomy, law, and, of course, philosophy. It was free, depending entirely on donations. True to his ideals, Plato also permitted women to attend! The Academy would become the center of Greek learning for almost a millennium.
Plato can be understood as idealistic and rationalistic, much like Pythagorus but much less mystical. He divides reality into two: On the one hand we have ontos, idea or ideal. This is ultimate reality, permanent, eternal, spiritual. On the other hand, there’s phenomena, which is a manifestation of the ideal. Phenomena are appearances -- things as they seem to us -- and are associated with matter, time, and space.
Phenomena are illusions which decay and die. Ideals are unchanging, perfect. Phenomena are definitely inferior to Ideals! The idea of a triangle -- the defining mathematics of it, the form or essence of it -- is eternal. Any individual triangle, the triangles of the day-to-day experiential world, are never quite perfect: They may be a little crooked, or the lines a little thick, or the angles not quite right.... They only approximate that perfect triangle, the ideal triangle.
If it seems strange to talk about ideas or ideals as somehow more real than the world of our experiences, consider science. The law of gravity, 1+1=2, “magnets attract iron,” E=mc2, and so on -- these are universals, not true for one day in one small location, but true forever and everywhere! If you believe that there is order in the universe, that nature has laws, you believe in ideas!
Ideas are available to us through thought, while phenomena are available to us through our senses. So, naturally, thought is a vastly superior means to get to the truth. This is what makes Plato a rationalist, as opposed to an empiricist, in epistemology.
Senses can only give you information about the ever-changing and imperfect world of phenomena, and so can only provide you with implications about ultimate reality, not reality itself. Reason goes straight to the idea. You “remember,” or intuitively recognize the truth, as Socrates suggested in the dialog Meno.
According to Plato, the phenomenal world strives to become ideal, perfect, complete. Ideals are, in that sense, a motivating force. In fact, he identifies the ideal with God and perfect goodness. God creates the world out of materia (raw material, matter) and shapes it according to his “plan” or “blueprint” -- ideas or the ideal. If the world is not perfect, it is not because of God or the ideals, but because the raw materials were not perfect. I think you can see why the early Christian church made Plato an honorary Christian, even though he died three and a half centuries before Christ!
Plato applies the same dichotomy to human beings: There’s the body, which is material, mortal, and “moved” (a victim of causation). Then there’s the soul, which is ideal, immortal, and “unmoved” (enjoying free will).
The soul includes reason, of course, as well as self-awareness and moral sense. Plato says the soul will always choose to do good, if it recognizes what is good. This is a similar conception of good and bad as the Buddhists have: Rather than bad being sin, it is considered a matter of ignorance. So, someone who does something bad requires education, not punishment.
The soul is drawn to the good, the ideal, and so is drawn to God. We gradually move closer and closer to God through reincarnation as well as in our individual lives. Our ethical goal in life is resemblance to God, to come closer to the pure world of ideas and ideal, to liberate ourselves from matter, time, and space, and to become more real in this deeper sense. Our goal is, in other words, self-realization.
Plato talks about three levels of pleasure. First is sensual or physical pleasure, of which sex is a great example. A second level is sensuous or esthetic pleasure, such as admiring someone’s beauty, or enjoying one’s relationship in marriage. But the highest level is ideal pleasure, the pleasures of the mind. Here the example would be Platonic love, intellectual love for another person unsullied by physical involvement.
Paralleling these three levels of pleasure are three souls. We have one soul called appetite, which is mortal and comes from the gut. The second soul is called spirit or courage. It is also mortal, and lives in the heart. The third soul is reason. It is immortal and resides in the brain. The three are strung together by the cerebrospinal canal.
Plato is fond of analogies. Appetite, he says, is like a wild horse, very powerful, but likes to go its own way. Spirit is like a thoroughbred, refined, well trained, directed power. And reason is the charioteer, goal-directed, steering both horses according to his will.
Other analogies abound, especially in Plato’s greatest work, The Republic. In The Republic, he designs (through Socrates) a society in order to discover the meaning of justice. Along the way, he compares elements of his society (a utopia, Greek for “no place”) to the three souls: The peasants are the foundation of the society. They till the soil and produce goods, i.e. take care of society’s basic appetites. The warriors represent the spirit and courage of the society. And the philosopher kings guide the society, as reason guides our lives.
Before you assume that we are just looking at a Greek version of the Indian caste system, please note: Everyone’s children are raised together and membership in one of the three levels of society is based on talents, not on one’s birth parents! And Plato includes women as men’s equals in this system.
I leave you with a few quotes:
"Wonder is the feeling of a philosopher, and philosophy begins in wonder."
"...(I)f you ask what is the good of education in general, the answer is easy; that education makes good men, and that good men act nobly."
"(I) do to others as I would they should do to me."
"Our object in the construction of the State is the greatest happiness of the whole, and not that of any one class."

Aristotle
Aristotle (384-322) was born in a small Greek colony in Thrace called Stagira. His father was a physician and served the grandfather of Alexander the Great. Presumably, it was his father who taught him to take an interest in the details of natural life.
He was Plato’s prize student, even though he disagreed with him on many points. When Plato died, Aristotle stayed for a while with another student of Plato, who had made himself a dictator in northern Asia Minor. He married the dictator’s daughter, Pythias. They moved to Lesbos, where Pythias died giving birth to their only child, a daughter. Although he married again, his love for Pythias never died, and he requested that they be buried side by side.
For four years, Aristotle served as the teacher of a thirteen year old Alexander, son of Philip of Macedon. In 334, he returned to Athens and established his school of philosophy in a set of buildings called the Lyceum (from a name for Apollo, “the shepherd”). The beautiful grounds and covered walkways were conducive to leisurely walking discussions, so the students were known as peripatoi (“covered walkways”).
First, we must point out that Aristotle was as much a scientist as a philosopher. He was endlessly fascinated with nature, and went a long way towards classifying the plants and animals of Greece. He was equally interested in studying the anatomies of animals and their behavior in the wild.
Aristotle also pretty much invented modern logic. Except for its symbolic form, it is essentially the same today.
Let’s begin with metaphysics: While Plato separates the ever-changing phenomenal world from the true and eternal ideal reality, Aristotle suggests that the ideal is found “inside” the phenomena, the universals “inside” the particulars.
What Plato called idea or ideal, Aristotle called essence, and its opposite, he referred to as matter. Matter is without shape or form or purpose. It is just “stuff.” pure potential, no actuality. Essence is what provides the shape or form or purpose to matter. Essence is “perfect,” “complete,” but it has no substance, no solidity. Essence and matter need each other!
Essence realizes (“makes real”) matter. This process, the movement from formless stuff to complete being, is called entelechy, which some translate as actualization.
There are four causes that contribute to the movement of entelechy. They are answers to the question “why?” or “what is the explanation of this?”
1. The material cause: what something is made of.
2. The efficient cause: the motion or energy that changes matter.
3. The formal cause: the thing’s shape, form, or essence; its definition.
4. The final cause: its reason, its purpose, the intention behind it.
1. The material cause: The thing’s matter or substance. Why a bronze statue? The metal it is made of. Today, we find an emphasis on material causation in reductionism, explaining, for example, thoughts in terms of neural activity, feelings in terms of hormones, etc. We often go down a “level” because we can’t explain something at the level it’s at.
2. The efficient cause: The motion or energy that changes matter. Why the statue? The forces necessary to work the bronze, the hammer, the heat, the energy.... This is what modern science focuses on, to the point where this is what cause now tends to mean, exclusively. Note that modern psychology usually relies on reductionism in order to find efficient causes. But it isn’t always so: Freud, for example, talked about psychosexual energy and Skinner talked about stimulus and response.
3. The formal cause: The thing’s shape, form, definition, or essence. Why the statue? Because of the plan the sculptor had for the bronze, it’s shape or form, the non-random ordering of it’s matter. In psychology, we see some theorists focus on structure -- Piaget and his schema, for example. Others talk about the structure inherent in the genetic code, or about cognitive scripts.
4. The final cause: The end, the purpose, the teleology of the thing. Why the statue? The purpose of it, the intention behind making it. This was popular with medieval scholars: They searched for the ultimate final cause, the ultimate purpose of all existence, which they of course labeled God! Note that, outside of the hard sciences, this is often the kind of cause we are most interested in: Why did he do it, what was his purpose or intention? E.g. in law, the bullet may have been the “efficient” cause of death, but the intent of the person pulling the trigger is what we are concerned with. When we talk about intentions, goals, values, and so on, we are talking about final causes.
Aristotle wrote the first book on psychology (as a separate topic from the rest of philosophy). It was called, appropriately, Para Psyche, Greek for “about the mind or soul.” It is better known in the Latin form, De Anima. In this book, we find the first mentions of many ideas that are basic to psychology today, such as the laws of association.
In it, he says the mind or soul is the “first entelechy” of the body, the “cause and principle” of the body, the realization of the body. We might put it like this: The mind is the purposeful functioning of the nervous system.
Like Plato, he postulates three kinds of souls, although slightly differently defined. There is a plant soul, the essence of which is nutrition. Then there is an animal soul, which contains the basic sensations, desire, pain and pleasure, and the ability to cause motion. Last, but not least, is the human soul. The essence of the human soul is, of course, reason. He suggests that, perhaps, this last soul is capable of existence apart from the body.
He foreshadowed many of the concepts that would become popular only two thousand years later. Libido, for example: “In all animals... it is the most natural function to beget another being similar to itself... in order that they attain as far as possible, the immortal and divine.... This is the final cause of every creatures natural life.”
And the struggle of the id and ego: “There are two powers in the soul which appear to be moving forces -- desire and reason. But desire prompts actions in violation of reason... desire... may be wrong.”
And the pleasure principle and reality principle: “Although desires arise which are opposed to each other, as is the case when reason and appetite are opposed, it happens only in creatures endowed with a sense of time. For reason, on account of the future, bids us resist, while desire regards the present; the momentarily pleasant appears to it as the absolutely pleasant and the absolutely good, because it does not see the future.”
And finally, self-actualization: We begin as unformed matter in the womb, and through years of development and learning, we become mature adults, always reaching for perfection. "So the good has been well explained as that at which all things aim. | |
Confucius (551—479 BCE)
Better known in China as “Master Kong” (Chinese: Kongzi), Confucius was a fifth-century BCE Chinese thinker whose influence upon East Asian intellectual and social history is immeasurable. As a culturally symbolic figure, he has been alternately idealized, deified, dismissed, vilified, and rehabilitated over the millennia by both Asian and non-Asian thinkers and regimes. Given his extraordinary impact on Chinese, Korean, Japanese, and Vietnamese thought, it is ironic that so little can be known about Confucius. The tradition that bears his name – “Confucianism” (Chinese: Rujia) – ultimately traces itself to the sayings and biographical fragments recorded in the text known as the Analects (Chinese: Lunyu). As with the person of Confucius himself, scholars disagree about the origins and character of the Analects, but it remains the traditional source for information about Confucius’ life and teaching. Most scholars remain confident that it is possible to extract from the Analects several philosophical themes and views that may be safely attributed to this ancient Chinese sage. These are primarily ethical, rather than analytical-logical or metaphysical in nature, and include Confucius’ claim that Tian (“Heaven”) is aligned with moral order but dependent upon human agents to actualize its will; his concern for li (ritual propriety) as the instrument through which the family, the state, and the world may be aligned with Tian’s moral order; and his belief in the “contagious” nature of moral force (de), by which moral rulers diffuse morality to their subjects, moral parents raise moral children, and so forth.

Marcus Tullius Cicero | |

Cicero (106—43 BCE)
Marcus Tullius Cicero was born on January 3, 106 BC and was murdered on December 7, 43 BC. His life coincided with the decline and fall of the Roman Republic, and he was an important actor in many of the significant political events of his time (and his writings are now a valuable source of information to us about those events). He was, among other things, an orator, lawyer, politician, and philosopher. Making sense of his writings and understanding his philosophy requires us to keep that in mind. He placed politics above philosophical study; the latter was valuable in its own right but was even more valuable as the means to more effective political action. The only periods of his life in which he wrote philosophical works were the times he was forcibly prevented from taking part in politics.

Quintilian
Roman rhetorician, born at Calagurris (Calahorra) in Spain. Concerning his family and his life but few facts remain. His father taught rhetoric, with no great success, at Rome, and Quintilian must have come there at an early age to reside, and must have there grown up to manhood. The years from 61 to 68 he spent in Spain, probably attached in some capacity to the retinue of the future emperor Galba, with whom he returned to the capital. For at least twenty years after the accession of Galba he was at the head of the foremost school of oratory in Rome, and may fairly be called the Isocrates of his time. He also gained some, but not a great, repute as a pleader in the courts. His greatest speech appears to have been a defense of the queen Berenice, on what charge is not known. He appears to have been wealthy for a professional man. Vespasian created for him a professorial chair of rhetoric, liberally endowed with public money, and from this time he was unquestionably, as Martial calls him, "the supreme controller of the restless youth." About the year 88 Quintilian retired from teaching and from pleading, to compose his great work on the training of the orator, the Institutio Oratoria. After two years retirement he was entrusted by Domitian with the education of two grand-nephews, whom he destined as successors to his throne. Quintilian gained the titular rank of consul, and probably died not long before the accession of Nerva (AD 96). A wife and two children died early.
Such is the scanty record that remains of Quintilian's uneventful life. But it is possible to determine with some accuracy his relation to the literature and culture of his time, which he powerfully influenced. His career brings home to us the vast change which in a few generations had passed over Roman taste, feeling and society. In the days of Cicero rhetorical teaching had been entirely in the hands of the Greeks. The Greek language, too, was in the main the vehicle of instruction in rhetoric. The first attempt to open a Latin rhetorical school, in 94 BC, was crushed by authority, and not until the time of Caesar Augustus was there any professor of the art who had been born to the full privileges of a Roman citizen. The appointment of Quintilian as professor by the chief of the state marks the last stage in the emancipation of rhetorical teaching from the old Roman prejudices.
During the hundred years or more which elapsed between the death of Cicero and the birth of Quintilian education all over the Roman Empire had spread enormously, and the education of the time found its end and climax in rhetoric. Mental culture was for the most part acquired, not for its own sake, but as a discipline to develop skill in speaking, the paramount qualification for a public career. Rome, Italy and the provinces alike resounded with rhetorical exercitations, which were promoted on all sides by professorships, first of Greek, later also of Latin rhetoric, endowed from municipal funds. The mock contests of the future orators roused a vast amount of popular interest. In Gaul, Spain and Africa these pursuits were carried on with even greater energy than at Rome. The seeds of the existing culture, such as it was, bore richer fruit on the fresh soil of the western provinces than in the exhausted lands of Italy and the East. While Quintilian lived, men born in Spain dominated the Latin schools and the Latin literature, and he died just too soon to see the first provincial, also of Spanish origin, ascend the imperial throne.
As an orator, a teacher and an author, Quintilian set himself to stem the current of popular taste which found its expression in what we are wont to call silver Latin. In his youth the influence of the younger Seneca was dominant. But the chief teacher of Quintilian was a man of another type, one whom he ventures to class with the old orators of Rome. This was Domitius Afer, a rhetorician of Nîmes, who rose to the consulship. Quintilian, however, owed more to the dead than to the living. His great model was Cicero, of whom he speaks at all times with unbounded eulogy, and whose faults he could scarce bring himself to mention; nor could he well tolerate to hear them mentioned by others. The reaction against the Ciceronian oratory which had begun in Cicero's own lifetime had acquired overwhelming strength after his death. Quintilian failed to check it, as another teacher of rhetoric, equally an admirer of Cicero, had failed -- the historian Livy. Seneca the Elder, a clear-sighted man who could see in Cicero much to praise, and was not blind to the faults of his own age, condemned the old style as lacking in power, while Tacitus, in his Dialogue on Orators, includes Cicero among the men of rude and "unkempt" antiquity. The great movement for the poetization of Latin prose which was begun by Sallust ran its course until it culminated in the monstrous style of Fronto. In the courts judges, juries and audiences alike demanded what was startling, quaint or epigrammatic, and the speakers practiced a thousand tricks to satisfy the demand. Oratory became above all things an art whose last thought was to conceal itself. It is not surprising that Quintilian's forensic efforts won for him no lasting reputation among his countrymen.
The Institutio Oratoria is one long protest against the tastes of the age. Starting with the maxim of Cato the Censor that the orator is "the good man who is skilled in speaking", Quintilian takes his future orator at birth and shows how this goodness of character and skill in speaking may be best produced. No detail of training in infancy, boyhood or youth is too petty for his attention. The parts of the work which relate to general education are of great interest and importance. Quintilian postulates the widest culture; there is no form of knowledge from which something may not be extracted for his purpose; and he is fully alive to the importance of method in education. He ridicules the fashion of the day, which hurried over preliminary cultivation, and allowed men to grow grey while declaiming in the schools, where nature and reality were forgotten. Yet he develops all the technicalities of rhetoric with a fullness to which we find no parallel in ancient literature. Even in this portion of the work the illustrations are so apposite and the style so dignified and yet sweet that the modern reader, whose initial interest in rhetoric is of necessity faint, is carried along with much less fatigue than is necessary to master most parts of the rhetorical writings of Aristotle and Cicero. Quintilian's literary sympathies are extraordinarily wide. When obliged to condemn, as in the case of Seneca, he bestows generous and even extravagant praise on such merit as he can find. He can cordially admire even Sallust, the true fountainhead of the style which he combats, while he will not suffer Lucilius to lie under the aspersions of Horace. The passages in which Quintilian reviews the literature of Greece and Rome are justly celebrated. The judgments which he passes may be in many instances traditional, but, looking to all the circumstances of the time, it seems remarkable that there should then have lived at Rome a single man who could make them his own and give them expression. The form in which these judgments are rendered is admirable. The gentle justness of the sentiments is accompanied by a curious felicity of phrase. Who can forget "the immortal swiftness of Sallust", or "the milky richness of Livy", or how "Horace soars now and then, and is full of sweetness and grace, and in his varied forms and phrases is most fortunately bold"? Ancient literary criticism perhaps touched its highest point in the hands of Quintilian.
To comprehensive sympathy and clear intellectual vision Quintilian added refined tenderness and freedom from self-assertion. Taking him all in all, we may say that his personality must have been the most attractive of his time -- more winning and at the same time more lofty than that of the younger Pliny, his pupil, into whom no small portion of the master's spirit, and even some tincture of the master's literary taste, was instilled. It does not surprise us to hear that Quintilian attributed any success he won as a pleader to his command of pathos, a quality in which his great guide Cicero excelled. In spite of some extravagances of phrase, Quintilian's lament (in his sixth book) for his girl-wife and his boy of great promise is the most pathetic of all the lamentations for bereavement in which Latin literature is so rich. In his precepts about early education Quintilian continually shows his shrinking from cruelty and oppression.
Quintilian for the most part avoids passing opinions on the problems of philosophy, religion and politics. The professed philosopher he disliked almost as much as did Isocrates. He deemed that ethics formed the only valuable part of philosophy and that ethical teaching ought to be in the hands of the rhetoricians. In the divine government of the universe he seems to have had a more than ornamental faith, though he doubted the immortality of the soul. As to politics Quintilian, like others of his time, felt free to eulogize the great anti-Caesarean leaders of the dying republic, but only because the assumption was universal that the system they had championed was gone forever. But Quintilian did not trouble himself, as Statius did, to fling stones at the emperors Caligula and Nero, who had missed their deification. He makes no remark, laudatory or otherwise, on the government of any emperor before Domitian. No character figured more largely in the rhetorical controversies of the schools than the ideal despot, but no word ever betrayed a consciousness that the actual occupant of the Palatine might exemplify the theme. Quintilian has often been reproached with his flattery of Domitian. No doubt it was fulsome. But it is confined to two or three passages, not thrust continually upon the reader, as by Statius and Martial. To refuse the charge of Domitian's expected successors would have been perilous, and equally perilous would it have been to omit from the Institutio Oratoria all mention of the emperor. And there was at the time only one dialect in which a man of letters could speak who set any value on his personal safety. There was a choice between extinction and the writing of a few sentences in the loathsome court language, which might serve as an official test of loyalty.
The Latin of Quintilian is not always free from the faults of style which he condemns in others. It also exhibits many of the usages and constructions which are characteristic of the silver Latin. But no writer of the decadence departs less widely from the best models of the late republican period. The language is on the whole clear and simple, and varied without resort to rhetorical devices and poetical conceits. Besides the Institutio Oratoria, there have come down to us under Quintilian's name 19 longer (edited by Lehnert, 1905) and 145 shorter (edited by Ritter, 1884) Declamationes, or school exercitations on themes like those in the Controversiae of Seneca the Elder. The longer pieces are certainly not Quintilian's. The shorter were probably published, if not by himself, at least from notes taken at his lessons. It is strange that they could ever have been supposed to belong to a later century; the style proclaims them to be of Quintilian's school and time.