Socrates’ Worldview - Epilogue

Conversation 28, Socrates Worldview 22/22

SOCRATES. Well, fellow riders, what shall we talk about today?

ADEIMANTUS. I was thinking about your worldview, Socrates, and it prompted a few questions I would like to ask you before we move on to other topics.

S. Fire away, Adeimantus.

A. What would you say is the meaning of life? I don’t think you ever said outright.

S. I don’t think life means anything. It is not a symbol for something else. It ‘is what it is,’ as people like to say these days. But I do think life has a purpose.

A. Well then, what is the purpose of life?

S. The humanists would say that life has no purpose, because the purpose would have to be set by someone outside the human race, like God, and the humanists say there is no such person.

A. But what do you say is the purpose of life?

S. I think Euthydemus can answer for me. What do you say, Euthydemus?

EUTHYDEMUS. I say the purpose of life is to love God and love your neighbour.

CRITOBULUS. What if I don’t believe in God?

S. Have you been listening at all, Critobulus? If the saying ‘love God’ is too strong, or too abstract, or too picturesque for you, put it this way. It means to seek and uphold the truth, the objective truth, in all things and with all your strength.

C. And what about loving your neighbour?

S. It means doing your best to help your fellow man.

C. I’m still not sure who you mean by ‘fellow man’.

S. The person in front of you at any moment is your fellow man, Critobulus. You must treat every person as being of equal value and do your best to help the person who presents before you.

C. Does that mean becoming a ‘do-gooder’?

S. Not in the derogatory sense of the word, Critobulus. You must use your best judgement to decide what is best for the person, giving consideration to the effect of your actions on other people. Sometimes giving a person what they ask for is not in their best interests, or the interests of others who would be affected.

C. That doesn’t sound like a recipe for popularity.

S. Critobulus, there will be times in your life when even those you hold dearest will judge you, or turn away from you, and you will feel completely alone. Then you must forgive them and hope they will forgive you when you judge them, as you inevitably will do at some time.

C. All this is rather daunting.

S. At the time when you feel most completely alone, that is when you may feel the presence of the one who will never abandon you. Do not resist that presence, Critobulus, welcome it. It is the most natural of human experiences. Some may call that presence your ‘imaginary friend’. Don’t be put off that. It is the idea of God, if not God himself, the one who is always faithful and loves you unconditionally. Put your hope there.

A. Do you feel at home in the world, Socrates?

S. Yes and no, Adeimantus. When we begin our lives we feel at home, loved by our mother and our father, if we are lucky. Then we grow up and feel emboldened to move away from that comfort. For a time, the whole world feels like home to us, but then our path leads us into wildernesses where we feel like strangers in our own land. There is no going back. The home of our childhood has gone forever. We must look for a new home, one that is beyond earthly corruption. That home is with God. It is pure idea, or spirit if you like. There, your mind, or your soul, because your soul is beyond mere thought, can rest. Those who reject that home forever condemn themselves to wander in lands that grow ever more strange and more hostile.

E. So you are saying that humanism is not that home?

S. Humanism is not a stable place. At best it is a halfway house, a kind of hallway between two destinations. The front door looks inviting, but there is nothing inside to live on. You can’t stay long there before you find yourself drawn out the back door. Faith is a solid castle, glowing brightly and defended by strong forces readied by centuries of repelling assaults of every kind. Those who choose to leave the safety of the castle spend more or less time in the halfway house of humanism, but they can’t stay there forever. They find themselves going out the back door, enticed towards the dark castle of cynicism which at first looks attractive, but when they get there, they find themselves in a prison from which few manage to escape. Am I being too picturesque for you, Critobulus?

C. It all sounds familiar, like some fairly story from the past.

S. It may sound like a fairy story, but believe me Critobulus, on some psychological level it is very real. I can say no more.

A. You’ve thrown in your lot with Christianity, Socrates. Do you think Christianity has a future?

S. I think Christianity will survive because it is based so strongly in human nature. But in Western society it will come under merciless attack from cynics in their various guises. There are already wolves in sheep’s clothing inside the sheepfold who have lost their faith in objective truth and who will let the cynics in. I fear it could be grim. A Christian remnant might survive in the ashes of Western civilization. To be honest, I don’t share Jonathan Sack’s optimism for a return to civility and morality in the service of the common good (Sacks 2020). I can’t see that happening without a period of great strife. It takes a powerful idea to unite people to the extent that most can agree on a common morality. That powerful idea is most effective when cast as a person, a person we usually call God, but too many people can no longer bring themselves to put their faith in God.

A. And clearly you don’t think that humanism is the answer.

S. I said that humanism is an unstable place because humanism wants us all to arrive at our ethics rationally, and it hopes that everyone’s ethics will be compatible with everyone else’s ethics. I say that’s an impossible dream. Human nature will not allow it. Humanism is not the big idea we are looking for.

E. (Sings.) ‘People see me all the time and they just can’t remember how to act. Their minds are filled with big ideas, images and distorted facts.’ (Dylan, Idiot Wind 1975)

S. Euthydemus, you surprise me! You have hidden depths I never suspected. Bob Dylan has nicely described what postmodernism has done to our society, but those ‘big ideas’ are fakes, not the one we are looking for. I would have expected you to quote Saint Paul: ‘The time is sure to come when people will not accept sound teaching, but their ears will be itching for anything new and they will collect themselves a whole series of teachers according to their own tastes; and then they will shut their ears to the truth and will turn to myths.’ (The New Jerusalem Bible 1985, 2 Timothy 4:3-4)

C. Don’t you have any idea what the big idea might be?

S. If I did, Critobulus, I would tell you. Deep down, I think there is no big idea for humanity other than God. Our society needs to rediscover how to understand God in the light of what we now know about the universe. That is what I have tried to work towards in these conversations.

A. Do you think you’ve achieved what you set out to do?

S. I set out to argue that it is not irrational to hold a scientific materialist view of the physical world and at the same time to believe in God as the basis of your spiritual and moral life. Along the way I showed that there are choices to be made that are not governed by reason, but by preference. These preferences are not rational. I hope I have convinced you. If not, you should have spoken up when you had the chance!

C. What were your irrational preferences again, Socrates?

S. I gave enchantment and a basis for morality as motivations for believing in God. I will give another. As you grow older, if you are a reflective person, you start to see your life in the whole and from a more objective perspective. You find yourself asking the question: ‘How well have I spent my life?’ But what standard will you judge yourself against? The standards of the world: success, power, happiness, popularity, number of descendants? Or will you judge yourself against some other person’s moral system? No, for me the only standard that makes any sense is God’s standard, because God is above all human weakness and is absolutely just. So, paraphrasing Saint Paul,¹ I will be content if I can say, ‘I did my best, I kept my promises, and I ran the race to the finish in the service of God and those he entrusted to me.’

A. How do you think others will judge you if they read this record of our conversations?

S. The majority of people won’t read it to the end because they don’t trouble themselves about the sort of questions we’ve been discussing unless some crisis besets them. I don’t blame them, it’s human nature. Those of a scientific atheist bent will dismiss my arguments out of hand, because enchantment means nothing to them, and they think that morality is something they can adjudicate on whenever they choose to turn their minds to it. They, in my opinion, are not only lost, but harmful to the rest of us. Religious believers like Euthydemus here will wonder why I have had to agonise so much over these questions when it all seems obvious to them. They don’t know what they don’t know. They don’t agree among themselves, so they can’t all be right. Those who agree with me might accept me as a somewhat deluded novice. Others will look on me as a dangerous heretic. Then there are a few who might study my arguments carefully. Whether they accept them or not, I hope I will have helped them to clarify their ideas and to come to some sort of happy accommodation of the competing strands of thought that assail them.

A. After all this talk, Socrates, what do you know for certain?

S. I can say quite confidently that Petal and I care greatly for each other and that I enjoy your company at these discussions. About the true nature of the universe and about God I confess that I know nothing for certain. I only live in hope. I can do no better than my ancient ancestor. You do know the story about Socrates and the Delphi oracle, don’t you?

C. Remind us, Socrates.

S. The Delphi oracle said that Socrates was the wisest man in Athens. It said that Socrates knew nothing, but every other person in Athens also knew nothing, and Socrates was the wisest because at least he knew that he knew nothing. (Plato n.d.)

C. You mean that you know what you don’t know, but most people don’t know what they don’t know.

S. You could put it that way, Critobulus. And I know another thing: most people, as they get older, realise they know less than they thought they did when they were younger.

E. (Sings again.) ‘Good and bad, I defined these terms, quite clear, no doubt, somehow, Ah, but I was so much older then, I’m younger than that now.’ (Dylan, My Back Pages 1964)

S. Bravo again, Euthydemus! Even Bob had his evangelical phase.

C. (Sings.) ‘My faith was so much stronger then, I believed in fellow men, And I was so much older then, When I was young.’ (Eric Burdon & The Animals 1967)

A. Van Morrison was a little slower off the mark. I read somewhere that he said in an interview: ‘When you’re 40 you think you know everything. You realise that the older you get, how little you actually know.’ (Davis 2015)

S. My dear fellows, well done! What depth of wisdom is hidden in the modern songbook! What this tells me is that anyone who has survived for as long as those musicians have in a public profession has endured disillusionment that has kept them in touch with reality.

A. What does Petal think about your worldview, Socrates?

S. If I may quote from another song: ‘She is a perfect creature, natural in every feature, and I am the geek with the alchemist’s stone.’ (MacCarthy 1991) Petal has been blessed with what she calls a ‘simple faith’, which happens to be the faith of her fathers. Questions like the ones I have been grappling with don’t trouble her. But tell me, since you ask, what do you think of my worldview, Adeimantus?

A. You’ve given me a lot to think about, Socrates.

S. Still on the fence, Adeimantus! You can’t stay there forever, you know. A few more years and you will get down. What about you, Critobulus?

C. Well, I no longer associate with postmodernists. I can see where they are coming from now and I don’t like it. But like Adeimantus, I’m not ready to commit to your path. I still hope to find a better ‘big idea’.

S. I have hope for you, Critobulus. You've taken an important step. You are no longer wallowing in ignorance and complacency. Right now, you are lost in the wilderness. I pray that you will find the right way out. What about you, Euthydemus? Is your faith unshaken?

E. Yes, Socrates, but I admit there's a lot that I took for gospel that is open to question. I think I now have a better appreciation of other people’s points of view.

S. Well, that's a good place to be, Euthydemus.

A. What would Old Socrates think about your worldview, Socrates?

S. Will you permit me a parting shot at that humanist Grayling? Grayling lauded the ancient Socrates (Grayling 2013, Ch. 21) for being an ethicist and not a metaphysicist. (I prefer the term ‘metaphysicist’ to metaphysician, which sounds medical.) Grayling evidently feels he is in the same camp as Old Socrates, but I’m certain that my ancestor was very religious and would have hated humanism for reducing the human spirit to the workings of a machine. He would have conceded that the spirit proceeds from the working of a machine but would have insisted that it supersedes the machine in importance to our lives, that it takes on a life of its own, and that it is the life of the spirit that matters to us, since that is where our idea of ourselves resides.

(Socrates the Younger cries out, causing people at nearby tables to look around.) Oh Socrates, my ancient parent, where are you now when we need you to argue against these heartless cynics, these postmodernists, these scheming neo-Marxists?

C. Now, now, Socrates, have we really finished with your worldview?

S. I hope so, Critobulus.

References

Davis, Clive. 2015. “The Real Van.” Weekend Australian Review, 11 April.

Dylan, Bob. 1975. “Idiot Wind.” Blood on the Tracks. Comp. Bob Dylan.

Dylan, Bob. 1964. “My Back Pages.” Another Side of Bob Dylan. Comp. Bob Dylan.

Eric Burdon & The Animals. 1967. When I was Young.

Grayling, A. C. 2013. The God Argument: The Case against Religion and for Humanism. Bloomsbury.

MacCarthy, Jimmy. 1991. “The Bright Blue Rose.” The Song of the Singing Horseman. Comp. Jimmy MacCarthy. LUN053.

Plato. n.d. “Apology.” In The Classic Plato Collection: 24 Socratic Dialogues, edited by Charles River Editors, translated by Benjamin Jowett.

Sacks, Jonathan. 2020. Morality: Restoring the Common Good in Divided Times. Hodder and Stoughton.

1985. The New Jerusalem Bible. London: Darton, Longman, & Todd.

1. See (The New Jerusalem Bible 1985, 2 Timothy 4:7).