The duty to philosophize: Socrates and Maimonides

Judaism, Summer, 1993 by Daniel H. Frank

PHILOSOPHY MAY BEGIN IN WONDER, BUT it is sustained by the desire and need to understand; and these latter are the archai, the true grounds for philosophy. Furthermore, this desire to understand is, itself, motivated by a certain conception of the good life and human happiness. If one does not believe that the human good consists, at least in part, in the search for, attainment of, and reflection upon truth, one shall hardly see the need to philosophize. We, as philosophers, readily assent to all this, or at least understand it, but in so doing we must also be struck by how often we have strayed from this ideal. So professionalized has philosophy become that it seems that the only duty to philosophize which we feel is in the context of the obligation to meet various deadlines, to teach classes and to write papers for conferences. But such heteronomy was not always the norm. One cannot imagine Spinoza's reflections and writings, for example, being motivated by the just-mentioned obligations. For him, an inner need, as we might put it, was the driving force. And though this inner drive was, itself, derived from his desire to achieve blessedness, a condition in which one gained mastery over, and understanding of, the passions, and a sense of one's place in the universe,(1) the sort of heteronomy which motivated Spinoza seems rather "purer" than ours.

Viewed in this way, philosophy quite naturally fills a deep epistemic need of the individual. Indeed, Spinoza is a paradigm of the kind of thinker for whom philosophy as self-understanding, as understanding one's place in a purposeless universe bereft of a creator, makes sense. We have, in Spinoza, a picture (a self-portralt?) of a solitary thinker whose reflections are a very private affair. On this model, philosophy presents itself as a most apolitical enterprise, an activity done by the individual and, as importantly, for the individual.

But this model of philosophy and its practice is not the only one. And on this note we may begin.

1. Preliminaries

One of the hallmarks of the modern age, at least from Descartes' and Spinoza's time, is the privatization of many aspects of human life which were previously well-integrated into society as a whole. The privatization of religion is an obvious example; another is exemplified by the "problem," indeed the embarrassment, which the Greek philosophers, Plato and Aristotle in particular, felt in attempting to square competing conceptions of the human good. The tension between politics and philosophy, and, with it, an unresolved tension between competing conceptions of the human good,(2) arose precisely because of the philosophers' discovery that the human good might be conceived as apoilitical in nature. For us moderns, this dichotomy between the private and the public is familiar and hardly surprising, but, for the Greek philosophers, this (apolitical) conception of the human good did not sit well with the "truth" which Aristotle himself, on behalf of Greeks generally, uttered: "man is by nature a political animal" (Nicomachean Ethics I.7, 1097b11; Politics 1.2, 1253a7). If this latter is true, then the privatization of the human good becomes problematic.

The point, then, is this. In pre-modern times a certain "publicity" attended activities which, in latter days, we have privatized. In this essay I should like to reflect upon this with reference to the aforementioned duty to philosophize. I choose, as my pre-modern exemplars, Socrates(3) 3 and Maimonides. These two philosophers, so different in time and place, do share at least this in common: for both, the duty to philosophize (to "do" philosophy and/or to study it) is a religious obligation, an obligation grounded, at least in part, by a divine pronouncement, oracular or scriptural. Furthermore, such philosophical activity as both Socrates and Maimonides engage in, is not activity whose results are bereft of political application. On the contrary, I shall show that the religious obligation to do philosophy has political relevance. For both Socrates and Maimonides, the duty to philosophize does not remove the philosopher from the world, but, rather, impels him, on the basis of his philosophical reflection, toward it.

II. Socrates and the Duty to Philosophize

Socrates viewed his philosophic mission to the Athenians as exactly that, a mission, grounded, at least in part,(4) by remarks which the Delphic oracle uttered to his friend, Chaerephon. Motivated by reflection upon Socrates' discussions with Athenian citizens of repute, Chaerephone betook himself to Delphi and asked the priestess of Apollo whether any man was wiser than Socrates. The reply was no. Never has a negative proven to be more positive, for Socrates was dumbfounded by the response and, in reflecting upon it, he was driven to test its veracity and to discover its meaning. And thus, motivated by an oracular decree, Socrates took to the streets.(5)

He questioned poets, politicians and craftsmen, all of whom imagined that they possessed (moral) wisdom and knowledge (of virtue). Euthyphro, for example, a man with a reputation for piety, supposes that he, more than others, possesses knowledge of what piety is. But Socrates shows him, indeed proves to him, that he does not possess such knowledge about piety as he thinks he has. Euthyphro is ignorant about the nature of piety. In this regard, however, Socrates is no wiser than Euthyphro, for he, too, possesses no knowledge of what piety is. What, then, accounts for Socrates' wisdom, of which the oracle spoke? The only knowledge which Socrates is cognizant of possessing is his knowledge, his awareness, that he has no knowledge.(6) In this he is wiser than Euthyphro, who imagines he knows what, in fact, he does not know. Socrates' second-order knowledge of his lack of (moral) knowledge accounts for the oracle's declaration that no one is wiser than Socrates; correlatively, the "double ignorance" of Euthyphro (and those like him), his ignorance - his lack of awareness - of his ignorance, manifested in his conceit of wisdom, accounts for the oracle's declaration of Socrates' preeminent wisdom.(7)