Can the Socratic Method Make You Happy?

Plato's Charmides, temperance, and the avoidance of error

I recently re-read the Charmides, a dialogue about temperance. The word is not well translated. It’s sophrosune, which means something like the right understanding of self and one’s duties in relation to others.

Like many of the dialogues, it doesn’t come to a conclusion. You get to the end and you don’t know what you’re supposed to think. This causes many readers of Plato to get frustrated, thinking that Socrates is just a crank causing trouble, but not offering any genuine solutions.

As is always the case, the characters in the dialogue are important. These are dramatic works, and you should put as much effort into figuring out who the speakers are as you would in Antigone. Charmides is a young man of great physical beauty, and Critias is the leader of the Thirty Tyrants who attempted to overthrow the democracy through proscriptions and violence. Both are relatives of Plato.

Temperance

Critias praises Charmides for his temperance, and Socrates, leechlike, grabs onto the concept. If you make a declarative sentence about an abstract quality around Socrates, you had better be able to define the word that you used. You wouldn’t have used the word, after all, if you didn’t know what it meant!

What is temperance? There’s much give and take as is usual in the dialogues. Go read it for yourself! Eventually, temperance is equated with the oracular “know thyself”. It becomes a science, a kind of knowing. But what is it a science of? Carpentry is the science of housebuilding, arithmetic is the science of number, but what is temperance the science of?

“And being temperate and temperance and knowing oneself amount to this, to knowing what one knows and does not know.”

It turns out to be the science of science, the science of knowing when one knows and when one doesn’t know, while not thinking that one knows what one doesn’t know. This becomes the same as Socratic wisdom, which consists of not thinking one knows what one doesn’t know.

What good is it?

If you could have such a science, what good would it be?

How could such a science proceed? How do you know when you do not know? It would require knowing the thing that you don’t know, right? Surely the doctor or carpenter is best equipped to judge that you don’t know medicine or house-building. But what if you don’t know the subject at all? How can you be sure of a lack of knowledge? You can do it by examining what you believe and seeing if there are logical contradictions. This is what Socrates does to the people he talks to. Euthyphro thinks all the stories of the gods are true, that the gods fight, and that piety just means being loved by the gods. He doesn’t see the contradiction in his thoughts about piety until Socrates points it out.

It works, but what good is it? Socrates gives a good answer. If temperance really means knowing when you know and also knowing when you don’t know, then it would be a wonderful thing:

Because those of us who had temperance would live lives free from error and so would all those who were under our rule. Neither would we ourselves be attempting to do things we did not understand–rather we would find those who did understand and turn the matter over to them–nor would we trust those over whom we ruled to do anything except what they would do correctly, and this would be that of which they possessed the science. And thus, by means of temperance, every household would be well-run, and every city well-governed, and so in every case where temperance reigned. And with error rooted out and rightness in control, men so circumstanced would necessarily fare admirably and well in all their doings and, faring well, they would be happy.

I apologize for the long quote, but it’s well said. Imagine how good your life would be if you could just avoid making mistakes. A consummation devoutly to be wished!

Is avoiding error the same as happiness?

Socrates takes it all back. He grants that if we all had temperance and acted according to knowledge, scientifically, we would avoid error. “But whether acting scientifically would make us fare well and be happy, this we have yet to learn, my dear Critias.”

Is it the case that avoiding error, that acting scientifically is sufficient for happiness? Avoiding error is good, but is there a science of happiness?

They work through some possibilities. Could it be the knowledge of checkers? Certainly not. Could it be math? Does math make us happy? How about medicine? None of these are primarily about happiness. They have different subjects. Critias gives an answer: the science of happiness is that “by which he knows good and evil.”

Let’s presume that there is such a science of good and evil. Let’s call it kalology, the science of the good, the knowledge of good and evil. What does it add? The doctor studies medicine. What does “kalology” add to the practice of medicine? It doesn’t seem to add anything!

What do we do, then? Maybe there’s such a thing as temperance that protects us from error, but would it even be any good if it doesn’t lead to happiness? Furthermore, there’s the difficulty of how you can know that you don’t know something. Don’t you have to know something about a topic to know that you don’t know the topic? Mysteries abound!

The science of happiness

In the Euthyphro, Socrates asks at the end what piety is really about. If it is service to the gods, what kind of service? This is an attempt at real theology, at discovering something of the axiological nature of being. What is happiness, and how do you get it? It probably has something to do with the divine. If happiness is the highest and greatest thing that humans can hope for, happiness probably has to do with the highest of all things, which would be the divine things and God.

You can’t get ethics ought of the mere avoidance of error. You have to have a positive good, self-sufficient and complete, that orders everything else and gives it meaning. It all comes back to happiness

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