Know Thyself An introduction to the philosophy of Socrates

Know Thyself  

An introduction to the philosophy of Socrates

Philosophical interest in self-knowledge is long-standing. Socrates cited with approval the Delphic oracle’s injunction to “Know Thyself,” and he took the fulfillment of this injunction to be a core part of the philosophical life.

"Tell me, Euthydemus, did you ever go to Delphi?" asks Socrates 

"Yes, twice."

"Did you read that inscription upon the temple, Know thyself?

"Certainly."

Whereupon Socrates proceeds to enforce the deeper significance of this maxim by various examples. Self-knowledge is the key to all knowledge; only by knowing yourself or the Self, can you know the world, and thereby pass from subject to object.

Know thyself may be considered the germinal Starting-point of Socrates. The self-knowing Ego had already been announced by the Sophists who made it purely subjective, and hence negative also, when they said that man is the measure of all things. But Socrates proclaimed that this self-knowing Ego knows itself likewise as object, as the principle of the world, in which man is to find himself in order to know it. Thus Socrates reached the lofty point of seeing that Thought is objective, that the world is Thought which his Thought must recognize in order to obtain true knowledge. In this sense Socrates still holds to the principle that man is the measure of all things, but with a vast new meaning different from that of the Sophists who made the particular subjective Ego with all its caprices and opinions to be the measure of all things.

Socrates saw the all-creating Nous, if not in the whole universe, at least in important parts of it; his own nous must recreate the same by thinking if he is to know the truth of it. This objective all-creating nous-is what the Sophists denied or left out; they were subjective, subjecting creation to their own Ego, from the outside, instead of identifying their own Ego in creation.

To know thyself is not merely to know this individual Self with its ever-changing bubbles of notions, but to know thyself as man, as humanity, as universal. Not simply an introspective act is this, but at the same time an extrospective look into the creative soul of the world, whose process is that of truth itself. We may say, then, that Socrates saw the fundamental Norm of the Universe, but he saw it immediately, and did not separate it fully from its particular embodiment, grasping and uttering it as it is in itself. This, however, makes him the beginner of the movement which unfolds the philosophic Norm of human Thinking to a full consciousness of itself. Now, this self-knowledge of Socrates has its own process, whose stages we shall glance at.

1. He starts with an act of faith, which is that every person, even the humblest Athenian laborer, has within himself implicitly the truth, the universal Concept. But it is covered up and intertwined with a mass of opinions and notions from which it must be sifted, and exposed as it is in itself. So he goes to the people, in whom he believes this original germ to be existent, though as yet potential and unconscious. He is one with them, and he puts every man, high and low, who will talk with him, through the same process which he has experienced within himself.

2. He separates the fleeting, untrue, insubstantial shreds of mind from the eternal and universe element, whereby the hitter becomes conscious and explicit. This he does by question and answer, by his peculiar method still known as Socratic, which is the pedagogic method. He, too, wants to know somewhat, so he starts to interrogate the bystander and interweaves him into a Socratic dialogue. The general movement of it is to make the interlocutor contradict his own inadequate opinions, to make him negate his own negative notions, and thereby to have him rise to the true Concept of the object. The irony of Socrates is to assume ignorance himself in order to convict others of ignorance and thence lead them to knowledge.

3. This knowledge was the becoming conscious of the general Concept, the advance from the particular to the universal or to the creative thought of the object. It is sometimes called the Definition of the thing under consideration, as of Justice or the Good. We may deem it also a criticism of the terms used by the people, and a finding of their essential meaning. Thus it becomes a category; Socrates calls forth out of the vague notion, the definite category — a great step in philosophy which now becomes a conscious categorizing of the universe. Undoubtedly

Philosophy has moved hitherto in categories, but such a movement has been largely unconscious. In Socrates, however, Thought returns upon itself and formulates itself as Thought, wherein we behold the third or self returning stage of this whole Hellenic Psychosis, or psychical movement of the Hellenic Period.

As Socrates works up from the particular to the general, his method has likewise been called inductive.

The Sophist took the particular subject with all its impulses, feelings, fancies, as the man who was to measure all things; but Socrates purified this measuring man of his subjective caprices, and elevated him into a rational or universal Self, which was thought as reproductive of the Universe. Not simply man is the measure of all things, but man as thinker, as the maker of the Concept, is the measure of all things.