The great teacher Socrates believed that if someone knew right from wrong, there would be no way they would choose the wrong path. Ignorance was the cause of immoral action. His argument goes something like this: 1.) each person is one thing, 2.) to know goodness is to be aligned one way, 3.) to do bad is to be aligned another way, 4.) one thing cannot be aligned two ways, therefore people cannot know good and do bad.
This position has been blasted as being horribly shortsighted concerning human nature. Humans are often of two minds, feeling one way for some reasons and feeling another way for others. It seems that his view rejects temptations, moral confusion, and uncertainty. Most people reject the first premise.
While I would agree to the complexities of people, I think Socrates may still have been on to something. He believed that knowing the truth would prevent immoral behavior. Is it possible that this statement was true for him? Lets look a little closer.
Socrates was a highly contemplative man, who was known for entering fugue states where he reflected deeply. This was not a man with a casual approach toward knowledge. Also, he claimed to have a voice that would speak to him with clarity. He believed this voice to be external to himself, and of supernatural origin. As a thinker, he had a very rigorous standard for knowledge, claiming that true knowledge had to be right and non accidental, with the idea in intimate relation with the truth in the world.
One possibility is that Socrates is a more powerful thinker than we who reject his notion. Is it not possible that through rigorous contemplation he effectively welded his motivations, aesthetics, and moralities into a immovable piece. It may be true of such a thinker that they can be of only one mind.
I also think that his daemon, the voice that spoke to him, may have played a valuable role. Such powerful divine experiences have a way of unifying the spirit of the one who witnesses them. Perhaps he was permeated by an unquestionable truth leading to an undeniable set of actions. A truth more powerful than our petty human temptations and confusions.
Under this construction there is a higher form of knowing, a more intimate orientation toward the truth. Those defending the Socratic "knowledge leads to goodness" argument would retort to the "splintered nature of the person" counterpoint and say, "The one who is splintered clearly doesn't truly know." This is a more robust knowing than is often discussed in purely academic traditions. It is not, however, a stranger to the student of theology.
This morality motivating knowledge is basically a kind of theological awareness, a fusion of head and heart knowledge that changes the way the thinker experiences the world. Some truths, when fully grasped, are nothing short of transformative. These unstoppable truths are huge ideas, moving glacierally through consciousness, shaping swaths of behavior and ideologies in their wake.
And yes, they are likely to be supernatural mental experiences. Moments where the dross of your own wondering is impossibly purified into a artifact of otherly wisdom. Moments where the branches of your ancient and deeply rooted assumptions snap under the cluttered mass of ivy ideologies, and a beam of true light cuts through your green and stifled dimness and touches the floor of your mind.
Even if this has never happened to you all at once, it most likely has happened by slow growings. Look into the eyes of your most beloved, the one you know the best and strive to know even better, and tell me that true knowing doesn't motivate moral action.
As Socrates would have it, it is when we loose sight of the truth that we do ill. If this is indeed the case, strive to know the world, its people, and all things as well as you can. See them as thought they were illuminated by the light of their own good, and be open to the transformation that is likely to follow exposing yourself to the truth.
Monday, October 20, 2008
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