Letter #24: What Socrates Knew

It Wasn't All Nothing

Spirit of Spencer Present,

Great letter. The 1951 A Christmas Carol is the sum of all wisdom. Which only proves, as Johnny Mercer put it, “How Little We Know.”

One of my favorite Victorian novelists, Anthony Trollope, had a genius for inventing characters with funny names that sound almost real. One of his doctor characters is named Doctor Filgrave. Hilarious. But the joke reflects the fact that, for most of human history, doctors were as likely to kill you as cure you — because they didn’t know anything. In spite of that, sick people always called the doctor. They needed to believe that someone somewhere knew something.

Now, Socrates, as you point out, was the wisest man in Athens precisely because he was the only man who knew he knew nothing. That is why he wandered around the city-state asking people questions until their most dearly held beliefs fell apart. So they killed him. Because, really, that is an incredibly annoying thing to do.

But it also revealed a discrepancy in the Socratic worldview. It showed that Socrates really did know something. He knew that the truth holds together. It makes sense.

Crito urged Socrates to escape from prison and avoid execution. Otherwise, he said, the public — the many — would believe Crito had failed him. Socrates peppered Crito with questions. Should we value everyone’s opinion or only the opinions of the wise? Aren’t wise men in the minority? Then why should we care what the many say? Eventually, Crito had to admit that public opinion was largely worthless.

The truth, if it is the truth, will not contradict itself. If rocks fall when you drop them, then you can’t build a city on floating rocks. Likewise, if racism is immoral, you can’t build a moral system on racism, even if you call it “anti-racism.” When ideas conflict with one another, we must reconcile them. That’s the way truth works.

But the question is: what are our premises? Where do we start the reasoning process? Philosopher Yuval Harari, for instance, says, “When I cut a man open, I don’t see any rights, therefore man has no rights.” That makes sense because his premise is materialism.

Materialism is an interesting idea. But what’s it made of? The idea is immaterial and therefore disproves the premise.

Ideas are immaterial realities communicated by material means. So it is with the spirit. The spirit is an idea of a self made manifest in flesh. If the world makes sense, it must be because the spirit that made the world is the same sort of spirit that is in us. He made our spirit in the image of his.

So when you speak of “the kind of knowledge we have of each other, and of a God who comes to us with a human face,” you’re talking about making the connection between spirit and spirit. Which is the definition of love.

Maybe the baseline of our humanity lies there.

Dad