Is Meliorism a Live Option? Toward a Reconstruction and Defense of Socratic Faith

Every generation begins the quest anew—the search to hammer out, to forge a coherent system of values that retains what can be salvaged from the past and that establishes the background from which later thought is to distinguish itself given a different set of contingent circumstances. Has there ever been any other way? Emerson, then, had it right: "Each age, it is found, must write its own books; or rather, each generation for the next succeeding. The books of an older period will not fit this (1957, 67).

Such a view undoubtedly emphasizes the precarious at the expense of the stable. Are there not other live options? Another approach sees things differently: the more things change, the more things stay the same—only those who hold fast to a certain prized inheritance possess the means of coping with the incoming flux. An ancient quarrel, no doubt. In either case, we are embarked: tomorrow is on its way. If—and perhaps we presume too much—this quest is to be undertaken not just philosophically but pragmatically, no less, then we gain our foothold, our cognitive orientation as world-makers; proceeding with a sense of imaginative circumspection, we give ourselves not the moral law but we ask ourselves: "what sort of self is in the making, what kind of a world is making?" (Dewey, MW, 14:150).

The question is not a factual probing, an assessment of the most likely projection of present trends. It is this, of course, but there is more: forward-looking, vision-making, the pragmatist holds fast in the face of a world-weary cynicism and insists: things could be other than they are: things could be better. All of this is just to note that pragmatism is reconstructive at heart, and as such, is a philosophy of hope. Like the sailor, the pragmatist knows the ship is to be repaired at sea, with whatever materials may be had.

Let us not look past the reconstructive moment—pragmatism is not merely forward looking, a trait for which it is often maligned. "Reconstruction" is a double-barreled term, and insists not simply on asking whither, but whence as well. But we do not look back in order to relive or recreate the past—as Aristotle notes, we cannot deliberate over what has already come to pass, for not even the gods can undo it. Surely, though, we can deliberate upon its import.Undoubtedly, a thorough understanding of the pragmatist's commitment to meliorism would require an analysis of a variety of cultural and religious influences and attitudes—not to mention the rapid industrialization and technological changes the classical pragmatists experienced. However, when considering these influences from the vantage point of the philosophical past, the pragmatist's meliorism is found to be an outgrowth of the philosopher's Socratic Faith.

After Socrates, of course, no one is ever the same. The guiding questions no longer pertain first to the natural world, but the moral one. Philosophical inquiries are reoriented toward self-knowledge and the life worth living. Even Plato, amidst all of his fanciful speculations, gets this right: "our inquiry," he tells us in book IX of the Republic, "concerns the greatest of all things, the good life or the bad life" (1961a, IX:578c). But what then is the faith that Socrates lives by?

We find one statement of this faith in the Meno. After being presented with the paradox of inquiry, the "likely account" of recollection is presented. At the end of this account, Socrates states:

I shouldn't like to take my oath on the whole story, but one thing I am ready to fight for as long as I can, in word and act—that is, that we shall be better, braver, and more active if we believe it right to look for what we don't know than if we believe there is no point in looking because we don't know what we can never discover.

(1961b, 86b–c)

Further, in the Phaedo, after recounting the myth of the afterlife, Socrates proclaims:

of course, no...