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CHAPTER 4 The Roots of Philosophy
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Socrates’ conversations are motivated by the concerns we discussed in the first chapter. These concerns issue in admonitions to continue to deliberate or to be virtuous. What virtue is, however, proves to be elusive. Several of its elements are reasonably clear, of course, and we see that a city governed by virtue will look something like the regime of the Laws. Yet, some of virtue’s elements are hazy, especially because the virtues involve knowledge. It is here that obscurity is most obtrusive because the range and power of knowledge is unclear. What differentiates and connects the Protagoras’ calculation, the Meno’s recollection, and the Charmides’ self-knowledge? What, moreover, are the elements of soul that virtue orders? What are its parts and wholeness? What are the true connections among the pleasures, pains, benefits, and nobility with which it deals? These questions point to philosophy, for philosophic understanding is knowledge about such matters. They also point to the philosophical way of life, the use of our powers to attempt to know. As we have seen, Socrates suggests that philosophical activity perfects political virtue or more fully reflects its aims. Although philosophy perfects political virtue, it also radically shakes it. We CHAPTER 4 The Roots of Philosophy 116 Politics and Philosophy see this disturbance in the Gorgias and Euthyphro, despite the surface reconciliations they effect. Radical philosophical questioning walks along the path of justice and ethical virtue, but it also lingers at the start in a way that uproots the path’s origin and transforms its conclusion. The philosophical life originates in questions and experiences more telling or general even than fathers’ concerns for sons, and it concludes in an order more general but less restrictive than legal justice and piety. In this chapter I make a new beginning by discussing four experiences and phenomena at the center of Plato’s understanding of philosophic inquiry. He devotes a dialogue to none of these subjects, however, although in some cases he offers a central or core analysis. Nature Socrates often claims to be searching for something’s nature.1 When he examines justice, he seeks what is naturally just; when he or the Athenian and Eleatic Strangers consider forms of government, they look for regimes that are naturally best. We may say provisionally that what philosophy seeks to know is nature and what is natural. Plato’s approach sets the course of political philosophy, for its central question is the question of natural justice or right.2 Hegel, who turned the question of justice away from nature, still designated his political work with the traditional name. Even those who claim today that natural differences between, say, men and women are, in fact, constructed, must first have in mind what would constitute a natural as opposed to a merely conventional difference. The intellectual turn by Hegel, Nietzsche, and Heidegger away from nature is not made so completely in practice. The United States is founded on a Declaration that defends our independence by appealing to natural rights, and we continue to conduct political and legal discussion in their terms. (Of course, we more frequently clamor for our rights than call them natural.) The Catholic Church and American Catholic intellectuals, moreover, have rediscovered the natural analysis of politics and ethics that Thomas Aquinas adapted in the thirteenth century from Aristotle. Questions of abortion, marriage, death, and genetic engineering have thrust nature and natural right into the foreground of contemporary political debate.3 Nature, natural rights, and natural law, are, therefore, still present in our politics and in the understanding that underlies our way of life. It is, thus, [44.222.212.138] Project MUSE (2024-03-29 01:35 GMT) The Roots of Philosophy 117 especially useful to consider what Plato has in mind by nature. Indeed, natural law was the standard term through the nineteenth century for the truths sought by physics and economics; “physics” transliterates physis, the Greek term for nature. So, Plato’s quest for the natural is at the core of science or philosophy generally. Our difficulty is that Plato does not discuss what he means. He wrote no dialogue “On Nature” to rival Aristotle’s Physics. Nor do his characters examine nature systematically in any dialogue. So, to the usual difficulty of extracting Plato’s teaching from the conversations that embody it, we must add the fact that we have no explicit conversation from which to start. I I begin by indicating briefly how Plato...