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Socrates and flute-girls

Does the enjoyment of beauty have a place in the philosophical life, I ask? A discussion with the historical Socrates as its point of reference.

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Outline of this page ...

• Philosophy and the Irrational (Music and beauty)
  • "Things Socrates would have said" (Xenophon)
  • Plato, Symposium 176e-177a
  • What is the Ethics of Socrates?
    • Socrates, Ethics and World-view
• Despair and Longing
  • Good and Evil Pleasures. As if pleasure were the good for man, i.e. what he should seek and live for
    • "The pleasures of the good are greater than the pleasures of vice" (Xenophon)
    • "Agreeable to the soul"
      • Is existence per se or as such the good for anything?
    • What is the source of despair? (About old age)
      • What are you aiming at, living for?
        • "Will-to-live" (Schweitzer)
        • Ethics, Wittgenstein, Socrates
      • Existence and Good
• Philosophical Reflections
  • Philosophy and Socrates
  • "To heal the wounded understanding"
  • The Historical Socrates
    • We make for ourselves a picture
  • Holding discourse always with oneself alone
  • Nothing stays clear for very long ...
    • Phenomena and Concepts
    • Concepts and Phenomena

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Plato, Symposium 176e-177a

... it was unanimously agreed that this was not to be a drunken party, and that the wine was to be served merely by way of refreshment.

"... I also propose that we dispense with the services of the flute-girl who has just come in, and let her go and play to herself or to the women inside there, whichever she prefers, while we spend our evening in discussion ..."

It was generally agreed that he should go on with his proposal.  (tr. Joyce)

I would not have been the guest who made that proposal, and would have been most disappointed. Philosophy is, after all, always with me. Beauty, however, is not. And I am drawn in both directions, not wanting to choose, but knowing that I shall always choose the first and often be sad that I cannot have the second.

In Protagoras 347d, Plato calls "girls piping or dancing or harping" "frivolous nonsense", i.e. foolishness ('foolishness' as opposed to 'wisdom'). From reading the dialogs I think that Plato didn't much care about girls in any case, and that matters to this discussion because it costs a man nothing to dismiss what is of no interest to him, e.g. sport, games.

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Despair and Longing

Ethics is about good and evil as determined by philosophical reflection. Why man is not indifferent to good and evil, or in other words, what the source, origin and cause of moral consciousness is (e.g. Schweitzer says that the foundation of ethics is compassion or pity) -- is not a question that belongs to philosophy; it is natural history or psychology only. "What is the good for man, how should he live his life?" is not a question about causality (or irrational "values").

And therefore in the following I am not asking about ethics but about the reasons, causes and remedies of despair.

Good and Evil Pleasures. As if pleasure were the good for man, i.e. what he should seek and live for

Note: seeking what is good and avoiding what is evil are related, but they are not simply different ways of saying the same thing. Because evil-doing is pleasure seeking or pain avoiding whereas good-doing is neither. Ethics does not judge by the standard of pleasure.

Despair leads to vice (irrationality), vice to despair. If love of a good does not fill the void, then man seeks to lose himself in harmful pleasure: the present moment becomes sovereign and self-control (a synonym for self-control is self-denial) is lost to willfulness (the short-sightedness of vice). According to Xenophon the following is the way to cure oneself of vice ('vice' being the antithesis of 'moral virtue'):

For avoiding slavery to the belly or to sleep and incontinence, is there, think you, any more effective specific than the possession of other and greater pleasures, which are delightful not only to enjoy, but also because they arouse hopes of lasting benefit? (Memorabilia i, 6, 8)

For Xenophon's Socrates, for man the good equals the useful or beneficial to the soul or the body. However, here Xenophon introduces the standard of "greater pleasures". But can we say that was the standard of the historical Socrates? Certainly not.

[For what and by what does the philosopher live? What does Socrates live for? Objects of love.]

In the place of the simply pleasurable [as the good for man (which is what Sophists like Callicles claim), Socrates] put the rationally pleasurable.... [The] rationally moral is that which procures for the agent true pleasure, or, what means the same thing, true profit [Xenophon's "lasting benefit"] ... (Schweitzer, Civilization and Ethics, v, p. 33)

But Schweitzer's equation doesn't balance, because as we normally use the word 'pleasurable', pleasant ≠ profitable. That is to say that if man is rational ("rationally moral"), then the good = the beneficial (in contrast to the harmful), not the pleasurable (Phaedo 69a-b).

Schweitzer speaks of "the attempt by the historic Socrates to explain the good as that which is rationally pleasure-giving" (ibid. p. 41; cf. Plato, Protagoras 351d-358d), i.e. to say that it is rational (or reasonable) to choose those pleasures that give lasting benefit to the soul and the body, and to reject those pleasures which are harmful to them. But that is to equate the thought of the historical Socrates with Xenophon's thought, and I think that is a mistake.

The beneficial (the good) may not always be pleasant, e.g. memorization, exercise, and therefore the good does not equal the pleasant. But that is not to say that the good for man is never pleasant (e.g. travel, fine art), but that if pleasure ever is the good, then it must be pleasure that is rationally chosen; and it is not rational to choose pleasures which are harmful or to avoid pain that is beneficial. But ought the philosopher to be pursuing pleasure at all?

"The pleasures of the good are greater than the pleasures of vice"

What is the "greater pleasure" with which the Socrates of Xenophon answers the emptiness or longing that other men seek to fill with oblivion in food, drink and sleep? The friendship of good human beings. But how is the word 'good' defined here -- is the good friend one who is useful to his companions (Memorabilia ii, 5, 1)? Apparently.

Note that in Xenophon's way of thinking nothing is "good in itself" but only in relation to some specific use or benefit (ibid. iii, 8, 2-3).

"... my fancy ... is for good friends. And I teach [my companions] all the good I can, and recommend them to others from whom I think they can get some moral benefit. And the treasures that the wise men of old have left us in their writings I open and explore with my friends. If we come on any good thing, we extract it, and we set much store on being useful to one another." (ibid. i, 6, 14)

Do you think then that out of all this thinking there comes anything so pleasant as the thought: "I am growing in goodness and I am making better friends?" (ibid. i, 6, 9)

In Xenophon, the man who is more interested in the flute-girls is admonished for his "slavery to pleasure" as opposed to the desire for wisdom, which his companions at a banquet ("symposium") may teach him.

But what if, rather than "slavery to pleasure", we spoke of "the longing for beauty"? What is the place of beauty in the life of good for man?

The enjoyment of music is not reasonable, nor yet unreasonable, but is it harmful or beneficial to the soul? Perhaps it may be either. As may companionship. (But how is this to be measured? It has no meaning otherwise.)

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What is the source of despair? (About old age)

Plato suggests in Philebus 21d-22b that it would be a wretched life that contained no pleasure whatever; however, it does not follow that therefore a life devoted to the enjoyment of even the "greatest pleasures" (the greatest being, according to Xenophon, friendship) is the good for man.

Is a thing good for man if it makes man ethically better? There are higher and lower things -- but only higher, ennobling things are the good and good for man. Higher things belong to the good for man -- the negation of that proposition seems absurd.

And is a lower thing good for man if it makes his existence endurable? Only if "to exist as such is good for man" (but that combination of words is without meaning).

Where is one to look for the good that can cure despair? Plato does not find that good in this world other than in hope for another -- because the world of Absolutes (the Good) is not our world. Plato can say what to die for, but not what to live for (Phaedo 67e-68a). But he wrote: "The body is a source of endless trouble to us. It fills us full of lusts and loves and fancies of all kinds" (ibid. 66b-d). And the body, then, the source of despair?

Despair seeks distractions and finds them "in the body", in alcohol, sleep, indifference. Escape. Schweitzer seems to say that Aristotle identifies ethics with rationally virtuous activity in contrast to Plato's contemplation of the Good (Civilization and Ethics, v, p. 43). Regardless, if one is busy with dutiful work, one will not have time for the vices of idleness. But emptiness and idleness are not the same thing. A man concerned only with virtuous thought and philosophy may be called idle, but he will be far from empty. Activity may push despair -- and every other thought -- aside, but it cannot eliminate it, because the problem is deeper.

Self-control guided by wisdom (knowledge of what is good) is, Xenophon's Socrates believed, the good or the particular excellence proper to man, or, in other words, happiness for man. Man is free only because he can reason -- and only when he reasons, and what he reasons his way to is wisdom.

Note that Plato's ethics and his life also have active elements: the conclusion that "it is not the function of the good man to harm anyone, but to benefit both his friends and enemies, because the good makes things better not worse" (Republic 335e) has consequences for how man should live his life, as has the simple reflection that "if the good man does that (e.g. is unkind to animals), then what does the evil man do?", as has that the statesman must aim, not merely to make the people materially prosperous, but foremost to make the people ethically better (Gorgias 517b), as had that Syracuse should have a king who is a philosopher instructed by Plato himself. Plato's ethics is not entirely inward directed towards pondering the Good, but it is also "an ethics of working in the world" (to use Schweitzer's expression).

According to Plato, the body is what stands in the way of self-control. But is that true, or to the contrary: the man who knows what is good does what is good -- in other words -- is self-controlled. Then despair, which seeks consolation in vice, is ignorance? Vice is only sought in ignorance (because it is misperceived to be the good), but I don't know whether despair itself is ignorance. (Is it possible to be indifferent to the good, because it appears that in our despair we are indifferent to anything but immediate relief from the burden of existence?)

"The body is a source of endless trouble ..." Is the body truly the source of an elusiveness of self-control? Do we say it is (1) because we have been raised in the way of thought of Kant (reinforced by Wittgenstein) to presume that ethics is irrational, and so (2) we disbelieve in the power of reason to change men's lives?

What are you aiming at, living for?

Indifference to self-control and submergence in vice is a product of despair, despair the product of ignorance. But if so, ignorance of what? Not, I want to say, ignorance of the good for man or of the beneficial or useful to oneself.) What is the source of despair? Longing for something better, something higher, something "we are made for, and our hearts are not at rest until they rest in" (Augustine), but above all the thirst to know why. To know that is wisdom, Plato's "something worth knowing".

I'd say that the kind of self-control Xenophon speaks of is only needed in the absence of a higher motivation, that despair and emptiness is the absence of a higher motivation.

Love, faith in God or in another ideal may be that motivation. But I doubt that Wittgenstein's "absolute value", Kant's "categorical imperative" or Plato's "the Good" would be. What kind of doubt is this?

I wonder if Plato's "the Good" is not nonsense -- an abstraction so abstract as to be without content: nothing can be put into words about it.

To say that life is worth living or worthwhile (Schweitzer's "life affirmation") seems to mean it has "value". What does that mean? That it is something desired for itself or as a means to something else. What is the source of -- i.e. justification for -- the desire to live? To say that a thing is desired is the same as to say that the thing is a living thing's perceived good. But man reflects and seeks not what is perceived to be good, but what is good. Again, is to exist good? Rather existence is simply the precondition for there to be any kind of virtue, not a virtue itself. Is to maintain one's life a moral virtue? Is it a moral vice to end one's life? (Plato: yes, you must not desert your guard post (Phaedo 62b). Epictetus: no, "the door is always open".) Is the choice a question of good and evil (a moral choice)?

"Will-to-live"

To live it hurries. To feel it hastes. (Afanasy Fet, quoted by Pushkin)

Schweitzer speaks of "the universal will-to-live", but if I follow Schweitzer's rule of speaking only about what I myself have experienced, I do not find in myself a desire to live, to self-perfect, or to work in the world, but only an all-my-life desire for a particular pleasure, namely the enjoyment of beautiful things. But by 'will-to-live' Schweitzer seems to mean no more than the simple desire to avoid extinction and pain -- which impulse I don't see as something to revere: existence per se (for its own sake) isn't morally noble (or ignoble). The bumblebee's existence is striking, but no more than the existence of a slab of slate: it is the existence of anything at all that is "astonishing". But Schweitzer makes no distinctions: to be moral is to revere life, to promote and not harm life (Civilization and Ethics, xxi, p. 246).

"I do not find ..." Yet you aim to be a morally good man (Republic 335e)? Well, but that has nothing to do with will-to-live -- it is not a source of will-to-live: I don't desire to exist for the sake of doing that.

But, be my experience as it may, what has my experience to do with ethics?

Ethics, Wittgenstein, Socrates

If to exist were a moral virtue, then not to exist would be a moral vice. The question of existence, "the riddle" that Wittgenstein said does not exist, which has preoccupied me all my life did not concern Socrates, who was concerned only with the question of how we should live our life (and the tools or aids of logic needed to answer that question). At least what Socrates seeks is knowable (within the limits of our knowledge of the facts) and definable. (That is the principal problem with the question of existence -- that it is indefinable.)

Thinking about his work in philosophy Wittgenstein wrote: "I destroy, I destroy, I destroy" (CV p. 21, remark from 1931). But Wittgenstein destroys only houses of cards (PI § 118) because he chooses only houses of cards (as cases to discuss). Philosophy as it has been done in the past, discussing philosophy's eternal questions (as Plato does in the early dialogs written in the spirit of Socrates), he declares to be no longer possible (he calls those who think otherwise "slum landlords" -- a "house of cards" is a "slum" -- and claims that his logic-philosophy is putting them out of business), although he offers no proof of this in his later work beyond his "houses of cards" (while the TLP's proof is absurd and untenable: because "nonsense" that conveys meaning is not nonsense). "Philosophical investigations -- conceptual investigations" (Z § 458) is dogma, because it is based on Wittgenstein's particular selection of examples. That the specific excellence proper to man is rational moral virtue is a statement of fact, and it can be disputed as such.

According to Wittgenstein philosophy is a dysfunction of language. But that is only because Wittgenstein avoids philosophy's most difficult and important questions, choosing to limit the concept 'philosophy', to exclude ethics, that part of philosophy "concerned with life and all that has to do with us" (Diog. L. i, 18), the part of philosophy Socrates introduced (ibid. i, 14), Plato's "the discussion of no small matter, but of how to live". In other words, the most important part of philosophy.

... what is the use of studying philosophy if all that it does for you is to enable you to talk with some plausibility about some abstruse questions of logic, etc., & if it does not improve your thinking about the important questions of everyday life. (Malcolm, Memoir (1984), Letter No. 9)

But "the important questions of everyday life" are philosophy, whereas "abstruse questions of logic" only incidentally so. Logic is a tool of ethics (and related metaphysics); that is the principal justification for studying it. Wittgenstein's "philosophy" is not the "heir" (BB p. 28) of philosophy.

What is your aim? To be a good man. But that only says the way you want to live, not why you want to exist at all.

Existence and Good

To know whether despair is ignorance of the good, what would I need to know? Despair is certainly not beneficial, nor is it a perceived good, but it may be a natural consequence of a view of existence.

Is to exist good -- not good with respect to this or that -- but good in itself? According to Xenophon that is not logically possible. (According to Wittgenstein someone might regard (treat) existence as being of "absolute value"; but because Wittgenstein's ethics is irrational (categorical), it cannot be demonstrated to be so.) What is existence good (useful or beneficial) for, Xenophon would ask, because if a thing is good for nothing, then it isn't good at all. On the other hand, like Plato, Xenophon with regard to a discussion of the meaning of 'know thyself' does not discuss only what is good, i.e. useful, for a thing, but also what the good for a thing is according to its nature: it is beneficial rather than harmful for a thing to be true to its own nature. Is that an empirical question? (This language is too plastic. The grammar of 'beneficial' is like the grammar of 'pleasure' in this respect.)

That-ness and How-ness

Is it the that-ness of existence that is the source of despair? Or is it only its how-ness that is the source? An unhappy (with his life) person might confuse the one with the other. This is an important distinction: philosophy isn't "If man's unhappy, God's unjust". If the that-ness of existence is the source of despair, that is a philosophical problem (although so is the existence of evil).

H.D. Thoreau (I don't know the context): "Most men lead lives of quiet desperation." Why?

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The Historical Socrates

Is Schweitzer right to identify the Socrates of Xenophon as the historical Socrates (if that is what he does)? For Plato was present at Socrates' trial and would have remembered everything that was said, and if he added to that, would it not have been Socrates' own ideas he added (unless, of course, the Socrates of the Apology is already the literary invention he clearly became in Plato's later works), whereas Xenophon was not present at the trial (although Xenophon's source was present at Socrates' death), and what justification therefore would there be for not basing the picture of the historical Socrates on Plato's Apology, especially given that Plato's later works are not consistent either with Plato's Apology or with Xenophon? Further, Aristotle's account of Socratic definition is not found in Xenophon, whose Socrates does not seek common nature definitions for common names. And although like Plato Xenophon puts his own ideas in Socrates' mouth, unlike Plato's ideas, Xenophon's ideas are often commonplace.

We make for ourselves a picture

Note: even if a Venn definition using all the ancient sources were made, would the question of who the historical Socrates was be a question of certainty rather than of plausibility? Normally Russell's theory of descriptions, as adapted by Wittgenstein in PI § 79, is the rule that is followed.

When looking for the historical Socrates behind the literary creations of Plato and Xenophon, there should be reasons for the particular selection of elements we include in our own picture of Socrates. The criterion I use is to accept whatever is consistent with the foundation of my own thinking in philosophy that I have from Socrates, namely "They only err who think they know what they do not know" (Augustine) and "If a man knows anything, he can explain and defend to others what he knows".

Holding discourse always with oneself alone

With no one to criticize my ideas there must be countless problems that go unnoticed by me, leaving me far more shallow a thinker than I would ever want to be. I must more often "not know what I'm talking about" than I know.

Note.--According to the OCD 2e ("Music" 9, ii [p. 710]), the Greek aulos was a reed instrument, and therefore 'flute-girls' is a mistranslation; it was not a flute, but instead akin to an oboe or clarinet. Therefore maybe 'reed-piper girls' or simply 'girl pipers'.

Image source: M.I. Finley's The Ancient Greeks (Penguin: 1963), Plate 17: marble from the incorrectly-named "Ludovisi throne", southern Italy ca. 460 B.C. I do not believe there is a more beautiful image than this.

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