Greek Philosophy 7.2: Socrates' Philosophy

[Music] is in this part of our introduction to Socrates. We'll be looking at his philosophy, his basic ideas, as some of the ancient sources portray them in context. This follows our discussion of Socrates' life and methods, and further back, our exploration of intellectual life in classical Athens.

So, topically, we're going to be talking about Socrates' philosophical views and his legacy. Thematically, we'll be focusing on how he thinks dialogue, or exchange, both outwardly and inwardly, can be used to reorient us, or our values, to beliefs that we genuinely can hold in a consistent and harmonious way. We'll also look at this theme a bit more closely of how Socrates is portrayed by some ancient sources as, in a way, free from different forms of coercion, both outward and inward forms of what are sometimes called tyranny, after the Greek political word.

We'll also look at how Socrates is represented as heeding certain internal or external agencies: one that he calls the *daimonion*, in a way, the spirit that comes to him or gives him a sign, and one called the *logos*. Both of these, as we'll see, have important connections with notions of value and conscience. We'll also look at Socrates' ideas about the goal of philosophy, especially the notion of a flourishing *psyche*, and the way that we can care for one another in a community.

So, here's a bit of a more detailed orientation to what we'll try to talk about as we understand what Socrates means by *philosophia*, or the love of wisdom. First, we'll focus on this idea of the reorientation of values. Second, we'll turn to this notion of freedom from coercion, outward and inward. Third, we'll look at what Socrates means by *logos*, especially, uh, what he means by the search for meaning in life, if we take meaning as a core constituent of what *logos* means for Socrates. Next, we'll look at how he describes the *daimonion*, or the spirit that helps to guide him. And finally, we'll talk about his ethical outlook, or his philosophy of life, individual flourishing, and mutual care.

So, for the first of these points, an important passage for understanding Socrates' idea of human flourishing is actually in his defense speech in 399, in Plato's portrayal. "I say that this is actually the greatest good for a human being to spend every day in conversation or dialogue about human goodness, one translation of *aretē*, and the other subjects that you hear me debating, when I question both myself and others closely. And in fact, the unexamined life, that is, the life without *ekstasis*, without asking questions, isn't even fit for a human being to live." This is the passage that's sometimes translated as "the unexamined life is not worth living," but it does have a bit of a broader range of nuance in the Greek. It can mean something like this: it's just not possible to live a life without asking questions.

So, what are these questions about *aretē* for Socrates? This passage, also in the defense speech by Plato, 29 to 30, seems to me particularly important to, in a way, understand how Socrates cultivates the use of the word philosophy, or love of wisdom, to describe his own practice. In context, he's imagining that the jury, which has the power to sentence him to death, is offering him the chance to free himself from that sentence if he promises to stop doing *philosophia*. So he says, "People of Athens, in this hypothetical case, I'm grateful and I am your friend, but I will obey the god rather than you." He's speaking here to, uh, the way that Apollo and the Pythian oracle to his friend Crito has inspired him. "As long as I draw breath and I'm able, I will not stop practicing philosophy, or the love of wisdom." That is, and we can understand what comes next as explaining what he takes us to mean: "to exhort you, that is, to encourage you, in Greek, and in my usual way, to point out to you, good sir, are you not ashamed of your eagerness to have as much stuff or money (*chremata*) as you can, reputation or *doxa*, and honors (*time*) as you can get, while you do not care for wisdom (*phronesis*), or the truth (*aletheia*), or the best possible state, or the most healthy possible state of your *psyche*?" And then, "if one of you disagrees and says they do care, I'll question them, examine them, and test them. And if they don't seem to me to possess *aretē*, or this kind of goodness or excellence of the *psyche*, though they claim they do, I'll reproach them."

And for Socrates, this reproach and examination takes us back to the beginning again, to a process of encouragement to reorient values in the way that he describes. So, in a way, this can be seen as a brief discussion of what philosophy means to Socrates: this reorientation of values with a process of examination and encouragement.

So, what are the values that he thinks should be reoriented in this way? In the passage we just saw, on the one hand, we have values like caring for possessions and money, reputations and honors. And on the other hand, we have values like wisdom and truth, and the most healthy state of one's *psyche*. What Socrates seems to be suggesting is that we need to reorient these. So, normally, we care for possessions, reputation, and honors most; those have the strongest motivational grip on us. And we care for wisdom and truth and the health of our *psyche* less. And he thinks we should try to turn this around, to value our own psychological well-being and the search for truth and wisdom more.

Perhaps one way of getting at what Socrates means here is to compare another influential moral view. This is Jeremy Bentham's, the founder of utilitarianism. On Bentham's view, it's a descriptive fact about human moral life that "nature has placed us under the governance of two sovereign masters, pain and pleasure, and it is for them alone to point out what we ought to do, as well as to determine what we shall do." And in fact, for Bentham, this is more than just a descriptive fact about how we are; it's also how we should be. "On the one hand the standard of right and wrong, on the other the chain of causes and effects are fastened to their throne. They govern us in all we do, in all we say, and in all we think."

Socrates might acknowledge that we do often find ourselves to be governed by pleasure and pain, and that includes both a sort of embodied pleasure and pain, as well as social approbation and disapprobation, and the kinds of pleasantness and unpleasantness that follow from those. But for Socrates, we should add other kinds of value that are even more important, or at least should be in motivating us, including wisdom, the search for truth, and this kind of search for psychological integrity, or well-being of the *psyche*, however we interpret that notion. It's not the case that he thinks we should discount pain and pleasure altogether, but that there are many cases where it's more important for us to follow these other values: again, the value of psychological well-being, wisdom in the search for truth, or at least that's one way, again, of interpreting a passage like this one in 29 to 30. We find ourselves seeking possessions, reputation, and honor, and possessions, in a way, as we see in other dialogues, as a way to more pleasure and less pain. But it's wisdom, truth, and the best state of our *psyche* that we might seek most in our quest for *aretē*, or human goodness.

This brings us, in a way, to two kinds of coercion or tyranny, in a loose use of that Greek word, which will become a psychological use in Plato's *Republic*, that Socrates is seen by some ancient sources as particularly resisting. And we previewed this a little bit in our last discussion of Socrates' approach to philosophy. On the one hand, there are kinds of external tyrannies or coercive forces that try to guide our action through tools like our tendency to obey authority and our tendency to conform to the will of the majority. On the other hand, we also face internal kinds of coercion from Socrates' point of view, particularly in the excessive dictatorship of some of our appetites and our pride, or our will to social status. The word tyrant in Greek can not necessarily always carry a negative connotation, but in many cases, it indicates a person who takes power in a state unconstitutionally and, in a way, is excessive or takes too much power to themselves. The issue here isn't that authority, conformity, appetite, and pride are always bad. In fact, as we'll see in Plato's interpretation, at least, it's important to have a kind of harmony of motivations in the person. But in some cases, they run a risk of being excessive, and that seems to be a state that Socrates finds in some of his contemporaries.

So, I want to emphasize this point: that even though we'll see Socrates criticizing these sorts of coercive motivations on human value and activity, it doesn't mean he thinks they're always wrong, at least in the interpretation that we'll develop here. The way this is represented in some of the ancient sources about Socrates seems pretty clear. So, in a lot of dialogues, like, for example, this one, Plato's *Charmides*, he stresses that when we're evaluating a view, it doesn't really matter who said it and whether they have authority, but whether it's true, and that's what we have to look into in the search for the truth in life as well. He emphasizes in his own defense speech in Plato's *Apology* 32, that even the tyrannical government of the Thirty, with the power to put him to death, didn't intimidate him into doing something wrong or acting against his values by arresting Leon of Salamis, even though the others did. Socrates and his followers seem to want to single this out about him and about us as philosophers. If we're considering Socrates as a kind of example, they think that we want to avoid simply obeying authority because it's authority.

To give this a bit of weight, we could compare the famous Milgram experiments in more contemporary psychology. In this study, which was done in 1961, published in 1963, Stanley Milgram wanted to investigate whether accomplices and directors of the atrocities of the Holocaust in Germany were just, in a sense, following orders. That's of course not to morally excuse their actions, but to try to explain them in some way that could help us to understand whether something like that could ever happen somewhere else, like in America. Milgram approached it like this, and this is a famously difficult study to interpret ethically. There's many reasons to think this was an unethical study to conduct, given what the participants knew when they did it, and there have been difficult attempts to replicate the findings of this study in a more ethical way.

With this in the background, Milgram envisaged that a subject of the experiment, who we're going to call here the teacher, T, in the diagram you see, would arrive and be told that they were going to engage in, let's say, a simple sort of spelling experiment with another randomly assigned subject, we'll call them the learner, L. And the teacher, that is, the real subject, was given the impression that they were randomly sorted into the teacher role, and the other subject was randomly sorted into the learner role. In reality, though, the learner was an actor who was an accomplice in the experiment with the experimenter, who's labeled here E. In the actual experiment, the experimenter would instruct the teacher, that is, the real subject, to, let's say, ask a spelling question, uh, to the learner, and if they got something wrong, to administer a light electric shock to the learner. In the practice of the experiment, the actor who was playing the learner would react as if they were receiving a shock. So, to the teacher, this appeared to be true that they were actually shocking another human being.

As this worked out, initially, the learners might get things right or get things a little bit wrong and get an electric shock. But the teacher would be directed to increase the voltage of the shock more and more and more until the learner, again, remembering this as an actor, but the teacher believed it to be true, might be writhing on the ground in pain, or might actually seem to be dead. The finding was that as long as the experimenter was perceived by the teacher to be a recognized authority figure, about two-thirds of the genuine participants, the teachers, would continue to administer electric shocks at the highest level of 450 volts, while all the participants continued to 300 volts. Which is a pretty horrifying finding. In a 2009 replication, again, that was trying to conduct the experiment in an ethical way, 70 percent of the base condition participants continued with the next item on the test and had to be stopped by the experimenter.

What Milgram was really interested in wasn't just whether people would do something atrocious to another human being that conflicted with their own values, but whether what made them do so would be the compulsion of a socially recognized authority figure. So, in this experiment, if it's a professor at Yale in a white lab coat saying, "The experiment must continue," there's a good chance that people would continue. If it was another one of us in a sweater without apparent authority, just going, "Oh, I think you should carry on," then they're a lot less likely to continue. So, Milgram posited authority can have a very destructive and corrosive effect on our ability to put our values into practice.

Milgram commented on the experiment about 10 years later like this: "The legal and philosophical aspects of obedience are of enormous importance. I set up a simple experiment at Yale University to test how much pain an ordinary citizen would inflict on another person simply because he was ordered to by an experimental scientist. Stark authority was pitted against the subject's strongest moral imperatives against hurting others, and with the subject's ears ringing with the screams of the victims, authority won more often than not. The extreme willingness of adults to go to almost any lengths on the command of an authority constitutes the chief finding of the study and the fact most urgently demanding explanation."

So, when we think back to Socrates' emphasis, as his contemporaries and followers see it, on resisting authority, we could maybe explore some of the implications of a study like this to, to really illustrate that it's important, it's practical, it matters, especially in a society that relies on people not necessarily blindly following authority, but trying to use their own judgment.

Another kind of, if we can put it like this, external form of coercive force, at least as it's perceived by Socrates' followers, is the influence of the majority of people. Now, of course, it's a pretty good guide to moral decisions, often, what the majority are thinking. But sometimes it isn't. There have certainly been times in history when the majority of people in a community endorsed something that's morally abhorrent, for example, slavery in the United States prior to the Civil War, or indeed in ancient Greece and Athens itself. Since the majority sometimes gets things wrong, Socrates argues we shouldn't, when we're trying to find the truth, think quite so much about what the majority will say, but what the person who understands justice and injustice will say. Of course, this is dangerous in a way, because who's that person going to be? We could get back to the problems of authority. But on Socrates' view, it's important that we maintain this kind of intellectual humility, where we don't necessarily profess to have this wisdom ourselves.

So, there's also the sense that conformity can lead us down the wrong path. Another way of getting at this, or teasing out why it seems practically important, is to look again at some more current experiments, current in a way, last century, in social psychology. In this case, the Solomon Asch experiments on conformity. These were about 10 years before Milgram's experiments, in the 1950s, and measured the influence of a majority group on individual perceptions. So, this time, you kind of get the idea of these diabolical social psychology experiments. This one goes like this: Similarly, a real subject arrives in a room full of others. They think are also random subjects of the experiment, but are in fact paid actors, unknown to the real subject. And they're told they're, let's say, going to do a simple visual perception task together. So, they're going to look at some lines on the screen and say which ones are the same length as other ones. Uh, so suppose you're this subject, or I am. We sit down alone, but around us are all these strangers. And the experimenter arrives and shows a line on the left and three lines on the right, A, B, C, and says, you know, "Which one of the lines on the right is the same length as the line on the left?" And the first few trials, pretty easy. Well, A, B, or C looks like C. Everybody raises their hand for C, and we go on. But suppose on the third or fourth trial, things go a little differently. Everybody in the room but you raises their hand for what looks like the wrong line. It's line A, but for you, it looks like, that seems plainly not what my eyes see. So, what are you going to do? Well, obviously, there's a bit of pressure here not to be, though, the weird one in the room who's not raising your hand with everybody else's.

So, a lot of people, as one subject said, had the feeling, "Well, to go along with it, I'll go with the rest. I suspected something was weird, but I tried to put it out of my mind." So, maybe not entirely surprisingly, a lot of people would just raise their hand to be on the same page as the rest of the room. What's more interesting, in a way, is that often in debriefs, the subjects would actually remember what they saw to be what the majority of people in the room claimed to be the case. So, even if line A was shorter than the line they were shown, they'd remember it as the same length if that's what the others said. If line C was longer, they'd remember it as shorter, if that's what the others said, and so on. So, that was one of the first studies to cast out on eyewitness testimony in court, which is an interesting point as well, and showed that conformity to a majority view is not only a matter of, uh, going along with it, but even what we remember, often what we perceive, and how we think. And if it wasn't just about the length of lines, but was about collective decisions, you can see how this might be an important point to consider.

In the experimental group, about three-quarters of the participants conformed at least once, but about a quarter never did. It's also interesting to stress that conformity was reduced a great deal by answering in private. So, think of in democratic voting, the importance of a private ballot, or by the presence of a single ally. An important point if you think back to Socrates, for example, being the only one in the assembly administration refusing to do something unconstitutional in 406, when he didn't want to go along with a motion to put all the generals to death illegally. Having a single ally can make a big difference, rather than having to have that courage to stand alone. There have been a lot of attempts to replicate the study, by the way. Results can definitely be culturally specific and gender specific, which is really interesting.

So, Asch commented like this: "We found the tendency to conformity in our society so strong that reasonably intelligent and well-meaning young people are willing to call white black." As a matter of concern, it raises questions about our ways of education and about the values that guide our conduct. And I put you, just in spirit, that Socrates would agree. I've mentioned before the American philosopher Martha Nussbaum as a reader, interpreter of ancient philosophy. She too stresses that because human beings are prone to be subservient to both authority and peer pressure, then to prevent atrocities, we need to counteract these tendencies by producing a culture of individual dissent. The dialogues of Plato are second to none to inspire searching, active thinking, with the life and example of Socrates up front to inspire. And Socrates, again, would stress in these respects that he would be the same person in public as in private life. This inner integrity mattered to him most of all, at least certainly more than some of these forms of what he might perceive to be coercive force. That, in a way, shows how Socrates would be a non-conformist in some cases, in denying the power of an authoritarian, tyrannical regime like the Thirty, or conformity to what the majority of people wanted, if he thought it conflicted with what was right.

But it's also important that it doesn't mean for him just doing whatever we want because we're not obeying the rules or we're not going along with others. He applies the same sort of constraint, if we want to call it that, because it also is a kind of freedom, to the inward pressure or coercion in a way that we might receive, only when they're excessive, from appetites and aversions, and from the motivation to popularity or status. And in fact, it turns out that these internal forms of tyranny, if we can call them that, from the point of view of Plato and Socrates, are the hooks or the reasons why external tyranny has force for us. After all, what can authorities do to threaten and force obedience? Really, it's our appetites, our aversions, our social status. Those are the only things they can control. But on the view that Socrates takes, and in this he's followed by later Greek philosophers like the Stoics, no authority can control what we think.

So, thinking a little bit about these internal forms of tyranny, we can come back one more time to this central passage in the *Apology*, where Socrates says, "Aren't you ashamed of being eager to have as much stuff or money (*chremata*), reputation (*doxa*), and honor (*time*) as possible, without caring for wisdom or truth, or the best possible state of your *psyche*?" As Plato interprets this later, at least as Socrates' student, uh, part of the reason that we ordinarily find ourselves to be more interested in what's pleasant and easy, and in possessions and money and reputation and so on, is because we have motivational clusters in us that are in a way outside of our control and aren't always oriented to living a life with integrity, even though they're also part of who we are and, in a way, constitute us.

One of these is called *thumos*, or the *thumoeides*, part of us which gives us a lot of our emotional life, as well as our pride, our anger, and our motivation for social status. Another is *epithumia*, which is the cluster of capacities oriented to fulfilling our needs, wants, appetites, and desires, and avoiding what's unpleasant. In contrast, these are very natural human motivations. It is fundamental to us as living beings to want to be recognized and appreciated members of our society, to have pride, to be honored, to fulfill our basic needs. You can think here of Maslow's hierarchy of needs as well, for example. So, the idea isn't, again, that these are bad, but it is possible for them, in some ways, to be excessive.

To illustrate this, we can think again of this passage from Plato's *Republic*, Book IV, 443c to e, where Socrates is depicted as describing our own sort of justice, not so much as a matter of how we act on the outside, but how we act on the inside. "A just person," he says, "puts herself in order, is her own friend, and harmonizes the three parts of herself: that's these three motivational streams, *logos*, *thumos*, and *epithumia*, like three limiting notes in a musical scale, the high, the low, and the middle. If you're tuning a lyre, she binds together those parts and any others there may be in between, and from having been many things, she becomes entirely one, moderate, and harmonious. And only then does she act. And when she does anything, whether it's acquiring wealth, taking care of her body, engaging in politics, or in private business, all these things are okay to do. In all of these, she believes that action is just and fine that preserves this inner harmony and helps achieve it, and calls it so, and regards as wisdom the knowledge that oversees actions like that."

So, here we can see that these motives, *thumos* and *epithumia*, are not supposed to be eradicated in the person in the context of *Republic* 4, but are meant to be part of a harmony. They're only tyrannical if they are, shall we say, excessive motivations. And to put this in context, imagine if everything we do is to satisfy an appetite of the moment. This could either just pull us in a lot of different directions. At one point, Plato, in Book IX, depicts it like a many-headed beast of Greek mythology, because it's very hard to coherently follow the same pattern of life and realize our values if we're just going along with whatever we want in a given moment. Or we can have a truly tyrannical appetite that becomes the sole kind of function, or, uh, or the kind of access around which our whole personality comes to turn in a possibly self-destructive kind of cycle, and that's a tyrannical life. Normally, though, in a sense, if, and of course, it can be dangerous to think of what counts as normal, but in this context, under a sort of harmonious psychological organization, we are fulfilling our needs and appetites and our wants in a healthy and wholesome way that's in harmony with all of our other motivations. So, we can have a little bit of chocolate. Uh, we can relax at the end of a hard day. We can fill these needs. In doing so, we're, we're filling all of them in a wholesome sort of way that doesn't allow, let's say, one to become a tyrant of our whole life.

On the other hand, so too with *thumos*. Imagine a life that was all about popularity, or all about doing what got us sort of social recognition or fame, uh, or or honor. Now, of course, that could lead us to do good things. Uh, that's not necessarily all bad. But again, if that was a sort of tyrannical motivation, if we did everything we did to be popular, that could be the wrong reason to do some things, and also it could lead us in directions that might be harmful to us and those around us in our community. So, again, the idea here isn't to eradicate one of these motivations. And going back to Socrates' statement, it's not to eradicate values for possessions and comforts and honor and reputation and so on, but it is to bring them somehow into a harmony. Or, in the musical metaphor, at tuning.

The aspect of us that's capable of doing that is apparently, for Plato, called *logos*, or the *logistikon*, that part in our *psyche* that is motivated by and engaged with activity of *logos*, which, of course, raises the question: what's that? And this takes us to our next point. After exploring how Socrates seeks freedom, in a way, from these kinds of coercion, as he's represented, both external and internal, well, freedom for what? And if it is a kind of harmonious life that he seeks, which is also independent, to some degree, from these, uh, external forces or internal tyrannies, then what is, in a way, the way that life is lived?

So, in understanding *logos* in this case, I'm going to focus on the notion of a search for meaning, and especially on frameworks of intrinsic motivation and, to some degree, narrative identity. Putting this in dialogue with some of our earlier conversations about myth. So, Socrates, in one dialogue, the *Crito*, also by Plato, at 46a, says famously in one sentence: "I'm the kind of person who heeds or listens to nothing in me but the *logos* that on reflection seems best to me." So, here's this word again. What does it mean? I'm going to start from the ancient Greek dictionary that's fairly standard for classical Greek, the Liddell-Scott-Jones Greek-English Lexicon. One meaning of *logos* is the capacity for thinking, reason, and reflection. That's a really common one. And if you think of *logos* at the end of English words like biology, psychology, anthropology, and so on, well, it's kind of *logos* in that way. How do we reflect in a reasoning way about, well, life? In the case of biology, the earth with geology, the *psyche* with psychology. So, that's pretty familiar. It can also mean the explanation or grounding of something. It can mean one's conscience, so what we sort of refer to when we're thinking about, "Is this right or wrong? Is this me? What I'm doing right now?" It can mean value, what we hold in esteem, what we care for, coming back to this theme of values. It can mean a formula or definition of something. It can mean simply meaning, particularly in speech, debate, or discussion.

So, usually, when we're interpreting the meaning for Socrates, we focus a lot on this sort of cognitive aspect, which is obviously important. That is, how we reason, the arguments we present for things. But I'm going to try to focus here a little bit more on a complementary picture of *logos*, more about meaning, more about this sense of conscience and value. This is kind of intuitive in Greek, in a, in a way, because *logos* is the noun from the verb *legein*, which can mean to speak, but it means to speak in a very particular way. It's not just like *phone*, which is making noise, but it's speaking meaningfully. The Greek way of saying, "You're not making sense to me, I'm not understanding you," is to say, "*ouden leges*," "You're logosing nothing." The idea there isn't that you're failing to reason, it's not that narrow, it's not that you're not making valid inferences, it's that "I just don't get it, I'm not getting the meaning here, you're not logosing something." So, it's that kind of idea of grokking the meaning, of seeing what's significant or salient, that I'm going to try to focus on here. And I'm not the first one to look at it that way.

So, in addition to the dictionary meaning, there's a well-known book by Viktor Frankl, a survivor of the Holocaust, called *The Search for Meaning*, or *Man's Search for Meaning*. Frankl emphasizes that "everything can be taken from someone, but one thing: the last of the human freedoms to choose one's attitude in any given set of circumstances, or to choose one's own way." You can think back here to the kind of freedom not just to, to do what's easy necessarily, but to be genuinely free in Socrates' sense that we talked about a few moments ago. For Frankl, that is what Socrates and other Greek philosophers mean by *logos*. Frankl argues that *logos* denotes meaning, striving to find a meaning in one's life. He suggests, as a psychotherapist, is the primary motivational force in a human being. That's why I'm speaking, this is Frankl speaking, of a "will to meaning," in contrast to the pleasure principle on which Freudian psychoanalysis is centered, as well as in contrast to the will to power. "Man's search for meaning is not a secondary rationalization of instinctual drives." Frankl suggests this meaning is unique and specific, in that it must and can be fulfilled by him alone.

So, this sense of *logos* as a search for meaning, as sort of integrating narrative patterns in a life, is not new for us. We've also talked about this in our discussion of Greek myth, the way that, uh, in a more modern idiom, narrative identity theory focuses on myths and stories as an integral part of our daily life, as we try to integrate all our experiences, whether it's on the bus, trying to finish an exam, making sense of our work life, whatever we're doing, integrating all these experiences through coherent patterns. And that this is integral to us as storytelling people, *homo narrans*, cultivating a sense of meaning, intrinsic motivation, and purpose.

So, this kind of quest for meaning can be a way of understanding *logos* in general, thinking of what kind of story we feel like we're living in today. As we seek a *logos* in our stories, we've also talked a little bit about how, even from the vantage point of cognitive neuroscience, humanity's purpose, or at least the way we generate our sense of purpose, is correlated deeply with our drive to get meaning out of the world around us. And even EEG brain imaging scans, all that kind of perspective on the neural correlates of our conscious experience, emphasizes this in a broad way: search for meaning, making sense of things.

Now, that's a bit vague, and we might not want to put too much emphasis on this, but it does have sort of practical import. There's good arguments that this kind of search for meaning, for patterns that help us to make sense of all kinds of events, and especially through theory of mind, to make sense of each other as also seeking meaning, also trying to realize values, and in a way, empathizing with each other. All this is is integrated as a kind of important way of understanding our individual and social responsibilities. Even democracy, as one neuroscientist argues, has a lot to do with managing ways of making meaning together.

This kind of dialogical focus, one way of making sense of this too, is through, uh, broad and growing psychological literature on intrinsic motivation theory. So, in this context, uh, when we try to self-determine our goals, this is also called, after Ryan and Deci, self-determination theory. We might seek intrinsic motivations: our spontaneous tendency to seek out novelty and challenges, to exercise our capacities, to explore and to learn by doing what we find inherently interesting, not so much extrinsic motivation for instrumental consequences, like seeking rewards that are pleasant, avoiding punishments that are painful, and achieving outcomes that come from the outside. Now, again, that's not to say there's anything wrong with doing that. It's pretty sensible to try to achieve what's extrinsically motivated. But this kind of life that motivates people like Frankl, and perhaps like Socrates, to seek meaning, a kind of narrative coherence, a sense of purpose, is often felt as grounded inside, as being something that is genuinely somehow up to me. And again, it's interesting to notice that there have been efforts to find that search for meaning deeply integrated into our own neural networks as well. What we find salient, significant, or meaningful in the world, those moments of curiosity, if those pull us on in our lives, that's well, curiosity, philosophy, the search for wisdom.

So, in that context, we've thought a little bit about the *logos* as a search for meaning. There's a lot of other ways of looking at *logos*, as we've seen, but in this context, it's, uh, it's something we can put in dialogue with this notion of freedom from these different kinds of external and internal coercion. How do they work together? Well, it's not that *logos* is supposed to eliminate or remove all of these external and internal motivations that are different. Rather, it's like that part of us that's there with needle and thread, or spinning the wool, trying to integrate and weave together all these different threads in a single coherent and integrated pattern of meaning. One where we feel like, yeah, how I'm feeling in my social environment, how I'm trying to make sense of what I want, what I need in the world, the ideas I've got, the stories and myths that I'm telling, the authorities that I'm noticing what they're trying to do, how my society is collectively trying to make choices, all these things that we encounter at once, our lived experience, all our engagement of of heart, hand, and mind, all hang together in some kind of integrated pattern of meaning that's harmonious. That's the goal, at least from this point of view that I'm suggesting.

So, what's the inspiration for that? That kind of *logos*, *thumos*, and *epithumia* all together trying to reflect, well, what, where does this meaning come from for Socrates? It comes from a kind of inner voice. This is an interesting point about his philosophy, because he's often represented as a kind of arc rationalist, and yet he describes himself as hearing voices. Specifically, as one of his interlocutors, Euthyphro, says in the dialogue that bears his name, "Socrates, these people are accusing you, bringing you to trial, remember, he's brought to trial for impiety, because you say yourself that your divine sign, your *daimonion*, comes to you from time to time." Socrates mentions this sign, this *daimonion*, this spiritual vision, in a way, in his *Apology*, or defense speech, as well, in Plato's version, 40a to b. "All the time in the past," he says, speaking to the jury, "my familiar prophetic power, my *daimonion*, frequently opposed me, even in little things, when I was about to do something wrong." That kind of tingling of conscience, "Something's not right here." But now, that is, coming to trial, "my divine sign has not opposed me, either when I left home at dawn, when I came into court, or any time." And in fact, this sort of loyalty to the *daimonion*, to the voice or the spiritual that Socrates feels, is aligned for him with the message from Delphi. He sees his philosophical life as a service to the god, and that's why he says, "I will obey the god rather than you," the jury with the power to put him to death. He's free of that, in a way. He will not stop practicing philosophy.

This idea of the inner voice, we could even focus on, even though it's a bit of a literal way of looking at this notion of the *daimonion*. We learn to talk to ourselves quite early in life, to to hear. And it's interesting to think that this inner voice often comes to us, including as children, as us, in a way, as our authentic self. This kind of real inner speech or dialogue with ourselves is important to how we reflect on ourselves, how we come to know ourselves as well. And in fact, uh, modern philosophers, psychologists, neuroscientists who study this kind of inner voice phenomenon have hearkened back to people like Socrates and their demonic sign.

So, this idea of a kind of inner dialogue with a sense of conscience is a way of understanding what Socrates is talking about. Just briefly, we can think back to the pre-Socratic philosopher Heraclitus, they're saying that "character is the *daimon* of a person." The *daimon*, the spirit, in a way, as later philosophers sometimes understood or interpreted this, the authentic person deep down, maybe not entirely conscious, whose voice comes through in that kind of tingling of conscience. When we seek to know ourselves, as the Oracle at Delphi suggests, and Socrates tries to realize, we're trying to listen to that voice. And it's distinct for every person. I can't tell you what yours is saying. Uh, the story goes, and we can't get it from authority, conformity, even from appetites or our social motivations (*epithumia* and *thumos*), that is, but only by being sensitive or receptive to listen, as Socrates did, or at least, again, that's a way of interpreting it.

So, this also comes out in later Platonist readers of Socrates. Olympiodorus, for example, much later, uh, who's teaching some of the Platonic dialogues in antiquity to his pupils in Greek, says, "One's allotted *daimon*, thinking of Socrates in part, is really the conscience." *Sunesis*, this is, in a way, the crowning peak of one's *psyche*. So, that again is a way of of interpreting what Socrates means with this inner voice. It's something spiritual in him, something higher that he heeds, is sensitive to, and receptive to.

Putting this all together, then, in heeding that inner voice, going back, Socrates is able to reflect those values, in a way, in the search for meaning in his life, harmonizing all the different motivations that he encounters, all his actions, agency, and experience, and setting himself free, as he might see it, as his contemporaries and followers see it, from external and internal forms of coercion. Because he is free always to act in line with these values, if he doesn't have the sorts of hooks that, let's say, authority or conformity might use, uh, to to coerce an individual. There's a great optimism in that about human freedom, but it's certainly a vision that many of Socrates' successors found to be powerful. And what it allows him to do, coming back to our very first point, is to reorient his values so that they're really lived and practiced.

So, this takes us to Socrates' view of philosophy as a way of life, which I'm going to look at in three parts. First, how philosophy can be seen as a way of life, not just a way of thinking, according to the Socratic. Second, uh, how, in a way, recognizing our self, the self that is known in the Delphic project of self-knowledge as the *psyche*, well, how this has moral implications in how we live. Moral, not in just the right or wrong sense, but moral in the sense of Greek *ethos*, character, character in action, and ethics as well. So, what sort of practical output this vantage point on philosophy might have? How Socrates thinks that recognizing our self as our *psyche*, in a way, and following this kind of philosophical therapeutic approach to a good life, might lead to self-care, to psychological integrity, and to treating one another with care, a kind of philosophy of care and empathy, as some have recently, especially stressed.

So, I'd like to start with this idea of philosophy as a way of life. This is indebted to the French scholar Pierre Hadot, and it's the recognition that when an ancient Greek or Roman person identified as a philosopher, *philosophos*, a lover of wisdom, after Socrates, they committed not only to a kind of pattern of thoughts, but to a way of life. Socrates himself talks like this. So, in Plato's *Republic*, Book I, Socrates is presented as saying, "The question they're asking isn't about something ordinary, but *peri tou tropon*," "how we ought to live," or "what's the way of life that's sort of healthy." So, this is a key finding of scholars like Hadot and in his train, who have especially singled out how important it is to see that, in contrast to a more sort of vocational notion of philosophy, ancient Greek philosophy is about living, is about choosing values and trying to live by them in the most honest way we can.

In this sense, as John Cooper puts it in his book *Pursuits of Wisdom*, which we cited earlier, "philosophy can become the steersman of a life." Alongside the pursuit of truth, in particularly strong forms of Socratic moral thought, it turns out that all of our motivations to action are driven somehow by latent judgments or conscious judgments in the *psyche*. That is, we all do what seems good to us at some level. So, trying, as we saw before, to use *logos* in a way, following the *daimonion*, to reorient our values, is also a way of seeing how we can reorient what seems good to us. And because we act on what seems good to us, reorienting what we find to be good, in a way that's wholesome and authentic for us, makes it possible for us to act differently in the world.

From the point of view of the Socratic philosopher, philosophical reflection, when it's coupled with certain exercises, or as cases in Greek, basically forms of habituation, can in principle uproot appearances when they're mistaken and open our minds to new discoveries and help us to better our lives and the lives of our communities. This sounds pretty ambitious, and it is. So, it's not, at least for Socrates, with this interpretation, represented as a kind of project that we should see ourselves as done with at a certain point. It's always ongoing. It's dialogical. We always have more to learn from each other and from our experiences and discoveries as we work. This dialogue can be external, and it very often is. And in fact, philosophy is seen as reliant on this kind of process of exchange of ideas, for example, in Plato's *Sophist* and *Parmenides*. But it can also be internal. It can be an inward dialogue. And in fact, some Platonic dialogues, like the *Sophist* 263e, makes this point explicit that *logos* can be outward or inward and do the same kind of work.

Later philosophers pick this kind of internal dialogue notion up, by the way. So, Epictetus, who's a Stoic writing in the first century CE, makes this unexpected comment about Socrates, which we alluded to before: "Didn't Socrates write?" says one of his students. "Yes," says Epictetus, "he did write." This is surprising because we always hear about how Socrates didn't write anything for publication. But how did he go about it? Well, "since he couldn't always have someone at his side to subject his *dogmata*, our beliefs, to examination," there's that word *elenchus* again, which we talked about in Socrates' method, "or to be examined by him in turn, while he used to subject himself to examination, to test himself out. So, he was always trying out the practical application of some specific preconception or prolapsis." Now, that is the kind of thing Epictetus says that a philosopher writes.

So, thinking of it this way, whether it's dialogue with each other, whether it's, uh, writing a journal, as Socrates is said to have done, or simply reflecting on the inside, this kind of constant dialogue, this curiosity and reflection, or meaning-finding discovery process in our life, that Socratic philosophy, one of the outcomes of this kind of exploration that's interlocked with it, in a way, or intertwined for Socrates, is this Delphic quest for self-knowledge, trying to find out who we are. And part of the reason it's important to do this, as we've seen, is because it allows us to cultivate this person who we are. And that's not just a sort of selfish project, because self-care or self-cultivation is what also allows us, hopefully, to be a positive force in the world around us.

This is put quite explicitly by some of the later Platonists as well. So, for example, Proclus, who's writing in the fifth

The 4th century CE says if we could learn who or what we are, well, this is the starting point of Platonic philosophy. He thinks we could learn what is good for us, but first, we have to know who we are. Uh, otherwise, you know, the good we seek might not be our good at all.

Socrates' answer to this question, and in a way, even though he doesn't definitely insist on certain views, there are some that are never refuted in the dialogues, and that he consistently seems to endorse, is that the human person is really the psyche. So, this comes from lots of ancient Socratic sources. For example, it's in Xenophon and the Memorabilia. It's in the Alcibiades that was attributed to Plato in antiquity, and it's in, uh, Plato's Apology of Socrates.

So, what is this psyche? Who are we? The word *psyche* literally means breath in Greek, but it comes to indicate something like what's present in a living or animate being and absent in an inanimate being. So, that is the life principle, in a way. Breath, then, is a natural kind of metaphorical use or experiential use. Breath is often an indicator of life for us. And in fact, in Greek, the usual way you'd say an animal is *empsychos*, uh, a being that has *psyche* inside. So, that's the usual Greek way of saying living being or animal. And in fact, uh, we get the word animal in English out of Latin, which is a cognate usage of *anima*, which also means breath or wind. So, an animal or an animate being is a being with life, with breath inside.

This is a pretty common point in a lot of world languages, that life has something to do with breath. Breath has to do with soul, and soul is, in fact, a common translation of the Greek word *psyche* or *tsuke*. Even though *psyche* is obviously the transliteration that we have. You can think of the Sanskrit word *atman*, for example, or another Greek word *pneuma* or *numa*, or the Latin *spiritus*, which also has to do with breath and can be transliterated as spirit. So, these are ideas about life forces in terms of how *psyche* is understood or interpreted.

Going a bit further than the sense as fundamental of a life principle, a *psyche* feels to many of the Platonist philosophers like a locus of both agency or choice on the one hand, and experience on the other hand. In a way, it's that in virtue of which we are free to make choices and have experiences. You can sort of recognize this maybe for yourself if you introspect and have a sense in a moment that you're free to choose what to do next. We can pause and take a moment to do that experiment. You could close your eyes, you can stop the video or the sound, you can get up, you can stretch. What will you do? So, you get the idea. If you have that sort of thought or that feeling, there's a sense that these experiences are integrated. We feel aware, in a way. And in the space that opens up when we can ask ourselves that question, "What am I going to do?" somehow we might feel ourselves there. So, this kind of locus of agency and experience, in any case, that's how many of the Platonic philosophers, following Socrates, understand *psyche*.

Agency and experience are picked up in later Greek in different words. So, it can be that aspect of us, uh, that makes choices or is practical, practical, and that aspect of us, uh, which has awareness or consciousness, uh, or *nous* or *gnosis*. There's a lot of psychological vocabulary that's picked up in this notion of the *psyche* as integrating these two.

Another way of looking at it is through the lens of the language Plato uses in the *Sophist*. That something that's real is something with the potential both to act and be acted on, to be part of the causal system of the world. And in a way, for a *psyche* to be a locus of awareness and experience as a capacity to be acted on, and to have agency or choice is a capacity to act. And the two are unified in one. And that, in a way, is a philosophical notion of the *psyche* that flourishes in Platonic philosophy.

*Psyche* is also explained in a lot of different ways in different ancient Greek philosophies, and that's important to stress. It's often translated quite understandably and usefully as soul in English. The word soul has a particular kind of religious usage that suggests a counter-scientific understanding, for example, and that's not so much the case in Greek. So, *psyche* or *tsuke*, this life force that's also in a way a locus of agency and experience, is explained in all kinds of different ways. It might be a pattern, and it could well be a sort of immaterial pattern that's instantiated in many different ways for Platonists and is in a sense eternal, like a mathematical or metaphysical truth. The pattern that is really me. It can also be a harmony or a tuning of elements for some Pythagoreans. It can be particularly refined particles or atoms for Atomists and Epicureans. It can be the realization of a potential, the pattern that is in a way self-motivating to bring a potential that's natural to realization for Aristotle, sometimes called an *entelechy*. So, there's a lot of different ideas about the kind of entity that this locus of agency and experience might be. But there's not a lot of denial that there is such a thing as the kind of lived experience of being human. And that's what we'll focus on here as we explore this idea.

When we try to integrate agency and experience again, that kind of idea that we're sitting or standing or, you know, "What am I gonna do?" creative acts are a good metaphor for a lot of Platonist thinking about what this is like and what it means to Socrates. So, Plato, Socrates often describes human life like a creative art, indeed like a craft. The word *demiurgia*, which is behind the word demiurge that Plato famously uses in the *Timaeus* for the creative force in the cosmos. This can be a tinker, it can be a bronze smith or blacksmith, it can be a sculptor, a painter, a musician. In all these cases, Plato, Socrates imagines the creative person looking to patterns of value and realizing them in a medium. But as a metaphor for human life, this medium isn't canvas, and it's not clay or stone. Think of Socrates as a stone mason again, and even in later tradition as a sculptor. In this case, the medium is our own life choices. That's the medium in which we're instantiating or realizing these values or patterns. And to do that with *logos*, again, reflecting the *daimon* in a way, for Socrates is to organize all these psychological motivations that we have with harmony and integrity. As I remember from the passage we've looked at several times from *Republic* 4, 43c to e, we're seeking our actions in this medium of life to reflect an authentic and unified character.

One way of thinking of this too, this this notion of *psyche* and practice, and here we're stretching beyond what we think we might know of Socrates to later Platonic interpretations and beyond to other traditions of the philosophy of the arts, is through borrowing this translation of soul for *psyche* and thinking of its sensitivity in English. When we speak of soulful, for example, what is it to be soulful? To make art or music soulfully? To be moved? To sense soul? In German, *Seelenvoll* can be the same kind of instruction in music. And even the 20th-century philosopher Wittgenstein puts it like this, in a way that helps to see how *logos*, as rational as it might sometimes sound as a force of meaning, is also quite artful. Understanding a sentence, as Wittgenstein says in one place, is much more akin to understanding a theme in music than one may think. He uses the language of gesture often to describe this. A music-blind person will understand what can be recognized by rules, but does not understand this soulful expression in music. Won't understand a direction given to play a piece of music as if it were an answer to a question.

So, what I want to bring out here is that this sense of an integration of agency and experience that's brought through the lens of these metaphors of the arts, creativity for Socrates, is also in a way about living life vividly, about living soulfully. And it's not something that can easily be put in in rules. Uh, I think in a way, if we borrow Wittgenstein's language here, that seems true. But nonetheless, it's integral to his notion of the *psyche* and the creativity of the *psyche* in particular.

So, why should we care about this? This is an interesting sort of aspect of Socrates' thought that he thinks we are *psyche*. And it's interesting to think about what this word means for him. It has some important output and implications for Socrates. If it had turned out that what we are is only our embodiment, in the sense of what we can see, touch, taste, hear, smell in one another, uh, if that was it, then making wise choices to care for ourselves would be to care for our bodies only, to do what's pleasant for them and not what's painful for them, for example. Uh, that's sort of on this principle that we try to know ourselves and care for ourselves. Again, if it turned out that we were only our social reputations, our honor, then our wiser choices would preserve that social standing, and we'd avoid choices that did anything else that made us unpopular. But since, on Socrates' view, we are in fact *psyche*, sometimes we do things that are unpleasant, physically harmful, or unpopular in order to care for the integrity and unity of this genuine self, the soulful, creative choices, if you like, that express the *psyche*, can sometimes not do what seems best or easiest for our bodies or our social persona, but nonetheless might be the things we do with authenticity and integrity. Uh, and in a way, that that sort of follows from the way he understands *psyche* and this idea of doing what is best for what is most genuinely us. Again, much of this is interpretive, but a surprising amount of it does come back to points that Socrates makes in both Xenophon and Plato, and might well go back to Socrates himself.

It also seems to be a point that goes back to Socrates himself, that we don't know that *psyche* is mortal. So, at least as he says in Plato's *Apology*, or defense speech, to fear death, and this is poignant because he himself is on the verge of execution at this point in the narrative. Well, to fear death is just another form of that old vice that I've fought all my life: to think one knows what one does not know. So, there's an intellectual humility here, too, a curiosity, even in the face of death.

At the same time, with that curiosity, Socrates himself feels confident, as he puts it in the *Phaedo*, in his last conversation, that he is *psyche* that will go on. In a way, and again, this isn't to say that there's no value in the body, only there's no value in our social presence, but in addition to those values, and in a way cresting the wave of them all, is this sort of core of humanity. And this is a memorable passage from *Phaedo* 115c to d, which is in the midst of a series of arguments that Socrates offers without making any of them, in a way, explicitly definite, but suggestive that the *psyche* is immortal and outlasts the body. "I can't persuade Crito," his friend, he says, "that I am the Socrates here who is talking to you now and marshaling all these arguments. He thinks that I am the corpse who he'll see presently lying dead." But on, on Socrates' view, this *psyche*, this sort of locus of awareness and and freedom and choice, that is the core of the human being, feels like it goes on. So, that's an important point in Socratic philosophy as well.

Coming back to, uh, to earth, in a way. So, however this, uh, sort of characteristic understanding of the *psyche* is expressed for Socrates, uh, it's very grounded in embodied social life for him. And it's important in his interpretation of human moral choices that nobody does willfully or intentionally what seems wrong to them. This is, for example, the point he makes in Plato's dialogue, the *Protagoras*, around 358. It's kind of surprising because it seems like people do things that seem wrong to them a lot of the time. Uh, but on Socrates' view, we're always doing what seems good. And if we think we're not doing that, we're not feeling like we're doing what seems good to us, it's because we're not fully aware yet of what seems good to us.

So, in my case, if I think it's a good idea to have my 17th chai latte of the day, I might think that's a pretty bad idea. You know, you're going to be pretty caffeinated after those 16 chai lattes already. You probably don't need a 17th one. But what thank you, I'm doing it anyway? Well, on this sort of story for Socrates, um, I'm actually doing something that seems good to me. It seems to me like the pleasure and the spicy taste of that chai latte is so good that it's more good than, let's say, the possible concerns or harm that might come from that many chai lattes. So, when I say to myself, "I'm doing something that doesn't seem good," I'm really underneath that simply taking one apparent good, that is the pleasure of the taste, to be better, uh, than another apparent good, which is, let's say, the health benefits or the safety considerations.

So, on Socrates' view, when I face these kinds of moral conundrums, they might appear to be a case of what in Greek is sometimes called *akrasia*, a weakness of will, where I think, "You know better, if I don't have that extra latte, but I just don't act on that judgment." Instead, for him, in this case, I have this deeper but suppressed judgment according to which that taste is really good, and that's what's actually going to motivate me. So, partly because of that, since it turns out that every human action is motivated by something judgment-like, even if it's implicit, there's a few important corollaries.

One is that in general, philosophy is useful because it can uproot these deeply implicit motivational beliefs that we seem to have. So, it's possible that I can really be open to an understanding of this, this appearance to me, that that taste of the chai latte is really good, and by understanding it, sort of transform it and set it in correct proportion with, uh, other apparent goods that might be useful for me. Uh, but at the same time, if I make a mistake, let's say by having that extra chai latte, it's probably not the case that I need punishment for that mistake so much as education about what is actually more wholesome or good.

And coming out of the chai latte metaphor, for Socrates, it seems like there's lots of cases where in society we make mistakes in this way, in how we treat one another, how we conduct our own lives, doing always what seems good to us, often in this sort of implicit way, simply because we haven't yet recognized or been able to examine those beliefs and find a deeper, truer, or more authentic understanding of what's really good for us. So, in general, somebody who makes a mistake needs education. There might be exceptions, but mostly this is the case for Socrates. Education cannot root beliefs that are implicit in our biased and harmful behavior.

So, for example, he thinks that corrective systems, it seems punitive measures, prisons, while they might be helpful in the prison system being quite different in Athens, but going with this sort of example, they might be helpful, let's say, to keep somebody who could act harmfully out of, uh, society and the capacity to engage in those harmful actions. What's actually better for people is a more kind of health-oriented model, not the sort of punitive corrective model, but one that cultivates education and well-being. And that, in fact, seems to be to some degree in keeping with modern research and studies as well.

It also follows for Socrates that different virtues or patterns of human excellence are actually deeper down a kind of wisdom. We have lots of different kinds of excellence. We could be fast runners, we could be good mathematicians, as well as, let's say, being brave or fair. But knowing how to use those kinds of excellence comes back to wisdom. So, I might be really fast, but do I know when it's wise to use that skill? Uh, am I going to use my mathematical talents for good? So, in this way, wisdom turns out to be a kind of grounding or fundamental kind of virtue or excellence.

Also, for Socrates, there's a connection with the value of non-violence, at least this really unusual, sometimes called Socratic paradox, together with the last set of ideas, that it's better to suffer unjust harm than to do unjust harm. That's from Plato's *Gorgias* 474b. Part of the reason for this is that unjust action, of course, is communally harmful. But more than this, it harms the *psyche* of the one who acts by cultivating an internal dissonance and disharmony, the opposite of that sort of integrity of meaning that we were talking about with *logos* before. You could compare this with modern views about the, uh, the distractions of cognitive dissonance and narrative disunity.

This comes out in Socrates' debate with the Sophist Callicles in the dialogue *Gorgias* by Plato. It also comes out in his debate with Thrasymachus in the first book of the *Republic*, and the notion of internal harmony later in the *Republic*, when Socrates says to Thrasymachus, for example, "The question we're asking isn't about an ordinary topic, but how we ought to live." He goes on, "It's whether more just people live better and are happier than the unjust." And this is expressed in that passage we've come back to many times in *Republic* 4, about inner harmony.

So, pulling some of these themes together, uh, in trying to bring about our, sort of free unity of a life with integrity and meaning, uh, that expresses our values in a genuine way, like the soulful artist does, uh, in the medium of life, and bring about this kind of harmony, it's, uh, more destructive for us, Socrates thinks, to treat others unjustly and engage in violence unjustly than it is to be the object of that violence, even though that's bad as well. So, there's a kind of attitude of radical compassion here for him as well. Even though his own embodied life shows how important it is to him to try to get out there, in a way, as an activist in his society and change people's minds, change their understanding of how they can really put their values into action better. So, it's not that he's not doing anything, but on his view, it's not something on any condition he wants to do coercively, in a way.

We could come back in this spirit to some of the passages from Viktor Frankl before, from *Man's Search for Meaning*, when Frankl was narrating the importance to him of the search for meaning as something basically free. It's also in the context of thinking of his experience as a Holocaust survivor. "We stumbled on in the darkness," he says. "The accompanying guards kept shouting at us and driving us with the butts of their rifles. Hiding his mouth behind his upturned collar, the man marching next to me whispered suddenly, 'If our wives could see us now, I hope they're better off in their camps and don't know what's happening to us.' That brought thoughts of my own wife to mind. And as we stumbled on for miles, slipping on icy spots, supporting each other time and again, nothing was said, but we both knew each of us was thinking of his wife. My mind clung to my wife's image. I heard her answering me, saw her smile, her frank and encouraging look. Real or not, her look was then more luminous than the sun which was beginning to rise. And a thought transfixed me. For the first time in my life, I saw the truth as it is set into song by so many poets, proclaimed as the final wisdom by so many thinkers: the truth that love is the ultimate and highest goal to which man can aspire. Then I grasped the meaning of the greatest secret that human poetry and human thought and belief have to impart: the salvation of man is through love, and in love."

So, this is a beautiful passage and description in a very moving moment in Frankl's experience. It also, in a way, might pick out the spirit of, of non-violence in Socrates' view, the connection between meaning and kindness. And in addition, there's the interesting point that we'll come back to in the future, that Socrates said there was one thing he did understand, which was love.

One more point to develop a bit further on this view of Socrates' philosophical outlook. Now that we've seen a bit more about how he conceptualizes philosophy, let's try to put this in a bit of a broader historical perspective. So, in our conversations, we've looked back at the foundational poetic values of rhapsodic figures like Homer and Hesiod, the oral traditions that they represent. We've thought about some of the values of the *polis* poets like Pindar and Simonides, and also some of the legendary legislators who followed divine inspiration, like Solon or like Lycurgus. We've thought of the value they place on the community, doing what's good for the *polis* as a whole, and on heeding divine inspiration. On the other hand, we've seen how sometimes Athens' Sophists come back to Homer, the individual brilliant heroes like Achilles, in framing their own power and their own individualism as a philosophical value. In a way, in contrast to these *polis* poets, their value lies on the individual, and rather than heeding an inspiration that feels like it comes from without, they emphasize the individual power of reason, how things seem to each person individually. We could see, in a way, that both these influences are present in Socrates' philosophy. So, he does see value in individual flourishing. He sees value in the application of reason in testing what seems true to me. At the same time, he sees fundamental value in mutual care and compassion, doing what's good for the community, and heeding inspiration when it comes to him. Think of his *daimon*.

So, in these ways, he's reunited threads that we saw flow from Homer and Hesiod, in a way, before, in the *polis* poets and Athens' Sophists, in one philosophy. Let's say, in the owl of Athens, the inspiration of Athena. So, let's think a bit about Socrates' legacy from that point forward. Now that we've thought about where he sits in the context, looking back from the standpoint of some of the Socratics who follow in the Socratic movements of the fourth century, Socrates has energetically encouraged this kind of free and radical reorientation of motivational values. As we've seen, he's done it in a way that is guided by this inward faculty of *logos*, however we translate this idea, meaning, value, reason. It's also inspired by this kind of demonic influence, which can be interpreted as one's own authentic character, mediated by the inner voice of conscience, as we've seen, and also can be seen as an openness or receptivity to inspiration from the divine. It's practiced through an open-ended exchange of ideas, a dialogue with ourselves and with one another that cultivates a diversity of perspectives. What will be seen in Plato and Aristotle as the practice of dialectical exchange, conversation in good faith, saying what one truly believes and receptively listening to one another, uh, and doing that with a certain kind of care for *logos*, for speaking in a way that's reasonable, but also meaningful.

In addition, all this for Socrates drives toward realizing each of our best human potential or *arete*, yours and mine, being distinct individuals, in a way that's also good for the community or the *polis* as a whole. For Socrates' successors in the Socratic schools of the fourth century, this leaves open to each of us a space to seek our own authentic meaning and our guiding values with a combination of conscience and care. This was a positive outcome of, in a way, as we could see it, the earlier Sophist value for subjective discovery. Here, it's part of a bigger picture, if you like, like Epictetus, it's been integrated into the harmonious whole, or like the moss, it's integrated into the whole. Now, this cultivation of individuality, *idios*, which becomes the *idios poiēsis*, a notion of individuality in later Stoicism, is brought into the picture. One can seek individual flourishing and meaning in a way that is also good for and kind to one's community and social environment.

Since Socrates left mainly questions and nothing written, in the generations following his life, the first generation of Socratic philosophers sought their own answers and communities gathered around them. Some of those Socratics were known as individuals like Xenophon and Aeschines. Some founded schools of their own, maybe most famously the philosophy of Plato, who taught in the garden of Academus in Athens, uh, sacred to the Muses, uh, with a grove sacred to Athena. And because of the name Academus, this is known as the Academic philosophy, which is also where we get the word academic in English. There is also the Cynic philosophy, uh, springing from philosophers like Antisthenes, who also followed Socrates, which emphasized not so much the contemplative practice of the Academics, but the expression of values of nature over nurture or socialization. And the Cynics' famous emphasis on this freedom to act naturally, uh, led to the name *kynikos*, or it was one of the factors that led to this name, which literally has to do with the life of a dog. Dogs being, in a way, compassionate, yes, and also free to act naturally. And then other philosophers like Aristippus expressed Socratic philosophy more hedonistically, that is, in the pursuit of pleasures, which might be surprising, given Socrates' emphasis on the pursuit of meaning over the pursuit of pleasure.

All of these schools, the Socratic schools, weren't quite schools so much as they were schools of thought, meeting groups with a very loose organization around individuals. But they inspired more institutionalized schools in the later fourth and especially third centuries, including the Stoics, named for the Stoa where they met in the Athenian Agora, the Epicureans, named for their founder Epicurus, and the Skeptics, who all, in a way, had some inspiration from Socrates. But especially the Stoics and Skeptics. Still, with all that in mind, the dialogues composed by Plato are still the most influential testimony to Socrates' life and work.

In thinking about this legacy, we could come back one more time to that famous quote of no spelms we've returned to on several occasions in this review, because human beings are prone to be subservient to both authority and peer pressure. To prevent atrocities, we need to counteract these tendencies, producing a culture of individual dissent. The dialogues of Plato are second to none to inspire searching, active thinking with the life and example of Socrates upfront, to inspire in a way that would be a way of reflecting on how, for all these views that come out in the Platonic dialogues as possibilities of exploration, what seems most influential in Socrates' legacy coming through Plato is this value for independent thought and curiosity. Also, the idea that, to quote Gandhi, "Our greatness might lie not so much in what we do on the outside as in our capacity to remake ourselves again," to close the gap, in a sense, between our values and our actions, or in what the Greeks called *paideia*, education or self-transformation.

So, with all that in the background, we've talked in this conversation about Socrates' philosophical views, and we've looked briefly at his later legacy. Thematically, we focused on how Socrates uses dialogue, dialectical conversation, to reorient us toward values that we genuinely hold as interlocutors in the dialogues. How this can be framed as a kind of search for freedom from different forms of coercion when they're excessive. How Socrates works with *logos* as a sort of factor of meaning in reflecting the *daimon* and creative work, that sort of soulful, artful impression of human life. So, heeding and being receptive to the *daimon*. And finally, the goal of philosophy in the flourishing of the *psyche* and an ethic of mutual care.