Why was Socrates a symbol of greek decadence?
De-cadence, from de-cadere meaning to fall (cadere), apart (de).
Socrates was only possible in a society that was allready falling apart. A healthy society would never tolerate someone openly questioning their norms and Gods for so long. With his excessive reason/dialectic, he provided a possible cure for what was allready felt, but not yet articulated, by fellow athenians.
This is basicly Nietzsches thesis.
A possible analogy on the level of the individual is sport, say tennis for example. You do not reason your way to victory. On the court you rely on instinct, muscle-memory... on all the training you did before. As soon as you start to question and think about your play, you're likely to start playing even worse.
Socrates was only possible in a society that was allready falling apart. A healthy society would never tolerate someone openly questioning their norms and Gods for so long. With his excessive reason/dialectic, he provided a possible cure for what was allready felt, but not yet articulated, by fellow athenians.
This is basicly Nietzsches thesis.
A possible analogy on the level of the individual is sport, say tennis for example. You do not reason your way to victory. On the court you rely on instinct, muscle-memory... on all the training you did before. As soon as you start to question and think about your play, you're likely to start playing even worse.
Comments (53)
There are points in tennis: is there a point to this OP? :wink:
Point is that reason has it limits. Nietzsche was reevaluating the value philosophers put in reason. It's a way out of the rabbithole Socrates created a few millenia back....
Anyway, i'm a chattering monkey, i'm not supposed to make points.
I am sure human reason has its limits. But for things where reason is applicable, reason is infallible. Thus if Socrates was able to rationalize against the norms of the day, then he was right to do so. If people disagreed with his points, they too would have had to use reason to refute his arguments.
I did not read Nietzsches, but if he claimed we should rely less on reason, this claim would have to be defended by reason to be valid, which creates a self-contradiction.
This is not quite the point Nietzsche was going for. He was not a skeptic when it came to the use of reason.
Quoting Samuel Lacrampe
This comes closer. Just "being able to do so" is not a sufficient reason to actually do it. Socrates is symbolized by knowing to know nothing. Nietzsche's point being, that, if this was the result of socratic philosophy, then something must be horribly wrong with it. It is of no use to know nothing.
I'd say where reason is applicable is precisely the question. I don't think it's that selfevident that reason is all that usefull for determining morality. It has a role to play, but not necesarily in the way Socrates wanted to use it. The way i see it is that a morality of a given society is something that devellops over generations involving many people, trail and error... and an ongoing discussion which does involve reason, but that's only a part of it.
It easy to question the norms of the day like Socrates did, because no one person really knows anymore how it all came to be. It's a bit like an economy in that way, and emergent property.
And, as for your last comment, reasoning about using reason to determine morality, is not the same as using reason to determine morality. There's no contradiction there. Also it's not per se reason in general that Nietzsche was after, it's the way it had been used in philosophy thus far.
Nietzsche was after 'pure reason', abstracted from societal context and human biology, an idea that started with Socrates and Plato, and propagated with Christianity and by philosophers all the way up to Kant.
Hello. When Socrates would say "I know that I know nothing", he was saying it as a bit of a joke. His point was that we should use critical thinking, even on common sayings known by tradition. His philosophy starts with doubt, but does not necessarily end with doubt.
This sounds more like Marx. Nietzsche stressed that reason has to serve the wellfare of the individual or has lost it's own purpose. In ideals he saw a mirror of the conditions of existence of groups of individuals. He concluded that negative ideals (like that of doubt) could only be made by people that needed to fight against the establishment. Or by people that didn't know where they stood - and this is where decadence, in the sense of not being able to distinguish what is good or bad for yourself, comes into play.
Ethics has traditionally been called "practical reason", and is as such part of reason. The first principle of ethics is justice, or the Golden Rule, which is found in nearly every religion and ethical traditions - source
Quoting ChatteringMonkey
Morality is unchanging. I think you are thinking here of mores or traditions, rather than morals. Mores are judged by moral principles.
Quoting ChatteringMonkey
I agree that merely questioning where a thing comes from and criticizing for not knowing is not useful. But Socrates went further because he found flaws in them using reason, and that is a good thing.
Quoting ChatteringMonkey
Understood. I thought you were saying Nietzsche was aiming to remove reason as such.
Nah I'm good. I am here to talk about philosophy, not philosophers.
I think you basicly have the right idea. To be a bit more precise, in his view decadence is 'anarchy in the instincts' or 'drives not ordered properly'. When that is the case one loses confidence in himself, and begins to doubt... and turns to reason as a tyrant to subdue that anarchy. He saw Socrates as the prime example of that.
Argument by definition or tradition is not a viable argument in my book.
There is no such thing as an unchanging morality divorced from societal context. That is precisely the mistake Nietzsche saw Socrates, Plato and other philosophers make. We are beings of flesh and blood, with interests and desires, and live our lives in a societal context. Trying to forget about all of that when we start philosophising seems like a bad idea.
Perhaps you should have said 'There are balls in tennis, but are there any balls in your response?'
I don't think that the value of reason can reasonably be denied; any attempt to do so would be to enact a performative contradiction. So, I don't agree that Nietzsche denigrated reason, but he may be understood to have criticised the idea of pure reason. This idea of pure reason seems to be inherent in Socrates' dialectic, if we understand it as a postivistic rationalist approach that hopes to arrive, by thinking alone, at the truth. But Socrates' method can also be interpreted as a deflationary, apophatic approach that aims to show what is not true by revealing inconsistencies, incoherences and contradictions in what we believe we know, rather than aiming to arrive at what is true.
Chattering monkeys may not be able to make points, but apparently enough typewriting monkeys are thought by some to be able to produce, given enough time, the works of Shakespeare.
So to clarify your position, morality is relative to the social norms of the time. Does it follow that slavery was morally right at the time that society had slaves, and wrong today, until society decides to have slaves again?
Nice find, i knew there had to be one!
We probably agree to a large extend. He was indeed criticising the idea of pure reason in the first place. I do think he was also devaluating reason a bit in general (not denigrating per se) in that he had less confidence in its abilities then philosophers before him.
As for Socrates, yes, it's hard to say for sure how he meant it because we only know him through Plato. I'm not sure it matters all that much, because it's the platonic interpretation that had the most influence historically. Nietzsche was mainly concerned with the influence of that idea.
[off to reproducing the works of Shakespeare now]
Reason is good. It is the necessary pause before all thoughts and actions. Without it we would be jumping to conclusions and that, despite the healthy connotation of bodily exercise, is bad.
Why?
We're far more likely to be wrong when we think and act sans reason. To be wrong is to be separated from reality and that's unhealthy, generally.
We all live in our private worlds which may or may not mesh with the truth, reality.
As I said, everything has limits, including everything I've just said.
We do and can not pause and reason before all thoughts and action. This is just not the case. There's so much actions and thoughts that happen habitually and instinctually, like for instance setting one foot before the other. We would simply not be able to function if we were to reason about every single thing we do.
Well, that's why we have memory, learning and regret. When we behave instinctively we may commit errors. We look back at these errors and we (hopefully) regret and update our behavior. It's a self-correcting system although not perfect.
What would be examples of "good arguments" to judge the norms, if there is nothing higher than the norms?
Up to now, I was just trying to get clarity on your position. Now do you have an argument to back up that position? Since, as I said before, the Golden Rule is found in nearly every religion and ethical traditions, it is the prima facie, and you have thus the onus of proof to dispute it.
I don't see how i should necessarily prove my position because almost every religious tradition had an iteration of something like the golden rule. But anyway, my meta-ethical position is basicly that the legitimacy for morals in a given community comes from a social contract. Because we all have the same human genetic make-up, it shouldn't be all that surprising that some of the morals will end up being similar accross the board. That doesn't imply that morality is unchanging though.
No offense intented: Isn't this nihilistic? You are basically saying that the one is as good as the other. And both are nothing.
In stark contrast, Nero was a symbol of decadence, though he was Roman, not Greek. A Greek counterpart doesn't immediately spring to mind.
That doesn't mean that one is as good as the other though. For instance if you make an argument pointing to the implications of a moral rule, and you happen to be factually wrong about these implications, then that would be a bad argument.
Nietzsche would disagree. He didn't view austerity, search for wisdom at the cost of all else (his family, his life as a part of society,... ), the application of reason to everything, etc as all that commendable. And he based that on a couple of psychological insights that you may or may not accept.
In short, and probably butchered to some extend, what he valued the most was health and love for life... affirmation of life. That entails, in his view, the cultivation of human desires and instinct, and not the eradication of them. Asceticism, Christianity, excessive use of reason, and giving up on worldly interests in favour of the search for wisdom, he all saw as crude atempts to do away with desires and instincts... with disastrous results.
I said that morality is a group thing (social contract theory), no whatever one person deems right. He may try to convince the group to change their minds, with good arguments, rethoric, force or whatever... but there is no ultimate standard, unless you believe in God.
The onus of proof is on the one that disputes the prima facie. Correct me if I am wrong, but I think up to this point, you have merely expressed an opinion, not an argument.
Quoting ChatteringMonkey
If a large majority of subjects perceives the same thing, then it is reasonable to infer that the thing exists objectively. If a large majority of people sees a boat in the distance, then it is reasonable to infer the boat exists objectively. Similarly, if most civilizations have used the Golden Rule, then it is reasonable to infer it exists objectively.
You shifted your argument in the last sentence from what we see, to what we use. I don't think it's reasonable to infer something exist objectively because we use it.
And - would you call the morality 2000 years ago equally far developed as today?
And 'equally far developed' implies that there is progression on some kind of ahistorical scale, the question doesn't make sense absent an ultimate standard.
Indeed, societies had slaves back then; but it is not uncommon to hear that some people treated their slaves with respect, more like servants. And it could be supposed that it is through the perception of the golden rule that societies progressed from slaves to servants.
Quoting ChatteringMonkey
No. Both are examples of perceptions. The golden rule is perceived to be the criteria that determines if an act is morally good or not.
Quoting ChatteringMonkey
Progress is defined as "change towards the good", and thus true progress implies an objective good.
And the word progress doesn't have to imply any specific goal, it can be the advancement towards any goal... for instance, i don't think we are making a lot of progress towards resolving our disagreement in this thread.
He was a virtue ethicist, yes, but that is a broad concept and there are many brands of virtue ethics... He was really only thinking of 'moraline-free virtue', or something like the virtù Machiavelli theorised about. That is, manly virtue (from the latin root 'vir', or man) rather than christian or moral virtue.
Cultivation of desire and instinct is meant as in cultivation of or tending to a garden. You work with the material you have, trimming and cutting left and right, on a regular basis. I'm pretty sure it was along these line he saw it, "become who you are", "amor fati" et al... He didn't believe in force changing people to conform to some abstract otherwoldly (moral) standard, he thought it had serious adverse psychological effects in the long run.
As for Heraclitus, yes, Nietzsche liked him because unlike most other philosopher, like Socrates and Plato, he wasn't trying to falsify the world by reducing it to fixed essences. He believed the nature of the world was in the first place change, flow... like Nietzsche.
As i said i think it's important to understand the psycholigical insights he based a lot of his views on. He read a lot between the lines, and if you don't agree with his psychological analysis.... you probably don't follow the rest.
A thing does not need to be perceived through the 5 senses. It can be perceived through feelings, like moral feelings. You can perceive an act to be unjust, and this feeling of injustice cannot be explained by mere senses.
Quoting ChatteringMonkey
This is true. But you were claiming before that there is progress specifically in morality. In this case, progress means advancement towards the ideal morality, which must exist if true progress exists.
Either way, i would not agree that all people agree (have the same feeling) on what is just or unjust, which is why we have that group proces I described earlier, to determine morality.
As a side note, i think subjective vs objective is a flawed and confusing distinction philosophically. I think it's more helpfull to speak of individual vs collective.
Progress on individual moral issues means just that, to me that doesn't entail a specific endpoint, like an ideal morality. Since circumstances change, I would hope it will be an ongoing discussion until the end of times.
Perception simply means information coming to us. The means by which it comes to us is not relevant; thus this can be through senses and feelings, as both serve the function of feeding information.
Quoting ChatteringMonkey
A being is called 'subjective' if it exists only inside a subject's mind; and called 'objective' if it exists outside a subject's mind. How do we test if any being is objective? By checking if all subjects (or at least a large majority) perceive that same being. We would infer that unicorns are objectively real if a large majority of subjects could perceive one. The same goes for morality. We infer that morality is objectively real if a large majority of subjects perceive that Mother Theresa is a morally better person than Hitler.
Quoting ChatteringMonkey
Morally correct acts are indeed relative to situations, but that does not entail subjectivity. For a given situation, there may be an objectively correct way to act. Thus arguments about the correct way to act given the circumstance will indeed never stop, but the very fact that we all argue about it proves the topic is objective, because we do not (or should not) argue about subjective topics.
On a side note, could you hit the 'reply' button when responding? This notifies me that a response was made.
I just don't agree that "perceptions'' from feelings is of the same type as perceptions from the senses. There's no organ for feelings (like eyes or ears) that recieves information from the world outside of us.
The raw data is also through our senses, because feelings are only triggered if we are aware of the events that cause them, and that awareness comes from seeing, hearing, etc. information about the event.
But surely you agree that some feelings inform us of real things. For example, the feeling of fear triggered from encountering a bear is true, for it points to a real danger; and the feeling of relief triggered by seeking shelter in a blizzard is true, for it points to a real removal of danger. These are examples of true feelings that point to physical good or evil.
Then we observe that virtually nobody in the world likes to be lied to, cheated on, ignored, or bad-mouthed, due to the negative feelings these events trigger in us. These feelings do not point to physical evils, for we are not physically harmed when being lied to, cheated on, ignored, or bad-mouthed. Therefore they must point to moral evils. And it is reasonable to infer these feelings are true, because they are felt by virtually everybody in the world.
Feelings can also be caused by things that are not real, like dreams or imagination. And imaginairy threads may also cause the same feelings in a large group of people, which is what politicians have been known to make use of...
I don't agree with feelings themselves being true or false. Only statements can be true or false, and we know by veryfying the statements with the senses. Say for instance, you have fear for a spider. Your feeling will not help you determine if that spider is actually dangerous. To know you will have to test it, and observe what happens.
Look, i'm not denying that ultimately morality has something to do with our feelings, but i don't agree with attaching the label 'objective' to the proces of how morality forms. People have feelings yes, but there's no simple one on one relation with morality there. It's a complex, mediated proces involving a community where choices have to be made between conflicting interests etc... It's not like there is only one true morality that can be deduced from feelings with mathematical certainty. What's the point of calling it 'objective', if not for rethorical reasons?
Sure, but the same goes for senses. We know our perceptions from dreams to be false, from contradictions among our own perceptions or those from other subjects. This "reality" could be a dream, but it is unreasonable to infer this because the large majority of subjects perceives the same things, and this hypothesis then fails the law of parsimony.
Quoting ChatteringMonkey
Not true. All our different types of perceptions can be false. We may falsely see, hear, smell, or feel something, without making a statement. And their correctness are tested by contradictions among ourselves and other subjects. How frightening it must be to be the last person in the world, because of the challenge to differentiate the true from false perceptions without other people's feedback. :sad:
Quoting ChatteringMonkey
Agreed. I don't believe the function of emotional feelings is to find truth, but to provide a quick way to make a judgement, rather than using the more accurate but much slower reason. Nevertheless, while not infallible, feelings are designed to feed true information, and they tend to be true most of the time. If this was not the case, then it would be wise to suppress all feelings, which is absurd.
Quoting ChatteringMonkey
But there is. Fact: Virtually nobody in the world judges the situation of being treated as less-than-equal as a good thing; not even bad people like Hitler. We are either collectively wrong about this judgement (for if not objective, then not objectively true), or this treatment is objectively bad. Most civilizations have opted for the latter hypothesis, because they all adopted the Golden Rule of ethics.
I think the fundamental difference between your view and mine is that i don't believe that 'true is what the majority of people think is true'. I think we determine what is true by veryfing it with data, and it doesn't matter how many people believe something if it can't be veryfied. Agreement about something doesn't make it true.
And the rest of our disagreement follows from that really. I agree that morality is about agreement between people about a set of rules, but that doesn't make it objective or true. Speaking about truth in relation to morality just doesn't make sense in my view.
I also diagree with this example you keep bringing up btw, just to make that clear. Large portions of history hierarchy, different classes and unequality were to norm. Not a whole lot of people thought there was something wrong with that. The quest for more equality is a relatively recent thing. And it's also not true that all religions have this principe, take for example Hinduism.
Also the point that you seem to miss is that the golden rule by itself is far from a fully formed morality. It's vague, and only deals with one aspect of what humans want. There are a variety of things we want, and not all of these things line up perfecty. Choices need to be made between conflicting interest.... Anyway, at this point, i'm starting to repeat myself.
I agree about statements. Statements are not judged as true by majority. I also agree that we verify statements with data. But how do we verify data? We know that not all data perceived is true. Thus we judge data to be true by majority; and that is the point I am trying to make.
Quoting ChatteringMonkey
Well, this new definition is not too far off the mark, because looking for an agreement between people implies that everyone has a say in it. However, notice that even with this new definition of morality, slavery is not morally good because surely slaves would not have agreed with those rules.
Quoting ChatteringMonkey
Here is my source. But assuming you are correct, this fact is likely explained by the use of force by a particular group, and surely not by a mutual agreement among the whole group; and thus the reason is not an ethical reason.
Quoting ChatteringMonkey
Except for the victims of the inequality. You make it sound like slaves wanted to be slaves. I don't know my history too well, but I am fairly sure this could not be the case.
Quoting ChatteringMonkey
I think this is incorrect. The fact is nobody values being lied to, treated as lower than others, badmouthed etc; and on the other hand, everybody values honesty, treated as equal, trusted etc. Thus the Golden Rule is fitting: As I seek honesty, equality and trust towards me, and reject dishonesty, inequality and badmouthing towards me, so I ought to treat others in the same way, knowing they want this treatment too.
Quoting Samuel Lacrampe
As i said before, truth is about statements, and nothing else. You will no doubt disagree with this, but data or feelings or whatever else are not themselves claims to truth.
Slaves were not considered part of the group usually. But either way, a social contract (an agreement) doesn't imply that everybody has a say in it. That would make it practically impossible to reach any kind of agreement. People are represented. For the same practical reasons democracy almost never is a direct democracy, but a represented democracy.
That the Wiki also lists Hinduism as having an element of the golden rule in it, only goes to show i think how vague it really is, since apparently it can fit any system, even the ones that have strict class distinctions from birth.
And like i said above, mutual agreement among the whole group is an utopia, you will never get anywhere if you have to wait on that. Force and social pressure is part of any moral system. For instance, a thief disagrees with the moral rule that stealing is wrong, and yet people find it perfectly acceptable and even expect that he will be dealt with forcefully.
Slaves were as i said not considered to be part of the group. But "victims of inequality" in general, probably wanted to improve their lot in life by moving up in class yes, but i very much doubt they thought it even feasable to remove classes altogether. At some points in history they did, in the French revolution for instance, and then after years of political instability they begged Napoleon to clean up the mess.... But that is, again, a relatively recent phenonomon.
Yet how many people act in this way, really... taking a cursory look at the general discource on for instance Twitter should be evidence enough that people generally don't act on the Golden rule.
Indeed they are not "claims to truth" because they are not claims at all. But what do you call the difference between the perception of a thing that is really there, vs the perception of a thing that is not really there, if not true and false? Whatever you want to call it, false data is effectively the same as false statements, insofar that they both convey information that does not reflect reality.
Quoting ChatteringMonkey
True. But a contract requires an agreement among all parties involved, whether it is in a direct or indirect way, as is the case when being represented. As the slaves were not represented, this "social contract" is not really a contract; more of an imposition.
Quoting ChatteringMonkey
No. In this case, the golden rule is in direct contradiction with the class distinction (unless lower classes are treated more like servants than slaves; but I doubt it). Rather, this tells me that the Golden Rule, although known, was simply ignored in that system. One may choose to ignore the moral law, but the fact is that it was still known.
Quoting ChatteringMonkey
A thief does not believe stealing is right, because he does not want it to happen to him. He is therefore stealing, knowing it is wrong to steal. The fact that some go against the moral system does not count against the existence of that moral system.
Quoting ChatteringMonkey
Sure; but this does not go against the existence of morality. Quite the opposite, it could be used to explain why slavery took so long to be abolished.
Quoting ChatteringMonkey
This still doesn't mean some people value being lied to, treated as lower than others, or badmouthed. You cannot derive an 'ought' from an 'is', that is to say, you cannot deduce the existence of morality based on human behaviour. We can both be right, namely, morality exists, and a lot of people act immorally.
Yeah but, but,... you are just assuming the golden rule there, when it's the thing that is being questioned.
I don't value being rejected by a women, nobody values being rejected... are women therefor morally obliged to allways give in to my advances? Wait a minute... why am i going through all this trouble to seduce women if i could've just appealed to an objective moral rule all along?
Of course a thief doesn't want his stuff stolen, and yet he steals from other people. That is precisly the point, that people don't allways follow the golden rule. In fact it seems to be pretty much the case that most people naturally hold other people to different standards than they do themselves. They may not want certain things done to themselves, but it doesn't follow that they believe that this is how everybody, including themselves, should act allways... unless you just assume the golden rule.
And that is where morality comes in, because people do recognise that it's maybe better for them to forfeit some of their own freedom to act in exchange for the benefit of other people restricting their freedom to act. Morality is an agreement to collectively restict certain actions, because without it people won't necessarily refrain from them naturally.