Socrates, The Man and His Mission by R. Nicol Cross

Author:R. Nicol Cross
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780429461064
Publisher: Taylor & Francis Ltd
Published: 2018-06-27T00:00:00+00:00

(b) KNOWLEDGE AND VIRTUE

The result of Definition as Socrates pursued it is to lead us to knowledge of that in which rightness or wrongness, justice or injustice, prudence or recklessness, consists, so that we shall be able to apply these terms appropriately and rightly. And it is at once obvious that as our conduct is determined by our ideas, right ideas, and the ability to attach the right moral term and description to things, are necessary to right conduct. A man whose moral conceptions are obscure and confused is sure to go wrong, he will inevitably blunder and commit mistakes in action. Clear knowledge alone can save us from such error, and save us from all the other causes of error, e.g., current custom, irrelevant circumstances, and our own prejudices. Thus to have a firm, dear grasp of the true ideas of things, as a result of the intellectual process of Definition, would mean nothing less than a moral liberation. It would result in moral freedom—freedom, that is to say, from the influence of that whose influence is only allowed to operate on us because of our ignorance; it would mean truth and truth alone as the guide of conduct, and that is freedom in the ethical sphere. Harmony with reality is the condition of liberty of the kind which alone can be called moral liberty, and which alone the illuminated and emancipated mind would desire. And Harmony with reality or with truth in our actions is what is meant by virtue. Since then it is only to be attained by knowledge or wisdom, we may say that Virtue is knowledge. As Emerson, in his essay on “Spiritual Laws,” puts it: “Virtue is the adherence in action to the nature of things, and the nature of things makes it prevalent. It consists in a perpetual substitution of being for seeming.”

That Virtue is knowledge is the cardinal thesis of the ethical theory of Socrates, and he made all the virtues to consist in specific kinds of “knowledge”or “science.”1 For knowledge Xenophon puts “wisdom”: “He (Socrates) declared that Justice and every other virtue is wisdom. That is to say, things just and all things else that are done virtuously are beautiful and good; and neither would those who know these things prefer anything else to them, nor would those who do not know them be able to do them, but even if they set about them they would go astray. So it is the wise who do what is good and beautiful, but those who are not wise cannot, but even if they try, blunder. Well, then, seeing that just actions and all other beautiful and good actions are done with virtue it is evident that justice and all other virtue is wisdom.”1

Knowledge, prudence, wisdom, these three terms by which Socrates is said to have defined virtue, carry rather different overtones of meaning, though they are closely related, and we may take it that virtue as he understood it really comprised and involved all three.

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