The Grateful Dead and Philosophy by Steve Gimbel

Author:Steve Gimbel
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Open Court
Published: 2011-03-30T16:00:00+00:00

Some Folks Trust to Reason, Others Trust to Might

At this stage, philosophy rears its head. The question of our lives, and the principle question of philosophy since the times of Plato and Socrates, is how should we live our lives? Should we orient ourselves towards fame, power and fortune? Or should we aim for the moral life? It’s the question that shapes the philosopher Socrates, as described by his student Plato through his many dialogues. Plato is justly famous for many philosophical views, but the central question for him was the one about ethics. Almost all of Plato’s dialogues in one way or another address this issue.

In American society today, this question is not unusual, though we think we have the answer. We all think that we ought to live a moral life, though there seems to be a difference of opinion as to what constitutes the moral life. This commitment to the moral life is only on the surface. Ask any class of college students to list their principle goals, and the vast majority will list “to be rich” at the top. They orient their lives and their studies to achieve financial power.

This is not unlike many young men during Socrates’s time, though the aim was of a different sort, or rather, with a different emphasis. In Ancient times, political power was the path to fame and fortune. The students of Plato’s day aimed at political power through the art (“techne”) of persuasive speaking. In the Classical Age, Athens was a democracy, but not like the U.S. today. There was no representative democracy. There, democracy was direct. The first six thousand free men assembled voted on everything. The people themselves decided on matters trivial and deep, all the way to the power of war. The people had to vote for war, and they even voted on who would lead their armies. In this environment, the power to speak persuasively was the key to political power, and political power was the key to fame and fortune. So the best and the brightest of Athens studied the art of persuasive speaking, so that they could pursue what they thought they ought to pursue, power.

Socrates was deeply disturbed by this. The young people of his day, Plato describes Socrates as saying, show an “eagerness to possess as much wealth, reputation and honors as possible, while you do not care for nor give thought to wisdom and truth” (Apology, line 29e). In Plato’s masterpiece, The Republic, Plato describes Socrates as making an argument designed to show them that this was the wrong way to live. To introduce the discussion, Plato describes a discussion between Socrates and an Athenian aristocrat named Thrasymachus. In the middle of Book I, Thrasymachus makes what was for the Greeks and for Socrates a shocking claim: that Justice is not a virtue, but a vice. It is not clear from the dialogue whether Thrasymachus actually believes this view, but in defending it, he makes the following claim: “A just man always gets less than an unjust one” (Republic I, line 343d).

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