Socrates and Descartes on Virtue: A Rationalistic Approach

Socrates’s view of virtue, of what is right and what is good may be called a rationalistic moral philosophy. A rationalistic moral philosophy is a view which claims that reason, or rationality, is the exclusive or the dominant factor in moral conduct. It is, as Socrates himself says, the claim that to know the good is to do the good.

After Socrates was put to death Plato was more than ever convinced that a democratic state, a state ruled by the many, is doomed to disaster. The many, he believed, can never know what is good for the state: they lack the necessary level of intelligence and training; they are concerned only with their own immediate pleasure and gratification; and they are swayed by unstable, volatile emotions which render them susceptible to clever demagogues or to mob passions. He believed that a democratic government, run by the many, cannot produce good human beings, and, in turn, he believed that good people would find life impossible under such a state.

An allegory is a kind of story in which what is talked about is being compared to something else which is similar, but what that something else is, is left unstated. An allegory is accordingly defined as an incomplete simile the reader must supply what is similar to the events described. What, then, is the Plato’s Allegory of the Cave to be compared with? The people in the cave are living out their lives in semidarkness, chained by their necks and legs, unable to turn around, never knowing that what they see before them on the wall of the cave are only shadows. They are in bondage, but unaware of it. They remain ignorant of themselves and reality.

Moral philosophy or ethics may be defined as the branch of philosophy which studies the nature of good and evil, right and wrong, duty and obligation. It asks questions such as, Is there a highest good, an absolute good for human beings or, as the Sophists argued, Are all goods relative to time and place, to history and to culture? Is the highest moral good the achieving of happiness or is it the performing of one’s duty? Is the good knowable? Is the good rational, or is it merely the voice of the spirited and appetitive passions? What is the meaning of right and wrong actions?

For Plato’s ethics, what is virtue? Virtue, or the right conduct of life, is action which flows from knowledge, knowledge of the tripartite soul, the forms, and the Idea of the Good. Only the few have such knowledge and they should control the conduct of the other members of society. The heart of Plato’s ethics is still Socrates’s original view that virtue is knowledge.

Totalitarianism is a type of twentieth-century politics which cannot meaningfully be compared to the politics of the ancient Greek city-state. But there are certain resemblances. Like totalitarian governments, right-wing and left-wing, fascist and communist, Plato rejected individualism and democracy and argued for the subordination of the individual to the supremacy and power of the state. Like totalitarian governments, Plato denied individual rights, civil liberties, due process of the law; and he advocated government by an elite group, with state censorship, thought-control by propaganda, state control of the economy, the intrusion of the state into almost all areas of the private life.

Descartes was devoted to working out a method for unifying the sciences. Meanwhile he sold the estates in France which he had inherited from his father so as to have the funds to live “free from the obligation of making a living from my science.

” Leisure enabled him to sleep long hours. He usually stayed in bed until noon, and has come to be known as the philosopher who did his best work in bed. He recommends idleness to anyone who would wish to produce good intellectual work, and he values his leisure, which enables him to live “without cares or passions to trouble me.

Descartes remained always aloof from the moral and political conflicts of his day. Like some other philosophers of his time he did not become a professor at a university, since the universities were so censored by the Church that they had become stagnant, and hostile to the new science and to its supporters, like Descartes. Always a solitary man, he decided that he would make no social commitments and no marriage bonds, so as not to interfere with his vow to advance know-edge in accordance with his vision.

Source : From Socrates to Sartre: The Philosophic Quest by T.Z. Lavine

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