Abstract
The paper argues that everyday ethical expertise requires an openness to an experience of self-doubt very different from that involved in becoming expert in other skills—namely, an experience of profound vulnerability to the Other similar to that which Emmanuel Levinas has described. Since the experience bears a striking resemblance to that of undergoing cross-examination by Socrates as depicted in Plato’s early dialogues, I illustrate it through a close reading of the Euthyphro, arguing that Euthyphro’s vaunted “expertise” conceals a reluctance to submit himself to the basic process of self-redefinition that results from learning the limits of one’s knowledge. I show how the dialogue itself models the disruptive experience of selfquestioning that leads to moral maturity, providing further evidence that expertise has an important non-cognitive element, as well as casting doubt on the ethical value of seeking “definitions” of the virtues
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Notes
I use ‘moral’ and ‘ethical’ interchangeably. For critical appraisals of the Dreyfus theory, see Selinger and Crease 2002, and Moss 1990. Stichter 2007 finds support in Dreyfus for his skill model of virtue. References to it occasionally appear in the literature on “applied ethics”; for a recent overview, see Steinkamp et al. 2008.
It is far from my purpose to discredit the Dreyfus theory of expertise as a whole, with which I am in general agreement. I am only claiming that it falls short of describing the ethical.
Socrates’ undeniable ethical emphasis is more often held to be in conscious opposition to, rather than in sympathy with, “the new scientific outlook” Dreyfus’s Socrates supposedly adopts without question from the pre-Socratics. See Matson and Leite 1991, pp. 148–149. Socrates’ own piety is probably too well established to be dismissed in favor of his being partial to a pre-Socratic worldview that saw little need for the divine (Vlastos 1991, pp. 158–160). The problem here may be that Dreyfus’s reading makes no distinction between the man Gregory Vlastos calls SocratesE, the Socrates of the early dialogues who cares only about moral issues, and SocratesM, Plato’s spokesman in the middle dialogues, passionately interested in science and metaphysics (Vlastos 1991, pp. 46–48)—although Vlastos inadvertently concedes something to Dreyfus’s view in claiming that SocratesE “rationalizes the gods by making them moral” (1991, p. 162, my emphasis).
“… an ethical situation could occur so unlike any previous situation that no one would have an expert intuitive response to it. Then no amount of involved deliberation would serve to sharpen the expert’s intuitions. In the face of such a total breakdown, and in that case alone, the ethical expert would have to turn to detached reflection” (Dreyfus and Dreyfus 1990, p. 258).
The five stages are: novice, advanced beginner, competence, proficiency, and expertise. See Dreyfus and Dreyfus 1990, pp. 240–243.
The terms “selving” (verselbsten) and “unselving” (entselbstigen) are from Bidney 1988, pp. 6–12, quoting Goethe’s Poetry and Truth (Hamburger Ausgabe, 9:353).
As Nicias warns his friends in the Laches, anyone drawn into a discussion with Socrates “will be continually carried round and round by him, until at last he finds that he has to give an account both of his present and past life, and when he is once entangled, Socrates will not let him go until he has completely and thoroughly sifted him” (187e–188a). (All translations of Plato herein are based on Cooper 1961 and Fowler 1966.) See also Protagoras 331c-d.
In any moral performance, “I have to set things in motion—by a bodily intervention, by saying something, by signing something, by handing something over—and I must thereby crease the world” (Sokolowski 1985, p. 57).
I use the word “crisis” in a weaker sense than Dreyfus and Dreyfus appear to when they deny that “the development of the self requires crises”; such an idea, they say, “goes with an intellectualist view of theory change that may well be true for science but which has nothing to do with selves” (Dreyfus and Dreyfus 1990, p. 263n47). But their example, of “women [who] are led into traps concerning success and need crises to get out of them,” illustrates a more “global” personal crisis than the localized, everyday experiences I am seeking to characterize by means of the Socratic elenchus.
Arguably, when it is felt to be personal this happens because an extraneous ethical element is present: our pride is hurt, a vulnerability we had kept hidden from ourselves is exposed, or the situation reveals that we have an unconscious animosity towards others.
In fact, the elenchus experience may not be an appropriate way to understand truly major crises which threaten one’s entire worldview.
The fact that the “teaching” is not maieutic naturally signals a departure from Plato. In Levinas’s later works, the metaphor shifts from “height” or “distance” to “proximity,” but the basic idea remains the same: the Other is other because he radically challenges my self-understanding; he is always more than I can comprehend or “contain,” and the ethical challenge he represents comes to me as though from something absolute, transcending myself.
In Levinas’s terms, the “face” of the Other “signifies” my responsibility for her, a signifying beyond language. This is what Levinas means when he says that “the face speaks” (Levinas 1969, p. 66). Of course, for Levinas, our response to this signifying, whether we are conscious of it or not, is continual, since at every moment we are in the Other’s presence. What I am exploring here are the implications this has for the more intermittent “higher level” dilemmas we tend explicitly to think of as “moral.”
“The Other alone eludes thematization. … The welcoming of the Other is ipso facto the consciousness of my own injustice.... [T]he movement of thematization is inverted. But this inversion does not amount to ‘knowing oneself’ as a theme attended to by the Other, but rather in submitting oneself to an exigency, to a morality” (Levinas 1969, p. 86).
Similarly, Sayre 1995 proposes that many of the dialogues instruct us not so much in philosophical doctrines as in the practice of philosophy.
A Socrates who was interested in subjecting his interlocutors to the elenchus simply in order to reveal their personal ethical task would, for many commentators, be a non-intellectualist and therefore somewhat implausible Socrates.
Nehamas 1999 gives a useful discussion of this debate in the course of arguing that Socrates never claimed to be a teacher of virtue at all.
“Scholars agree that Euthyphro would not have found it easy to persuade an Athenian jury. … What would arouse revulsion in the jury … is that Euthyphro has voluntarily engaged in the persecution of his father” (Edwards 2000, p. 216). See also Kidd 1990, pp. 213–221. Euthyphro is repudiating a widely respected tradition. In the sayings of Confucius, for example, we find: “… a father covers up for his son, a son covers up for his father, and there is integrity in what they do” (Analects 13/18).
The standard work on this subject appears to be MacDowell 1978.
Some commentators have preferred to ascribe Euthyphro’s annoyance to the inordinate lengths to which Socrates will go just to win an argument. My diagnosis of his frustration, however, would have validity even if so unscrupulous a Socrates actually cared very little about Euthyphro’s moral well-being or “soul.”
Perhaps Socrates does this in order to introduce his own ideas, although this need not mean that Socrates considers piety to be only a part of justice, as we shall see.
“[T]he notion that the gods have work to do, work in which human beings could assist them, is foreign to Greek religion” (Vlastos 1991, p. 175).
At 15a, he declares: “No good that we possess but is given by them.” Cf. Republic 379b, a passage which Vlastos considers wholly characteristic of the Socrates of the earlier dialogues (Vlastos 1991, p. 163n27).
This is very close to McPherran’s position, except that the role he assigns to the elenchus includes the more conventional one of helping us acquire true intellectual beliefs about the nature of the virtues. For a somewhat different argument leading to a conclusion similar to McPherran’s, see Parry 1994. See also Howland 2011, p. 192.
Versenyi argues this in Versenyi 1982, pp. 1–7. It may also have been Plato’s view, as the Protagoras suggests.
On this last point, see Parry 1994, p. 535.
Many of the early dialogues make this shift from considering the character of moral acts to considering that of moral persons. See Vasilou 2008, pp. 143–144. In Euthyphro’s case, the change in direction seems to have little effect on the outcome.
Thus, Jacob Howland contrasts Socrates, a self-critical “circle thinker,” with Euthyphro, who is an unquestioning “straight thinker” (Howland 2011, p. 162–63).
As Vasilou observes, however, there is an important sense in which Euthyphro fails to see that his lawsuit is a “hard case,” in that the issue is not injustice or impiety in general, but whether his father’s act was unjust (Vasilou 2008, p. 154). Hence we cannot rule out the possibility that had Euthyphro been less certain about his own piety, he might have been quicker to appreciate that he had not faced the real dilemma: namely, how he could know that he was acting rightly in this particular case.
It should be noted that the belief that self-questioning is fundamental is not incompatible with strong convictions about oneself such as those which Socrates displays in the Apology. The certainty that one is doing the right thing in a given situation is consistent with a knowledge that all (or almost all) of one’s beliefs about oneself could be defeasible.
Although perhaps not beyond Reshotko’s Socrates, if definitions constitute “moral” knowledge.
Versenyi makes a similar point about self-knowledge (Versenyi 1982, p. 92).
Reshotko offers an original reading of Socratic self-knowledge by arguing, against the popular view, that even the knowledge we think we have about our own desires and actions is aporetic (Reshotko 2006, pp. 91, 171–172). Nothing is so immediately obvious that it cannot initiate self-doubt: “The way things seem to us is not, somehow, pure and pre-theoretical. … We must embrace aporia. … [O]ur realization that we know nothing is the first step to moving in a positive direction” (2006, p. 90).
I would like to thank anonymous referees for valuable suggestions. Very special thanks to David Gill, for advice and encouragement during the early stages of writing the paper. I would also like to acknowledge the inspiration of Hubert Dreyfus, who taught memorable courses at Berkeley when I was an undergraduate there many years ago. I have always had the greatest admiration for his work.
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Reed, R.C. Euthyphro’s Elenchus Experience: Ethical Expertise and Self-Knowledge. Ethic Theory Moral Prac 16, 245–259 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10677-012-9335-x
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10677-012-9335-x