TSV EPISODE 16: THE WISDOM OF SOCRATES WITH  
DAVID L. COLLINS

Photo by Thomas Despeyroux
Author: David L. Collins, PhD
Title: University of Texas at Austin Staff
Affiliation: University of Texas
Twitter: @bodhidave3
Date: November 20, 2019

Hi everyone. I have a special episode of the podcast here for you today. It's not even really a podcast episode. It’s a recording of a talk given by friend of the website, David Collins. David has been on the podcast; he was on episode 7. He also wrote not one but two essays for us in issue 1 of the journal. One of those essays was on the history of mindfulness practice in the United States. The other one was a piece on Christian contemplative practice, focused on the author of The Cloud of Unknowing.

Dave shared this audio with me thinking that the Side View audience might be interested in it, and I listened to it and, as with so many things that Dave does, I just immediately fell in love with it. It's a short piece. It's a 13 minute talk that he gave recently. The subject of the talk is Socrates. And you could say—I want to call it “The wisdom of Socrates,” or maybe even “The religiosity of Socrates,” or something like that. Of course, as Dave makes clear in the talk, that word “religion” isn’t one that the Greeks of Socrates’s time would have used. But there's a real depth to Socrates that I think sometimes gets lost in the sort of “History 101” approach to teaching philosophy. And I think the way Dave presents the subject of Socrates—who he was, what he was really doing, the sort of daimonic forces that were operative for him and that influenced his thinking and action—will be really interesting to many of you. And, as well, you’ll get some historical context and some commentary on what we know about Socrates and where those sources come from, and things like that.

So, like I said, it’s a 13 minute talk, not really a podcast. I’m not doing any editing or clean up on either on this intro or the episode. I just wanted to put it out there, to spread it on the internet, spread Dave’s wisdom, spread the wisdom of Socrates. If you’re not steeped in this history, or if you don't know this history from Dave’s perspective, I think it's worth 13 minutes of your time. So, I won’t say anymore, please just dig in and enjoy.

Here’s David Collins on Socrates.


So tonight’s talk is just me thinking out loud a little bit about Socrates, and the nature of religiousness and of philosophy. Lots of folks in the West trace philosophy, the history of philosophy, to Socrates, although that word, “philosophy,” wasn’t so much in effect at the time, and literally, etymologically, means “a love of wisdom.”

Socrates was executed by the Athenians on a charge of what gets translated as “impiety.” What “impiety” meant in those days sort of is a matter of not being in step with the customs of a given locale, a polis, a city. It’s a little bit like being out of order, or being disrespectful. The Greeks didn’t have a word that exactly lines up with and matches our word “religion.” “Religion” is going to be a Latin word, and etymologically most likely means “re-connection.” But for the Greeks it was more a matter of a kind of respectfulness and being in harmony, being within the order of life. And that could extend to everything.

It’s not sure exactly how the Greek figure, Thales, meant it, but he is quoted as having said, “Everything is full of gods.” And for the Greeks there were sort of abstractions—Eros, and Fate, and Strife—and then there were the Olympic gods, and the stories. But there were also nymphs, and tree spirits, and water spirits, and a way to respectfully eat a meal, a way to invoke good luck, or divine engagement with pretty much everything—the way you sold and traded things in the marketplace. Pretty much all of life was a matter of being in tune. And that is what we in our time and day will look back and understand, or presume, to be what religion was for the Greeks.

And each polis, each city-state, typically had their own set of rules, and observances, and ceremonies. Athens had lots and lots and lots of ceremonies, almost weekly some religious event or parade or observance. And it was expected that folks would be in compliance, folks would be respectfully in harmony with a given custom, a given way of doing things in a particular place, even while understanding not all places had the same customs. There wasn’t like an over-arching Greek orthodoxy. There wasn’t a set scripture. There were ways that were locally specific, for how to be a respectful person—with regards to your family, your city, and Nature, and the divine forces at large.

So there’s a question of what exactly it meant—some feel it was sort of a political deal, that the Athenians were just upset with Socrates and some of the associations he had with politicians who had fallen out of favor. And then others will point out, well, you know there’s no real big difference in that day between religious/spiritual matters and political/customary matters.

And the other charge that was levelled against him was that he “introduced new gods.” And a likely source for that charge is that Socrates, kind of notwithstanding the stereotype or the image or presumption we often have of him as being the father of rationality and thus the instigator of the Western philosophical tradition—Socrates had a spirit, he had sort of a guiding angel. He had a voice—sometimes it’s translated as a “sign”—that would come to him, and did so from childhood. And the word for that is a “daimonion,” which kind of means a “divine thing.” Later Christians, very uncomfortable with the multitude of divine things in the Mediterranean world, recast that word daimon or daimonion as “demon,” a devil. But for Socrates’s time, even someone like inspired with courage on a battlefield could be said to be touched by a daimon, or to be expressing or embodying a daimon.

In Socrates’s case it appears—well, we get different descriptions. In Plato, it’s depicted as something which told him not to do things, in certain instances, including not to get up one time, because someone was coming and a nice dialogue was going to happen. Another compatriot, or someone who was around and respected Socrates, is Xenophon. He suggested that it also told him when to do things, like what advice to give people on occasion.

That touches on, as a quick little sidebar here, what modern academics will call “the Socratic problem,” which is that we don’t have anything that Socrates himself wrote down. There are a variety of reasons, one is because not whole a lot of people did a lot of writing in those days. Another is Socrates may well have been uncomfortable with things being written down. Plato depicts him this way, as saying that something written down is like a “parentless child”—in that it has no protection against getting misinterpreted. And another is Socrates is more about asking questions, by and large. And so the quote unquote “Socratic problem” is that we don’t really know the real Socrates, because all we have are other people’s descriptions of him. And they don’t always match up. The main ones are Plato, and Xenophon, and a playwright, Aristophanes, who made fun of Socrates, made him the buffoonish character in one of his plays. And there were some others, most of which are lost to us.

But the Socratic problem is we can’t really tell who the real Socrates was, because different people describe him different ways.

My personal suspicion is that is an indication of a key characteristic of Socrates, that he was the sort of person that different people experienced different ways. And one of the reasons for that is he wasn’t so much about expressing his own views, as he was about really listening to your view, and helping you hear yourself and question your habits of thought.

There’s a famous Zen master, named, Yunmen, who was brilliant, and adept at using other people’s own imagery or patterns of speech in overturning their views. So I’m reminded of that with this business about Socrates being a deep listener, helping someone listen to themselves and question. In Yunmen’s case, the Zen master who would use somebody else’s language forms and sort of turn them inside out or upside down, it was said that he was adept as “using the thief’s horse to catch the thief,” adopting their way of speaking in a way to help them see what they’re saying, and go beyond it.

So Socrates was forever inviting people to hear what they were saying. Not everybody went for it. Not everybody got it. But that, it’s my sense, was both what got him in trouble and what was in fact his philosophy/religion, understanding that neither of those words apply in those days the way we use them. Questioning things, being put back in touch with a kind of unknowing. In Greek it was “aporia”—a being at a loss for what to say or what to think, a realizing one doesn’t know everything.

In contemplative traditions that’s a deeply rich place to be. A kind of humility that makes us all the more intimate with our lived experience. Because we’re not so sure. We don’t have a prejudice about life. We don’t have a preset notion about it. We may not have a quote unquote “theology” about it.

That word, incidentally, is another that didn’t have quite the use in those days as it does for us. It may very well be Plato, a follower of Socrates, who first uses that word, “theology,” and for him it just means talking about divine things, talking about the gods.

So at any rate, what I’m interested in looking at is ways in which sort of the West gets started with what turns into philosophy and turns into religion, and seeing that in a figure like Socrates those things aren’t so separable. And his questioning things, his deep listening, which upset people and some found to be disrespectful, because it was questioning everything—questioning custom, questioning the habits and practices, questioning the values that people presumed were viable and not to be questioned, questioning assumptions.

That was both a very matter-of-fact way of being in the world, and I suspect it’s also ultimately a spiritual matter, where the word “spiritual” isn’t necessarily required—it’s just a kind of honesty.

So that’s the talk for this evening.