no, Socrates was not a troll

Over at CROOKED TIMBER, there’s a post up by Henry about trolls and the ancient world. (Hat tip, Matthew.)

Before getting into my wider disagreement with it, I should point out that the blogger he quotes doesn’t even have the facts of Plato’s Laches right:

“Two important men are having a careful conversation on military training. What do you call the guy who, having no particular competence or interest in the matter at hand, jumps in the conversation, systematically contradicts everyone with contrived arguments, ridicules the two competent discussants, orients the conversation on a completely different topic, then leaves the audience baffled and walks away, laughing? That Troll is Socrates in Plato’s Laches.”

This has to be one of the most puzzling summaries of a Platonic dialogue I’ve ever read. It misses the following key points about the Laches:

1. The two important men in question decide for themselves to go seek out the opinion of Socrates on military training. Socrates does not “jump into the conversation”; they go looking for him. He didn’t ask to be included in this conversation. And at least one of the characters (Nicias) knows full well what he’s getting into when they go looking for Socrates.

2. The two important men by no means agree with the blogger that Socrates is incompetent in military matters. In fact, Socrates is praised throughout the dialogue for his great bravery in combat during the Peloponnesian War, and is praised by none other than these two important men.

3. Socrates doesn’t “orient the conversation along an entirely different topic.” He says that the proper military training cannot be determined unless we first know what courage is. That’s a pretty typical Socratic move, and a quite reasonable one in this instance.

4. Socrates “leaves the audience baffled and walks away, laughing?” Hardly. He gets everyone to admit that they don’t know what courage is, and then makes plans with them to continue the conversation the next day. And he certainly doesn’t walk away laughing.

5. Socrates “systematically contradicts everyone in the dialogue with contrived arguments”? That’s not the Laches I just finished rereading. He made good points, I thought.

If you want to make the case for Socrates-as-troll, the Gorgias is the place to do it. He’s a first-rate jerk in that dialogue, for whatever reason. (Socrates on a bad day, or perhaps Plato on a bad day.) But the summary of the Laches cited above isn’t just forced– it’s completely off the mark. Read the dialogue and you’ll see what I mean. I have no idea why the blogger cites that dialogue in particular; it seems almost randomly chosen.

Socrates is often a pain, but only rarely is he a troll. The troll is a person who sneers from nowhere, who merely wants to make all forward progress impossible. Socrates does the exact opposite: he tries to propel further progress by showing the inadequacy of each of the false preliminary answers that come up in discussion.

Most importantly of all, the Platonic Socrates does have a crucial and paradoxical positive thesis: you must know what X is before you know what qualities X has. This separation of the thing from its qualities is the very essence of philosophy: the love of a wisdom of which we now have a part and will always only have a part; the thinking of something that is not circumscribed by thought. To the extent that this principle is forgotten, the original meaning of philosophy is lost– and that is the danger of corelationism, not to mention all the forms of reductionism that reduce downward just as correlationism reduces upward. To say that “X is nothing more than the qualities of X” is to miss the Socratic lesson completely.

The post also implies that the ancient sophist was just another form of the troll. That’s too sloppy: there have been numerous different forms of the anti-philosopher throughout history. In fact, I am inclined to think that each era of philosophy generates its own form of anti-philosophy, just as every new kind of factory produces its own innovative form of toxic waste. But I’ll be writing an essay about this point in the spring. To begin with: the sophist, the pedant, the Inquisitor, and the troll are four separate types of the anti-philosopher (and there may be many others). The troll is the waste product of an era in which critique has been systematically overrated as an intellectual method. And that is the modern period, not the ancient one.

One of the things I would like to do in that essay (if I have the space) is not just to classify the various forms of anti-philosophers that have already existed. As with any good scientific theory, I would also like to make predictions about what new forms of anti-philosopher might be generated in the future. If you can guess what new types of philosopher might still emerge (a worthy thought experiment) then you can also guess the properties of their corresponding “anti-particles”– that is to say, the anti-philosophers for each era.

It is now pretty much a requirement for all philosophers to have their own takes on the history of philosophy. I think it would be even more interesting if everyone had to have their private take on the future of philosophy. Wouldn’t that be an interesting new fashion? Philosophers needing to write projected histories-in-advance of the philosophy of the next 500 years. In fact, I’m really warming to the idea as I write this post, and will try to do it myself someday.