The Socratic Turn. Dustin Sebell

      

      The Socratic Turn

      The Socratic Turn

      Knowledge of Good and Evil in an Age of Science

      Dustin Sebell

       PENN

      UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA PRESS

      PHILADELPHIA

      A volume in the Haney Foundation Series, established in

      1961 with the generous support of Dr. John Louis Haney

      Copyright © 2016 University of Pennsylvania Press

      All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations used for

      purposes of review or scholarly citation, none of this book

      may be reproduced in any form by any means without

      written permission from the publisher.

      Published by

      University of Pennsylvania Press

      Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19104-4112

      www.upenn.edu/pennpress

      Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper

      10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

      Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

      ISBN 978-0-8122-4780-0

       To Florence and Leonard Sebell,Edith Tagrin and Marvin S. Kaplan, and Anne and Joel Youkeles

      Contents

       Introduction

       PART I

       Chapter 1. The Problem of the Young Socrates

       Chapter 2. What Is Science?

       Chapter 3. The Prospects for Matter in Motion

       Chapter 4. Noetic Heterogeneity

       PART II

       Chapter 5. Teleology

       PART III

       Chapter 6. Science and Society

       Chapter 7. Dialectic

       Conclusion

       Notes

       References

       Index

       Acknowledgments

      As for any Obligations they owed to the Antients, they renounced them all. ’Tis true, said they, we are informed, some few of our Party have been so mean to borrow their Subsistence from You; But the rest, infinitely the greater Number … were so far from stooping to so base an Example, that there never passed, till this very hour, six Words between us. For, our Horses are of our own breeding, our Arms of our own forging, and our Cloaths of our own cutting out and sowing. Plato was by chance upon the next Shelf, and observing those that spoke to be in the ragged Plight, mentioned a while ago; their Jades lean and foundred, their Weapons of rotten Wood, their Armour rusty, and nothing but Raggs underneath; he laugh’d loud, and in his pleasant way, swore, By G——, he believ’d them.

      —Jonathan Swift, A Full and True Accountof the Battel Fought Last Friday, &c.

      Introduction

      Over fifty years ago, Robert Dahl argued that the difficulty with “traditional” or “normative” political theory, what seems to make it more akin to literary criticism, for example, than scientific analysis (1958, 97–98), is that it can “rarely, if ever, meet rigorous criteria of truth” (95). Dahl’s main point was not that he himself knew the criteria in question and knew, as a result, that they could not be met by political theory (cf. 97); it was that, so far as he could see, political theorists themselves had not made a serious effort to spell out the kind of evidence from which they take their bearings or the criteria on the basis of which they evaluate it. And in the absence of a serious effort along those lines, political theory necessarily suffers from a degree and kind of “vagueness” hardly compatible with an aspiration to be counted among the (social) sciences (97). Dahl demanded, therefore, that political theorists say with some “high degree of precision what would constitute a fair test of a political theory” (95, 97, 98).

      On the other hand, in a seminal work that, according to one later assessment of it, more than any other in the 1960s “summed up the frustrations and hopes of the contemporary political theorists” (Scaff 1980, 1155; Gunnell 2006, 772) in the face of the behavioralists’ objections, Sheldon Wolin made a case against truth that is “rigorous, precise, and quantifiable” in favor of “tacit political knowledge,” as Michael Polanyi first put it (1964), which is none of these things (1969, 1069–77, cf. 1063). By Wolin’s own account, tacit political knowledge and the criteria of evaluating it—that is, “[judgments] about the nature and perplexities of politics” and “judgments about the adequacy and value of theories and methods” (1077)—are indeed vague. Tacit political knowledge, he said, “is elusive and hence meaningful statements about it often have to be allusive and intimative. … Knowledge of this type tends, therefore, to be suggestive and illuminative rather than explicit and determinate” (1070). And the criteria of evaluating “the forms of theory built upon [tacit political knowledge]” (1071) are not less “elusive” than tacit political knowledge itself. “A certain sensibility is needed, qualities of thinking and feeling which are not readily formulable but pertain to a capacity for discriminative judgment” (1076, emphasis added). If tacit political knowledge is “elusive” and if, when it comes to the evaluation of it, “appropriateness of judgment cannot be encapsulated into a formula” (1076), it is indeed hard to see how what Wolin went so far as to call “the creation of theories” (1073) does not, as Dahl and others objected, fall into “the domain of literary criticism, where the study of the ‘meaning’ of a poem generally does not, even at the hands of the new critics, lead to an agreed interpretation” (1958, 97). Wolin, of course, did not think it did. But instead of articulating, “in rather careful language” (Dahl 1958, 97), the evidence or criteria on the basis of which tacit political knowledge or a theory founded on it could be sharply and exactly distinguished from “false, vague, unreliable, or even ‘mystical’” opinion (1071) or from mere “bias”—to which, even he himself granted, it surely has “a family resemblance” (1074)—Wolin seemed to argue that this could not and hence need not be done. Instead of doing so himself, at any rate, he (merely) gave eloquent and impassioned expression to the fact that there is something vague in the very nature of political