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Articles

Socrates & Zen

Geoff Sheehan uses Buddhist parables to illustrate Socratic philosophy.

Many share a common picture of Socrates: a goggle-eyed, pot-bellied, barely clothed man, asking all and sundry difficult, and irritating, questions about virtue, a fixture in the public places, shops and gymnasia in and around the central market place of fifth century BCE Athens. What was he on about? One answer to this question, ‘searching for definitions’, seems on the face of it utterly inadequate: Socrates was tried and executed because he was searching for definitions!

Yet definitions are important. For Socrates, only if we make clear and distinct definitions which can illuminate all situations under discussion can we be said to know what a particular moral value is. So we can know what bravery is only if we can discern what the many acts we call ‘brave’ have in common, from the bravery of the soldier in pitched battle, to the bravery of the worker who stands up to bullying in the workplace, to the bravery of the depressive who crawls out of bed every morning despite every fibre of their being urging them to stay put. But simply to arrive at a common definition – even assuming that this is possible – seems to me to fall short.

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