The Socratic Turn. Dustin Sebell
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textbook, one of “the rules of the road to scientific knowledge of politics” is to “avoid normative statements” (Kellstedt and Whitten 2013, 17–18). So they say, but why? Do we know scientifically that scientific knowledge of “normative” statements is impossible, or is this just a hunch; in the end, a bit of “folk wisdom” or pseudoscience? It could seem to follow from the widespread disagreement about “normative” statements that criteria for reaching agreement about them are necessarily lacking (Pippin 2009, 37; cf. Williams 2006, 157). In reality, it does not. Nothing follows from the hoary truth that “what is just and unjust is usually in dispute” (Rawls 1999, 5) but the incentive to resolve the disputes; which is to say, the incentive to engage in political philosophy.
If then it is not so much the age-old, widespread disagreement about the opinions or evidence from which political philosophy starts that, to our eyes, precludes the possibility of genuine or scientific knowledge of “values” from the outset, perhaps it is also, in the second place, a certain implicit, negative assessment of the evidence itself that does this? Apparently, “no one … can deny that post-Enlightenment science and mathematics (Newton, Darwin, Maxwell, Lorentz, Planck, Einstein, Bohr, Schrödinger, Heisenberg, Dirac, Hawking, Higgs) has infinitely eclipsed ancient understandings of the world” (Beiner 2014, 60–61). But according to Friedrich Nietzsche, who was perhaps the first and surely among the last to face this difficulty squarely, modern nonteleological natural science undercuts our prescientific awareness of the world or the world of “common sense” (Burtt 1999, 303). That world, “the world that concerns us,” as Nietzsche called it, ceases to be the true or only one in the face of the “materialism” or “naturalism” of modern science (Beyond Good and Evil aphs. 34, 226). The latter implies or presupposes that the prescientific, common sense world is either a figment of the imagination or an epiphenomenon of matter in motion, or both. And since just or good things in particular belong to that world, modern natural science implies or presupposes that nothing is just or good in itself; the “is,” as it is conceived by modern natural science at least, excludes the “ought” (aph. 9). From the outset, then, modern natural science serves to undercut the evidence from which traditional political philosophy takes its bearings. In its shadow, ordinary opinions to the effect that something is in itself just or good can no longer be accepted at face value.13
Now, for the sake of clarity, let us double back and retrace our steps. Beginning at the end, then, “the modernist separation of the ‘fact-orientation’ of politics from ‘abstracted’ theory is itself tied … to the growth of forms of philosophical materialism, naturalism, empiricism, and positivism in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and its consequent seepage into common sense. The ‘factual-orientation’ view of politics is thus the product of certain comparatively recent historical developments” (Vincent 2004, 9). That most “empirical” political scientists presuppose the validity of these developments is obvious.14 It is considerably less obvious, however, that most political theorists do too. And yet, as suggested, even political theorists and others who appear to resist or reject the developments in question actually do so, almost without exception, only to a limited extent. For they do not seriously question, much less consistently deny, the developments’ necessary consequence: the separation of (political) science from (political) philosophy and the impossibility of scientific knowledge of “values.” They tend, instead, to disagree with their fundamentally like-minded “empirical” colleagues primarily about the implications of this consequence or about its consequences.
To put this more exactly, it is agreed on all sides that “values,” in particular, transcend or fall short of the reach of science. As for “the ongoing methodological crisis of social science” (Gerring 2001, xv), it has to do with the disagreement that then arises over whether what transcends or falls short of the reach of science or human reason still deserves a hearing.15 And at this point a difficulty emerges for political theory. For, unless “having a subfield of political philosophy in a department of political science is akin to having a subfield of faith healers in a medical school,” “a hearing” necessarily means, first and foremost, a hearing before the tribunal of human reason.16 And those who maintain that “values,” though they buck reason, still deserve a hearing before reason are bound, as this ambiguous or even self-contradictory formulation itself suggests, to have difficulty articulating their position in clear and distinct terms.17 The difficulty, to say it again, follows from the fact that, notwithstanding their acceptance of the distinction between the sciences and the humanities, as well as of political theory’s place among the latter as opposed to the former, they can hardly relinquish the mantle of science completely. Inevitably, they are forced into a kind of halfway house.18 And since it is unintelligible to say political theory does and, at the same time, does not merit the name “science,” the effectual truth of their position is an almost fanatical obscurantism.19 In this way, that sector of the discipline not shaped by modern natural science more or less directly is still shaped by its reaction to it.
In this situation, political theorists can hardly avoid making an experiment at least of leaving their all but anti-theoretical halfway house and laying claim to the mantle of science themselves.20 This is much easier said than done. For it requires, to repeat, both the discovery of criteria, or a method, for converting our opinions about justice into knowledge of justice and a defense of those opinions, especially over and against modern natural science’s implicit, negative assessment of their cognitive status. And it seems unlikely that these two requirements can ever be met. Still, the fact remains that to seem unlikely is one thing, to be impossible another. And, given this difference, the following study cannot be written off merely for exploring the possibility that they can be met, indeed, to add unlikelihood to unlikelihood, that they already were: in classical Athens, by Socrates.
This is not the first or only attempt in recent times to solve a peculiarly modern problem by recourse to the thought of the past. It suffices to mention in this connection the work of Hannah Arendt, Alasdair Mac-Intyre, Martha Nussbaum, and Leo Strauss. But why should we look in this case to Socrates of all people?
We have it on good authority that political philosophy was founded by Socrates. It was Socrates, according to Cicero, who first called science or philosophy down from heaven—or rather, away from the study of the whole of nature—established it in the cities, introduced it also in the households, and compelled it to inquire about human life and manners as well as about good and evil.21 Similarly, Aristotle, Plato, and Xenophon seem to say that Socrates concerned himself exclusively with the ethical or human things, and—contrary to his philosophic predecessors, the so-called pre-Socratics—not at all with the whole of nature.22 He did so, they seem to say, especially or only as a result of practical considerations, for whereas natural science does not “matter” much or at all to human life, political philosophy surely does.23 The first philosopher was famously ridiculed for falling into a well because his head was in the clouds (Theaetetus 173e1–174b7); Socrates, it seems, was just the first philosopher to get the joke. In that case, however, “the Socratic turn,” as the founding in question has come to be called, would be only indirectly relevant to the awkward situation in which political theory finds itself today. For even granted that Socrates acquired “the true political art” (Gorgias 521d7–8), as he put it, by methodically examining opinions about just or good things, the success of modern natural science still presents a difficulty. Doubts about the assumption that it is theoretically possible to examine opinions about just or good things would not be directly affected by, indeed, they would continue to subvert, the examination of them. For how could the conclusions of an examination whose premises—in this case, common sense opinions—are deprived of cognitive value by what passes for science amount, themselves, to science? In this regard, the experience of the last century or so is telling. For example, “in Husserl on the life-world; in Heidegger on pre-predicative experience, being-in-the-world, and the everyday; in the later Wittgenstein, Austin, Cavell,” Robert Pippin finds, “an appeal to ‘the ordinary’ as a way of bypassing, avoiding, not refuting the supposedly reductionist, skeptical, disenchanting, enervating trajectory of modern naturalism” (2003, 344). But however