Thursday, September 16, 2004
The ultimate good.
In the opening of the Euthydemus, Socrates asks of Cleinias whether our ‘prospering’ depends on the possession of genuine goods, and whether health, beauty, wealth, etc. are such goods. Aristotle’s argues that a good life is achievable given the opportunities to exercise our capacities to reason, and will thus lead to Eudaimoneia. The factors that give us the opportunity to reason are the abovementioned ‘goods’.
Luck and good fortune in the Socratic view are merely by-products of wisdom. A truly wise person will always act well and always prosper, thus has no need of good fortune. However, this leads to a very rigid sense of knowledge. His idea for knowledge allows for no mistakes, and results in only an all-knowing individual being able to act wisely. It is true that we’ll have a higher chance of acting well given the proper knowledge, but it is not clear that we will always succeed without the help of luck. Here Socrates’ view that luck is superfluous is suspect.
The good things, from which humans benefit are, to Socrates, not ultimate goods – they are only beneficial to people insofar as they have the proper knowledge with which to use them. Thus, a rich man with proper knowledge can use his funds wisely, and a rich man who is foolish will not benefit from his money. A fool with no money will not be able to misuse this good, and thus cause less harm. In arguing, however, that wisdom is the necessary condition for benefiting from these goods, Socrates stumbles. In most cases, this would be true, but it cannot be said that a fool will necessarily misuse the goods that he possesses, and thus wisdom is not necessary for the proper use to goods, it is simply a condition that will aid in the proper use of them. It is possible to argue, however, that having wisdom is necessary in the understanding of whether or not the goods have been used in a beneficial manner.
Socrates argues that since conditional goods, such as health, wealth and beauty require wisdom for proper usage, then wisdom must be the greatest good of all. As wisdom does not require anything else to be beneficial, unlike the lesser goods, wisdom must in itself be the only thing that is good by nature. Furthermore, since the lesser goods depend upon wisdom being present in order to actually be goods, they can be said not be goods at all. Therefore, if wisdom is the only good that is self-sufficient, wisdom must be that which is sufficient for a happy life.
Socrates blunders in his claim that wisdom is, in itself, sufficient for a happy life. In outlining the lesser goods, I feel that Socrates is taking a step in the right direction, but to expel them from the picture completely with his claim of wisdom being sufficient for happiness is highly questionable. His earlier argument of a wise man using the lesser goods well to achieve happiness, and a foolish man using these goods poorly resulting in evil is clearly defensible. However, his sufficiency claim would have to agree that a poor, ugly and sickly man would be happy insofar as he was wise. This seems to imply the notion of acceptance into Socrates notion of wisdom, or else a view that wisdom would ultimately generate all of the goods. Perhaps a man that accepts his fate would ultimately be happy, but there is nothing in the context of wisdom that links the two together. If he argues that wisdom would generate the goods, then this detracts from the view that wisdom is of itself sufficient for happiness. This cannot be so, if the goal of wisdom then, is to generate the goods.
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