Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Michael Kellogg (Washington, DC), educated at Stanford and Oxford in philosophy and at Harvard Law School, is a founding and managing partner at Kellogg, Huber, Hansen, Todd, Evans & Figel, P.L.L.C.

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THREE QUESTIONS WE NEVER STOP ASKING

Prometheus Books

Contents

Preface................................................................9Acknowledgments........................................................17PART ONE WHAT CAN I KNOW?..............................................19Chapter One Plato and the Task of Philosophy...........................23Chapter Two Wittgenstein and the End of Philosophy.....................57PART TWO WHAT MAY I HOPE?..............................................99Chapter Three Kant and the Leap of Faith...............................103Chapter Four Nietzsche and the Death of God............................135PART THREE WHAT OUGHT I TO DO?.........................................165Chapter Five Aristotle and Public Virtue...............................169Chapter Six Heidegger and Authenticity.................................203Epilogue...............................................................237Suggestions for Further Reading........................................245Notes..................................................................251Index..................................................................273

Chapter One

The European philosophical tradition ... consists of a series of footnotes to Plato.

Plato was born in Athens in 427 BCE, the scion of an aristocratic, wealthy, and influential family. In his youth he was an accomplished wrestler and aspired to be a poet. By all accounts, his early poems showed great promise.

But, like many of the wellborn youths of Athens in this era, Plato fell under the spell of Socrates. He was completely captivated by the Socratic insistence that a man must be able to give a reasoned account of his beliefs and his actions, and that he must place virtue and wisdom before all other pursuits. He began to haunt the agora (marketplace) and lyceum (gymnasium) where Socrates engaged in his withering cross-examinations of those who claimed to understand and practice virtue. Poetry was cast aside as at best a distraction from the serious business of philosophy and at worst a dangerous and corrupting illusion.

Plato was twenty-three when the Peloponnesian War (431–404 BCE) ended in a disastrous defeat for Athens, and he was twenty-eight when his fellow Athenians—pushed beyond limit by the war and the tyranny that followed—condemned Socrates to death. Plato's reaction was not surprising: disgust with the city and its politics. He established a school in the sacred grove of Academus, outside Athens, and taught and wrote there for much of the rest of his life, dying in 347 BCE at the age of eighty-one and leaving behind a body of work that has inspired readers and bedeviled professional philosophers ever since.

All of Plato's surviving writings (aside from a handful of letters, most of dubious authenticity) take the form of dialogues. They begin (insofar as one can group them chronologically based on internal evidence) with idealized, exquisitely crafted encounters between the quasi-historical Socrates and various Athenian citizens with pretensions to wisdom. In the course of the dialogues, those pretensions are punctured, but no competing claims to wisdom are put in their place. The early dialogues end in confusion and doubt, a state of mind superior only to thinking one knows what one does not know.

But Plato transcends his teacher. In a series of transitional dialogues, still using Socrates as his interlocutor, he begins to put in place the positive doctrines and theories that reach full flower in The Republic. To resolve the core Socratic question of how one can know virtue and lead a good life, Plato develops a full-scale metaphysics (theory of being), he places the good life for man in the context of the good society and fashions an educational system, including a restrictive theory of the arts, designed to mould ideal citizens. In the process, Plato sets the agenda for future philosophers. Metaphysics, ethics, aesthetics, and political theory are all established as parts of a single, interconnected enterprise.

To say that Plato is the greatest of all philosophers does little justice to his work. He is the greatest thinker in the Western tradition, as well as a writer of uncommon subtlety and power. His dialogues belong on the same narrow shelf as Homer's and Dante's epics, Shakespeare's plays, and Montaigne's essays. I had a teacher in college who liked to say: No man can consider himself educated who has not read The Republic with understanding. Complete understanding may be too high a benchmark. But repeated readings are definitely a requisite.

THE EARLY DIALOGUES

Euthyphro is not the earliest of Plato's dialogues, but it is generally presented first in editions of his work, and for good reason. It forms a natural unit with the Apology and two related dialogues (Crito and Phaedo) dealing with the trial and death of Socrates. It is also a perfect introduction to the sort of philosophy practiced by Socrates and the challenge that he posed to Plato.

In Euthyphro, Socrates is on his way to face the charges of impiety and corrupting the young that will eventually lead to his conviction and death. He meets Euthyphro, who expresses surprise at seeing Socrates in the vicinity of the courts. Socrates explains his mission. Euthyphro in turn says that he is there to pursue murder charges against his own father. One of his father's household servants killed another servant when drunk. The father had the offending servant bound hand and foot and thrown into a ditch, while he sent to the priest for instructions on what to do with him. Meanwhile, the servant died of hunger and cold.

It is important to recognize that Euthyphro's actions in prosecuting his own father are startling and would seem impious to Socrates' contemporaries. Euthyphro himself recognizes this and is proud of his singular stand: "They say it is impious for a son to prosecute his father for murder. But their ideas of the divine attitude to piety and impiety are wrong, Socrates." Socrates himself presses this point: "'Certainly, Euthyphro, most men would not know how they could do this and be right. It is not the part of anyone to do this, but of one who is far advanced in wisdom.' 'Yes, by Zeus, Socrates, that is so.'" Euthyphro adds, speaking of himself in the third person, "Euthyphro would not be superior to the majority of men, if I did not have accurate knowledge of all such things."

Euthyphro is so pompous and sure of himself that he does not even recognize Socrates' irony, which is laid on very thick in this dialogue. Indeed, Socrates openly mocks Euthyphro, but Euthyphro never notices, and the mockery might make the reader uncomfortable were Euthyphro not insufferable.

Since Euthyphro is so confident of his own wisdom and his knowledge of piety, Socrates proposes to become his pupil and to learn the true nature of piety so that he can respond properly to the charges brought against him. Euthyphro readily agrees. But when Euthyphro tries to explain "what is the pious, and what is the impious," all he does is cite his own example. "The pious is to do what I am doing now, to prosecute the wrongdoer, be it about murder or temple robbery or anything else, whether the wrongdoer is your father or your mother or anyone else; not to prosecute is impious."

Socrates...