Socrates and Descartes, a conversation between two major rationalists
Many similar ideas are we going to find if we were to compare Descartes’ philosophical meditations with those of Socrates─ and friends. Both regard human effort to understand nature and one’s self as of paramount importance to mankind among any other activity to which he is capable of. As with Socrates who says to us that “the unexamined life is not worth living for men” (Apology, 38a5). And Descartes who advices us likewise “My third maxim was to endeavor always to conquer myself rather than fortune, and change my desires rather than the order of the world” (Discourse on Method, Part III).
Both of them call us to examine one’s inner thoughts relying in one’s capability of doing it by means of, primarily our reason rather than our senses or our imagination. Reason, as opposed to wrongly imagining things away from our mind’s understanding as Descartes says to us: “neither our imagination nor our senses can give us assurance of anything unless our understanding intervene” (Discourse on Method, Part IV).
Socrates regards imagination as the lower of the soul’s faculties in the VI part of The Republic. But in that same chapter, we can find, almost the exact parallel way of reasoning Descartes uses in the part of his discourse where he speaks about how deductive reasoning leads us necessarily to conclude the existence of some higher entity which commands every existent in the universe. As interestingly is the same which topic Socrates also had in discussion with his friend Timaeus in another dialogue─ the idea of the Demiurge.
Socrates identified this method first, at the end of chapter VI he tried to explain it to him, but I will quote Glaucon, since he summarized it so Socrates can see that he understood his point “I understand you to say that knowledge and being, which the science of dialectic contemplates, are clearer than the notions of the arts, as they are termed, which proceed from hypotheses only: these are also contemplated by the understanding, and not by the senses: yet, because they start from hypotheses and do not ascend to a principle, those who contemplate them appear to you not to exercise the higher reason upon them… And the habit which is concerned with geometry and the cognate sciences I suppose that you would term understanding and not reason, as being intermediate between opinion and reason” (The Republic, Part VI).
Where dialectic is the use of reason and mathematical coherent syllogisms, and the hypotheses─ contemplated by the understanding─ are the axiomatic principles to which Descartes arrived as «I think therefore I am», which were also not contemplated by the senses because start from irreducible─ not ascending to principles─ abstractions such as good and the thinking as intrinsic and only nature of men─ a fact which would be repugnant to doubt about. Not leaving apart the similar nature of this method to that of geometry.
