How does the power of objective reason infiltrate the budding child’s subjectively egocentric mentality? In the history of mankind, there has hardly been documented an entire behavioral set, or whole personae, as principled as Socrates’, and yet even Socrates, who claims in Crito that he is “and always [has] been one of those natures who must be guided by reason,” on occasion drops hints to his more childish, egocentric nature. There is a subjectivity to Socrates’ reasoning that he shields with language. Consider this exchange from Crito:
“S: Ought a man to do what he admits to be right, or ought he to betray the right?
C: He ought to do what he thinks is right.”
Socrates’ language suggests that rightness is very clear objectively, yet Crito’s response twists the meaning of rightness in just such a subtle way as to make it a little more imperfect – that is, rightness is what we believe it to be. Socrates, in embracing Crito’s answer, endorses this level of subjectivity within rightness; however, he seems also to believe that subjective believing is aligned more towards rightness when reason is used as the means to rightness as opposed to any other means (for instance, social acceptance).
Even Socrates’ way of presenting his reason allows for a deeply personal (dare I say even – aesthetic, artistic) manifestation of thought. Yet it’s no person’s reason who he empathizes with, but the entire Athenian state’s. His entire argument which he presents to Crito is from the supposed, personified point of view of the Athenian government or as he puts it, “the law”, which answers and argues and concedes using Socrates’ own tongue. Though the laws of the state are as objective as they are written down, there is truly an element of empathy in Socrates’ understanding of them – by realizing a point of view outside his own, he superficially abandons the simple confines of the child’s self-loving-interpreted-into-self-preserving ego. Of course, the reasonable man is also a grown child with emotions and desires and needs; however, the truly reasonable man (which Socrates undoubtedly, inspiringly is) is sad only when his actions betray virtue; desires only to be engaged with reason; and needs only to live according to his principles. Those principles he accepts as being in some ways contingent, but he respects the means (a la reason) in which they are derived from their contingencies. Insofar as reason is a subjective faculty of the mind, Socrates admits that the arguments of the Laws, which he has been channeling as his own arguments, comes to him as a voice. He says, “This, dear Crito, is the voice which I seem to hear murmuring in my ears, like the sound of the flute in the ears of the mystic; that voice, I say, is humming in my ears, and prevents me from hearing any other.” In this light, reason is not simply a mathematical abstraction of life, but an aesthetic obsession, an artistic arrest by the least likely, yet perhaps most effective, of artists – Reason!