Chapter 9: Is Socrates an archetype and what would that mean for the potential of humanity?

Socrates didn’t do as much socratizing as you might think. If you read the literature, you might get a different impression, but there is less socratizing than there could be and then Socrates gets even less socratic and more abstract as Plato gets older and is running out of time. Socrates often extracted premises and conventional wisdom from others, sometimes through a question to which a person could agree or disagree, and then, when the person accepted the premise, showed why the premise was wrong. That resulted in the particular aporia of Socrates, the inconclusiveness and bafflement of the ending of a discussion, the elenchus, and it was his genius, his spirit. It was genuine and honest. Socrates couldn’t achieve answers that he wanted and he knew it. He had the discipline to identify the boundary of the limitations of his knowledge. Whereas, as he said of others, they didn’t know that about themselves and they don’t know that they didn’t know the answers before they talked to Socrates and sometimes even afterwards. Socrates felt that he had to keep asking questions, groping towards his own fulfillment and the potential of humanity. And that may be what we remember or want to remember about Socrates, his potential, his struggle towards his potential and towards the potential of humanity. Maybe that is a significant part of why Socrates is so enduring in or minds. If so, what is the relationship between the potential and the actual? What is the potential of Socrates? The fascination has endured of the character of Socrates as a human being with an unusual facility for asking questions of others. Why has that aspect of the character of Socrates endured?

An answer may lie in the concept of the archetype created by the Swiss psychoanalyst Carl Jung, although we can never know for sure what would have happened if Socrates had questioned Jung. That is left to our imaginations, where a significant part of our experiences is found. We are partly the experience of what we dream and imagine, even if we have forgotten what we dreamt when we awake. We create fictions and produce a literature of fiction, as a kind of waking dream, and thankfully that is preserved for us to contemplate afterwards. Would Socrates have reduced Jung to a state of aporia or would Jung have changed Socrates to a different state of mind? Are our imaginations even capable of imaging that conversation?

For now, consider Jung’s concept of an archetype as it creates one possible way to imagine the potential of Socrates and the effect that the archetype of Socrates could have on us. Socrates distinguishes himself by his concept of dialogue as a behaviour in asking questions to articulate meaningful information. For example, in the Laches, Socrates pursues the question of what bravery is. In order to cultivate bravery in people, presumably we have to know what is brave and what is not, thus defining bravery. Socrates doesn’t have a definition of bravery and the dialogue concludes without the conclusion of defining bravery. That is typical of the particular aporia of Socrates in his elenchus in the early dialogues, ending the discussion in confusion and bewilderment. So, how is a dialogue like this in the Laches useful if it doesn’t end in a definite way with an answer? The typical answer to explain the inconclusiveness of the dialogue is that removing false assumptions and false ideas is a necessary stage before reaching a conclusion later. Conclusions are hard to form when they are confused by false ideas. To paraphrase the fictional character Sherlock Holmes from The Sign of the Four, eliminate what can’t be verified and the answer is what remains. Holmes actually said to Dr. Watson, “Once you eliminate the impossible, whatever remains, no matter how improbable, must be the truth.” In The Sign if the Four, Watson also asks Holmes, which he wants that day, morphine or cocaine. Holmes responds, "It is cocaine," he said, "a seven-per-cent solution. Would you care to try it?" But that’s different issue. It’s a typical rational answer to the purpose of the Socratic aporia, that, if it doesn’t offer a conclusion, it eliminates errors. But maybe that’s not very satisfying resolution to save the reputation of Socrates as a rationalist. Isn’t the purpose of the question to produce a definitive answer? That’s a rational premise, but is it a legitimate precise in the case of Socrates? By analogy, is Zen Buddhism a failure because the bewildering question or the bewildering answer is inclusive and bewildering? Zen Buddhism gives a uniquely different context that invalidates the rational premise that the goal is simply to produce definite answers, at which point the question can be discarded as obsolete. In contrast, the value of pure Zen is that the experience of thinking about the question that has value in itself without reaching a conclusion. The risk of the conclusion is that it creates dogma which traps the learner – a problem also in our education system. How will students learn to solve problems if they are simply given the solutions to the problems to memorize? If it makes sense that the experience of thinking about the question has value in itself, then Socratic aporia would be like Zen Buddhism: the value is in the experience of the questioning itself and what that process teaches someone. As Socrates says, perhaps honestly and without false humility or irony, wisdom belongs to the gods, not human beings. Do we play sports and exercise to win a trophy or is the goal of sports the experience of the challenge and the way it keeps us disciplined and fit? Do we read a novel or watch a film to get to the end to know the plot and be able to answer the question of what happened or do we read a novel or watch a film for the experience of reading it? Is the value of worshipping of a deity a commercial transaction to benefit a mortal human being by getting something of value from the deity or is the experience of worship itself good for the soul? Are those analogies fair or misleading?

So, to procced, what is an archetype? Carl Jung said that an archetype is a universal pattern or form that affects the thoughts, feelings and behaviour of human beings and maybe also affects animals too. A Jungian archetype, according to Anthony Storr, is a mythological motif or primordial form which helps organize our images and ideas. Jung said that the concept of archetypes explains the power of religious ideas and make them feel “numinous.” Jung added that archetypes also have this same power in “science, philosophy and ethics.” The ideas of religion, science, philosophy and ethics, according to Jung, are “created by consciously applying and adapting these ideas [of the archetype] to reality.” The undifferentiated feelings of the unconscious are differentiated and given form in consciousness. The archetypes are shared by human beings and so the archetypes make human experience understandable from one person to another. The archetype is the reason for the power that is felt in an image. That would mean that the forms of archetypes have unusual power over human beings to channel that power from the archetype, focusing an experience like a psychic lens. How archetypes are shared is more difficult to explain, but it can be observed that human beings distant from each other at different points on the planet have similar ideas in the myths that they cherish and the spiritual images that they experience. That can’t be coincidence, Jung reasoned.

Jung wrote: “For when an archetype appears in a dream, in a fantasy, or in life, it always brings with it a certain influence or power by virtue of which it either exercises a numinous or a fascinating effect, or it impels an action.” Jung tried to solve the difficulty of understanding his concept of the archetype in “Psychological Aspects of the Mother Archetype” by saying it is not an idea in the unconscious, but a principle of form or a shaping power like “the axial system of a crystal, which, as it were, preforms the crystalline structure in the mother liquid although it has no material existence of its own… The archetype in itself is empty and purely formal, nothing but a facultas praeformandi, a possibility of representation which is given a priori. The representations themselves are not inherited, only the forms, and in that respect they correspond in every way to the instincts, which are also determined in form only… In principle, [the archetype] can be named and has an invariable nucleus of meaning – but always in principle, never as regards its concrete manifestation.”

So, is Socrates an example of excellence with a facultas praeformandi? Is Socrates and the way he focuses experience through questions the behaviour of an archetype? The “concrete manifestation” belongs to Socrates, but the principle if the form of the archetype. Hopefully that makes sense. If not, maybe you should consider whether you are are wasting your time reading this any further.

This assessment of Socrates is not the typical western assessment of Socrates. And yet Socrates does qualify as a personality who has exerted power as an image for centuries. The prominent aspect of his character is that he relates to others and to experience through questions and dialogue. His mental lens focuses experience through doubt and questions, some questions being an expression of doubt. Socrates seems to share that essential characteristic with Zen Buddhists, psychotherapists and people believed to have “genius” in how they relate to experience as a process of discovery and not a process of following dogma. This type of personality is often found in religious figures who engage others with paradoxes that don’t seem to fit empirical reality or riddles for others to unravel. When Jesus curses the fig tree on the road, what does that mean? When Jesus turns water into wine at a wedding, does it have a deeper meaning than just impressing the crowd by providing something to drink? There is literature that casts Jesus as a Zen figure, such as books like The Zen Teachings of Jesus and Zen Wisdom for Christians. And something similar is happening in Zen and the Gospel of Thomas. How accurate are these as explanations of Jesus and Christianity? Before answering that, What are the premises of that question? How is it determined what the historical Jesus was, not unlike the question of the historical Socrates or the historical Buddha, actually said? Jesus, Buddha and Socrates never recorded their ideas. Everything that is known about them comes from others who don’t always agree with each other. And yet the ideas of Jesus, Buddha and Socrates are formulated as dogma with accepted interpretations that it is heresy to question. Nevertheless, we sense that the essence of these religious figures, their numenosity, still shines through even if the transmission isn’t perfect. Sorry, Xenophon. We still appreciation what you wrote about Socrates. It helps us somewhat. There are some good bits. But maybe you and Plato should have gotten together to get the story straight.

From mythology and psychology there are formulations of personality types, archetypes and interpretations of how individuals express the personality types and archetypes with some personal variations. An example in Jungian psychology are the anima and animus. The anima is a feminine personality within a male and the animus a masculine personality with a male, providing a kind of balance of the psyche as well as, under some conditions, an imbalance. Other examples are Athena, the Greek goddess of the ancient city of Athens, Hermes the messenger of the gods and a trickster, and the wily Odysseus, a trickster found in Homer’s Odyssey. Athena is the female warrior, the expert builder, the virgin and mother. Since was a religious figure, she was numinous. Athena was born from the head of her father, Zeus, which poses the archetype of a female with male origins. Psychoanalysis has seized on this to explain the behaviour of particular women as female goddesses with a close connection to their fathers.[viii] The trickster archetype is found in the mythologies of cultures around the world, including the indigenous people of North America. Odysseus might have been based on a historical person and the characterization of him later elaborated and shaped by the inspiration of the archetype. How much of Odysseus is historical and how much an elaboration of others, how much is fiction and how much is non-fiction, doesn’t really matter to us. We don’t have to decide that in order to experience the Odyssey in a way that has meaning for us. Athena does not have to be proven to have existed in order to find a form for experience and behaviour that has meaning. It does not matter if these figures ever existed or not. They help formulate a psychic reality. In the same way, the experience of the dream is real and affects the psyche even though the dream didn’t happen in empirical reality. And, in the same way, fiction in novels and films is a real experience that affects what people think and feel even though the novel and film are not accurate historical accounts.

If the premise makes sense that we have a meaningful experience of an Athena personality without knowing how much of Athena is fiction and how much is historical reality, then can the same concept be applied to Socrates? Do we need to know how much of the character of Socrates in the dialogues is historically true and how much is a fiction created by Plato, in order to have a meaningful experience of Socrates? Athena does not cause human beings to behave like her. But, is the pattern of the behaviour of an Athena type purely a coincidence? Or is a facultas praeformandi at work, the pattern of a potential being actualized which would not happen without the universal pattern? By analogy, think of the biological role of DNA. Is temperament wholly the creation of the individual in response to particular circumstances? Or is temperament partially inherited and only partially the choice of the individual? Remember that the argument of Jung is that the power is channeled from the archetype through the individual; the power is not a numerosity that individuals create wholly by themselves. That’s a different a cause-and-effect relationship from an empirical point of view. Rationalism presumes that Napoleon and Hitler are particular individuals who cause historical events, not that history wholly causes Napoleon and Hitler. Sure, we might qualify the premise to say that the circumstances at the time were ripe for a Napoleon or a Hitler, but that is not the same as saying that the circumstances wholly caused the actions and behaviour of the two.

Another issue is participation of multiple people in one story of an archetype. The story of the Odyssey or of Job in the Old Testament may be composed from amalgamating different stories with different layers of contributions from different storytellers over time. The power of these two stories is not diminished by departing from historical accuracy and being revised by multiple authors. The power, as Jung would say, comes from how a figure or a story embodies an archetype and seeks the fulfillment of the archetype. If that makes sense, then the power of Socrates would from the power that an archetype channels through him. People could relate to Socrates because the archetype is shared with others. The archetype communicates the numinosity. Jung would search for evidence of multiple versions of Socrates appearing at different times and different places around the world. If he found that phenomenon, then he would consider how this might be an archetype. If that also makes sense, then it is quite fitting that there are multiple revisions of Socrates by different people at different times that are legitimate because of how they channel and fulfill the potential of the archetype that Socrates embodies. Hegel, Kierkegaard and Nietzsche each were great questioners and saw a mental relationship with Socrates while also trying to identify their freedom from Socrates to feel themselves as individuals. Jungian psychology sees an individuation process and Jung’s disciple Marie-Louise von Franz finds individuation particularly strong in Socrates. We can be our own version of an Odysseus, of an Athena, of a Socrates. Taking caution not to inflate the ego, we can be disciples of Jesus, Mohammed or Buddha, which means that we take our spiritual DNA from them and see them as part of our spiritual heritage. But we need to be faithful to the potential of the archetype in our particular embodiment. Or, as Socrates the questioner would say, Do you think otherwise?

Is an archetype a kind of fiction? That depends on the context of what fiction is. Jung saw an important psychological function in fiction. This aspect of imagination allows us to test potential situations before we need to act and to review what might have happened in retrospect, recreating the past in a way that what might have happened can be experienced as though it happened. And this may be part of the natural process when we are asleep and dream. Our fictions are part of the reality that we experience. Our fictions are us. Jung would probably add that, in the unconscious, fiction and empirical experience are undifferentiated. They are only separated and polarized when they emerge into consciousness. Oddly, the English language has a word for “fiction,” but not a separate word for “non-fiction.” What is not fiction is thus termed “not fiction.” I would offer the term empiriction for non-fiction, but that is just me and it probably won’t catch on. Literature is separated into fiction and not fiction. Films are separated into fiction and documentary. Awards are given to these two in separate categories where they don't have to compete against each other, except, perhaps in the hybrid category in literature of creative non-fiction. Creative non-fiction is a somewhat fuzzy category that ranges from historical accuracy to invention that is plausible given the original model. An example of creative non-fiction is the book The Convict Lover by Merlyn Simmons. When Simmons bought a house, she went into the attic on her birthday and found, as an unexpected birthday present, the secret letters to a young girl in the previous century from a convict in the local penitentiary. During the day, the convict went to work in a nearby quarry, where he and the girl hid secret letters going back and forth. The guards weren’t apparently watching the convict very closely. Simmons had discovered the story of an romance by letter. But Simmons only had the letters from convict, not the letters from the girl. To write The Convict Lover as creative non-fiction, Simmons got into the character of the girl and isolated herself in a room that replicated the previous century. Then she imagined how a young girl would fit the correspondence she received from the convict without, for the moment, anachronistic distractions from the future. But, what difference does it make if the book were wholly the creation of Simmons? Fiction has to be plausible, according to the conventions of plausibility that readers will accept. Meanwhile, non-fiction has the freedom to be implausible that fiction doesn’t have. There’s always a catch, isn’t there? Plato works hard to make his Socrates plausible, but that may be because Plato is writing for an audience that has memories of the historical Socrates and the historical circumstances. Plato may make stretch the truth a bit in a way his audience will tolerate and he makes good use of dramatic irony, because the audience in Athens knows the future of the characters in the dialogue before they do. For instance, in the Laches the military leader Nicias is discussing bravery before his temperament affects his decisions later which ends in disaster for Athens and controversy for Nicias. [ix]The audience in Athens would relish that they know more about Nicias than he does. Future generations will get the story in too much detail from Thucydides.

Here’s another question. Are there other archetypal aspects of Socrates? Does Socrates make robust use of archetypes to increase his psychic strength? Citing what Alcibiades says of Socrates in the Symposium as a kind of Dionysian Silenus figure with flutes – and it should be remembered, a related satyr figure too – von Franz says that Socrates “is attracting archetypal contents and so drawing them into the realm of the human psyche… In order to keep him in this role, the daimonion prevented him from becoming active in political life; beyond this, however, the dream in the Phaedo endeavored to make him give these images of the gods a creative reality in the psychic realm, and thereby a way was prepared for a step forward in consciousness which, however, was only to be more fully realized later.” Von Franz does not explain why Socrates endures so significantly as a figure from ancient Athens down to contemporary philosophy, aside from a brief comment that he is an archetypal Senex or wise old man to others, without elaboration. That’s an intriguing hint worth pursuing. If Socrates is revered by philosophers for his intelligence, the connection with the Senex archetype and satyrs might seem a curiosity, a distraction. Being a Senex figure would not explain how Socrates is rational. But the whole character of Socrates has an effect and Plato tries to give a sense of that. Plato initially shows the whole psyche of Socrates – the depth of his spirituality, his compassion, his ability to connect with others in a genuine and intimate way, his exceptional ability to influence others, his introversion in an extroverted public culture, his mercurial trickster and satyr cunning. Socrates was very intelligent, a factor that has preoccupied philosophers, but it is significant that von Franz is finding different strengths in his psyche.

In Jungian psychology, there is another significance in the figure of Socrates. According to von Franz, the case of Socrates is the moment in human development when a healthy process of individuation begins and the projections of the unconscious onto “the mythological world” and onto nature begin to be withdrawn. This process creates a more mature and balanced psyche. Von Franz does not say how this insight of the beginning of the individuation process would apply to the original process that Socrates developed for inquiry that is intended to heal the soul of the individual. She leaves that crucial issue a mystery for philosophers to solve. It does not interest her, although it may explain the numinosity that Socrates channels.

Should von Franz then propose that the ultimate aim of the method of inquiry of Socrates is to produce a balanced psyche? Or, are those two aspects of the inquiry of Socrates and the balancing of his psyche disparate and unconnected and maybe even at odds? Does Socrates’ process of inquiry stall at his somewhat relatively advanced stage for his time of psychic development or does the process transcend the limitations of the psyche of Socrates as von Franz sees them? Is Plato’s transformation of Socrates and his thought in the later dialogues further progress in individuation or a retreat into a stronger rational ego consciousness? What if Socrates sense of a mission was really what Socrates himself claimed, to heal the soul of others by engaging them in questions as he has done in examining himself? Does the process of Socratic inquiry have the potential to help others avoid the psychic traps that Socrates is evading? What if the idea of Socrates has become its own archetype with a psychological reality of its own that transcends the historical Socrates? If it does, then people could find in Socrates archetypes beyond the earthly self of the man. The development of Socrates would then continue through others, maybe some with enthusiasm and others with reluctance.

Do the intellectual progeny of Socrates down through the ages – Hegel, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Foucault – have to wrestle - like a Joseph in the Old Testament of the Bible - with the angelic presence of an archetype they find in Socrates to release their own genius?

What if the Socrates described in the early dialogues of questions and not answers is the archetype of doubt, of the wisdom of doubt, uncertainty and perplexity, an idea that didn’t occur to the self-assured von Franz and rationalists in general?

What if these dialogues are an agon, a contest, between doubt and certainty where wholeness must encompass both doubt and certainty, but where doubt prevails against an overdetermined, unbalanced certainty of rationalism?

What if Socrates is an archetype of doubt testing the rationality of human beings through which they become wiser and whole?

What about you, who read this far, while others wavered and withdrew to the comforts of dogma? Are you personally drawn to the numinosity of Socrates or might another archetype be more active in your psyche?

But if Socrates is purely an elaborate fiction of Plato, would it still be possible to learn from a fictional Socrates?

email: socracticzen88@gmail.com

The many faces of Socrates and his variations by Shawn Thompson.