Believed by the Wise: Socrates, Pragmatic Arguments, and Pascal’s Wager

I’ve been wrestling with an aphorism that I can’t pin down. I want to say this:

The wise believe what is good and true, the clever only what is proven.

But I can’t. The tone may be right, but the content is wrong: or rather, not wrong but factually inaccurate.

The conjunction is the problem, and what it implies, because the wise would believe what is bad and true for no other reason than that it is true. It’s not wise to close your eyes to the badness of the world, and pretend it to be otherwise, in order to have a more contented life. If you walk around with your eyes closed you are liable to fall into ditches.

But if the wise believe what is bad and true, and what is good and true, then clearly goodness and badness makes no difference and truth is all that matters, which is not what I mean to say.

A disjunction won’t solve the problem:

The wise believe what is good or true, the clever only what is proven.

Because the wise wouldn’t believe what is good and false. (The false can be good, by which I mean ‘beneficial’, such as a placebo effect.) The wise cannot will their own ignorance, and while philosophical irony may make a show of this for a time, no one truly wise can come to believe their own ironic show.

What I’m reaching for is more accurately represented like this:

The wise believe what is good and not-false, the clever only what is proven.

But then the tone is contradictory, since it sounds a little ‘clever’ to make such a nit-picking distinction.

The category I’m looking to capture is that very broad range of things that are ‘true though unprovable’. Although reluctant (rightly) to philosophise by italicised adverbs, I’m inclined to say ‘deeply true though utterly unprovable’, since I’m not interested in trivial claims or disputed matters of fact.

What I have in mind are things like the meaning or value of art, or the love that I have for my wife and child, or ethics. No one can ‘prove’ these things are true, but we live by them nonetheless. The wise believe them, without proof; the clever take pleasure in trying to disprove them.

Some people are the same with religious faith, and when someone has a faith like that then I have nothing to say against them. That’s one difference between myself now and the argumentative academic that I was before. Now, if the effect of my atheological writing were to strengthen the faith of the faithful, I would be pleased. Rather than an argumentative loss, I would call that a win: to convince no one but leave someone better off. Before, I’m sure I would have argued the point.

But now, like Socrates in the Phaedrus, I turn away from all that since ‘to be curious about that which is not my concern, while I am still in ignorance of my own self, would be ridiculous’. And I have had enough of being ridiculous.

Proof

There is another line ascribed to Socrates in Plato’s Phaedrus (I paraphrase): ‘…this proof will be disbelieved by the clever but believed by the wise.’

This is said just prior to a myth, or an illustrative analogy, that likens the human soul to a charioteer in charge of a team of two flying horses. Our reasoning faculty is like the charioteer, and it must manage the two horses in order to steer a steady course. One of the horses is lofty and good and wants to lift us into the heavens; the other is debased and bad and wants to drag us into the mud. A certain balance needs to be struck, but as a rule we want to give freer rein to the good horse and steer in its natural direction, or else, if we allow the bad horse to take the lead, we will crash.

What kind of a ‘proof’ is this? It proves nothing. Not to the ‘clever’, anyway. Being a myth, it is literally false. But the wise recognise a certain truth in it. Thus ‘believed by the wise, disbelieved by the clever’.

I’m not sure about the translation. The word for ‘belief’, here, is ‘pistis’. A Christian would call this ‘faith’. It seems to me that ‘accepted’ might be a better word for a philosopher, or perhaps ‘trusted’, rather than ‘believed’. But there are fine distinctions to be drawn between the synonyms of ‘belief’ and ‘trust’ and ‘faith’, and what I mean to capture is not really belief and certainly not faith.

Pragmatic Arguments

It’s tempting to jump on board with the philosophical history of ‘pragmatic arguments’: Socrates in the Meno, or Pascal’s ‘wager’. Only these miss the point too.

Firstly, literally, in that if you think Socrates is offering a pragmatic proof in the Meno then I suspect you have missed the point of his irony. In the Meno, Meno claims that knowledge is impossible and so we shouldn’t bother trying to find it. Socrates offers a corrective provocation, by way of a counter-argument: knowledge is possible because all learning is recollection, because the soul is immortal. He demonstrates this by talking an uneducated slave boy through some basic geometry.

What kind of a ‘proof’ is this? It proves nothing. Not to the ‘clever’, anyway. Being a myth, it is literally false. But the wise recognise a certain truth in it. ‘Believed by the wise, disbelieved by the clever.’

If someone argues, ‘cleverly’, that motion is impossible, I will walk away. This response is no proof but it makes a point, and it gets you away from trouble. Socrates is trying to drag Meno away from trouble, with his ‘pragmatic argument’; that’s all.

But secondly, it would miss the aim to describe what I mean to say as ‘pragmatic’. The wise do not believe what is good and true only because it is in their interest to do so.

Pascal’s Wager

Pascal seems to fall into this self-interested ditch. He asks: should we believe in God, or not? Since God is beyond human understanding, we cannot know either way, so we must make a choice from a position of ignorance: like a gambler. How should we choose?

In the original presentation of his ‘wager’, he weighs up many things, but in the end Pascal wagers only on the weight of ‘happiness’. If you believe in God and are correct, an eternally happy life is your reward; and if you are incorrect then you lose little. But if you do not believe, and are incorrect, eternal damnation follows, while if you are correct you gain little.

‘If you gain, you gain all; if you lose, you lose nothing. Wager, then, without hesitation that He is’.
Pascal, Pensées

You can find the fault in Pascal’s reasoning, if you are clever: the little Freudian slip. Pascal talks about weighing up what you have to lose by betting on belief in God – ‘the true and the good’ – and what you must stake – ‘your reason and your will’, which he pairs with ‘your knowledge and your happiness’ (or is ‘happiness’ better translated as ‘bliss’?). Finally, he notes your natural aversion to ‘error and misery’.

Like the coin toss that he pictures as the wager itself, there is a constant pairing here, a separation to two sides, two distinct categories, which is intuitive and I’m sure intentional (since it would be uncharacteristically clumsy otherwise). On one side he places truth, reason, knowledge, and error; on the other he places goodness, will, happiness, and misery. These are common enough distinctions for philosophers: like Plato’s parts of the soul, or Hume’s ‘is’ and ‘ought’. It is rationality and sentiment, thinking and feeling, head and heart. It is an important distinction for a philosopher who would say: ‘Le cœur a ses raisons, que la raison ne connaît point.’

What follows from Pascal’s distinctions? Certain corollaries. First, truth is to reason as goodness is to will; that is, an aim: reason aims for truth as the will aims for goodness. Second, reason is to knowledge as will is to happiness; that is, a means and an expression: reason uses knowledge as a means to find the truth and to express it, just as the will uses goodness as a means to find happiness and express it. (Do you see the mistake? The subtle reversal?) Finally, the oppositions: truth is opposed to error, as happiness is to misery.

There is no problem on the ‘reason’ side of the coin: that is straightforward. Reason desires truth, seeks knowledge (as a means to what it desires), and is averse to error.

The difficulty comes on the ‘will’ side of the coin: there we have a choice. Is it that the will desires happiness, seeks goodness (as a means to what it desires), and is averse to misery? Or should it be that the will desires goodness, seeks happiness (as an expression of what it desires), and is averse to misery? If what we stand to lose is, as stated by Pascal, ‘the true and the good’, then it ought to be the latter. Pascal places ‘goodness’ as the will’s ultimate aim; this is what he says. But he wagers only on the weight of ‘happiness’; this shows what he really means. It is a little inversion, where what is ultimate it made subsidiary and what is subsidiary is made ultimate.

Imagine if we performed the same inversion on the other side of the coin: in place of ‘truth’ we put ‘knowledge’ as the ultimate aim of our activity as thinking things. Absurdities follow. What sense would it make to say that your reason desires knowledge, and for the sake of knowledge seeks the truth? It puts the cart before the horse. Knowledge is held accountable to truth in a way that truth is not held accountable to knowledge: there are many unknown truths, but false knowledge is not really knowledge at all.

To labour the point: there are many unknown falsehoods too, but I have little interest in learning all of them. We only try to discover what is false, or incorrect, in order to better know what is true: ordinarily this is because there is no better or more direct way available to us (as is the case with the scientific method). If you gave me a choice between learning one truth and no falsehoods, or a thousand falsehoods and no truth, I would choose to learn the one truth; but were it the case that my reason ultimately aimed at knowledge, and sought truth only as a means to what it desires, then I should rather take the far greater degree of ‘knowledge’ over the far smaller degree of ‘truth’.

That is absurd. And so it cannot be like that. It must be that my reason desires truth, and seeks knowledge only as a means to what it desires. False knowledge is worthless, and knowledge of the false is worth very little in comparison to the truth. Whereas, if I could possess the truth without knowing it, I think that would be fine; although I might rather know it than not, it is not necessary that I know. I couldn’t say the same about possessing knowledge without the truth. The former sounds like some natural master of an art who ‘acts without intention’, but the latter is a description of a know-it-all fool.

Apply the same line of reasoning to the other side of the coin and we will see what Pascal really means. Perform the little inversion: remove ‘goodness’ as our will’s ultimate aim and replace it with ‘happiness’. We say that we want happiness, and for the sake of happiness seek goodness. This sounds very plausible, but it still puts the cart before the horse. Goodness holds happiness to account in the same way that truth holds knowledge to account. Just as there are many unknown truths, and false knowledge is nothing worth having, so too are there many acts of goodness that do not necessarily bring about our happiness, and any happiness brought about by bad acts is not worthy of the name. If I could possess goodness without happiness, I think that would be fine; although I might rather feel happy about it than not, it is not necessary that I feel happy about it, and sometimes it would be odd if I did. (Picture someone caring for a dying loved one, who is sad but good; we needn’t imagine them happy.) I couldn’t say the same about possessing happiness without goodness. The former sounds admirable, but the latter sounds like an arsehole.

Goodness must be the ultimate aim of the will, because our happiness is answerable to it, in the same way that our knowledge is answerable to the truth. Pascal says as much when he states that we stand to lose ‘the true and the good’. What Pascal says is right, but he doesn’t really mean it; what he really means is wrong, but he doesn’t say it.

Although he says we stand to lose ‘the true and the good’, what he really means is that we stand to lose ‘the truth and our happiness’. Happiness is Pascal’s true aim, for the will, as truth is for reason, because in the end Pascal wagers everything on ‘happiness’, regardless of truth; since reason is powerless to offer anything either way, this is a choice of will. But what happened to ‘goodness’?

To imagine someone seeking happiness regardless of goodness is like imagining someone seeking knowledge regardless of truth. What kind of knowledge is that? Nothing worth having. And yet I can imagine someone seeking truth regardless of knowledge: that sounds like Socrates, who ‘knows that he does not know’ and yet considers the unexamined life not worth living. Socrates tries to persuade Meno to persevere in his investigations, for example, even though he doesn’t know the answer and has every reason to believe that no answer is available: still he perseveres. I can also imagine someone seeking goodness regardless of happiness, which also sounds like Socrates: in conversation with Crito, for example.

It is a choice to prioritise ‘happiness’, but it isn’t the only choice. There is goodness beyond happiness. There is a kind of goodness that holds happiness to account: though an abusive tyrant, or an addict on a high, or a child rapist that got away with it, might be ‘happy’, we would reject it as the wrong kind of happiness.

A Clever Argument

Pascal’s wager has always seemed to me to encourage the wrong kind of faith. This faith is self-interested and is expecting a payoff – a return for your investment – and the reasonableness of the wager is conditional upon the value of that return. Is it the wisest investment?

Here is a clever little argument that pitches one famous philosophical wager against another. Take what Socrates says in the Meno. Pascal says, like Meno, that knowledge is impossible: Pascal, of God; Meno, of virtue. After offering his counter-argument, Socrates says this:

‘Most of the points I have made in support of my argument are not things that I can confidently assert; but one point that I am determined to defend, both in word and deed, so far as I am able, is that believing that we have a duty to investigate what we do not know will make us better and braver and less helpless than believing that there is not even a possibility of discovering what we do not know, nor any duty of investigating it.’
Socrates in Plato’s Meno

Is knowledge of God possible, and do we have a duty to investigate the matter, as far as we are able? How should we wager in our investigations of God?

Either we are capable of knowing God, in some way and to some degree, or we are not. ‘To which side should we incline?’ Since we decide on what we know we do not know, reason is powerless here. How do you know you cannot know God? Such a thing is not something you can know.

‘Do not, then, reprove for error those who have made a choice; for you know nothing about it.’ “No, but I blame them for having made, not this choice, but a choice […] The true course is not to wager at all.” ‘Yes; but you must wager. It is not optional. You are embarked. Which will you choose then?’
Pascal, Pensées

To seek knowledge of God, or not? ‘Your reason is no more shocked in choosing one rather than the other since you must of necessity choose. This is one point settled. But your happiness?’ Let us weigh the gain and the loss in wagering that knowledge of God is possible. If you believe it is possible to know God and are correct, an eternally happy life is your reward; and if you are incorrect then you lose little. But if you do not believe, and are incorrect, you lose the opportunity for the most valuable knowledge conceivable, while if you are correct you gain little.

‘If you gain, you gain all; if you lose, you lose nothing.’ Wager, then, without hesitation that knowledge of God is possible.

“That is very fine. Yes, I must wager; but I may perhaps wager too much.” ‘Let us see.’ Since there is an equal chance of gain and of loss, if you stood to gain, by your investigations, more knowledge than only knowledge of God, that might tip the balance in their favour. If, in your investigations of God, even though they may prove fruitless, still you find other benefits, such as improving your logic or ability to think well, then you gain from your wager even though you don’t ‘gain all’. That is like wagering at good odds, that offer more in return than what you are required to stake: if the odds are good enough, you would be a fool not to take the bet.

And what if you stood to gain, by this philosophy, not only an improvement to your ability to think but also, by that, an ability to live well? The function or task or proper work (ergon) of philosophy is only to think well. But in thinking well, you realise that our purpose or goal or aim (telos) as human beings is to live well; by which we mean to live in a way that is ethically excellent, among other things. And so the product of philosophical activity becomes just that: to live well by thinking well.

If you take the lessons of philosophy, learn them, and apply them in your life, you will be left with a gift that keeps on giving, an investment with endless returns. Philosophical understanding never goes away and cannot be taken away: once you have it, you cannot lose it, so long as you live and can think. Unlike material wealth, whose worth is always subject to good or bad fortune, the wealth of wisdom only ever increases its worth. It doesn’t rot or degrade; it can’t be stolen or defrauded; it isn’t taxed. It is a wealth that can be passed on to future generations, if they choose to receive it.

The wealth of wisdom is priceless: it costs nothing but is worth everything. Why would you refuse such an offer, at any price?

This being so, ‘you would act stupidly, being obliged to play’, by refusing to stake so little when there is ‘an infinitely happy life to gain’.

Wager, then, without hesitation, on the pursuit of wisdom.

The Pursuit of Wisdom

What happens when you wager on the pursuit of wisdom? First, in pursuit of wisdom, you recognise that it is wiser to acknowledge your lack of knowledge than it is to remain ignorant of your ignorance; second, in pursuit of wisdom, you acknowledge your ignorance. You stop giving answers and start asking questions. But you do not stop asking questions.

What is it that we want from all this? Let’s accept Pascal’s distinctions: our reason wants truth and our will wants happiness. We question this, and we find no problem with reason wanting truth; but it doesn’t sit right to say that our will wants happiness. Our will wants the right kind of happiness: a happiness that we call right and good. Not the ‘bliss’ of a child rapist who gets away with it.

Instead of happiness, then, we place ‘justice’ or ‘goodness’ as the ultimate aim for our will. But if goodness is our aim then happiness falls out of the picture, because it is neither a necessary means to goodness nor the only end of it, lending weight to that old idea that happiness isn’t something you aim for: happiness is something that you get by aiming for something else.

‘Those only are happy who have their minds fixed on some object other than their own happiness: on the happiness of others, on the improvement of mankind, even on some art or pursuit followed not as a means, but as itself an ideal end. Aiming at something else, they find happiness by the way.’
John Stuart Mill

Some philosophers treat ethics like it were a career in finance, wherein the primary measures are gross profit and what you can expect to earn in return. But in making happiness your aim, you lose the means to achieve it. So much for Pascal’s payoff.

Enchantment

But is there another way of seeing the wager? Not made in expectation of a payoff, but as an enchantment, to enable you to live in hope and expectation? Or is it (like this) exoteric protreptics? An ironic show? I hope so, but I’m not sure. Pascal talks of the ‘necessity’ of the bet, but he doesn’t specify the nature of this necessity. Is it for him, like Kant after him, a practical necessity?

I don’t think it was, but I have no difficulty imagining Pascal’s wager to be an instance of philosophical irony. Pascal is one who says: ‘C’est le cœur qui sent Dieu, et non la raison. Voilà ce que c’est que la foi parfaite, Dieu sensible au cœur.’

And in light of that I have no difficulty imagining him trying to persuade himself, and others, by appeal to the heart’s desires. Socrates does the same; only for Socrates (and Plato) it doesn’t end there.

Consider what happens in Plato’s Phaedo. Socrates is facing death. He understands, having investigated the idea, that death is inevitable. He understands, having investigated the idea, that dying well is something that he would choose to do, as opposed to the alternative of dying badly or living on when it is not right to do so. Socrates understands that he is faced with something that he must do and do well, and so he does what he does and does well: he applies his philosophy to the task. He rehearses the arguments that enable him to do this thing well.

As in the Meno, Socrates presents arguments for the immortality of the soul. And also as in the Meno, when he is done with his arguments, he insists that no one reasonable can say for certain that the soul is immortal, but that it is a belief worth risking because it inspires confidence in us to be better people, and it’s for that reason that he’s spent so much of his final hours on these charming stories. (Only remember that Plato is the storyteller.)

This is a recurrent feature in Plato’s dialogues; we can’t be surprised to find it featured here at the end of Socrates’ philosophical life. It is a matter of healing your soul through philosophical activity, and in that context the job of rhetoric is to persuade you to take your medicine. Sometimes this involves a bit of sweetness or misdirection, especially if the medicine is bitter.

Like the ‘headache’ that is cured in the Charmides: Socrates says the cure is ‘a kind of leaf, which needs to be accompanied by a charm, and if a person would repeat the charm at the same time that they used the cure, they would be made whole; but that without the charm the leaf would be of no use’. But once they get talking the ‘leaf’ is forgotten about and it is only a matter of understanding why self-restraint is a good thing. This philosophical understanding, this ‘charm’, is like a magic spell. But of course it’s anything but magical.

And in the Gorgias, Socrates spends a long time offering rational arguments for his ethical conclusions before finishing with a mythological story about the gods judging the souls of human beings and sending them to the underworld. He says he is convinced by these rational accounts (logon). Of course it’s not about the myth.

Plato has a habit of making the point of his dialogues in the ‘digressions’ from the argument. He does it three times in the Phaedo. It is a philosophical sleight of hand that he hides in plain sight. (The Theaetetus is another good example.) In among the arguments of the Phaedo we find Socrates’ friends troubled by the fear of their own deaths. How can they overcome this fear? Socrates says: ‘Repeat the words of the charmer until you have charmed them away.’ This is the point of the dialogue, this is what Plato wants us to understand, and so this is what he shows us: Socrates repeating his own words, practising his philosophical activity, to take his medicine and keep his soul in good health as he dies.

Irony and Purpose

Why do I react positively to this enchantment, and to that in the Meno, but negatively to Pascal’s Wager?

I think it is a question of telos (aim, goal, purpose). If Socrates only said ‘believe this and you will be happy’, like any charismatic guru-charlatan, I would turn away from him as I turn away from them all. But he does not only say that. His irony (and Plato’s masterful depiction of it) shows more than what is said.

To see this, you need to see the ironic contradictions in Socratic philosophy, and to what these point, which is rarely said but always there. Like the proverbial finger pointing at the sun: don’t look at the finger and miss all that heavenly glory. But since, as Plato makes clear, you can’t look directly at the sun without the aid of strong filters, what else are we to do, outside of the academy, but point fingers?

For example: to someone who believes that our written code of laws is the highest form of justice, Socrates points out that there are unwritten laws; and since these laws are unwritten yet common to all mankind (e.g. prohibitions against incest), they must be established by the gods. Human laws cannot be the highest form of justice because there is the universal moral law of the gods.

But to someone who thinks that the moral law is established by the gods, Socrates points out that the gods are just as answerable to the moral law as we are, or else we cannot meaningfully call them good. Divine law cannot be the highest form of justice because even the gods are answerable to something.

It’s easy to get confused here, because Socrates seems to have said two different things. This difference in Socrates is a product of the particular conversation he was having. To one person, you say this; to another, you say that. The one thing common to all these conversations is the priority of wisdom and goodness, but this is argued for in as many different ways as there are different people to talk to.

To someone who thinks that the laws are and ought to be determined by the powerful and strong – tyrants who can impose their will on the world – and that social convention is only for the weak, Socrates points out that a group of people is always more powerful than any one person, and therefore social convention is the true product of power.

To someone who thinks that social convention is the only measure of what is right and good, Socrates will point out the obvious: many people can be wrong just as any one person can be wrong. We should not trust in the majority, simply because it is the majority, but only in those who are truly knowledgeable, simply because they are knowledgeable. If they really are knowledgeable then they will know what’s right and good.

To someone who thinks that doing what one wishes, within one’s power, is the highest form of justice, Socrates points out that the most powerful ought to be the most wise (since foolishness is a weakness) and the most wise would always choose to do good.

To someone who thinks there is no reason to be virtuous, because being virtuous holds you back in the great competition of life, Socrates will point out the rewards that being virtuous brings – you are liked, respected, trusted, etc. – and he will encourage us to see the value in these things. But to someone who thinks that the only reason to be virtuous is to be liked, respected, trusted, etc., Socrates will say that anyone who really understands virtue wouldn’t need these rewards because virtue is its own reward.

To someone who is convinced that good and evil require reward and punishment, he argues that the gods will ensure justice in the afterlife. To someone who thinks being good will reap good consequences, he encourages them to remember the good consequences of being good and not get distracted. But to someone who thinks being good does not reap good consequences, he argues that consequences should not really matter to someone who is genuinely good.

It is a disorienting array of arguments, but the one feature common to them all is the priority of the good. This is the telos, revealed as the ever-present underlying aim: this is what all the arguments point to. The superficial argument is adapted to suit the audience: it meets them at their level of ignorance, whatever it may be, and moves them one step towards a better understanding.

It’s said repeatedly that Socrates did not tell anyone what wisdom is, or what goodness is, or what justice is, but claimed to show these things in how he lived. His life was his instruction, by example. And what did he do with his life? He asked questions about wisdom and goodness and justice. To what end? To persuade you to take your medicine.

The medicine is a purgative: it makes you throw up your errors. It disenchants you from the nonsense that holds your attention and enchants you, in its place, with wisdom and goodness. ‘Repeat the words of the charmer until you have charmed them away.’

Morally Impossible

That is why I react negatively to Pascal’s wager. Even as an enchantment and not an argument, it works to the wrong aim: your self-interested happiness. This is an error: it is the same error that drives tyrants to tyranny, or addicts to the next high, or child rapists to try to get away with it (and sometimes succeed). It is an error that needs to be purged, not encouraged.

Goodness holds happiness to account. Ethics does not serve our purposes but judges them. Ill-gotten gains are not really gains at all. It is better to suffer wrong than to do it. Nothing can harm a good person, in life or after death.

These are the propositions on which I wager. No one reasonable can say with certainty that they are ‘proven’, but one point I am determined to defend, both in word and deed, so far as I am able, is that believing these things makes us better people.

And as it turns out, that prohibits belief in God, for me. In prioritising wisdom and goodness, I stumble upon the problem of morally-impossible evil.

Most people recognise a difference between the morally possible and the morally impossible. The difference between lying to your friends and raping them is not difficult to understand. While both are morally bad things to do, in one case there might be circumstances in which it is permissible, excusable, or even justifiable, the other would not be permissible or excusable or justifiable under any circumstances: there is no ambiguity about which is which.

We could call this prohibition categorical or absolute. It admits no exceptions, and because of this there are no good reasons, moral or otherwise, to do what should never be done. The impermissible cannot be permitted; the inexcusable cannot be excused; you cannot justify the unjustifiable. These are grammatical statements.

The recognition of the morally impossible is nothing more or less than a recognition of moral limits. Most people have moral limits. Does God?

We say that God is a good God and not an evil God; we say that God is knowing and not ignorant; we say that God is powerful and not weak. There is little disagreement here. No one seriously defends an evil, ignorant, or weak God.

Does God recognise the difference between the morally possible and the morally impossible? If no, then we have a problem. Because that means that nothing is morally impossible for God and that God has no moral limits. Like an ethically-dubious anti-hero, He will do what He must to get the job done.

Sometimes we revere these anti-heroes, but we do not do so unconditionally. We recognise them as flawed, broken, morally stained. They are meant to be morally-ambiguous figures, and they are mostly fictional. But God is not meant to be either of these.

We are all familiar with moral ambiguity and we don’t have to look to fiction to find it. We don’t ordinarily incinerate the children of our enemies to preserve the lives of our soldiers. We don’t ordinarily do it again as an intimidation tactic. But this is what happened at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. At best this is morally ambiguous; at worst it is something else entirely.

What that example means, for you, will depend on your moral limits. Reflecting on these kinds of examples cannot change anything, but it can teach you about yourself. You can discover your moral limits in these abstract philosophical investigations and with those limits you can carve out the shape of your moral world.

Any theodicy will depict a strange moral world, one in which the suffering of innocents can be used as a means to an end or otherwise compensated by greater goods or the avoidance of worse evils. It is the moral world of Hiroshima and Nagasaki; and of Jimmy Savile, offsetting his child abuse by his charitable contributions. It is not a world that I recognise as moral. But people will disagree about these things.

We must all live within our moral worlds or suffer the consequences. What moral world does God live in? If theodicy is anything to go by, it is a world without limit. It is a world where God permits what cannot be permitted, excuses what cannot be excused, and justifies what cannot be justified: the morally impossible. I would not call that morally good. I am not sure it makes sense to call it ‘moral’ at all.

If you recognise the morally impossible and the moral limits that are imposed by it, it is impossible to reconcile this recognition with a notion of God’s perfect goodness. This impossibility – of reconciling belief in a perfect God with a sincere recognition of the terrible evils of the world – is a moral impossibility. This essential inconsistency isn’t grounded in physical or metaphysical necessity but in moral necessity.

A good thing cannot permit the morally impossible without incurring guilt. A guilty thing cannot be considered perfectly good. Therefore, there cannot be a perfectly good thing that permits the morally impossible.

Can the problem of evil be solved? Logically: possibly. But morally? Impossible. As Socrates said, even the gods are answerable to something.

And so I would not wager with Pascal. I cannot. First, because he wagers to the wrong purpose – where happiness is the end and goodness the mere means – and second, the proposition wagered on, belief in God, is prohibited by the means: goodness forbids that kind of happiness.

The Aim of the Wise

What kind of a proof is this? It proves nothing. It will convince no one; no one clever, anyway. Is that its aim?

What is the aim of philosophy? Is it to present clever arguments? But if we really are clever, can we be proud of that aim?

Cleverness does not correlate with wisdom, for many clever people have not even tried to be wise, and how wise is that?

The ideal philosopher is not clever; the ideal philosopher tries to be wise. They pursue wisdom and, acknowledging its tremendous power, are stupefied by it, struck dumb by it, enchanted by it, as a lover is enchanted by their beloved. Realising the rare difficulty of the great task that is laid out before them, and understanding that everything excellent is as difficult as it is rare, they abandon everything to this pursuit, turning away from ‘the glories that most people seek’: money, prestige, and pleasure.

Most people neglect what matters and so chase what doesn’t. Philosophers chase what matters and so neglect what doesn’t.

In pursuit of wisdom, philosophers trade arguments like traders trade commodities. But whereas a trader looks to make a profit, a philosopher looks to make a loss, because it is better to lose an argument and learn your error than win an argument and remain in it.

Is this an accurate description of a contemporary philosopher?

Of course not. If you were to picture the ideal philosopher going about their business, you would think there is nothing wiser than the pursuit of wisdom, which is philosophy. But if you were to look at the picture of success for a modern academic philosopher, adorned with the prestigious ornamentation of qualifications and titles, strutting about on the stage, puffed up with glory, fat with a sense of their own self-importance, pre-occupied with their publications, their reputation, their position or their promotion prospects, nit-picking about details and presenting their petty arguments to no purpose beyond the refutation of any objections raised, you would think there is no pursuit more foolish.

Understanding ought to be the measure of what matters in academic philosophy. But no one who looks at the modern academic world could see it as a paragon of understanding, where the best form of understanding shown is how to cite and be cited.

Philosophy has lost its way. It is inconsistent with itself. It is not living in conformity with its nature. It believes itself to be profound and important, but what is characteristic of its daily activity is trivial and produces trivialities.

We have forgotten to take these things seriously. We lecture about how philosophers should not lecture but ask questions. We demand honours and titles for a discipline that claims to renounce honours and titles. We charge fees for something that we say is priceless. We live in contradiction with ourselves and then call ourselves logicians.

We are not lovers of wisdom but adulterers. We say we love wisdom but we are always pursuing something else: a job, a publication, a citation. These are our affairs.

The dominant form of philosophy represented now in universities is a kind of pseudo-philosophy that presents a believable image of the discipline but without any reality: it is a shadow of its former self. Once upon a time we would have recognised this shadow for what it is and called it what it was: ‘sophistry’.

The increasingly business-oriented character of the modern university is partly and possibly entirely to blame for this. The university changed, and philosophy (having nowhere else to go) changed with it. Sophistry is at home in the new university, but philosophy is uncomfortably out of place in this place.

Francis Bacon, in urging the introduction of the then-new science, complained that universities produced ‘minds empty and unfraught with matter’ having not ‘gathered that which Cicero calleth sylva and supellex, stuff and variety’. Now I complain that universities produce minds fraught with matter but empty of what matters. Their heads are full of stuff but incapable of judgement.

The modern university peddles a version of philosophy that is only a history of ideas combined with the activity of constructing clever arguments. You may as well say that music is just a collection of tunes and the activity of plucking strings. Some musicians do this, of course, and it can be done well or badly, but that’s hardly the point.

As a musician, to play out of tune and not realise it is one thing. But to realise that you are playing out of tune and to keep playing: that is absurd. Such a person is ridiculous. If you realise that you are playing out of tune, you stop playing. You don’t start playing again until you have tuned yourself up.

Philosophers pursue cleverness when they should pursue wisdom. Pascal wagers everything on happiness when he should wager on goodness. It is as if the ultimate aim of the two-aspect human nature as a thinking and feeling thing is not ‘the true and the good’ but rather ‘cleverness and happiness’. Or more accurately: ‘happiness by way of success, and success by way of cleverness.’ I see nothing admirable in any of this. I turn away from it.

Convinced by his ‘rational accounts’, I follow Socrates. The aim of the wise is ‘the true and the good’, not cleverness or happiness. There is no proof of this, of course, but it is the ever-present answer to the eternal Socratic questions. Which suggests a new formulation of the aphorism:

The wise pursue what is good and true, the clever want proof.

This seems right, in its abruptness, but it doesn’t really answer my original question. I know what we want (wisdom), and what we don’t want (to be only clever). What I want to know is whether, for the sake of getting what we want and avoiding what we don’t, we should believe these things that have no proof?

Socrates wagers on believing in immortality and the possibility of knowledge, in the face of all clever proofs to the contrary. I say this is wise and good. Why is it good? Not because it is true: no one reasonable can nowadays believe in conscious-life after brain-death, but neither can I know this to be false. I can’t have either belief or knowledge on this matter.

In William James’s sense, it is not a ‘live’ hypothesis. The hypothesis is practically as dead for me as for the dead brain: in the end neither of us are capable of conceiving the idea.

But when my loved ones die, do I tell myself I will be with them again? I do. And if I were afraid of death, would I tell myself there is nothing to fear? I would. And if I suspect there is no hope of understanding something, do I tell myself to persevere in my investigations? I do.

Why? Because it ‘inspires confidence’. As Socrates says, it makes us better people: it makes us better able to do what is right and be what is good.

The ultimate aim is, in its essence, a guiding principle: it is the final cause or ‘that for the sake of which’ we do what we do. It holds everything to account.

To be more of what is good.

If believing helps us to achieve that aim, then we should believe; if doubt helps us, then we should doubt. And if clever arguments will help to turn vicious belief into virtuous doubt, or vicious doubt into virtuous belief, then we, as professionally-trained philosophers, should construct and deploy those arguments.

But when we find ourselves deploying clever arguments for the purpose of inspiring a vicious doubt in virtuous belief, we should see what we’ve become and stop. We are making a bad noise. We should tune ourselves up.

And so in the end I do say: