Stephen Colbert and Philosophy - Aaron Allen Schiller [122]
Okay, we now see how Stephen thinks of higher education—it should be a supplier of ideas, where ideas are a kind of commodity, and where colleges and universities are structured just like for-profit organizations. This, as we will see, entails that their primary aim will be to generate and to maximize profit. So, what’s wrong with this picture? Plenty, if Socrates is right.
Why Socrates Thinks Stephen Is Wrong
In Plato’s Republic, Socrates argues that an action is made intelligible by way of its aim or end—that is, an action is made intelligible by whatever it aims at bringing about.198 Socrates reiterates in the Phaedo that understanding human action requires understanding the aims or ends of actions.199 He recalls that as a young man he had heard that Anaxagoras had developed a novel approach to explaining human action. But, when he read Anaxagoras’s book he was greatly disappointed. Socrates tells us how Anaxagoras would explain why he [Socrates] sits:
[I]n trying to give the causes of the particular thing I do, [the sort of account that Anaxagoras gives would] say first that I am now sitting here because my body is composed of bones and sinews, and the bones are hard and have joints which divide them and the sinews can be contracted and relaxed and, with the flesh and the skin which contains them all, are laid about the bones; and so, as the bones are hung loose in their ligaments, the sinews, by relaxing and contracting, make me able to bend my limbs now, and that is the cause of my sitting here with my legs bent … [But in explaining my sitting in this way, Anaxagoras fails] to mention the real causes, which are, that the Athenians decided that it was best to condemn me, and therefore I have decided that it was best for me to sit here and that it is right for me to stay and undergo whatever penalty they order. (Plato, Phaedo, lines 98c-98e)
The idea, I think, is that an anatomical description, as informative as it may be, does not make intelligible what Socrates is doing (namely, sitting). Rather, what makes what he is doing intelligible is knowing that he is tired, for example, or awaiting execution. Knowing why he sits makes what he does intelligible. The aim of his action, then, is what the action is for; it is that for the sake of which he acts.
Now, let’s return to the Republic. Here is a good analogy that will help me make my case down the road. Socrates asks: “Is the physician, taken in that strict sense of which you are speaking, a healer of the sick or a maker of money? And remember that I am now speaking of the true physician” (The Republic, 341c). Thrasymachus, his interlocutor, rightly replies that one who truly practices medicine is “a healer of the sick.” The idea is that when a physician is practicing medicine there is something specific that the physician is trying to bring about. Since the practice of medicine is aimed at bringing about health in the patient, someone engaged in bringing about anything else would not be practicing medicine, but would be engaged in doing something else. To be sure, a physician who aimed at bringing about a good in the patient, but instead brought about harm, could still be said to be practicing medicine, only badly. But, if he or she were trying to bring about harm in the patient, the physician is not practicing medicine badly, but is doing something else.
Socrates contrasts the practice of medicine in the above passage to the practice of money making. They are NOT the same thing. When the physician is practicing medicine, the aim is to bring about health in the patient (this is the good that the physician