Paul Tuns, Review:
Socrates Meets Box Set (Word on Fire, $139.95 USD, eight volumes, 1712 pages)
Between 2003 and 2014, the prolific author Peter Kreeft published eight books in which he imaginatively has Socrates interrogate eight famous philosophers: Macchiavelli, Descartes, Hume, Kant, Marx, Kierkegaard, Freud, and Sartre. Now, for the first time, these eight books have been collected in a (handsome) boxset by Word on Fire, the publishing outfit of Bishop Robert Barron. (A previous collection by Ignatius Press did not include Socrates Meets Freud.)
The “Socrates Meets …” series takes the form of Plato’s famous Socratic dialogues in which the famous ancient Greek philosopher would question others about their views to get to the root of their beliefs and show where they were logically sound or deficient. The purpose of the dialogue was not debate-style point scoring, but understanding. That is not to say that Socrates does not point out the intellectual errors of his interlocutors, most notably through their contradictions or misreading of the real world (as opposed to theory untested by actual living human beings). Reading Kreeft’s Socrates Meets series will help readers better understand eight important philosophical works, and their weaknesses.
The setting for all Kreeft’s imagined conversations between Socrates and the eight philosophers is purgatory (Kreeft is not only influenced by Plato but Dante’s Divine Comedy) and each dialogue focuses on only one of the philosopher’s books. Through the questioning of Socrates,Kreeft unpacks the reasoning or lack thereof of the philosopher’s ideas. They are excellent introductions to eight important philosophers and their most important, if sometimes flawed, ideas.
Interrogating Marx over his Communist Manifesto, Kreeft forces the intellectual founder of communism to confront Socrates’ idealism and defend his own materialism. Socrates argues that ideas can be universal (and therefore absolute) while Marx insists that ideas are relative to the circumstances in which they are found. Along the way they debate private property and the gender relations, but these are mere examples of the underlying materialism in which Marx operates. Interrogating Freud, Kreeft deals with the famous father of psychoanalysis less as a psychiatrist than a philosopher, picking apart the details of Freud’s foundational ideas and their disastrous consequences (namely the Sexual Revolution). Kreeft’s Socrates notes that Freud’s id, ego, and super ego are similar to the ancient Greek and later Christian understanding of appetite, will, and intellect or conscience, although with crucial differences. Whereas Freud’s id is the only real self-according to Freud, comprised of little more than animal instinct, the ancient philosopher or Christian understands that it is mankind’s challenge to overcome his mere appetites. Viewing the “real” person as simply the id denies Imago Dei, that mankind is made in God’s image. It is a crucial flaw in Freud’s philosophy.
These two books, on Socrates Meets Marx and Socrates Meets Freud may be the most accessible of the eight to most readers as Marx and Freud are among the most influential intellectuals of the past two centuries. Others are less so, most notably Søren Kierkegaard. Kreeft provides important critiques of each thinker, for example that Sartre’s existentialism is seriously flawed because he confuses freedom and independence, which led him astray into atheism, or that Hume’s subjectivism fails by the very test of subjectivism. The exception, it seems is Kierkegaard.
In Socrates Meets Kierkegaard: The Father of Philosophy Meets the Father of Christian Existentialism, sets up a battle of wits between Socrates’ reason and Søren Kierkegaard’s faith. Kreeft does not merely hold Socrates up as the end-all and be-all of philosophy. Kreeft hints that Socrates comes closer to Kierkegaard’s faith than the latter does to the former’s austere logical discipline. The dialogue is fruitful because, as Kreeft notes, they both combined “intelligence with imagination, truth with poetry … the objective with the subjective.” Both were deeply concerned with truth, goodness, and beauty. It is precisely because the two are so similar that they can truly challenge one another in their thinking (what we would call today, their “priors”).
Kreeft focuses on a small section of Kierkegaard Philosophical Fragments, which attempted to bridge philosophy, which Kreeft reminds us means “the love of wisdom,” and religion. Through Socrates’ investigation, Kreeft introduces the reader to Kierkegaard’s key concepts, subjectivity or selfhood, and the aesthetic, ethical, and religious “stages on life’s way.” Kreeft finds Kierkegaard is on the right track, declaring his ideas as “halfway between the philosophical-ethical-rational-secular and the religious,” befitting an attempt to move readers from philosophy to religious faith.
During the exchange, Kierkegaard rebuffs Socrates’ attempt to reason to belief and encourages his interlocutor to abandon his strict rationalism and make a leap of faith. Kierkegaard quite properly argues that Christianity is not provable or disprovable, and that is the point. We must have faith. Ultimately, Socrates is skeptical of making the leap but he is no longer content in the intellectual sphere in which he is left.
Unlike Socrates, Kreeft approaches his subjects with not only sound reasoning, but a deep rootedness in Christianity. This makes his dialogues deeper than Socrates’. But like Plato’s dialogues with Socrates, the conversations are blunt, to the point, eschewing flowery language or ornate argumentation. This makes the fictional conversations between the father of philosophy and the infamous fathers of idealism, Christian existentialism, psychoanalysis, communism, existentialism, modern philosophy, modern skepticism, and modern political philosophy accessible — but also nearly impossible to excerpt in a review. There are also touches of humour – a trait that Socrates famously did not possess – with Kreeft’s Socrates saying to Jean-Paul Sartre, “I promise I will try to be quick. Quicker than you were in most of your books, at any rate.”
While this reviewer did not do it, it would make a lot of sense to read Socrates Meets … alongside the individual philosopher’s works in question to help penetrate the ideas contained in them, to better understand what the philosophers are saying and the holes that may be poked in them due to their logical or historical shortcomings. Does Kant’s Categorical Imperative stand to scrutiny? Should we be skeptical of Hume’s skepticism? What to think of Machiavelli’s cynical rejection of idealism? Neither Kreeft nor Socrates tells us what to think about these and other ideas, but their dialogue will help readers think more clearly about those ideas and the philosophers who propagated them.
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