The Irony of Zen

Ten years ago, I was teaching a course called, “The Curse of Socrates” at The University of Texas at Austin. Two of the texts that I chose for the course as the primary texts were Robert Pirsig’s Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance and Plato’s magnum opus, The Republic, which is, on the surface, Socrates’ attempt to describe what the “perfect” city, would be like. He is ambushed leaving the port of Peiraeus by Polemarchus and his entourage after having attending the apparently inaugural celebration of the Thracian Atermis, known as Bendis.

Polemarchus coerces Socrates to come back to his house, where the conversation that is to be the discussion of the ideal city takes place. Plato’s own brothers, Adeimantus and Glaucon were apparently present in the discussion as is the main interlocutor, Thrasymachus, who turns out to be quite hostile to Socrates’ badgering of questioning and answering. Socrates had initially been asking the aged Cephalus about what he saw as being “Justice” with the advanced wisdom of his age. The discussion goes on a bit, but is inherited by Polemarchus, his son, taking up the definition that Justice is “doing good to your friends and harm to your enemies.” Eventually, as Polemarchus proves to not to be up to the taxing questions of Socrates as the Athenian gadfly eventual has him admitting that Justice is only useful in being useless.

Thrasymachus, a self-proclaimed know-it-all, cannot contain himself any longer and lunges into the conversation during a lacuna, like “a wild beast” and chastises Socrates for his usual way of escaping his own method of being questioned as Thrasymarchus says that he is clever enough to know that asking questions is easier than answering them. Socrates then agrees to allow Thrasymarchus to seemingly take control of the argument and yields by saying that it is Socrates’ own lack of ability that prevents him and that he should listen to one so clever as Thrasymarchus instead and from him receive pity rather than being berated.

To this, Thrasymarchus exclaims with a burst of “sardonic laughter,” that here is the “h eiothuia eironeia Sokratous,” or, the famous Socratic Irony. Thrasymarchus’ hostility and frustration with Socrates is not uncommon with those who are most confident in their own intellectual acumen. Yet, the harder they push, the more frustrated they become with Socrates asking “the wrong questions” and badgering them and annoying them. Yet, they chose to stay in the discussion because they claim to know something based upon the words of the so-called “experts” in the field. Socrates is not asking for a book-learned answer. Also, they may leave if they wish.

The mistake that Thrasymarchus makes, as do many a frustrated reader of Plato, is rather simple. Socrates is not looking for an answer. That is the irony that they fail to see. Instead, they keep refining their original answer, or saying it louder, becoming more and more irritated at Socrates, rather than possibly thinking that perhaps their own view is the one that is being stubborn. When asking, “What is Justice?” Socrates is not asking anything more than, “What is the sound of one hand clapping?” And yet, Thrasymarchus and his ilk will turn blue in the face being angry with the question, too blind with their own importance to grasp the irony of the situation. It is with little wonder that the generation of western scholars soon became known as “The Schoolmen,” preferring the apparent “scientific” answers that Plato's rebellious student, Aristotle provided and which served as a placebo for the gnawing inside them that Socrates had left them.