Liberal Arts and Sciences

The roots of the early forms of critical thinking among free citizens were found in ancient Greece (circa. 5th century B.C.). Prominent among this nascent critical reasoning environment in Athens were ongoing dialogues and debates involving Socrates, itinerant wisdom teachers known as Sophists, young elite males, and the free citizens of the city. The Sophists’ training methods, in particular, were based on intellectual machiavellianism, that is, using approaches to train and encourage the young, in particular, to achieve worldly success through the unethical use of words, thinking, and rhetoric; this approach certainly appealed to ambitious albeit powerless youngsters, but must have deeply concerned some of the guardians like Socrates in the Greek city-state of Athens. While it is true that Athens is the birthplace of Democracy, most of the residents were slaves. Work was considered to be a curse within Athenian society, and thus, there was a need to replenish the work force through war booty or through its many non-citizen émigrés from abroad. However, while it was the case generally that many free Athenian citizens owned their slaves, the former were nonetheless captives, in an intellectual and spiritual sense, to the ruling elites of Athens; while many Athenian citizens did participate on juries and in elections within the polis, they were not allowed to critically question Athens’s religion, with its biased, arbitrary, and capricious gods. Athens during the late 5th and early 4th centuries had been a time and place of tragedies and hopes for its inhabitants. The Peloponnesian War had recently come to an end (404 B.C.E.), with the consequence of having established illiberal Sparta as the regional superpower. This event also enabled the Thirty Tyrants, a pro-Spartan oligarchy, to suspend the nascent democratic enterprise in Athens for nearly a year before it was restored through the Phyle Campaign. The Athenian cultural ethos leading up to this tragic period was centered on the shallow idea that it was only beauty, strength, and intelligence which characterized virtue in life. Ultimately, Athenian society had committed civilizational overreach, in that, in order for its cultural and material prosperity to continue, it had to expand its resources acquisition strategies further afield throughout the Greek isles, and this required brutal military campaigns. Moreover, leading up to the Athenian defeat by the Spartans, Athens had welcomed many itinerant teachers from Sicily and other places and none were more popular than the Sophists. As Sophists were known for their ability to teach their students how to use rhetoric in unethical ways, many Athens’ emerging democratic leaders became more adept at winning debates using weak or deceptive rhetoric, than in engaging in a search for truth to benefit the polis. Young Athenian boys, the pride and future of Athens, were thus being corrupted by the Sophists by developing in them a regressive, rather than a critical and progressive habit of mind; this type of educational process prevented Athenians from learning how to actually critically analyze the irrational and corrupt assumptions underpinning Athens’s 5th century B.C.E. culture. The time had come to begin changing Athenian culture to a way of life based on better thinking and the good; Socrates would begin this shift and initiate many Athenians into the first Age of Reason. Socrates and new ways of thinking The entry of Socrates, considered now to be the father of critical inquiry, into the marketplace of ideas marked the beginning of a the West’s commitment to reason and dialogue as the more appropriate tool of persuasion for the free citizen, not only capricious political or religious power,. This had an empowering effect, in that, the average citizen without elite political power could influence the course of events in the polis or in their local communities. He would prove to be the fallen hero of his time by countering the Sophists’ influence and exposing the old order’s hypocrisy. If intellectual Machiavellianism was the emerging and popular Sophist teaching and learning approach, then Socrates would respond with a dialogical educational method intended to democratize knowledge construction, or what philosophy calls epistemology, at the street level.