From Socrates to Sartre EP30 ⟩ “… And In Review”

These, the best overview lectures of all time, provide a complete college course in philosophy. Beginners will get clarity and adepts will be revitalized.

Thelma Zeno Lavine’s From Socrates to Sartre: The Philosophic Quest (1978) is the most riveting (her painstaking contortionist elocution), endearing (the eerie, theremin-laced Moog soundtrack, straight from the golden age of PBS), and confrontational (her radical politics and censorship-defying critiques) philosophy lecture series ever produced.

SERIES FINALE — … And In Review

Saint Thelma’s Final Sweep through the Canon
In this—the last episode of From Socrates to Sartre, entitled “...And In Review”—Thelma Lavine does her final good deed. She gives us a synoptic map of 2600 years of argument that isn’t vague and boring survey mush. Not easy.

And she begins, in the great 70s tradition of Zoom, by inviting and asking you about YOU —

• Who are you?
• What do you do?
• How are you?
• Let’s hear from you.
• We need you.

More precisely, she asks —

“Are you a Platonist, or are you a Cartesian or a Hegelian? Do you find that you are committed to the philosophy of one particular philosopher—such as Plato or Descartes or Hegel or Sartre—whom you regard as offering the most cogent view of the world?”

Who doesn’t love an invitation like that?

But you knew that the simple hook was just a trick. She then reminds us that every “ism” we casually reify is actually anchored in a determinate historical crisis. Plato’s theory of Forms is a weapon against the Sophists and Athenian democracy; Hume’s empiricism is a scalpel taken to rationalist metaphysics; Kant’s categories are a deliberate counter to both.

But this forces a necessary question: If each system is so tightly bound to its own moment, what survives as usable conceptual equipment for another age? Isn’t that the Hegelian question?

Lavine’s answer is the guiding thread of this episode and of our session:

• philosophers speak to their own time,
• and yet they also leave behind timeless conceptual structures that can be detached from their original battlefields and redeployed elsewhere.

She then proceeds to do exactly that redeployment work, briskly but with real precision, across the major branches of philosophy.

What Lavine Actually Does in This Episode

Ice-T once said, “Thelma’s got 99 problems in the history of philosophy—but doing a lazy survey ain’t one of them.” Why did he say that? Because rather than rehearse biographical trivia or one “signature” doctrine per figure, Lavine organizes the series’ six major philosophers by branch.

Behold —

Metaphysics: What is real?

• Plato — Platonic idealism: Forms as eternal, intelligible essences; the Good as source of reality, truth, and value; the visible world as shadow.
• Descartes — Psychophysical dualism: two irreducible kinds of substance, mental and extended, yielding the intractable mind–body problem.
• Hegel — Absolute idealism: reality as the totality of rational concepts embodied in history, culture, institutions; “the real is the rational” understood dynamically rather than as a frozen realm of Forms.

But wait …

• Hegel can’t quite secure absoluteness if reality is always in conceptual motion.
• Plato can’t quite secure historical change if reality is exhausted by immutable essences.

Theory of Knowledge (Epistemology): What can we know?

Lavine runs a clean arc from rationalism through empiricism to the Kantian turn and Hegel’s response:

• Plato — Rationalism: intellect as the only route to certainty; the divided line; Forms as the true objects of knowledge.
• Descartes — Mathematical rationalism: intuition and deduction as philosophical analogues of geometry; methodological skepticism; subjectivism (certainty rooted in the “I think”).
• Hume — Radical empiricism: “no impression, no idea”; demolition of metaphysics, necessary connection, and even personal identity as cognitively respectable notions.
• Kant — The mind as concept-furnished: categories that structure appearances but do not reach “things in themselves,” making “ultimate reality” unknowable and classical metaphysics impossible.
• Hegel — Rejection of Kantian unknowability: the dialectical structure of reality and the dialectical structure of reason are isomorphic, making reality in principle intelligible.

Ethics: What is ultimately good? What is right and wrong?

• Plato — Moral absolutism rooted in human essence: justice as the internal harmony of the tripartite soul under the rule of reason.
• Hume — Anti-rationalism in ethics: reason is the slave of the passions; only sentiments motivate.
• Hegel — Social ethics: the good as identification with the ethical life (Sittlichkeit) of one’s culture; alienation as estrangement from this shared normative order.
• Sartre — Existential ethics: radical freedom and responsibility, but with no prior moral values to authorize or justify our choices.

Political Philosophy

• Plato — Political absolutism grounded in philosophical knowledge of the Forms; the tripartite city mirroring the tripartite soul.
• Hegel — A different absolutism: the state as the embodiment of Absolute Mind; the individual existing “for” the state.
• Marx — The state and law as instruments of class domination; the dictatorship of the proletariat as a transitional form aiming at a classless society.

Philosophy of History

• Hegel — History as dialectical development in the consciousness of freedom; the method interprets the past but does not strictly predict the future.
• Marx — Taking dialectic as quasi-predictive: given the inner contradictions of capitalism, the next stage (proletarian revolution) is not just intelligible but necessary.

She closes by glancing at a series of “spark points” we’ve encountered throughout the series—Eros, the noble lie, mitigated skepticism, the master–slave dialectic, ideology, bad faith, nausea, the look, and so on—explicitly admitting that no review can do justice to the richness of these local conceptual inventions. As Prof. Taubeneck never tires of reminding us, the aim is not to secure closure but to widen the aperture—with greater sensitivity and sharper perspicacity.

So bring your vulnerability as we flay ourselves open before each other and expose which of these philosophical viruses comprises our primary infection. And bring your Kleenex as we bid a teary farewell to the philosophical nanny we were never given, but finally—absurdly—managed to acquire in mid-life.

...@_@...

METHOD

Please watch the tiny 27-minute episode before the event. We will then replay a few short clips during the event for debate and discussion. A version with vastly improved audio can be found here:

• Thelma Lavine: From Socrates to Sartre

Summaries, notes, event chatlogs, episode transcripts, timelines, tables, observations, and downloadable PDFs (seek the FSTS Book Vault) of the episodes we cover can be found here:

• THORR (The High Ontology Reading Room)

ABOUT PROFESSOR LAVINE

Dr. Lavine was professor of philosophy and psychology as Wells College, Brooklyn College, the University of Maryland (10 years), George Washington University (20), and George Mason University (13). She received the Outstanding Faculty Member award while at the University of Maryland and the Outstanding Professor award during her time at George Washington University.

She was not only a Dewey scholar, but a committed evangelist for American pragmatism.

View all of our coming episodes here.