To
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of my interests. I am sending it
to Philosophical Forums/Ethics,
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From my reading of Plato's Dialogues I have
concluded that to be like Socrates I must be (1) very careful about what I
believe, (2) very careful about how I speak, and (3) very careful about how I
live. Extraordinary care, rather than a particular belief, or produced speech,
or adopted way of life, is the sine qua non. I have the feeling that many
people, like me, want to be like Socrates, and that this will gain them the
name "philosopher."
My own thought and experience have led me to
conclude that meeting the above requirements is not humanly possible. The
greater the care anybody takes the greater the difficulties he or she is going
to raise. Though my experience is extensive and, I think, deep, my training in
philosophy is well behind that of others who appear on this forum. I am
interested in knowing whether or not I am right, and if not, where am I going
wrong. Also in anything else that might help conceive, state, or solve the
problem.
The problem is not meeting the three
requirements individually; it's meeting them in combination. I don't see it as
a logical or theoretical problem; I see it as a human one, arising in the
world. And it is best displayed, I think, through personal narrative, a story
of my own attempts to be a good follower of Socrates.
Begin with that care about belief. I was once
very careful about my belief in God. I had reviewed the findings of the people
I had carefully determined to be the most careful I could find, university
professors. Their care forced me to discard every proposition requiring belief
in God's existence. I believed that Richard Dawkins' book, The God Delusion,
cinched the case. Then I plunged into the world with my belief. I declared it
at coffee hour after church. And the world spoke back. "Great Heavens,
watch your words," said my wife on the way home. "You are going to
hurt a lot of feelings. Nobody will sit next to you if you aren't more
careful." I couldn't accuse my wife of carelessness. My extreme care had
made me the careless one. And thrown me into painful conflict.
Reflection showed me that I had created the
conflict by introducing requirement (3), being careful about how I lived. I had
decided that to live the good life I had to join the human race. Living alone
in my head or my office was not a good life. But the human race, I saw, lives
in tribes and you can't join one without respecting tribal beliefs and speaking
tribal words. I had joined the tribe of church-goers.
Belief-wise tribal words are careless words but
speech-wise they're just what care requires. Is it possible to get one right
without getting the other wrong? Well, in the coffee-hour case, apparently yes.
Long-time members of this church, known to me to be non-believers, must get it
right regularly. Nobody avoids sitting next to them. They maintain contact with
the human race. They show no signs of pain or conflict. I just have to be like
them.
What will it take? Tact, sensitivity,
rhetorical skill, as my wife may point out. Acquire those and I'll have it
right. Learning to take my wife's kind of care will solve my problem. I think I
am capable of that.
But have I faced the problem in its entirety?
Does my church coffee-hour take me deeply enough into the world? I don't know
what I am capable of until I've been fully tested. On then to this, the
toughest challenge I think I've faced. (And on with me, I hope, philosophers
suspicious of personal narrative. I believe that I can't present the full
problem, down in the world, without such narrative. Socrates didn't hesitate
and neither will I.)
I am at a contemporary dinner party. I know
that I have to take the kind of care my wife took with speech. And I can't give
up the kind of care Socrates taught me. I still want to be a philosopher. I see
that a more comprehensive kind of care will be required — to get my situation
in the world right, to solve my problem, to lead the good life, an examined
life — but I haven't learned to exercise that kind of care yet.
All right, at the table, questions of the day.
Urgent questions. Is it true that blacks perform poorly in the classroom? Is it
true that desire to perform well is not much encouraged by black parents? by
fellow blacks in school? Is there a problem with black culture? I, careful as I
can be, report as fact the findings of those people that , again, I have
carefully determined to be the most careful I can find. So that we all can go
on to the big question: What do blacks need to do to get out of the fix they're
in? Over the horizon is the question, What can whites do to help? On the way
home my wife tells me that my reported facts have hurt a lot of feelings and
that I could wind up not being invited back.
She has shown me the prior problem. Before
worrying about speech or belief you've got to worry about where you are,
whether you're in a tribe or not, and if you are in a tribe, which one? On this
night I, with all my learned skill, had gotten my tribe wrong and seriously
underestimated tribal beliefs.
Now I came to that party thinking of the
academic tribe, descended from the tribe of Socrates, as the tribeless tribe,
or at least as the tribe that aspired to tribelessness, the one tribe that did
so. That gave it an advantage in solving problems. Its members started with a
more objective view of reality, where the causes of the problem were found.
They avoided tribal distortions. Example: When they reported the percentage of
blacks being incarcerated they included the percentages that give it meaning:
the percentage of blacks in the population and the percentage of blacks
committing crimes. Failure to do this distorted the picture, and revealed
tribal interest.
Members of the academic tribe did not, in my
mind, engage in war, cultural or physical, but messages from them could be very
helpful to warring tribes in solving their problems. At the table I tried to
deliver what I thought would be a helpful message because I wanted to live the
good life. A good life to me was a life engagé.
Does the fact that the engagement failed here
mean that such engagements will inevitably fail? No. The delivery was botched.
Though I had taken account of who the audience was, and where they were, I had
failed to take into account the times in which they and I were living, the
when. This was the postmodern era. My tribeless tribe was being called
"the tribe that kids themselves." Appeals to "reality" and
"objectivity" were being denied. The message I was delivering had, in
itself, insufficient weight to counter the weights — mainly the hurt to feelings
— already against it.
So there's a problem prior to the prior
problem. And I don't see a good solution, or at least one I am capable of. Yes,
the objective message that hurts feelings may be just what warring tribes need,
and yes, Socrates, the unexamined life is "not worth living," and
yes, Max Beerbohm, the examined life "is no bowl of cherries either,"
but I'm a frail human being, and I'm not up to knowing everything I need to
know about an era that will affect my message.
What I don't know is
whether or not I am an exception, whether there are other human beings who can
solve this problem. Until I know that I am not justified in concluding that
meeting the requirements to be like Socrates, and be called a philosopher, is
not humanly possible.
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