328. Article for a philosophy journal: request for suggestions.

This is the fruit of recent posts.  I haven't decided where to send it yet and would appreciate suggestions about that too.

A Problem with Socrates as a Model for the Philosopher

For some Socrates is the model teacher.  Be like him before students, using the question-and-answer method, and at the end you will have them telling you what you want to tell them. For some he is the model inquirer.  Be like him looking outward, theorizing and testing and checking, and at the end you will have the most reliable knowledge of the world.  Be like him looking inward and you will have the most reliable knowledge of yourself.  And for some, adding his pursuit of the good life, he is even higher on his pedestal, the model philosopher.  And he has been this model for a long time.

No wonder then that those who want to be, or be called, a philosopher, try to be like him.  I see them examining his behavior in Plato's Dialogues, and, if they do that carefully, coming up with something like this: one must be (1) very careful about what one believes, (2) very careful about how one speaks, and (3) very careful about how one lives. Extraordinary care, rather than a particular belief, or produced speech, or adopted way of life, that is what distinguishes Socrates and, insofar as he stands for him, the philosopher.

I take it that in distinguishing Socrates in this way I am also distinguishing the scientist.  Never mind that many of Socrates' (or Plato's) beliefs fall quickly under the scientist's tests.  It was the method that counted, the conjecturing and testing and checking and re-theorizing that produced reliable belief.  Distinguish the scientist and you have distinguished the West.  You have distinguished the tradition unique to it, the academic tradition. And Socrates started that.

I am working in that tradition when I make the following conjecture and submit it in this article for test by its readers: that it is impossible for a human being  to meet the requirements to be like Socrates.  My submission, though, will be outside of part of that tradition, the scientific part, in that it will not limit itself to impersonal observation.  For reasons that I hope will be come clear it will rely on personal narrative.  It assumes that scientists, if they could have a report from the rat in the maze, would welcome it.

All right, I'll begin with my care about belief.  I was once very careful [this rat wants to be a philosopher] 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 my belief at coffee hour after a church service.  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 [this is a thinking rat] 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.  I had joined the tribe of church-goers.

My wife had pointed out  that you can't join a tribe without respecting tribal beliefs and speaking tribal words.  Belief-wise tribal words are careless words but speech-wise they're just what care requires.  I had been careless.

Is it possible to be careful one way without being careless the other?  Well, looking at the coffee-hour crowd I had to say yes.  Long-time members of this church, known to me to be non-believers, must have gotten it right regularly.  Nobody avoided sitting next to them.  They maintained contact with the human race.  They showed no signs of pain or conflict.  I just had to be like them.

What would it take?  Tact, sensitivity, rhetorical skill, as my wife could point out.  Acquire those and I'd have it right.  Learning to take my wife's kind of care would solve my problem.  I thought I was capable of that. 

But had I faced the problem in its entirety?  Did my church coffee-hour take me deeply enough into the world, into its most difficult challenges?  I don't know what I am capable of until I've been fully tested. 

On then to this, the most difficult challenge I think I have faced.  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, 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 — of blacks and their friends, mostly — 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 in the United States they included the percentages that give such a percentage relevance: 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 inadequate to the need.  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 was a problem prior to the prior problem.  And I didn't see a good solution, or at least one I was capable of.  "Yes," I said to my academic colleagues, "the objective message that hurts feelings may be just what warring tribes need," and "Yes," I said to Socrates, "the unexamined life is not worth living," and "Yes," I said to Max Beerbohm, "the examined life is no bowl of cherries either," I know all that, 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.

Joining the scientist we can say that the maze is too difficult for this rat.  Will it be too difficult for all rats?  Can no rat ever be a philosopher on the model of Socrates?  The scientist can't say.  All he can say is that a rat of a certain capacity, willing and able to report on his experience, attempted to follow the Socratic model under the most difficult circumstances he could find and failed.  Though it might have been possible for him to meet each of the requirements individually it was impossible for him to meet them in combination, at the same time.

Though the eras and tests will vary, historians tell me that if I think there are other eras where the challenges are simpler and easier, then I haven't looked closely enough.  And if I think there are other rats able to meet challenges like this, super rats, psychologists will tell me I haven't read their work closely enough.  And when I learn from linguists of all the changes in the weight of words, in hurt or credibility, changes that will not stop, and count up all the eras and all the tribes causing and reflecting those changes, and that I would have to know about, my intuition tells me that it would be very unlikely that there would be a brain with all the capacity, and all cells and all the synapses, that, even at the highest firing speeds, could take it all in and make the owner of that brain, even if he had the determination and persistence and other traits of character Socrates had, able to take the kind of comprehensive care required of him.  Thus my conclusion: it is not humanly possible to be a philosopher on the Socratic model.