What a gorgeous day we had in middle Tennessee yesterday, perfect weather for biking at Edwin Warner and hiking at the Burch Reserve Trail. Spring was in the air. I'm ready.
It's Wallace Stegner's birthday. We had a little scroll from his Spectator Bird for the guests at our wedding.
The truest vision of life I know is that bird in the Venerable Bede that flutters from the dark into a lighted hall, and after a while flutters out again into the dark. But it is something--it can be everything--to have found a fellow bird with whom you can sit among the rafters while the drinking and boasting and reciting and fighting go on below; a fellow bird whom you can look after and find bugs and seeds for; one who will patch your bruises and straighten your ruffled feathers and mourn over your hurts when you accidentally fly into something you can't handle.
In CoPhi today, we'll search for the real Socrates.
Those who know Socrates mainly through the writings of Plato – Xenophon’s near-exact contemporary – will find Xenophon’s Socrates something of a surprise. Plato’s Socrates claims to know nothing, and flamboyantly refutes the knowledge claims of others. In the pages of Xenophon’s Memorabilia, however, Socrates actually answers philosophical questions, dispenses practical life advice, provides arguments proving the existence of benevolent gods, converses as if peer-to-peer with a courtesan, and even proposes a domestic economy scheme whereby indigent female relatives can become productive through the establishment of a textile business at home... this Socrates takes his conversation partner through logical steps that are not designed to refute him or humiliate him, but to awaken him to a different way of looking at the natural world... It’s not brow-beating, but gentle leading, which leaves his intellectual self-respect intact. This is a hallmark of Xenophon’s Socrates.Another recent re-take of "the real Socrates" suggests a less buttoned-down version, "more worldly and amorous than we knew." More importantly, it cites Aristotle's insistence that Socrates was more sympathetic to his own philosophy than to Plato's. "For him, Socrates was also a more down-to-earth thinker than Plato sought to depict... the picture of Socrates bequeathed by Plato should not be accepted uncritically."
On the heels of Valentine's Day, note: Socrates "is famous for saying: ‘All I know is that I know nothing.’ But the one thing he claims, in Plato’s Symposium, that he does know about, is love, which he learned about from a clever woman." Diotima? Or "an instructor of eloquence and relationship counsellor" called Aspasia?
Either way, the iconic version of Socrates is of one who values extended and even interminable conversations that disabuse all interlocutors of any dogmatic assurance they may have erroneously assumed. The wise know that they know not. And so it's very hard to believe that the real Socrates would have endorsed Plato's rigidly top-down authoritarian Republic.
After all, Socrates is one of the deepest roots of our "reflex to disbelieve official explanations." Fantasyland also reminds us today that the suspicion and paranoia endemic to public life in our day is rooted in a bad old habit of inventing conspiracies where none exist. The Freemasons, for instance, are and always were simply a fraternal organization for guys who like to socialize and "perform goofy secret rituals," not a pernicious cabal out to rule the world.
In A&P today we'll hear from Heather of Christopher Hitchens, mortality, and meaning. I'm fond of quoting Hitch's answer to the nihilist (or Extreme Existentialist) who proclaims meaninglessness as our natural condition. "A life that partakes even a little of friendship, love, irony, humor, parenthood, literature, and music, and the chance to take part in battles for the liberation of others cannot be called 'meaningless' except if the person living it is also an existentialist and elects to call it so. It could be that all existence is a pointless joke, but it is not in fact possible to live one's everyday life as if this were so." That's pragmatism to the rescue again.
I like Walter Glannon's statement: "We do not 'find' meaning in the brain, any more than an existentialist 'finds' meaning in the world. Rather, we construct it from the actions we perform on the basis of our brain-enabled mental capacities... There is more to persons than can be dreamed of in our neuroscience."
Socrates would like that too. Plato, I'm not so sure. Aristotle? Definitely.
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