Bluegrass Socrates

LISTEN. Are Socrates and Plato really Wendell Berry's spiritual ancestors? 

That may be a little glib. But Socrates the gadfly definitely modeled an aggressive and alienating version of Wendell's more reserved and honeyed way of persisting in the face of scorn and opposition to uphold what's right, and to insist on honesty in our mutual relations with people and places. He modeled strong loyalty to one's native grounds (see Plato's account of Socrates' rationale for accepting the state's ultimate injustice in Crito). Port Royal KY is Wendell's Athens. Fortunately no one will make the Mad Farmer drink hemlock.

Likening Wendell to Plato the metaphysical Idealist may be a harder case to make. If you believe your world is shadowy, cut off from light and eternity, second-rate compared to an abstraction like the Form of the Good, you're not a Wendell Berryan. "Abstraction is the enemy wherever it is found. You can't act locally by thinking globally." A Berryan thinks a concrete commitment to locality is prerequisite to the formation of an effective and informed global consciousness.

A Berryan has little use for philosopher-kings either. Or governors.

The opposite of an abstraction is someplace, some quite specifically distinctive place, to plant your feet and hang your hat. It's home. Home, in the first instance, is something we're born to. But then it's up to us to continue making a home for ourselves and keeping it, sustaining it, sharing it, bequeathing it. Home is Wendell's great theme, and in fact I think it is the great unnamed theme of many and possibly most philosophers. Socrates and Plato for sure... Epicurus and other "graceful life philosophers" who say our happiness depends on making ourselves at home here in the "forest" of earth rather than feeling lost in it ("Hang a sign on a tree that says Home and be done with it") .... Carl Sagan and other cosmic philosophers who say we are born to be cosmopolitans, citizens of the entire cosmos... And on we could go. So we will, in the coming weeks of our semester.

Our challenge is to expand the boundaries of home to include the planet and its intricately interconnected living systems. We must begin where we are. It's not helpful, Wendell would tell Plato, to begin with the assumption that where we are is a benighted subterranean Nowhere, a cave. Get out in the field, in the sunshine. Walk in the woods.

Funny thing is, Socrates would probably tell Plato the same thing. Probably did.

Here's a great introduction by Bill Moyers to Wendell and the place he calls home, nicely complementing a more recent conversation in which WB tells Eric Schlosser (author of Fast Food Nation) it is more than possible to be happy and hopeful in troubled times. It is indispensable.

"What does this earth require of us

if we want to continue to live on it?" -WB

Today in Environmental Ethics we begin The World-Ending Fire with "A Native Hill": "Take today for what it is, I counsel myself. Let it be enough... there is peace, too...the times when the creature rests, communes with himself or with his kind, takes pleasure in being alive."

And then he talks about those ducks that inspired his poem about peace, and about a moment when they were truly one with their element. "The moment was whole in itself, satisfying to them and to me."

And then he says "there is not only peacefulness, there is joy... a free nonhuman joy in the world... something heavenly in the earth." 

And finally, of his own final and eternal rest "as I sink under the leaves... It is acceptable to me, and I am at peace."

Wendell's own source of hope and peace is not quite mine, though I think I understand what he means by taking no thought for the morrow which "doesn't exist" and of which we thus can know nothing. But, whatever works in getting us to get on with doing the right thing, patiently and steadfastly for the long haul, the Long Now. 

For 10,000 years, for starters. For the whole earth.

An old post considers just how "down to earth," like Wendell, the real Socrates must have been.

In CoPhi today [2.18.20], 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.