THE WAY OF CONFUCIUS AND SOCRATES
For our discussion is not about some ordinary matter, but the way one should live.
—Socrates
Set your heart upon the Way.
—Confucius
PHILOSOPHY’S SPECIAL ROLE AMONG THE HUMANITIES
To paraphrase Frost, I have a lover’s quarrel with academic philosophy. Although the narrow-mindedness of many contemporary philosophers infuriates me, I love philosophy itself: I love teaching it, and I love discussing it with students and colleagues. I also recognize that academic philosophy has a very distinctive role to play in higher education, especially today. I’ve mentioned in earlier chapters that philosophy teaches reading, writing, and reasoning, but in a way that is distinctive from other disciplines. Let me explain more clearly what I mean.
In many institutions, philosophy is one of the few humanities disciplines, and sometimes the only humanities discipline, that still reads classic texts with what is known as a “hermeneutic of faith.” Those who use a hermeneutic of faith read texts in the hope of discovering truth, goodness, and beauty. They are open to the possibility that other people, including people in very different times and cultures, might know more about these things than we do, or at least they might have views that can enrich our own in some way. Of course, if you take seriously the possibility that others are right, you also have to take seriously the possibility that they are wrong. (It’s a hermeneutic of faith, not a hermeneutic of blind faith.) And if you are torn between which of two options is right, or at least better than the other, you have to discuss what reasons you have for believing in one or the other. It might seem that this is the obvious or only way to read philosophical, literary, and religious texts, but it is not. There are two major alternative approaches to a hermeneutic of faith: hermeneutics of suspicion and relativism.
Many contemporary humanists and social scientists emphasize a hermeneutic of suspicion. Those using a hermeneutic of suspicion look for motives for the composition of a text that are unrelated to its truth or plausibility. Instead, they ask how the text serves ulterior motives like economic interests and relations of dominance and oppression, as well as sexist, racist, or imperialist conceptions of the world. Many of those who use a hermeneutic of suspicion reject as naïve a hermeneutic of faith. I once gave a presentation to a multidisciplinary program in which I outlined different philosophical perspectives one can take on cross-cultural ethical disagreements. The first comment after my talk was from an anthropologist who began, “The fact is, Bryan,… ” and proceeded to explain to me that everything I said was absolutely irrelevant because the only thing that is really important is how cultural relations are dictated by economic interests. I replied that, while I agree that the issues she brought up are very important, this does not mean we shouldn’t also be interested in what we ought or ought not to do, or at least in understanding more clearly what our options are. She merely stared at me with the look of condescension and disgust one might use on an adolescent who should know better than to be picking his nose at the dinner table.
Those who completely reject a hermeneutic of faith do not only have a narrow perspective; their position is simply incoherent. If you give an interpretation of a text using a hermeneutic of suspicion, you are asking your readers to take what you are saying about that text as a candidate for truth. In other words, the very act of interpretation assumes the validity of a hermeneutic of faith. I am not saying that it is wrong to use a hermeneutic of suspicion. The varieties of hermeneutics of suspicion are indispensable parts of our contemporary scholarly toolkit. You’ll notice that I have used a hermeneutic of suspicion at a number of points in this book. My objection is only to the exclusive use of hermeneutics of suspicion. I am concerned that hermeneutics of suspicion have become hegemonic in the humanities and social sciences. Philosophy departments are often the last refuge of the hermeneutics of faith.
The other alternative to a hermeneutics of faith is a sort of relativism, which suggests that if you believe something then it is “true for you.” While hermeneutics of suspicion deserve to be taken seriously, relativism does not. There are two forms of relativism, cognitive and ethical.1 According to cognitive relativism, the truth or falsity of all claims depends upon the perspective from which they are evaluated. (For the cognitive relativist, “true” and “false” are like “front” and “back,” in that they implicitly make reference to a point of view.) As Plato demonstrated in ancient Greece and the Mohists demonstrated in ancient China, we can see why this doctrine is incoherent by trying to apply it to itself.2 Is cognitive relativism itself objectively true or only relatively true? If you say that relativism is objectively true, then not all claims are relative, so cognitive relativism is false. (And if cognitive relativism is objectively true, why can’t other claims be objectively true too?) If you say that relativism is only relatively true, then from the perspective of those of us who deny it, relativism is false, and we may safely ignore it. (In fact, those of us who deny cognitive relativism believe that it is objectively false, so the cognitive relativist must agree that his view is objectively false.)
Ethical relativism asserts that the truth or falsity of evaluative claims (and only evaluative claims) depends upon the perspective from which they are evaluated. Ethical relativism is not intrinsically incoherent. (Since ethical relativism itself is not an evaluative claim—it is a purely semantic claim about evaluative claims—it does not apply to itself, so it is not self-undermining the way cognitive relativism is.) However, ethical relativism is a banal dead end in philosophy. Suppose you are unsure about whether capital punishment can be justified for some crimes. One kind of ethical relativism tells you that it depends on what you individually think. Does that help? Imagine you are torn about whether drones should be used to kill suspected terrorists. It depends upon what your culture thinks, says another kind of ethical relativism. Since Americans disagree about whether drones should be used to kill suspected terrorists, you now have to decide which “subculture” you belong to. Are you any closer to a decision now? Students often think that there is something more tolerant about relativism. This is simply a conceptual confusion. According to relativism, whether you should be tolerant of others depends upon the point of view you adopt. If you adopt the point of view of xenophobic nationalists, then you ought to be intolerant. If it seems that I am grumpy about relativism, it’s because I am. In my more than thirty years of experience as a teacher, I have found that every single time relativism comes up it is invoked by those who wish to insulate their opinions from criticism, not those who wish to bring new voices into the conversation or discuss issues in a more open-minded way. In short, when the conversation gets challenging, the challenged turn relativist.
It is important that philosophy is one of the last bastions of the hermeneutic of faith, and a discipline that is willing to challenge relativism. But of course this is not what is definitive of philosophy. Other disciplines in the humanities can and occasionally do use a hermeneutic of faith. If we look at the broad sweep of activities that have been called “philosophy” (and its cognate terms) in Western history, there is no common methodology they employ, nor any set of topics they all discuss. In other words, there are no necessary and sufficient conditions for defining what has been called “philosophy” across all of history, even if we limit the discussion to the West.3 However, I am foolhardy enough to propose a definition of what philosophy is for us now. We are doing philosophy when we engage in dialogue about problems that are important to our culture but we don’t agree about the method for solving them.4 In game theory, a game is said to be “solved” once there is an algorithm that determines the best move in each situation. Using the notion of a “solved game” as an analogy, we could say succinctly that “philosophy is dialogue about important unsolved problems.” Once we do agree about the method for solving a problem, the problem gets kicked out of philosophy and into its own discipline. Consequently (as we noted in chapter 4), astronomy, biology, chemistry, mathematics, and physics began as parts of philosophy, but are now separate fields because in each case there is (generally) agreement about what counts as reliable evidence, good arguments, and well-established conclusions. Viewing it in this way, we can see why philosophy is like a glacier: it moves so slowly that it appears to be going nowhere, but in the long run it radically transforms the world you live in.
The fact that philosophy deals with problems that we are unsure how to solve is part of what makes it tempting to “build walls” around it.5 We may be seduced into simplifying seemingly intractable philosophical problems by narrowing the number of solutions we consider and the premises we entertain. However, a moment’s reflection shows that this sort of strategy is counterproductive. You cannot have confidence in the accuracy of your conclusions, or even the usefulness of your method, if you rule out in advance alternative perspectives on the problems under discussion. As Alasdair MacIntyre has stressed, “any claim to truth involves a claim that no consideration advanced from any point of view can overthrow or subvert that claim. Such a claim, however, can only be supported on the basis of rational encounters between rival and incommensurable points of view.”6 Consequently, it is a fundamental failure of rationality to rule out multicultural critiques a priori.
I want to stress again that “dialogue about methodologically unsolved but important questions” is what philosophy is for us now (in extension if not in intension). Philosophers of earlier eras or different cultures typically categorize what they are doing differently.7 This is something we need to keep continually in mind so that we have a genuinely sympathetic and accurate understanding of their projects as a whole. However, we can (without injustice) describe what they are doing as philosophy, in our sense, if we recognize what they are discussing as potential answers to similar questions to the ones we philosophers discuss today. And, as we have seen repeatedly in this book, we frequently do find thinkers in other cultures addressing the important unsolved problems in ethics, metaphysics, political philosophy, logic, and the philosophy of language that we still wrestle with. Consequently, it is both legitimate and productive to treat them as philosophers in our sense, and bring them into the dialogue.
What I mean by “dialogue” can take various forms. Philosophers sometimes provide arguments in favor of philosophical claims. Nonphilosophers often have trouble grasping what philosophers mean by an “argument.” An argument is not simply a disagreement or a quarrel. In an argument, you try to convince someone of a particular claim (your conclusion) by drawing her attention to other claims (your premises) that you think she will agree with, and that give a good reason to accept your conclusion. What counts as a “good reason”? And are there some premises that everyone ought to agree about? Well, if we all agreed about the premises and what counts as a good reason, we wouldn’t be doing philosophy anymore; we’d be doing astronomy, or biology, or mathematics, or some other methodologically “solved” discipline.
Providing arguments is undoubtedly an important part of philosophical “dialogue.” However, I think philosophers in the English-speaking world sometimes make one of two mistakes about philosophical argumentation. First, there are many ways to express and construct an argument. The structure of some arguments is very clear. For example, Wang Chong (first century CE) presents the following argument against survival after death:
Humans are animals. Even if exalted as a king or lord, one’s nature is no different from an animal. There are no animals that do not die, so how could humans be immortal?8
Contrast Wang Chong’s syllogistic argument with the more discursive and poetic style that Plato uses when he constructs the allegory of the cave in book 7 of The Republic. In this dialogue, Socrates invites his interlocutor Glaucon to
compare the effect of education and of the lack of it on our nature to an experience like this: Imagine human beings living in an underground, cavelike dwelling, with an entrance a long way up, which is both open to the light and as wide as the cave itself. They’ve been there since childhood, fixed in the same place, with their necks and legs fettered, able to see only in front of them, because their bonds prevent them from turning their heads around. Light is provided by a fire burning far above and behind them. Also behind them, but on higher ground, there is a path stretching between them and the fire. Imagine that along this path a low wall has been built, like the screen in front of puppeteers above which they show their puppets.
I’m imagining it.
Then also imagine that there are people along the wall, carrying all kinds of artifacts that project above it—statues of people and other animals, made out of stone, wood, and every material. And, as you’d expect, some of the carriers are talking, and some are silent.
It’s a strange image you’re describing and strange prisoners.
They’re like us. Do you suppose, first of all, that these prisoners see anything of themselves and one another besides the shadows that the fire casts on the wall in front of them?
How could they, if they have to keep their heads motionless throughout life.…
Then the prisoners would in every way believe that the truth is nothing other than the shadows of those artifacts.
They must surely believe that.
Consider, then, what being released from their bonds and cured of their ignorance would naturally be like. When one of them was freed and suddenly compelled to stand up, turn his head, walk, and look up toward the light, he’d be pained and dazzled and unable to see the things whose shadows he’d seen before.… And if someone dragged him away from there by force, up the rough, steep path, and didn’t let him go until he had dragged him into the sunlight, wouldn’t he be pained, and irritated at being treated that way? And when he came into the light, with the sun filling his eyes, wouldn’t he be unable to see a single one of the things now said to be true?9
Socrates describes how the person would gradually adjust his eyes to the sunlight and come to recognize that the things he had taken to be real in the cave were just shadows of things that were themselves merely copies of the real things that existed outside the cave.
What about when he reminds himself of his first dwelling place, his fellow prisoners, and what passed for wisdom there? Don’t you think that he’d count himself happy for the change and pity the others?
Certainly.
This whole image, Glaucon, must be fitted together with what we said before. The visible realm should be likened to the prison dwelling, and the light of the fire inside it to the power of the sun. And if you interpret the upward journey and the study of things above as the upward journey of the soul to the intelligible realm, you’ll grasp what I hope to convey.10
Plato uses this elaborate allegory to explain how a proper education leads students to question their common-sense beliefs (represented by the shadows in the cave) and gradually rise to an understanding of reality through reason and mathematics. Aristotle argues in a similarly poetic mode that pleasure cannot be the goal of life, because pleasure is not itself a complete activity, but rather “completes the activity … like the bloom on [the cheek of] youths.”11 As we can see from these examples, Western philosophy largely consists of quaint myths and poetry, in contrast with the precise argumentation that is characteristic of Chinese philosophers.
My mainstream philosophical colleagues are champing at the bit to point out that I have taken these selections from Plato and Aristotle out of context. The allegory of the cave is part of a complex and subtle epistemological and ethical project. Aristotle’s poetic comment about pleasure comes at the end of a tightly argued discussion, and must be interpreted in the light of his nuanced view of properties. You’re quite right. But perhaps now you can understand my frustration with those who treat Chinese philosophy as nothing but context-less kōans or fortune-cookie platitudes. Reading philosophy requires an effort to think about the text holistically, constructively, and charitably. We are used to doing this with Western texts that we identify as philosophical. The fact that Aristotle, or Descartes, or Kant, or Russell is often hard to understand, or is seemingly contradictory, or occasionally gives what appear to be unpersuasive arguments only inspires us to read more carefully, interpret creatively, and reconstruct or even supply arguments. But many philosophers, when they come to non-European philosophy, simply roll their eyes and throw up their hands in frustration at the first knotty passage or unfamiliar technical term, like a petulant freshman confronting Plato for the first time. I cannot prevent anyone from being narrow-minded or intellectually lazy. But I would much prefer you did not excuse your intellectual vices by ignoring the fact that reading philosophy—any philosophy from any tradition—is always hard work.
I have noted that one common mistake in Anglophone philosophy is to pretend that all philosophical arguments (at least in the Western tradition) are in tight syllogisms or are transparent at first glance, when in reality almost none are. A second common mistake is the tendency to overemphasize argumentation, as if that were the only thing that philosophers do in dialogue. Another important aspect of philosophical dialogue is the classification and clarification of alternatives. Gilbert Ryle was doing this when he distinguished between “knowing how” and “knowing that.”12 The Confucian Mengzi (fourth century BCE) was doing this when he gave three different paradigms of what courage is (aggressive behavior, fearlessness, and action in accordance with a strong sense of righteousness).13
In addition to presenting arguments and clarifying alternatives, a third goal of philosophical dialogue is providing substantially new perspectives or answers to questions. Even if one did nothing else, this is a significant contribution to philosophical discussion. This can involve a narrow suggestion on a specific topic. Karl Popper is largely remembered now for his claim that science is distinguished from nonscience because we know what kinds of tests would falsify a scientific claim. Although this is merely a suggestion for an answer to the question of “What is science?” (and a demonstrably mistaken one at that), it is a contribution to philosophical dialogue. Similarly, when Confucius’s disciple Youzi suggests that the virtue of benevolence develops out of love for family members, this is in itself a valuable contribution to philosophical discussion in ethics.14
Among the less commonly taught philosophies (LCTP), the ones that I know the most about are the Three Teachings of the Chinese tradition: Buddhism, Confucianism, and Daoism; I also have some familiarity with the Advaita Vedanta school of the Indian tradition. It is absolutely indisputable to anyone who actually bothers to learn about these traditions that they discuss the sort of “important unsolved topics” that we recognize as philosophical, and engage in all three of the methodologies characteristic of philosophical dialogue. In regard to other non-European traditions, I do not wish to make the same mistake I have criticized others for making and pontificate about them in ignorance. However, based on what little I know about African philosophies and the philosophies of the Indigenous peoples of the Americas, they at the very least provide substantial new perspectives on how to understand the world, and for this reason have earned their place in the philosophical dialogue.15 The other LCTP (including African American, Christian, feminist, Islamic, Jewish, Latin American, and LGBTQ philosophy) are historically related to the Greco-Roman tradition, so they are transparently philosophical.
Philosophers in the Western hermeneutic tradition—including Heidegger, Gadamer, Habermas, Ricoeur, and Rorty—recognize the centrality of dialogue not just to philosophy but to all of human existence. However, many of them have failed to appreciate another of the key ethical requirements of dialogue: to be open to new voices, alternative solutions, fresh vocabularies, and different formulations of the same or similar problems from outside the Anglo-European tradition. In some cases, as with Gadamer, this can perhaps be forgiven as part of the limited cultural “horizon” in which the philosopher came to maturity. In other cases, as with Heidegger, hermeneutics became mistakenly fused with a dangerously nativist rejection of cosmopolitanism. Whatever the reason or rationalization, anyone who shuts down possible avenues of dialogue in advance is failing to be a philosopher. And when the dialogue is blocked by the exercise of institutional power, it becomes what Jean-François Lyotard rightly called “terror”:
By terror I mean the efficiency gained by eliminating, or threatening to eliminate, a player from the language game one shares with him. He is silenced or consents, not because he has been refuted, but because his ability to participate has been threatened (there are many ways to prevent someone from playing). The decision makers’ arrogance, which in principle has no equivalent in the sciences, consists in the exercise of terror. It says: “Adapt your aspirations to our ends—or else.”16
The most horrifying forms of terror are physical: murder, imprisonment, and assault. But there are also insidious forms of terror that are dangerous precisely because they are more subtle. Recall (from chapter 1) what doctoral student Eugene Park was told by one of his professors when he questioned why philosophy couldn’t include works by noncanonical thinkers: “This is the intellectual tradition we work in. Take it or leave it.”
RECOVERING THE WAY OF CONFUCIUS AND SOCRATES
One aspect of my characterization of philosophy may seem particularly problematic. I have argued that philosophy is dialogue over important unsolved problems. Some will object that this is far too broad, as different things will seem important to different people. But there is one question that is most important in every form of philosophy: What way should one live? Bernard Williams referred to this as “Socrates’ question,” and identified it as central to ethical philosophy.17 I would expand upon this and say that it is the ultimate motivating question behind philosophy in every tradition. Furthermore, it is the question that gives sense and importance to even the most abstract topics in metaphysics, epistemology, and semantics. So if I may be forgiven one further tweaking of my definition: philosophy is dialogue about problems that we agree are important, but don’t agree about the method for solving, where “importance” ultimately gets its sense from the question of the way one should live.
I worry that contemporary academic philosophers often lose sight of this issue of importance, and are thus partly to blame for the perception that philosophy is nothing but intellectual masturbation. Consider some of the topics that many philosophers consider central to their discipline and often use in teaching introductory philosophy courses. If you were a disembodied brain in a vat being electronically stimulated to believe that you have a body, could you know this fact?18 Suppose there were teleporters like in science fiction, but the way they worked was by disintegrating you completely, and then building an exact atom-by-atom duplicate of you somewhere else: Would this new person be you or not?19 What is the right thing to do if you are confronted with a runaway train that will kill five people if you do nothing, but will only kill one person if you pull a lever redirecting the train?20 Should we explain the fact that some sentences must be true (like “1 + 1 = 2”) while others only happen to be true (like “Obama won in 2012”) by postulating that there are an infinite number of alternative possible universes, each of them just as real as the one we inhabit, and that some sentences are true in all of them, while other sentences are only true in some of them?21 What evidence do we have that emeralds are green rather than grue, where “grue” refers to anything we observed up until today that is green, or to anything we did not observe before today and is blue.22 The examples I have drawn so far are from analytic philosophy, the style that is dominant in the English-speaking world. However, Continental philosophy is not immune to degrading into intellectual onanism. I think that Martha Nussbaum’s comment about Jacques Derrida could be applied to many other recent Continental thinkers:
Once one has worked through and been suitably (I think) impressed by Derrida’s perceptive and witty analysis of Nietzsche’s style, one feels, at the end of all the urbanity, an empty longing amounting to a hunger, a longing for the sense of difficulty and risk and practical urgency that are inseparable from Zarathustra’s dance.… Nietzsche’s work is profoundly critical of existing ethical theory, clearly; but it is, inter alia, a response to the original Socratic question, “How should one live?” Derrida does not touch on that question.… After reading Derrida, and not Derrida alone, I feel a certain hunger for blood; for, that is, writing about literature that talks of human lives and choices as if they matter to us at all.23
Some students find purely intellectual puzzles fun, and there will always be a trickle of students who want to devote their lives to wrestling with them. This trickle will be enough to keep elite philosophy departments staffed with people who, generation after generation, will keep the same puzzles alive. But it is not unreasonable for thoughtful students to wonder whether the intellectual games played in philosophy classrooms are a better use of their minds than crossword puzzles or Sudoku.
I am not arguing that philosophers should avoid thorny technical questions. Sometimes we are led to quite subtle issues by the dogged effort to construct a comprehensive answer to the challenge “What way should one live?” (I have myself written an entire article on grammatical and interpretive problems involving two sentences in the Analects of Confucius.)24 If given the right context, even the abstract problems I mentioned earlier can assume a deep human significance. The teleporter thought-experiment was originally part of a challenge to our ordinary individualistic conception of ethics. The runaway train example was introduced to illustrate the difference between doing something that harms another person and allowing to happen something that harms another person. But my experience is that many philosophers end up fixating upon these examples as if they were self-contained intellectual games. Let us never lose sight of why the technical issues that we study matter, and let us always make sure that our students see why they matter.
Consider Nobel Laureate Bertrand Russell (1872–1970). Russell was the coauthor of Principia Mathematica, a three-volume book that uses logic and set theory to prove that 1 + 1 = 2. (In case you weren’t sure.) Principia Mathematica made significant contributions to formal thought, but Russell was not simply playing a pointless intellectual game when he worked on it. He had a powerful and moving view of the purpose of human life and how it is connected to philosophy:
The impartiality which, in contemplation, is the unalloyed desire for truth, is the very same quality of mind which, in action, is justice, and in emotion is that universal love which can be given to all, and not only to those who are judged useful or admirable. Thus contemplation enlarges not only the objects of our thoughts, but also the objects of our actions and our affections: it makes us citizens of the universe, not only of one walled city at war with all the rest. In this citizenship of the universe consists man’s true freedom, and his liberation from the thraldom of narrow hopes and fears.25
After writing these lines, Russell would go on to become an advocate for women’s suffrage, be imprisoned for his opposition to the pointless bloodshed of World War I, get fired from a job at the City College of New York for advocating sexual liberation, speak out against Stalin when many intellectuals looked the other way from his crimes, and become a leading advocate of nuclear disarmament. Russell’s relentless search for objective truth no doubt played a role in preparing his mind for his activism.
However, readers of Russell’s own Autobiography know that another factor shaping his ethics was a specific experience he had in 1901. Russell witnessed a close friend undergoing intense, unrelievable suffering due to an illness:
She seemed cut off from everyone and everything by walls of agony, and the sense of the solitude of each human soul suddenly overwhelmed me.… Suddenly the ground seemed to give way beneath me, and I found myself in quite another region.… At the end of those five minutes, I had become a completely different person. For a time, a sort of mystic illumination possessed me.… Having been an Imperialist, I became during those five minutes a pro-Boer and Pacifist.
Russell turns to the language of Asian philosophy to describe his transformation: “Having for years cared only for exactness and analysis, I found myself filled with semi-mystical feelings about beauty, with an intense interest in children, and with a desire almost as profound as that of the Buddha to find some philosophy which would make human life endurable.”26 It seems unlikely that Russell would have become such a forceful advocate for others had it not been for the compassion that this Zen-like experience taught him.27 How many students who have read Russell’s seminal essay “On Denoting” (about the semantics of the word “the”) know the passion that lies behind his work?
Russell was deeply influenced by Plato. Plato explained that he was motivated to pursue philosophy because he was horrified by the corruption and vice that he saw in the government of Athens, regardless of whether those in power happened to represent the aristocratic or democratic faction: “So I was compelled, praising true philosophy, to declare that she alone enables men to discern what is justice in the state and in the lives of the individuals. The generations of mankind, therefore, would have no cessation from evils until either the class of those who are true and genuine philosophers came to political power or else the men in political power, by some divine dispensation, became true philosophers.”28 John Rawls, the most important mainstream Western political philosopher of the twentieth century, was a decorated soldier in World War II. As a member of the Occupation Force in Japan, he saw firsthand the devastation rendered by the atomic bomb on Hiroshima, and he said this affected him deeply.29 The bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were supposedly justified by utilitarian considerations: they saved more lives, on balance, than would have been lost by invading the Japanese home islands. However, Rawls’s classic A Theory of Justice argued that, contrary to utilitarianism, each individual possesses intrinsic rights that cannot be sacrificed for the sake of the well-being of others. On this basis, Rawls would later argue explicitly that “both Hiroshima and the fire-bombing of Japanese cities were great evils”30 because they specifically targeted civilians, who cannot be held morally responsible for the actions of their authoritarian government.
R. M. Hare, a leading British philosopher, developed a form of philosophy called Prescriptivism, according to which there are no objective moral facts, but only prescriptions that one is willing to universalize and to actually live by. Many philosophers are familiar with his work, but few know that he was led to this philosophy by his horrific experiences in a Japanese prisoner-of-war camp in World War II.31 In this context, morality was reduced to the absolute bare bones conceptually required by the minimal meaning of moral terms.
So deeply meaningful life experiences often drive one to study philosophy; studying philosophy can also prepare one to face challenging life experiences. One of the most persuasive and moving accounts of the value of philosophy and a liberal arts education was offered by Admiral James Stockdale.32 Stockdale was a POW in the Vietnam War. Prior to the war, he had taken a philosophy course at Stanford in which he studied the thought of the Stoic Epictetus. Epictetus teaches that maintaining one’s integrity is more important than anything else, certainly more important than avoiding pain. He also argues that we must learn to accept our fate, and that hatred of our opponents is a trap. Stockdale said that philosophical lessons he learned from Epictetus helped him to survive years of torture with his character intact. (Epictetus was one of those Roman “philosophers, with the long flowing white robes and the long white beards,” that Ben Carson warned us about.)33 Upon his return to the United States, Stockdale was awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor, the highest award given by the US military, for his courage and leadership as a POW.
Many people seem to think that education should only involve studying authors you agree with. (More realistically, authors they agree with. Recall Buckley’s complaint that his professors at Yale were undermining students’ faith in Christianity.)34 However, Stockdale said that it was a great benefit to him that he had taken a course in which he read systematically and charitably the works of Marx and Lenin: “In Hanoi, I understood more about Marxist theory than my interrogator did. I was able to say to that interrogator: ‘That’s not what Lenin said; you’re a deviationist.’ ”35 Stockdale explained that among the soldiers most vulnerable to being “turned” by their interrogators were those who had never been exposed to criticisms of their own country, and had never gotten the opportunity to think carefully about why they rejected Marxism.
Stockdale isn’t the only heroic figure who learned from and admired philosophy. Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., said that his favorite book after the Bible was Plato’s Republic: “it brings together more of the insights of history than any other book. There is not a creative idea extant that is not discussed, in some way, in this work. Whatever realm of theology or philosophy is one’s interest—and I am deeply interested in both—somewhere along the way, in this book you will find the matter explored.”36 The influence of Plato’s thought is evident in King’s own philosophy. In his historic “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” King invokes the allegory of the cave in order to explain taking actions (like civil disobedience) that were contrary to the conventional values of his era: “Just as Socrates felt that it was necessary to create a tension in the mind so that individuals could rise from the bondage of myths and half-truths to the unfettered realm of creative analysis and objective appraisal, we must see the need of having nonviolent gadflies to create the kind of tension in society that will help men to rise from the dark depths of prejudice and racism to the majestic heights of understanding and brotherhood.”37 In other writings, King makes reference to moral lessons he learned from Plato’s Symposium and Phaedrus.38
As the preceding examples show, the greatest philosophy is inspired by and inspires passionate engagement with the problems important to human life. Western philosophers are the heirs to Socrates, who stated that “the unexamined life is not a life fit for a human.”39 Yet you would be stunned at how often contemporary philosophers are flummoxed or merely annoyed if you ask them what difference their philosophical research makes to the world, or even to their own lives. We should make clear to ourselves and to our students why what we are studying is important. And if we have trouble seeing the connection between our philosophy and any real-life concerns, we should focus our energies on something different.
Socrates and Confucius are seminal philosophical figures in their respective cultures, and also paradigms of what philosophy is in any culture. The differences between them are substantial, but the similarities are sometimes overlooked. For both Socrates and Confucius, philosophy is far from an intellectual parlor game: it has a significant ethical purpose. For both Socrates and Confucius, philosophy is conducted through dialogue. For both Socrates and Confucius, dialogue begins in shared beliefs and values, but is unafraid to use our most deeply held beliefs to challenge the conventional opinions of society. For both, to engage in dialogue is to only assert what one sincerely believes. For both, dialogue involves charitably interpreting and constructively responding to one’s interlocutor. For the traditions that grow out of each thinker, the goal of dialogue is twofold: truth and personal cultivation. For both traditions, we do not fully understand at the beginning of the dialogue what truth and personal cultivation are. For both traditions, dialogue is an endless striving toward perfection. Fundamentally, dialogue is an attempt to persuade rather than coerce. We find the same values in the best philosophy of every era and every culture. Contemporary philosophy needs to recover these ideals.
The thesis of this book is not that mainstream Anglo-European philosophy is bad and all other philosophy is good. There are people who succumb to this sort of cultural Manicheanism, but I am not one of them. This book is about broadening philosophy by tearing down barriers, not about building new ones. I too desire to bask in the lunar glow of Plato’s genius, and walk side by side with Aristotle through the sacred grounds of the Lyceum. But I also want to “follow the path of questioning and learning” with Zhu Xi, and discuss the “Middle Way” of the Buddha. I’m sure you and I will not agree about which is the best way for one to live.
Let’s discuss it …