This introduction purports to speak to my grandchildren (who are six and twelve as I write this), but is also an appeal to all parents, grandparents, and anyone who cares about the young and the future we deliver them into.
We have too long left the education of our young to institutions, when what they need most they can get best from those who love them. The influence that we have in this world is nowhere more powerful than by way of the seeds we plant by the questions that we ask and the lessons that we teach.
So one purpose of this book is to shine a happy light on the benefits of aging, or let’s call it, maturing, including the good we might do for future generations. It's important for us to conceive of happy endings because the best of life’s blessings come by self-fulfilling prophesy, after all, and we cannot have a dream come true if we don’t first have a dream. Ideals are essential to practical wisdom, for they are targets that can both inspire and guide us to actualize our higher potentials, create what could be from what is. So it’s imperative we ‘see’ the outcomes that are truly good for us, and for those who will enjoy, or suffer, the consequences.
So I implore you to learn this dialectic art, if only to help pass it on to your progeny and help generate a dialogue between generations. The influence that one can have in this world is nowhere more powerful than by way of the seeds we plant in the hearts of our children and grandchildren. As Gandhi once said, “we must be the change we’d like to see in the world.”
To this end, the ancients left us – sometimes at great cost to themselves – their greatest written and oral legacy, and for no other purpose than to enhance the quality of our lives sufficiently that we would see the benefit of passing it on.
This book is a dialogue between those great voices we most need a pep talk from right now, as we prepare to face the challenge we have set the future up for. Dialogue is the source of so much good, in fact, the best “cure for things gone wrong.”(Veninga) And it can make all the difference in a life’s ultimate happiness. Yet we scarcely realize that this medicine is still and always available to us all, and arguably, we’ve never needed it more.
Our job is to teach our own young that there are an infinite number of ways to become an excellent human being, and the greatest thing we each can do, for our progeny, our fellow human beings, and ourselves, is to find and become the best of our personal and unique potentials. We must help them see that it doesn’t matter if they are or are not like others; what matters is that they are living up to their own unique best selves. Others can only know of us what we know of ourselves, after all, so true happiness requires that we not bother with appearances, as Socrates says, but rather become in reality what we wish to appear. We must teach them – first by example - to become whatever it takes to make them the most self-respecting person that they can be. That is every person’s highest potential, and the source of all true happiness and human excellence in this world.
And even if we are not inclined to do this for ourselves, then perhaps we should do it for our children and grandchildren – even and especially those who aren’t born yet – for much of what the future holds depends on our actions now. Because it is not too late – pray god – to learn while there is still time to save our children the suffering we are setting them up for by our active ignorance of wisdom that has been right in front of us since ancient times. We have too long left the education of our young to institutions, when what they need most they can get best from us and other living human beings who will pass on what they’ve learned. As we’ve said, for all the hundreds of teachers that a young person has in a lifetime, they have only a very few parents and grandparents who love them enough to tell them the truth, or do their best to help them find it.
It is the purpose of philosophy to seek this whole truth, and the higher purpose of education to pass on these dialectic skills that generations to come might continue to learn from one another and the past. Since generations past dropped this ball when it was their turn to pass it forward, this ancient art of eclectic dialogue is something we all need to learn anew. Not to fight over who is right – as we too often do - but to discern what each adds to the whole truth for the others. The ancients understood that the natural diversity of our perspectives could add depth to our understanding and enrich our mutual interactive education. But lacking the ancient insights about dialectic complementarity, that same diversity makes agreement and mutual understanding difficult at best, and at worst, feeds the widespread conflict that plagues our world. So it is, arguably, our active ignorance of ancient wisdom that accounts for much of the relentless violence that is becoming increasingly ferocious in our time.
There is no denying that we’ve never needed this ancient wisdom more than we do now…as the effects of our neglect come home to plague our children. Now more than ever, the world needs us all to do our best, whatever that might mean in any given human life. Our responsibilities differ because our opportunities are diverse, and none of us can be all things to all people. But we can do our best at whatever we choose to take up - that’s our part. We cannot follow every path, but we can benefit more than we do from one another’s learning experience. And for this we need dialogue.
Without these ancient insights, we are allowing our children to flail in the dark, or illuminating only a single well-worn path for them, as if the destination were the same for each and all. When we might simply turn the lights on, and let them see that there are an infinite array of paths they might take to the heights of human excellence.
The ancients understood that it is the first responsibility of elders to understand and proliferate this idea, for there can be no hope for the world’s most affected and least powerful to resolve their conflicts, if the world’s most powerful and privileged cannot.
So the challenge we face is to do right by our grandchildren, and to do everything we can to enhance the quality of the future we deliver them into. As Indigenous people would have us remember, “Part of our spiritual preparation…is as ancestors. It’s the challenge that all of us face who are alive on earth today. How do we prepare to be ancestors of future people?”(OI, Parhuli, 316)
As Lou Marinoff has put it, “One plants olive trees for one’s grandchildren. Perhaps one does philosophical practice for them too.”
We have too long left the education of our young to institutions, when what they need most they can get best from those who love them. The influence that we have in this world is nowhere more powerful than by way of the seeds we plant by the questions that we ask and the lessons that we teach.
So one purpose of this book is to shine a happy light on the benefits of aging, or let’s call it, maturing, including the good we might do for future generations. It's important for us to conceive of happy endings because the best of life’s blessings come by self-fulfilling prophesy, after all, and we cannot have a dream come true if we don’t first have a dream. Ideals are essential to practical wisdom, for they are targets that can both inspire and guide us to actualize our higher potentials, create what could be from what is. So it’s imperative we ‘see’ the outcomes that are truly good for us, and for those who will enjoy, or suffer, the consequences.
So I implore you to learn this dialectic art, if only to help pass it on to your progeny and help generate a dialogue between generations. The influence that one can have in this world is nowhere more powerful than by way of the seeds we plant in the hearts of our children and grandchildren. As Gandhi once said, “we must be the change we’d like to see in the world.”
To this end, the ancients left us – sometimes at great cost to themselves – their greatest written and oral legacy, and for no other purpose than to enhance the quality of our lives sufficiently that we would see the benefit of passing it on.
This book is a dialogue between those great voices we most need a pep talk from right now, as we prepare to face the challenge we have set the future up for. Dialogue is the source of so much good, in fact, the best “cure for things gone wrong.”(Veninga) And it can make all the difference in a life’s ultimate happiness. Yet we scarcely realize that this medicine is still and always available to us all, and arguably, we’ve never needed it more.
Our job is to teach our own young that there are an infinite number of ways to become an excellent human being, and the greatest thing we each can do, for our progeny, our fellow human beings, and ourselves, is to find and become the best of our personal and unique potentials. We must help them see that it doesn’t matter if they are or are not like others; what matters is that they are living up to their own unique best selves. Others can only know of us what we know of ourselves, after all, so true happiness requires that we not bother with appearances, as Socrates says, but rather become in reality what we wish to appear. We must teach them – first by example - to become whatever it takes to make them the most self-respecting person that they can be. That is every person’s highest potential, and the source of all true happiness and human excellence in this world.
And even if we are not inclined to do this for ourselves, then perhaps we should do it for our children and grandchildren – even and especially those who aren’t born yet – for much of what the future holds depends on our actions now. Because it is not too late – pray god – to learn while there is still time to save our children the suffering we are setting them up for by our active ignorance of wisdom that has been right in front of us since ancient times. We have too long left the education of our young to institutions, when what they need most they can get best from us and other living human beings who will pass on what they’ve learned. As we’ve said, for all the hundreds of teachers that a young person has in a lifetime, they have only a very few parents and grandparents who love them enough to tell them the truth, or do their best to help them find it.
It is the purpose of philosophy to seek this whole truth, and the higher purpose of education to pass on these dialectic skills that generations to come might continue to learn from one another and the past. Since generations past dropped this ball when it was their turn to pass it forward, this ancient art of eclectic dialogue is something we all need to learn anew. Not to fight over who is right – as we too often do - but to discern what each adds to the whole truth for the others. The ancients understood that the natural diversity of our perspectives could add depth to our understanding and enrich our mutual interactive education. But lacking the ancient insights about dialectic complementarity, that same diversity makes agreement and mutual understanding difficult at best, and at worst, feeds the widespread conflict that plagues our world. So it is, arguably, our active ignorance of ancient wisdom that accounts for much of the relentless violence that is becoming increasingly ferocious in our time.
There is no denying that we’ve never needed this ancient wisdom more than we do now…as the effects of our neglect come home to plague our children. Now more than ever, the world needs us all to do our best, whatever that might mean in any given human life. Our responsibilities differ because our opportunities are diverse, and none of us can be all things to all people. But we can do our best at whatever we choose to take up - that’s our part. We cannot follow every path, but we can benefit more than we do from one another’s learning experience. And for this we need dialogue.
Without these ancient insights, we are allowing our children to flail in the dark, or illuminating only a single well-worn path for them, as if the destination were the same for each and all. When we might simply turn the lights on, and let them see that there are an infinite array of paths they might take to the heights of human excellence.
The ancients understood that it is the first responsibility of elders to understand and proliferate this idea, for there can be no hope for the world’s most affected and least powerful to resolve their conflicts, if the world’s most powerful and privileged cannot.
So the challenge we face is to do right by our grandchildren, and to do everything we can to enhance the quality of the future we deliver them into. As Indigenous people would have us remember, “Part of our spiritual preparation…is as ancestors. It’s the challenge that all of us face who are alive on earth today. How do we prepare to be ancestors of future people?”(OI, Parhuli, 316)
As Lou Marinoff has put it, “One plants olive trees for one’s grandchildren. Perhaps one does philosophical practice for them too.”