On Great Teachers and Original Sources*: No matter how much larger than life history has inflated these great souls to seem, they were really only human beings, just like the rest of us, perhaps the difference being that no one managed to discourage them from their ideals, and we are all considerably better off for their strength. They were driven to follow an ideal of moral excellence, a path that most of us, perhaps just as capable, allow ourselves to give up on. They stand out in history as a few of among many examples of what human beings, at their best, can accomplish. And it shouldn’t surprise us that they all seem to be saying much the same thing, despite the differences in all their eloquent voices - a variation on the theme that we must listen inward and look to our own hearts. We remember these great teachers because they are true guides who helped us to follow our own inner voices, to focus the meaning of what we want and need to remember, the truth of what we know in our hearts about what matters, and they help us to remember to choose the path of excellence over the path of least resistance. As Socrates made clear, “While everyone is entitled to their opinion, not every opinion is equal to every other!” There are both wise and foolish people, and unfortunately, we have too often followed the foolish.
Mill put it well:“[T]here are but few persons, in comparison with the whole of mankind, whose experiments, if adopted by others, would be likely to be any improvement on established practice. But these few are the salt of the earth; without them, human life would become a stagnant pool. Not only is it they who introduce good things which did not before exist; it is they who keep the life in those which already exist.”(pp.78-79)
As Peter S. Beagle put it, “We are raised to honor all the wrong explorers and discoverers--thieves planting flags, murderers carrying crosses. Let us at last praise the colonizers of dreams.[i]” (Peter S. Beagle, of J.R.R. Tolkien)
My job, as I see it, is to bring the voices of those long dead philosophers into our daily dialogues. (Philosophers call this bibliotherapy.) Philosophical counseling would encourage us to read and study more of the original sources, rather than to participate in what can too easily become a game of telephone. By way of example to illustrates how this game-of-telephone works, take the acclaimed Austrian philosopher Karl Popper who, in the middle of the 20th Century, decided that Plato ought to be exposed for the “fascist” he is. In “The Open Society and Its Enemies,” Popper discusses Plato’s so-called‘ Guardian State’, calling it: “the political science of dictatorship…chillingly familiar to students of the Third Reich and Communist regimes from Stalinist Russia to the Cultural Revolution.” Popper goes on to say that, “Never was a man more earnest in his hostility toward the individual.” Socrates’ ideal is “a totalitarian state with mass conformity,” incorporating “social theories that are offensive in the extreme,” and concludes that Socrates would have viewed the Christian doctrine ‘love thy neighbor’ as “the enemy of his caste state.” And to make matters worse, Popper’s view has held among philosophers for most of the last century. And if this weren’t bad enough, drawing on Popper, and author of a book (tellingly) entitled ‘Plato in 90 Minutes,’ Paul Strathern concludes: “Plato’s opinions on the topics mentioned above are almost all seriously at odds with the opinions held nowadays by all but earnest bigots and the slightly crazy.”[p.36] What was Popper and Strathern’s error? Short attention span! Certainly insufficient for following Socrates’ and Plato’s nuanced reasoning. And perhaps they were even bent on seeing only what they want or, at any rate, expect to see. They (and, given the authority attributed to his view) apparently many others have failed to notice that Socrates was not advocating this state! He was, rather, holding it up as if to say, “What is wrong with this picture?” Despite Popper calling Socrates the “enemy of the free individual,” Socrates argues that all should be free to do what they are good at when they choose to do it! (see later)
And yet, all this is ignored by so-called Socratic scholars since. Strathern (though I hesitate to call him a Socratic scholar, since his book is entitled, ‘Plato in 90 Minutes’), dares to make the claim that: “Platonism…through the centuries produced a succession of thinkers who understood Plato better than Plato understood himself – the Platonists, the Neoplatonists, St. Augustine, and so forth.”[p.53] …apparently adding Karl Popper to the list! Closer to the truth is John Stuart Mill’s observation: “the title of Platonist belongs by far better right to those who have been nourished in, and have endeavored to practice Plato’s mode of investigation, than to those who are distinguished only by the adoption of certain dogmatic conclusions, drawn mostly from the least intelligible of his works, and which the character of his mind and writings makes it uncertain whether he himself regarded as anything more than poetic fancies, or philosophic conjectures.”[Autobiography, p.19]
And so a case must be made for the importance of primary sources, and the danger of education becoming a mere game of telephone without them. And we must also come to terms with dramatic degree of deliberate interference that obstructed the flow of ideas through time. The time may soon come when we discover that the proof of pedophiles and the bodies of unascended messiahs are not all that have been hidden from humanity for all these centuries high in locked abbey towers and deep Vatican vaults. And when we come to understand just how much has been lost in terms of human potential because so much of the great literature of antiquity was not available to us all these centuries, and when we’ve had time to consider what might have otherwise been, only then we will begin to understand the full extent of what amounts to diabolical crimes against humanity.
Notes and References
[i]Peter S. Beagle of J.R.R.Tolkien , "Introduction" to The Hobbit; or There and Back Again, (Ballantine Books; New York, 1937) [Watsonville, California, July 14, 1973]
Mill put it well:“[T]here are but few persons, in comparison with the whole of mankind, whose experiments, if adopted by others, would be likely to be any improvement on established practice. But these few are the salt of the earth; without them, human life would become a stagnant pool. Not only is it they who introduce good things which did not before exist; it is they who keep the life in those which already exist.”(pp.78-79)
As Peter S. Beagle put it, “We are raised to honor all the wrong explorers and discoverers--thieves planting flags, murderers carrying crosses. Let us at last praise the colonizers of dreams.[i]” (Peter S. Beagle, of J.R.R. Tolkien)
My job, as I see it, is to bring the voices of those long dead philosophers into our daily dialogues. (Philosophers call this bibliotherapy.) Philosophical counseling would encourage us to read and study more of the original sources, rather than to participate in what can too easily become a game of telephone. By way of example to illustrates how this game-of-telephone works, take the acclaimed Austrian philosopher Karl Popper who, in the middle of the 20th Century, decided that Plato ought to be exposed for the “fascist” he is. In “The Open Society and Its Enemies,” Popper discusses Plato’s so-called‘ Guardian State’, calling it: “the political science of dictatorship…chillingly familiar to students of the Third Reich and Communist regimes from Stalinist Russia to the Cultural Revolution.” Popper goes on to say that, “Never was a man more earnest in his hostility toward the individual.” Socrates’ ideal is “a totalitarian state with mass conformity,” incorporating “social theories that are offensive in the extreme,” and concludes that Socrates would have viewed the Christian doctrine ‘love thy neighbor’ as “the enemy of his caste state.” And to make matters worse, Popper’s view has held among philosophers for most of the last century. And if this weren’t bad enough, drawing on Popper, and author of a book (tellingly) entitled ‘Plato in 90 Minutes,’ Paul Strathern concludes: “Plato’s opinions on the topics mentioned above are almost all seriously at odds with the opinions held nowadays by all but earnest bigots and the slightly crazy.”[p.36] What was Popper and Strathern’s error? Short attention span! Certainly insufficient for following Socrates’ and Plato’s nuanced reasoning. And perhaps they were even bent on seeing only what they want or, at any rate, expect to see. They (and, given the authority attributed to his view) apparently many others have failed to notice that Socrates was not advocating this state! He was, rather, holding it up as if to say, “What is wrong with this picture?” Despite Popper calling Socrates the “enemy of the free individual,” Socrates argues that all should be free to do what they are good at when they choose to do it! (see later)
And yet, all this is ignored by so-called Socratic scholars since. Strathern (though I hesitate to call him a Socratic scholar, since his book is entitled, ‘Plato in 90 Minutes’), dares to make the claim that: “Platonism…through the centuries produced a succession of thinkers who understood Plato better than Plato understood himself – the Platonists, the Neoplatonists, St. Augustine, and so forth.”[p.53] …apparently adding Karl Popper to the list! Closer to the truth is John Stuart Mill’s observation: “the title of Platonist belongs by far better right to those who have been nourished in, and have endeavored to practice Plato’s mode of investigation, than to those who are distinguished only by the adoption of certain dogmatic conclusions, drawn mostly from the least intelligible of his works, and which the character of his mind and writings makes it uncertain whether he himself regarded as anything more than poetic fancies, or philosophic conjectures.”[Autobiography, p.19]
And so a case must be made for the importance of primary sources, and the danger of education becoming a mere game of telephone without them. And we must also come to terms with dramatic degree of deliberate interference that obstructed the flow of ideas through time. The time may soon come when we discover that the proof of pedophiles and the bodies of unascended messiahs are not all that have been hidden from humanity for all these centuries high in locked abbey towers and deep Vatican vaults. And when we come to understand just how much has been lost in terms of human potential because so much of the great literature of antiquity was not available to us all these centuries, and when we’ve had time to consider what might have otherwise been, only then we will begin to understand the full extent of what amounts to diabolical crimes against humanity.
Notes and References
[i]Peter S. Beagle of J.R.R.Tolkien , "Introduction" to The Hobbit; or There and Back Again, (Ballantine Books; New York, 1937) [Watsonville, California, July 14, 1973]