Post #150: What Is a Philosopher?

12 Oct. 2024

“To be a philosopher is not merely to have subtle thoughts, nor even to found a school, but so to love wisdom as to live according to its dictates, a life of simplicity, independence, magnanimity, and trust. It is to solve some of the problems of life, not only theoretically, but practically.”

—Henry David Thoreau, Walden (On Economy)

     According to Plato’s classic account, it takes fifty years to make a philosopher. In the educational scheme he sketches out in the Republic, just after the famous Allegory of the Cave (see #42), the journey begins the usual way, with schooling along more or less familiar lines, until the age of eighteen or so. Then a year or two of military training, or perhaps some other physical equivalent where soldiering is no longer as universal a requirement as it was in ancient times.

     For the next ten years, throughout a philosopher-candidate’s vigorous twenties, a schedule of participation in the cities ordinary affairs, including seasonal warfare, combined with efforts at consolidating and unifying the knowledge acquired previously—but no dialectical training yet, that is to say, no introduction to truly methodical argumentation and disputation. That comes, for a handful years, only at thirty, upon attaining the full measure of mature adulthood, as the Greeks would have conceived it.

     Then something that may come as a surprise: from the glories of higher philosophical training even the most promising candidates (perhaps especially they) are sent back down, to supervise the necessary, worthy, but unglamorous drudge-work of the city, perhaps running the municipal utilities, or, as I sometimes say in class to stress the point in cruder terms, “shoveling shit”—though this is not to be taken too literally in the manner of Pol Pot and others who took their Plato to heart the wrong way. (Doing one’s share of teaching, not in the Blessed Isles of some lofty seminar, but in the muddy trenches of basic education, may also qualify.) Only then, with all hurdles along the way cleared more or less creditably, or at least passably—and with time enough to make one’s ten thousand mistakes, as Michael Novak observed towards the end of his life, see #109—someone may, possibly, arrive at being a philosopher-guardian..

     But what does this arrival mean? Plato suggested that it would only now become safe to entrust someone (male or female, though not necessarily in equal numbers) with power, as governors over the city. Yet rule over others, though it has always grabbed most of the attention, is not the lone, or even the principal thing: first and foremost, these fully-trained “philosopher-kings” (or philosophers proper), are now ready to govern themselves in the best sense. They are guardians not necessarily in the public sphere, but rather, at last, fit to be set above others as friends and associates, or over anyone else put in their charge, whether it be in the city, at work, in the family, or anywhere else.

     Only with such a complete course of training behind them, Plato argued, would the philosophers emerge fully from the murky cave of blind reliance on sense-impressions. Only now are they able truly to see beyond the flashing images and dancing shadows, to what lies above and beyond, comprehending at last how everything is illuminated by the Sun of the true, the good, and the beautiful. Thus Plato’s Cave gives a most soaring interpretation to what is possible after such a long upward journey. Socrates, in the Apology, sets the bar much lower: to understand how little one really knows, to fathom how paltry our vaunted human wisdom looks beside higher truths, is perhaps the most we can hope for, even in a long life of continual inquiry.

     Epictetus taught that the defining quality of the philosopher was “to make good use of impressions”: to realize and remember, every moment, that things cannot and must not be taken at face-value, as our senses naturally present them to us. The apparently obvious needs to be scrutinized, questioned, analyzed with the help of a different kind of eye, that of the well-developed mind. Without such testing of what seems so obvious and unmistakable at the sensory level, we are forever doomed to frustration and misery, because we will mistake our proper domain—the inward things we can hope to control—for the world at large, which is none of our concern where it is not subject to our power. It is by learning to guard our desires and aversions—mindfulness and equanimity, as a Buddhist would say—not by thinking that we can shape life to our every specification, that we can attain to reliable tranquility and joy in life. Exceed the scope of what is truly yours, by attaching yourself to what lies beyond the demarcation line, and complaint, blame, and resentment must follow inescapably (Discourses 1.1, #93). Learn to accept, on the other hand, that what you cannot control comes from the gods (in other words, cultivate amor fati (#143)), and all will be well.

     None of the above implies that philosophers need to reject the everyday rules that their societies have evolved for guiding everyday conduct. Pyrrho, a very radical skeptic, nonetheless lived a fairly conventional life, though he is said to have traveled in the train of Alexander. Much human experience has gone into traditional customs, and it is no mere misnomer to speak of the wisdom of the crowd; at the same time, however, “conventional wisdom” lacks precisely what philosophy requires, namely an adequate understanding of why it is so, and a corresponding ability to give a proper account of one’s reasons before others. To take one’s own beliefs, in the usual complacent manner, as truths without inquiry, the habit for which Socrates so faulted his contemporaries, is very human, to be sure, but not therefore any wiser. Common sense, the ability to see through folly and nonsense, whether of the simple-minded or the highly contrived variety, could hardly be more precious—only, contrary to the label, it is not very common at all. The primitive confidence that one is right, which feels to all of us as if it should be a sufficient indication of truth, is nothing of the sort.

     Nor should we imagine that upon arrival, a philosopher’s every question will have received a good answer—not at all. He may, on the contrary, have to face more questions than ever, and fewer answers, though better ones, for all their uncertainty (#131). To be a philosopher is by no means to be sure of things, or more sure than others; it is merely to have better reasons for standing where one does, with no guarantee that the ground beneath one’s feet would be any firmer than for anyone else, anywhere else. Wisdom not only begins in perplexity (aporia, #124), it keeps returning there.

     Being a philosopher, in the sense of greater sagacity, not only greater mental acuity and analytical skill, should make one more loving and kind, universally, but perhaps not unconditionally. What is lovable or lovely still needs to be distinguished from what is not, but without venom or craving. It is not that distinctions will be lost, then, but that the mind’s eye will become more discerning along a richer array of dimensions. Harshness, one would hope, will indeed get worn down in the process of harmonizing a philosopher’s inward constitution and bringing its elements into what balance they allow. But love can be severe too, not only tender.

     To say that one is wise amounts, almost by itself, to a disqualification. Not so calling one a philosopher, at least in principle. After all it is merely a declaration of love, an aspiration, a desire for union with the truth, not a claim of consummation. Even so, philosophy is beset by railleries enough without her would-be champions giving themselves airs before their contemporaries. Never call yourself a philosopher, Epictetus therefore insists, nor hold forth about her precepts, but do quietly what she calls for, without calling any attention to yourself (Enchiridion 46). You risk being ridiculed enough if anyone catches wind of your lofty ambitions; should you end up being defeated by your high aims, you will only make yourself doubly ridiculous for having proclaimed them earlier (Ench. 22). Seneca makes much the same point in his Fifth Epistle: the word “philosophy” makes people uncomfortable enough if its practitioners don’t also make a display of themselves. It is not, at any rate, by words and professions that one proves one’s love—whether for wisdom or for anything else—but by the integrity of one’s actions and the demonstrated course of one’s life, warts and all.

     Can philosophy help us to unlock life’s great secrets and make bearable what is otherwise intolerable? Socrates thought so, insisting that it was philosophy which allowed him to face death with good cheer and tranquility, although he held with equal determination that the charges against him were worse than unfounded and completely unjust. Boethius too turned to philosophy for consolation, and found it, when he was awaiting his death, also on trumped-up charges, after one of the steepest falls from grace and glory on record. James Stockdale credited the counsels of Epictetus with sustaining his spirits and saving him during seven years of captivity and torture in Vietnam, without resenting or hating even his torturer (#93).

     Seneca, at the outset of his Forty-Ninth Epistle, presented philosophers with a particularly dramatic challenge: “Would you like to know what philosophy has to offer the human race? Advice! You, the philosopher, have been summoned to assist those in need, to aid the shipwrecked, the captive, the sick, the impoverished, and those who must stretch out their neck for the axe. This person you are playing with is frightened: help him. Another is in suspense: break through the snares that hold him. All around you are asking you to rescue them from turmoil; scattered and wandering, they need you to show them the bright light of truth. Teach something that will give them relief!” It remains a pleasing prospect even if Seneca has been much criticized, through the ages, for not bearing up quite so nobly when his own hour of trial arrived. Who are we to judge the last moments of others, if they seem less than heroic?

     What, in the end, are the proper shares of intellectual discovery, meditation, and pious devotions in unraveling the mysteries of self-no-self, the cessation of suffering, the source of being, the realm of the unchanging, and the deathless? It is not for me to say; I would only suggest, meekly, that the philosopher, in the ancient sense that I have been invoking here, perhaps preserves a faint memory of that union of all understanding which our more compartmentalized approaches to knowledge have long surrendered to specialization. Once upon a time, one might say, all pursuit of truth was philosophy. Then the solar system of knowledge as we know it was formed by pieces breaking off, one by one, from the Sun of Insight and forming planets of their own, until it seemed that each was a complete world unto itself. That departmentalization may have performed miracles, in the sciences especially, but it has not worked equal wonders for an integrated art of living.

     Whether truth and higher meaning can indeed be found behind our words and ideas, or whether we are merely chasing after wind, may have to be resolved, in our lifetimes, no less by faith and experience than by argument or demonstration, and, at the last trumpet, by higher powers than our impressive but imperfect human faculties. Whether that conclusion should unsettle a lover of wisdom or not will depend, I suppose, on what kind of a philosopher he turns out to be.