Thursday, August 20, 2009


MY SOCRATES (1)

Everyone who takes this path has their own Socrates. Mine was Morris Kaplan, an imperfect incarnation, but one none the less—fascinatingly ugly, engaged with the greatest questions, unbeatable in argument. And so the door opened for me into the bright light of philosophy, and I walked through it.

Note the phrase, “fascinatingly ugly.” For me, as for Socrates’ students, the philosopher did not appear as a harmonious whole, at one in his being and truth. He was troubling. He questioned, sharply, powerfully, but didn’t have answers, except to study Plato and the other great minds of philosophy—and that gave no answers, just more questions. I was attracted to a way of thinking and being that seemed to have its home in an open sea, in a world without foundations. No ‘God,’ the ultimate answer. No ‘America’—it had been ripping apart for years (it was 1965, I was a sophomore at Yale). No certainties of ethics or even personal life. Somehow philosophy was at home in a universe and society permeated through and through with chaos.

On that path, however, were logoi sokratikoi, the conversations I had with Morris and my other Socrates, Bob Anderson, and then with Plato’s Dialogues themselves, and I was captured in them by some of the same puzzlements as the ancient interlocutors of Plato’s Socrates, and lifted up out of my puzzlement into new ways of thinking and puzzled again, as those insights were questioned, too.

So I was drawn into the thought and the life. For like Socrates himself, neither Morris nor Bob was a Sage, but a “philo-sopher,” a lover of wisdom, not just a theorizer about philosophy, but individuals who lived it, passionately, the only way they could be. I wanted that from philosophy too: to make the epistrophe eis heauton, the “conversion of the self to myself” and to the philosophical life—which paradoxically could not be separated from questioning how to live that life. Attracted to it, repelled by it, eventually making it my own.

This blog is about that life, as I live and think about it this fall, as I am teaching my class, “The Art of Living,” and as I read and reflect on the thoughts and ways of the philosophers who have had the most to say about philosophy as a way of life, pro or con. We will be reading the ancients, their modern critics, and American and contemporary authors in the tradition of the “art of living.” The last time I taught the class the students created a chapbook with some wonderful essays. We'll do that again, and I’ll reflect on their work and create some of my own as the semester unfolds and I seek, in better and more fulfilling ways, to live a philosophical life.

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