The Meaning of Life 101
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By Laura Miller
Furthermore, they're incomprehensible. A disgusted grad
student who approaches Phillips after one of the philosophical discussions the
author leads at cafes, community centers, schools and other gathering places
fulminates about abandoning a dissertation written in "academic mumbo jumbo.
I'm sure my professors would have loved it, but I hated myself while I wrote it
... they imagine themselves to be philosophers, but they aren't real
philosophers. I think what some of them do under the guise of philosophy is
criminal."
Like most of the anti-academic remarks in Phillips'
treatise on his "rather zany quest of bringing philosophy out of the
universities and back 'to the people,'" this diatribe doesn't come
directly from the author. (Perhaps that's because, as
Phillips puts it, "in addition to all my philosophical outreach
activities, I am tapping into the academic world in a creative way."
But as Plato has demonstrated, one of the best ways of getting your ideas
across is to put them in someone else's mouth, and there is too much incidental
sniping at the ivory tower in "Socrates Café" for Phillips to
credibly present himself as a bystander. You can't blame him: Most academics do
write in impenetrable jargon, and furthermore, the clutch of "academic
philosophers" who huddled together at one of his discussions, like a
clique of preteen girls snickering at the back of a classroom, sound awful
enough to drive anyone to paranoia and loathing.
Mostly, though, Phillips thinks academic philosophers (he
never actually names any) have put people off what William James called
"the most sublime and the most trivial of human pursuits." Phillips
sees himself as "a Johnny Appleseed of
philosophers." Are "the people" biting? Apparently yes, at least
on a small scale; 10 weeks after Phillips started his project in a
In 1991, a Norwegian schoolteacher named Jostein Gaarder wrote a very
peculiar but charming (and highly recommended) "Novel About
the History of Philosophy" called "Sophie's World," in which,
through the surreal adventures of its young heroine, readers receive a lucid
basic history of philosophy. The book became an international bestseller. Alain
de Botton recently hosted a popular British
television series on philosophy (although his book based on the show, "The
Consolation of Philosophy," published last year, proved a less felicitous
creation than his earlier book, "How Proust Can
Change Your Life").
So, despite what conservative Jeremiahs say, many people
hunger for a better understanding of the major events and ideas of Western
civilization, enough to put Jacques Barzun's mammoth
"From Dawn to Decadence: 500 Years of Western Cultural Life, 1500 to the
Present" on the New York Times bestseller list for several weeks. The
publishers of Anthony Gottlieb's "The Dream of Reason: A History of
Philosophy From the Greeks to the Renaissance" no
doubt hope it will meet with similar success (it even looks like the Barzun book). The first volume of a projected two-volume
work (this one takes us to the threshold of Descartes),
"The Dream of Reason" is crystal clear, conversational in tone and
fundamentally skeptical -- in the modern sense of the word. In fact, it's far
more digestible than Barzun's often enigmatically
allusive tome. Anyone who foundered in the midst of that elderly historian's
erudition will find more solid ground in Gottlieb's primer.
The Presocratic philosophers are
always the most fun to read about, even if the bulk of their ideas aren't
"philosophical" in the contemporary vernacular sense of the word. As
Gottlieb, an editor at the Economist, points out in his introduction, the
discipline of philosophy once included (and sometimes still does include)
"natural philosophy," what we now call science. The Presocratics mainly concerned themselves with the second of
the two mysterious questions Gaarder's Sophie
receives in her mailbox -- "What is the world made of?" -- and their answers were often as bizarre as the musings of an
LSD-addled hippie.
Parmenides, for example, reasoned that the universe
consists of (in Gottlieb's words) "just one eternal, immovable thing,
which is complete, indivisible" and that nothing ever moves, or is born, or
dies or in any way changes. (Not surprisingly, Zeno, of the famous paradox that
"proves" it is impossible for you to rise from your chair right now
and walk across the room, was a student of Parmenides. If, like me, you've
always found Zeno and his paradox annoying, Gottlieb covers both, and offers a
cocktail-party-ready refutation.)
Other Presocratics stumbled
surprisingly close to the facts about the physical universe before veering off
into fresh absurdities. Democritus and Leucippus hit upon the notion, called
"atomism," that everything is made of tiny, indivisible particles.
Empedocles, inventor of the four elements theory (which states that everything
is a mixture of air, earth, fire and water), was astute enough to recognize
that hair, feathers and scales were essentially the same thing. Even more
remarkable, he "said that creatures owe their useful and fortunate
features to the fact that there were originally many sorts of creatures and
that the strange, deformed ones failed to survive because they were unsuited to
do so, leaving only the well-suited creatures to reproduce their kind and
populate the earth." Darwin himself recognized his own theory of natural
selection "shadowed forth" in this idea, even if the ancient
philosopher did imagine the unselected animal kingdom as a trippy,
Hieronymous Bosch-like menagerie of "faces
without necks, arms wandered without shoulders, unattached, and eyes strayed
alone, in need of foreheads."
Whether they were of a mystical bent, like Pythagoras, who
believed that numbers had spiritual qualities, or mechanistic in outlook, like
Democritus, who refuted the notion of an afterlife and regarded the universe as
"vast, unlimited and impersonal," the Presocratics
don't seem to offer much moral or ethical insight on how to live. They serve
more as impressive demonstrations of the human mind striving toward a wider,
deeper and truer understanding of the world despite a paucity of both concrete
knowledge and the tools to get more of it. It's not so much what the Presocratics thought that seems worth celebrating, as their
commitment to thought itself, seen in Democritus'
famous statement that he'd rather find a single genuine explanation than become
the king of
With Socrates, in particular, what we'd now call
"philosophy" properly began: the probing inquiry into good and evil,
and the nature of such abstractions as justice and beauty, as well as attempts
to define more down-to-earth things like friendship -- all concerns championed
by Phillips in "Socrates Café." But it's with the two philosophical
giants that follow, Plato and Aristotle, that the gist
of Gottlieb's project really comes into focus. The obvious precursor of
"The Dream of Reason," the big shadow Gottlieb's book must creep out
from under, is Bertrand Russell's 1945 classic "A History of Western
Philosophy." Since Russell's book combines great erudition with ample
amounts of sheer reading pleasure, and since the number of readers up for two
massive works of philosophical history can't be large, Gottlieb certainly has
his work cut out for him.
Why tangle with Russell's "History," then? Well,
it is over 55 years old, but has the past half-century added that much to our
knowledge of pre-Enlightenment philosophy? And Russell is notoriously
opinionated, but then, that's what makes "A History of Western
Philosophy" so much fun -- and Gottlieb isn't exactly devoid of opinions
himself. In fact, it's those very opinions that make the most compelling case
for publishing "The Dream of Reason," for if Russell's book still has
the power to inform and delight, it's decidedly behind the times.
We in the West live in a peculiar age, one that combines a
ruthless, rationalized free-market approach to society with a Romantic attitude
toward intimate relations. Personally, we want to believe that intense feeling
is the highest truth, while politically we increasingly embrace a steely ethic
of laissez-faire capitalism bolstered by a scientific rationalism that's become
pretty much the only thing that almost everyone can agree to believe in. This
would have horrified the ancient Greeks, who, as a rule, thought that passion
ought to be moderated by wisdom and that civic love exists on a higher level
than love for another person's body or soul. But even an early 20th century
thinker like Russell, if "A History of Western Philosophy" is any
indication, would have looked on our time, and perhaps even Gottlieb's
elegantly written book, in despair -- not for its glorification of private
emotions, but for its indifference to public ones.
Gottlieb, for example, is far harder on the seminal
Neo-Platonic thinker Plotinus than is Russell, who
writes of the philosopher that "like Spinoza, he has a certain moral
purity and loftiness, which is very impressive. He is always sincere, never
shrill or censorious, invariably concerned to tell the reader, as simply as he
can, what he believes to be important. Whatever one may think of him as a
theoretical philosopher, it is impossible not to love him as a man."
Gottlieb, however, remains unsmitten, writing that
"the mystically inclined thought of Plotinus
inaugurated the final phase of Greek philosophy as it tottered over the brink
of reason into occultism." He stops just short of suggesting that Plotinus pushed it.
On the other hand, Gottlieb is very keen to champion
Aristotle, about whose "Ethics" Russell wrote, "to a man with
any depth of feeling it cannot but be repulsive." Russell thought
Aristotle had feet of clay; to Gottlieb, the Greek master represents the best
in ancient philosophy because he was a proto-scientist. Gottlieb doesn't defend
Aristotle from accusations that his "Ethics" shows, in Russell's
words, "a complete absence of ... benevolence or philanthropy."
Instead, he chooses to protest Frances Bacon's charge that "Aristotle
habitually ignored facts and disdained observation because of his blind
adherence to theories he had cooked up."
It's clear which aspects of the discipline count most in
"The Dream of Reason"; better to possess the practical temperament of
a "great scientist" -- as Gottlieb argues, convincingly, Aristotle
was, despite the philosopher's many famous errors -- than to pursue a moral
vision or, even worse, a spiritual one. Where Aristotle falls down, in Gottlieb's
eyes, is when, tangled in a bit of knotted reasoning about what made heavenly
bodies move, the philosopher posited the existence of an "Unmoved
Mover," or God. But, as Gottlieb hastens to point out, whatever God
Aristotle's theories may have suggested "was pretty minimal as supreme
beings go." (Whew! That was a close one.) Plato may have "wanted to
treat everyone like children" in his design for a perfect republic
(certainly not an unfair charge), but Aristotle, that exemplary man, had no use
for abstractions and preferred to roll up his sleeves and dissect dogfish.
Russell, a liberal pacifist (who, to his credit, distrusted
Communism from the very start) and an agnostic, would no doubt find Gottlieb's
history lacking in feeling, but in the cool, blue light of our technocratic
age, Russell seems embarrassingly idealistic about government at a time when
everyone has succumbed to the fatalism of capital. It's up to you which you'd prefer: Gottlieb's tale of the slow, stuttering
but inevitable triumph of scientific thinking, or Russell's obsolete notion
that philosophy exists in a "no man's land" between science and
theology and must find a way to wrangle both.
Neither, of course, is quite what Christopher Phillips
advocates in "Socrates Café." That author's intentions are so
laudable, his effect on the people he leads in discussions on such topics as
"What is home?" and "Can you be too curious?" so wholesome,
that it seems ungracious to point out the proceedings aren't all that Socratic.
The systematic, penetrating series of questions that Socrates applied to his
partner in a given dialogue were designed to dismantle conventional thinking
and uproot the unquestioned assumptions underlying the other person's beliefs.
The typical Socrates Café involves various people tossing out their ideas to
the group, occasionally challenging each other or digging a little deeper with
a nudge from Phillips, but ultimately concluding with a takes-all-kinds
acknowledgement of intellectual diversity and Phillips' customary sign off,
"It's something to keep thinking about."
This is admirable, but it doesn't make for exciting
reading, particularly when Phillips himself -- who really does sound like a
great guy, traveling to prisons, schools and rest homes to lead his discussions
and never charging a cent -- isn't a terrific writer. The book abounds in the
mawkish clichés of inspirational literature, such as the passage when a
fourth-grader chirps, "I think Socrates is anyone who's not afraid to keep
asking questions even when everyone wants him to stop." (I couldn't help
wondering if the kid thought "I know you are, but what am I?" might
be one of those questions.) For the intended audience -- which would appear to
be earnest, well-meaning people with charter subscriptions to the Utne Reader, people who are probably too good to have to
exist in a world with jaded cynics like me -- it will no doubt hit the spot and
inspire many fruitful conversations. Such people probably never even ask
themselves why writers with a penchant for the word "vibrant"
invariably write prose that isn't.
Which brings me back to Russell: While a Socrates Café may
provide some philosophical seekers with a chance to bounce their theories on
the meaning of life off of a cross-section of fellow citizens, some of us would
rather get our metaphysical kicks from bumping up against a truly remarkable
mind. There's not much to stretch the brain in "Socrates Café," but
even when he's being snobby, Russell does get your synapses firing. Here's his
consideration of Xenophon's description of Socrates
(the only substantive one we have besides Plato's):
There has been a tendency to think that everything Xenophon says must be true, because he had not the wits to
think of anything untrue. This is a very invalid line of argument. A stupid
man's report of what a clever man says is never accurate, because he
unconsciously translates what he hears into something that he can understand. I
would rather be reported by my bitterest enemy among philosophers than by a
friend innocent of philosophy.
To read Russell feels like sitting down with a genius to a
long, wine-soaked and gloriously frank tête-à-tête. Gottlieb's book isn't quite
so splendid, however more agreeable it may be ideologically to some
contemporary readers. He writes the way a favorite professor lectures: with
vigor, clarity and engagement, and the occasional cheeky wisecrack popped in at
just the right moment (as when he describes Empedocles' version of the cosmos
as "a mixture of the physics of Stephen Hawking and the romantic novels of
Barbara Cartland"). Phillips' book, alas, is a
bit like sitting in on the monthly meeting of a well-meaning community group.
Russell is the smartest and the best writer of the three,
and yet, as recent biographies have demonstrated, not
a very good person at all, particularly in the marriage department. Gottlieb
writes beautifully enough to make me fear for his character and the peace of
mind of his intimates, while Phillips seems devoted to his wife and a path of
laudable public service. Hmmm. One of Socrates'
favorite theories concerns how wisdom is identical with virtue; the more a man
understands what virtue is, the more virtuous he must become, for no man would
knowingly harm his own soul by doing wrong. Not being a writer himself, and
rather disapproving of writing as a means of communicating ideas (you can't
question a printed page, after all), Socrates would probably be unperturbed by
this apparent disparity between literary and intellectual ability and personal
virtue. He would no doubt consider it proof of the unreliability of fetching
rhetoric rather than a knock to his own theory; to write well about wisdom,
he'd probably say, doesn't necessarily make a man wise. Perhaps the term
"sophistry" would be bandied about. As Phillips would say, "It's
something to keep thinking about."
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About the writer
Laura Miller is Salon's