Good Old Socrates

I haven't read Plato's accounts of Socrates' words for over fifty years until today, when I happened to read the following from Phaedo:

 The aim of those who practice philosophy in the proper manner is to practice for dying and death.

You see, I have had this thing for a long time about death being the over-riding, all-important fact of our lives, but even my best friends are not with me on that. I myself can not think of anything more basic or important than understanding the reality and implications of death.

Cruelty to another person, or pride, or false belief, seem unacceptable once you you get the point, it seems to me. “Life is too short for this” has consequently come to mind in one form or another across my lifespan as a sort of talisman.

So I'm reading a bit more of Plato/Socrates and I come across this, in the account of Socrates trial:

The fear of death, gentlemen, is no other than to think oneself wise when one is not, to think that one knows what one does not know. No one knows whether death may or may not be the greatest of all blessings for a man, yet men fear it as if they knew that it is the greatest of all evils. And surely it is the most blameworthy ignorance to believe that one knows what one does not know.

They do put him to death, as you will remember, despite him saying such things as the following at his trial:

Be sure that if you kill the sort of man you say I am, you will not harm me more than yourselves. I am far from making a defense now on my own behalf as might be thought, but on yours', to prevent you from wrongdoing by mistreating the god's gift to you by condemning me.

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Progress, Midwestern Cornfields

Madame Necker,  the mother of Madame de Stael, wrote that “Fortune does not change men, it unmasks them.” There are probably many others, especially conservatives, who have said or thought it. My own mother used to say that “People really don't change much over time. They just become more of what they are.” I've seen it written in reference to Vice-President Dick Cheney that "Men do not change, they unmask themselves."

That seems like a radically conservative, even deadening, thing to say, especially for those of us who want to see a better world. And yet I must say that it is probably usually true for conservatives, yes, but also for liberals whose views are really not very well tested.

There is a contrary tradition of belief in “Progress,” that society is improving slowly despite occasional setbacks, that science and its spread to all areas of life is the long-term trend. I immediately think in this connection of Condorcet. He and Madame Necker were almost exact contemporaries.

The profession of sociology arose in that context in France, primarily, but also later in the US in the context of immigrations. The first sociologists wanted to make their study “scientific,” and thus bring progress to society. Condorcet maintained his faith in that even though coming to a bad end.

My own take on the view that people don't really change is that it doesn't have to be so, although it may often or usually be so! Nothing is set in stone when it comes to people and their future. Their minds were not given them just for amusement, as Tolstoy put it in the Two Wars piece that I recently mentioned. And there is that old Russian proverb that Solzhenitsyn mentioned in his Nobel Lecture:

In Russian, proverbs about truth are favorites. They persistently express the considerable, bitter, grim experience of the people, often astonishingly: 'One word of truth outweighs the world.'

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The newly-planted cornfields through which I drive in Ohio and Indiana were exciting during the first two weeks of this month of May. The millions of plants grew rapidly, grew about six inches in two weeks and looked to be vigorous and healthy. But now, the last week of May, the plants are drooping and the fields dusty. The TV weatherman spoke last night of the possibility of a drought and of the fact that there was no snow here last winter. No one is saying a single word about the social issue of a man-made climate disaster, but I can see they are thinking about it.

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The Smallest Thing

I'm always astonished that the smallest things can have an importance far beyond the most elaborate, thoroughly thought-out, infinitely considered conditions.

The immediate instance before my eyes is that of a friend's visit in my kitchen here this morning. He has been in a serious despondency for a year or two due to several severe health problems in his family, loss of income, and the reconsideration of old misfortunes going back fifty years to his childhood. He was “down,” no doubt about it.

I was thinking as we were going back and forth, often quite passionately, across his reasons for feeling down, that there was nonetheless the possibility that he could nonetheless make a decision, a very small decision similar to the flipping of a small switch, that could change his unhappiness into happiness.

Dostoyevsky described a man who has been depressed for years who looks out a train window while at a platform in Zurich and sees a donkey braying. Just seeing that donkey braying brings back his good perspective.

I'm sure a lot has been said and written on the problem, even on Dostoyevsky's specific instance. The guy in the train undoubtedly had been thinking over his problem for years, consciously and subconsciously. But in the end, it seems to me that there is a decision, a seemingly infinitesimally small but necessary decision being made.

All I have to do is to remember the face of a beloved friend I once knew, or to think of a young boy I once knew who was like a son to me, or to think of the most amazingly good-hearted old lady I once knew, pure of heart, who truly and simply trusted in God. There are others, too. All I have to do to put an upside-down world aright is to remember just the very existence of even one of these people. Then the world makes sense to me and I see the miracle.

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Tolstoy, Scholars

Reading Tolstoy's War and Peace now, at the age of seventy, is a much different experience from when I first tried to read it in my thirties. I had experienced some life by then, but I still had not the preparation necessary to know what he was saying. Now, I find the book simply stunning, even breath-taking. 

Dostoyevsky has a reputation for profundity, for looking into the abyss, etc., but right now he seems like a shallow, and timid compromiser beside Tolstoy.

There were other things Tolstoy wrote that did deeply effect me when I was young and which did strike me as remarkably insightful even then. There is in fact a passage from his essay, Two Wars, which I automatically memorized and which has been central to my heart for forty years. He is discussing the Russian government's reaction to the Dukhobors:

The people of our time, especially the scholars, have become so dense that they do not understand, and in their denseness cannot even understand, the significance and the influence of spiritual force. A charge of ten thousand pounds of dynamite sent into a crowd of living men – that they understand, and in that they see strength. But an idea, a truth, which has been realized, which has been introduced into life to the point of martyrdom, which has become accessible to millions, is not force according to their conception, because it does not boom and you do not see broken bones and puddles of blood. Scholars (it is true, bad scholars) use all the power of their erudition to prove that humanity lives like a herd, which is guided only by economic conditions, and that reason is given to it only for amusement. Governments know what it is that moves the world, and so, from a sense of self- preservation, unerringly and zealously monitor the manifestation of spiritual forces, on which depends their existence or their ruin.

That is cutting edge today.

Just the part about scholars trying to show that we are like robots, the playthings of forces located in our environment or heredity, is very contemporary. It's all in our wiring, our genes and our conditioning or programming, is the present way it's said, perhaps with the metaphor of a computer somewhere in the background. I've actually spent many many hours wondering why scholars, of all people, try to advance this belief that we are all robots, without choice or subjectivity or intentionality or meaning or consciousness, even alterity, to use some of the vocabulary of the present opposition to these views.

The best explanation for the scholars' attitude that I can find, although there are surely others, has two parts. One part is that the attitude allows the scholars to feel superior to other people, smarter than other people. It has an ego-payoff that they art smarter than others. They don't contend that they themselves are unthinking robots – it's just the herd below them that is the plaything of such forces. And the second part of the explanation for me is that the “herd” believe the “scholars” know things, believe that the view is true, and this keeps the “herd” in control.

Tolstoy also discusses in this essay a letter he received from Colorado asserting that the Spanish-American war was a noble (sic) work.

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This May Morning

The latest best thing about my part-time job driving a truck is going out upon the land and seeing May arrive in the fields and small towns of Ohio and Indiana and Kentucky and Tennessee and Michigan.

I imagine that we all have our own particular favorite articulation of the meaning of May deep within our souls, but one of my own is e. e. cummings' “I Thank You God For Most This Amazing Day.” There is a reading of the poem by cummings himself on youtube, and it has been put to music, as a hymn. But here is a reading of it that I'm sure he would have enjoyed:

Wordsworth's exuberance about May in the Ode is always with me, too, especially the bit about lambs in spring, and this:

     Oh evil day! If I were sullen

     While Earth herself is adorning

     This sweet May morning...

I see that cummings loved that Ode and read it aloud in its entirety in one of his six non-lectures at Harvard, prefacing the reading by saying that his mother wrote it out by hand and kept it always near her.

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Don't Do This to Yourself, Simple Joys and Death

A friend spoke these words to a woman who was about to carry out a criminal act that would hurt people: “Don't do this to yourself.”

But she carried on just as if he had said nothing at all, and it did destroy her.

That was probably the purpose of the criminal act in the first place – to destroy herself.

These things sometime seem incredibly subtle and convoluted. I read in a new book that Freud was getting over $4,000 per hour while living in England, for helping people to sort out their subtleties.

The subtleties are there, real, and fascinating for those of us who find ourselves engaged in studying them. They are as fascinating to me to study as the birds are to an ornithologist or the layers of earth are to a geologist.

But it is within reach of all of us to understand and live by the idea that we have 'to do to others as we would have them do to us.' That's not obscure rocket science. It's the central ethical idea of all the major religions.

It is subtle, but not impossible, further to understand that we are social in our uniquely human nature, and thus consequently to realize that what we do to others, we do do to ourselves! I take this to be an essential point of social psychology and it's also the idea of “send not to know for whom the bell tolls, it tolls for thee.”

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Here's another simple joy.

I was thinking of death this morning, as I often do, and of how much clarity and peace it gives me to think about it, as well as the simple joys it makes possible when seeing the grass outside my window or hearing the voices of those children next door.

I speak of death to certain friends from time to time but quickly sense the push-back and distaste. That's a little sad because I feel that they are missing out on something excruciatingly important and good, and I also feel the distance between us, which is a sorrow.

So it was with great appreciation and delight that I recently came across this quote from Jung in his Red Book, p.275:

Joy at the smallest things comes to you only when you have accepted death. But if you look out greedily for all that you could still live, then nothing is great enough for your pleasure, and the smallest things that continue to surround you are no longer a joy. Therefore I behold death, since it teaches me how to live.

I think that may be the simplest yet profoundest statement of what I feel about our approaching deaths.

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