Saturday, August 06, 2011
Dialogue is the Art of Soul Building
I suggest you re-read Jacob Klein's Meno, esp. the introduction. IIRC, Klein writes "Socrates is not ironical to satisfy himself." This is an important point. Snark is the opposite of Socratic inquiry and cannot lead to connection, collaboration, or wisdom. Remember Klein didn't want to teach us anything except that dialogue is the art of soul building
But of course dialogue annoys people, Wm., the purpose of it is to make you uncomfortable with what you thought you knew. All the misery of freshman year was learning to live with that discomfort in seminar, wasn't it? Wasn't it an enormous struggle just to endure seminar?
"The dialogues not only embody the famous 'oracular' and 'paradoxical' statements emanating from Socrates ('virtue is knowledge,' 'nobody does evil knowingly,' 'it is better to suffer than commit injustice') and are, to a large extent, protreptic plays based on these, but they also discuss and state, more or less explicitly, the ultimate foundations on which those statements rest and the far-reaching consequences which flow from them. But never is this done with complete clarity. It is we who supply the additional clarity by engaging in philosophy." Wouldn't you agree, Wm, that the clarity is the problem here. Many people want easy clarity without doing the work of philosophy. Such cheap clarity is mere ideology. But how can you say that to people? To urge them to work harder for what they think they know?
