"They have taken over into their own art all the superfluities of these other arts; the result is that they know more about careful speaking than about careful living.
"Let me tell you what evils are due to over-nice exactness, and what an enemy it is of truth! Protagoras declares that one can take either side on any question and debate it with equal success--even on this very question, whether every subject can be debated from either point of view.
"Nausiphanes holds that in things which seem to exist, there is no difference between existence and non-existence. Parmenides maintains that nothing exists of all this which seems to exist, except the universe alone. Zeno of Elea removed all the difficulties by removing one; for he declares that nothing exists. The Pyrrhonean, Megarian, Eretrian, and Academic schools are all engaged in practically the same task; they have introduced a new knowledge, non-knowledge.
"You may sweep all these theories in with the superfluous troops of 'liberal' studies; the one class of men give me a knowledge that will be of no use to me, the other class do away with any hope of attaining knowledge.
"It is better, of course, to know useless things than to know nothing. One set of philosophers offers no light by which I may direct my gaze toward the truth; the other digs out my very eyes and leaves me blind. If I cleave to Protagoras, there is nothing in the scheme of nature that is not doubtful; if I hold with Nausiphanes, I am sure only of this – that everything is unsure; if with Parmenides, there is nothing except the One; if with Zeno, there is not even the One." . . .
--Seneca the Younger, Moral Letters to Lucilius, 88 (tr Gummere)
I have to smile whenever I read this section of Letter 88, because you can change the names, and it sounds like he is describing the sad state of academic philosophy in our own time.
The Liberal Arts, in their study of the trivium (grammar, dialectic, rhetoric) and quadrivium (arithmetic, geometry, music, astronomy) were intended as the groundwork for the study of philosophy, the love of wisdom. And as the foundation was so poorly built, the house itself was crumbling.
We offer so many reasons why our world isn't quite as we would like it. We point to economic inequality, to social conflict, to political corruption. Yes indeed, to all three. But the root cause of all of these is that we do not encourage young people to love what is true, good, and beautiful. Instead, we tell them they must become rich, popular, and powerful. Any society will only be as good as the values it lives by.
At the last major academic conference I attended, and it was indeed my last, I suggested that we had distanced our thinking from reality, and that the effects were most measurable in how we were educating from the earliest age. I've always called it the problem of the three '-isms': skepticism, the denial that anything can really be known, subjectivism, the reduction of any truth to the self alone, and relativism, the claim that anything can be true.
I should have been prepared for it, but I was still taken aback by a question from one of the most esteemed Catholic philosophers in the country: "but isn't it terribly naïve to tell young people that there is such a thing as certainty? Of course we can talk about it logically, but real life doesn't admit of those distinctions."
Careful speaking, the love of language and terms for their own sake, has trumped careful living. Once I have blurred the distinction between the true and the false, between good and evil, I have negated the very measure of human life.
With Protagoras, Nausiphanes, Parmenides, or Zeno, with the schools of the Pyrrhoneans, Megarians, Eretrians, or Academics, we either make knowledge so obscure as to be meaningless, or deny its very possibility entirely.
This isn't simply an academic problem, but a problem at the root of our souls. Where there is no commitment to what is real, but only to our own imaginings, there is no commitment to moral responsibility. That seems a rather convenient way to live. With Ivan, from The Brothers Karamazov, it asserts that "everything is permitted."
Truth, and the love of truth, get in the way of our posturing. Seneca saw the ignorance and vice of obscuring or denying what is real. Once we have neutered the liberal arts and philosophy, we have neutered our humanity. Let's not simply blame the academic philosophers, but let us blame ourselves for buying what they sell.
Written 1/2010
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