Because even now, though we do not devote ourselves to training in these matters and though we are not drawn away, so far as I have any influence, from cultivating character, nevertheless we make no advance towards goodness.
What should we have to expect then, if we should add this business to our other employments?
Socrates saw it in Athens, and Epictetus saw it in Rome, and any one of us can see it today, if only we choose to look around: people who are so concerned with the form of the argument that they neglect the content of character.
Sophists, in whatever time or place, value style over substance, prefer sounding good to being good, and will talk the talk without walking the walk. A love for the arts of dialectic and rhetoric can all too easily become more important to us than the truths they were made to serve.
Once a scholar gets caught up in publishing articles, giving lectures, or earning tenure, he runs the serious risk of missing his vocation entirely. It will be the same in whatever we do, if we focus on the wording of the problem at the expense of actually doing something about the problem.
It isn’t that those who are called to philosophy shouldn’t learn how to think, but rather that all the thinking should not be treated as an end in itself, pursued without a broader context.
If I merely give a student pages of logical exercises to solve, or drill him in presenting a convincing argument, I have provided him with tools, but he has no idea what he is supposed to build with them. I have then trained an incredibly clever man, who also happens to be completely useless. He has learned how to argue for the sake of arguing, not for the sake of living.
Somewhere between a bitter disdain for reason and a fawning worship of reason lies the tempered use of the mind, directed to the humble purpose of living well. A man should be reasonable so that he can be good, and logic will have no worth without a sense of right and wrong.
Perhaps some were critical of Epictetus for not demanding more formal or rigorous training in dialectic and rhetoric from his students, but he had something greater in mind, a priority of the moral over the technical. By all means, exercise the mind to its fullest capacity, but fill it with the things that really matter.
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