Can you then point us to anything beyond your own opinion which will enable us to apply our conceptions better? Does the madman do anything else but what he thinks right? Is this criterion then sufficient for him too?
“It is not.”
Come, then, let us look for something beyond personal opinion. Where shall we find it?
Here you see the beginning of philosophy, in the discovery of the conflict of men's minds with one another, and the attempt to seek for the reason of this conflict, and the condemnation of mere opinion, as a thing not to be trusted; and a search to determine whether your opinion is true, and an attempt to discover a standard, just as we discover the balance to deal with weights and the rule to deal with things straight and crooked. This is the beginning of philosophy.
“Are all opinions right which all men hold?”
Nay, how is it possible for contraries to be both right?
“Well, then, not all opinions, but our opinions?”
Why ours, rather than those of the Syrians or the Egyptians, or the personal opinion of myself or of this man or that?
“Why indeed?”
So then, what each man thinks is not sufficient to make a thing so: for in dealing with weights and measures we are not satisfied with mere appearance, but have found a standard to determine each.
“It is not.”
Come, then, let us look for something beyond personal opinion. Where shall we find it?
Here you see the beginning of philosophy, in the discovery of the conflict of men's minds with one another, and the attempt to seek for the reason of this conflict, and the condemnation of mere opinion, as a thing not to be trusted; and a search to determine whether your opinion is true, and an attempt to discover a standard, just as we discover the balance to deal with weights and the rule to deal with things straight and crooked. This is the beginning of philosophy.
“Are all opinions right which all men hold?”
Nay, how is it possible for contraries to be both right?
“Well, then, not all opinions, but our opinions?”
Why ours, rather than those of the Syrians or the Egyptians, or the personal opinion of myself or of this man or that?
“Why indeed?”
So then, what each man thinks is not sufficient to make a thing so: for in dealing with weights and measures we are not satisfied with mere appearance, but have found a standard to determine each.
—from Epictetus, Discourses 2.11
If you wholeheartedly embrace the vocation of teaching, you will face many frustrations along the way, and you may be tempted to throw in the towel on account of the poor wages, the endless paperwork, or the clueless bureaucrats.
For me, however, the greatest annoyance has been what I call the “cult of opinion”, a whole generation of young people who are convinced that a proposition is true just because they happen to believe it, and that the premises should be cherry-picked in support of a preferred conclusion.
The psychologists call it “confirmation bias”, and while I am grateful for their insights, I fear that only an appeal to philosophy, in its most practical sense, can help us to escape from the quagmire. It is one thing to observe how we get trapped in our subjective habits, but quite another to establish an objective foundation for the sound judgments we so desperately need.
I remind myself how this is nothing new, even if the fashion of the age makes it easier to be at the mercy of our prejudices. If I do not make the effort to think for myself, I will become a slave to my passions, or to the clever manipulation of someone else’s thinking.
However distorted our reasoning, we will act with the confidence that we are right, so no good will come from condemning the person, or even from attacking the conclusion. The hope lies rather in examining the argument, and ultimately to revisit the first principles that stand behind it. Despite some initial protests, I have always been grateful to someone for challenging me to explain why I hold something to be true.
This is also why I regularly try to teach Plato’s Meno, where the distinction between opinion (doxa) and knowledge (episteme) is so critical to arriving at any meaning and purpose. If you cannot ground it, it is likely to fly away. Whatever the art or the field of study, success or failure depend upon an understanding of the causes.
Since not all propositions can be equally true, how are we to decide? I regularly find my students falling back on appeals to the authority of this or that “-ism”, as if the conformity to a crowd can excuse us from doing our own work.
There are the religious zealots, who insist they are saved because the heretic is damned, or the political demagogues, who prop up an ideology by so desperately hating the fellow across the aisle. Perhaps you feel comfortably smug, but that doesn’t make it true.
Philosophy has to start when we finally admit to the failure of assumptions. Most of what passes for debate is like a marketplace where no one can agree on a common set of weights and measures, or a bar where the patrons bicker over the match on the television without having ever actually read the rulebook.
It may be too late to call upon the philosopher after the pantry is bare and the bombs are falling.
If you wholeheartedly embrace the vocation of teaching, you will face many frustrations along the way, and you may be tempted to throw in the towel on account of the poor wages, the endless paperwork, or the clueless bureaucrats.
For me, however, the greatest annoyance has been what I call the “cult of opinion”, a whole generation of young people who are convinced that a proposition is true just because they happen to believe it, and that the premises should be cherry-picked in support of a preferred conclusion.
The psychologists call it “confirmation bias”, and while I am grateful for their insights, I fear that only an appeal to philosophy, in its most practical sense, can help us to escape from the quagmire. It is one thing to observe how we get trapped in our subjective habits, but quite another to establish an objective foundation for the sound judgments we so desperately need.
I remind myself how this is nothing new, even if the fashion of the age makes it easier to be at the mercy of our prejudices. If I do not make the effort to think for myself, I will become a slave to my passions, or to the clever manipulation of someone else’s thinking.
However distorted our reasoning, we will act with the confidence that we are right, so no good will come from condemning the person, or even from attacking the conclusion. The hope lies rather in examining the argument, and ultimately to revisit the first principles that stand behind it. Despite some initial protests, I have always been grateful to someone for challenging me to explain why I hold something to be true.
This is also why I regularly try to teach Plato’s Meno, where the distinction between opinion (doxa) and knowledge (episteme) is so critical to arriving at any meaning and purpose. If you cannot ground it, it is likely to fly away. Whatever the art or the field of study, success or failure depend upon an understanding of the causes.
Since not all propositions can be equally true, how are we to decide? I regularly find my students falling back on appeals to the authority of this or that “-ism”, as if the conformity to a crowd can excuse us from doing our own work.
There are the religious zealots, who insist they are saved because the heretic is damned, or the political demagogues, who prop up an ideology by so desperately hating the fellow across the aisle. Perhaps you feel comfortably smug, but that doesn’t make it true.
Philosophy has to start when we finally admit to the failure of assumptions. Most of what passes for debate is like a marketplace where no one can agree on a common set of weights and measures, or a bar where the patrons bicker over the match on the television without having ever actually read the rulebook.
It may be too late to call upon the philosopher after the pantry is bare and the bombs are falling.
—Reflection written in 8/2001
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