Purpose of this Blog

This website started as an outlet for students in Adriel M. Trott's Public Philosophy Senior Capstone course. It is now a website for sharing information about Wabash philosophy, studying philosophy in general and as an outlet for the Philosophy Club to engage.

Friday, January 31, 2014

Philosophy and the Habits of Conversation


I've been thinking lately about why it is difficult for people to confront and reconsider their views about the world.  Plato depicts a Socrates who confronted this problem when he encountered sophists who were less intent on exploring together with Socrates what the truth might be and more intent on using logic and rhetoric to support positions they already held.  The difference seems to be between elenchus, where we let the logos have an effect on how we think, and eristic, where we defend what we already think for the sake of winning.  Again and again, Plato shows us a Socrates who leads his interlocutor to the brink of an insight that the interlocutor's position cannot be defended, and again and again, the interlocutor walks away continuing down the same road he had begun when he started the conversation with Socrates.  The problem of using our reason to support positions we already hold rather than following the logos to see what position or insight it will lead us to remains at work in American politics, where most Americans watch news sources they already agree with.  Perhaps some have done the careful work of thinking about why they agree with those sources and are now moving from that position, but the numbers make us wonder whether people are only looking for ways to support the views they already hold rather than to examine them. Plato has Socrates raise this question in the Republic, where Socrates and Adiemantus look at the philosophical nature that is corrupted and is used for the advantage of others.  Such a character ceases to strive after knowing what is true and good and only uses her techniques as tools to support the views of those by whom she is employed.  

What then would it take to develop a character that was willing to think differently, to encounter ideas in a way that allows them to change our minds under real consideration rather than with a predisposition to reject certain positions and accept only those we already agree with?  Aristotle might be a helpful guide here because Aristotle thinks of character in two important ways that bear on this conversation: as cultivated through habit and as affected by emotion.  One thing that seems to keep us from having genuine conversation, where that means a willingness to reconsider our own position, is the emotional response that makes us defensive when we encounter a position that we have been cultivated to reject.  For Aristotle, what we habituate when we habituate ourselves to live virtuously is our affective life, the way that we feel.  So if we can habituate ourselves to empathize with other positions, to stand in someone else's position, to suppose that there might be real reasons and forceful ideas behind another person's perspective, we might possibly become interlocutors who don't just use the logos as a weapon to justify ourselves and thus keep it from ever really considering our commitments, as Nicias does in the Laches.  Of course, this is not easy because it means that we have to let go of being right - another Socratic commitment - and we have to practice having conversation differently than we have up to this point been habituated talk to one another.  But what might come from this change would be the possibility of real conversation with people we disagree with over issues that matter.   Be careful.  You might have to change.  

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