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Philosophy as a personal journey.

SO PHILOSOPHY AND EDUCATION should be aimed at a form of conversion, certainly moral conversion, but something more as well covering the whole of life. Plato also warns us against the petty minds of those who are acknowledged to be bad, but who are clever, sharp-eyed and perceptive enough to gain insights into what they are interested in, and ‘consequently the keener their vision is, the greater the evil they accomplish’.

Evil? Can philosophy be an adjutant to evil? If philosophy can be a force for good, for taking us through to its or our transcendent function, can it, if misused, be a force for harm too? Plato thought this, and maybe when we think about it more, it isn’t so far-fetched. After all the sophists were philosophers (of a sort) and were well known to Socrates and Plato. Maybe some of what they did, in fostering and encouraging doubts about morality and truth, wasn’t too good. Maybe (if I.F.Stone is to be believed) some of what Socrates and his followers did, qua philosophers, wasn’t too good either – at least not if you were an Athenian democrat of the time and an opponent of oligarchs and dictators. In Crito, when the laws of Athens are speaking to Socrates, they speak of Sparta and Crete – hardly bastions of democracy – as constitutions he admires. Maybe, more even than The Republic, The Laws, with its nocturnal council and its draconian regimentation of life, might give intellectual aid to would-be dictators and their repressive laws and inquisitions. This sort of thing is, of course, the burden of writers like Crossman and Popper who attack Plato as politically evil (though usually wanting to exonerate Socrates).

When you think about it, the great philosophies have rarely been neutral on matters of value. Philosophy is always done against a background of commitments, intellectual and other, which the philosophy is in a sense an attempt to work through, even if the working through may sometimes involve refining and modifying the commitments. Aquinas is often criticised for having very explicit commitments which his philosophy would not be allowed to challenge in a serious way; but all philosophers and all philosophies start from some framework of belief, even if that framework is one of fallibilism or even of scepticism. It is just in these cases the commitment is not as blatant as Aquinas’s, or in our day as objectionable. So Plato’s notion of philosophy (or education) as a turning of the soul one way or the other may not be so far fetched after all.

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