-
5. Fonlon’s Socratic Life: Its Relevance to our Political Culture and Contemporary Situation
- LANGAA RPCIG
- Chapter
- Additional Information
39 5 Fonlon’s Socratic Life: Its Relevance to our Political Culture and Contemporary Situation1 T he parallels between the life of Bernard Fonlon and that of the ancient Greek philosopher, Socrates, are so striking as to make a description of the former as ‘‘Socrates in Cameroon” both legitimate and appropriate. The respects in which Socrates towered like a colossus above his contemporaries and for which he has gained “immortality” in the annals of intellectual history are the very same respects in which Fonlon towered like a colossus above all of us, contemporary Cameroonians. Among the most important of these parallels are the following: moral integrity, intellectual courage, concern with moral perfection as the summum bonum, role as gadfly to society, use of the Maieutic art and the identification of virtue with knowledge. It is no accident that many of Fonlon’s writings are replete with references to Socrates. For Fonlon, Socrates evidently served as a model that he successfully replicated. Philosophy, they say, begins in wonder and curiosity. And what the earliest philosophers, beginning with Thales of Miletus in the western tradition, wondered and were curious about was the physical universe surrounding humans. It was Socrates who turned the focus of philosophical speculation from the mendacities of the early philosophers to speculation about man himself. “Man know Thyself ” became with Socrates a procedural maxim, for he rightly saw in man a microcosm no less complex and interesting than the macrocosmic physical universe that fascinated the other philosophers. Socrates, according to the testimony of Xenophon, only discussed human concerns – what makes men good as individuals or as citizens. Knowledge in this area was, for him, the condition of a free and noble character; ignorance left a man no better than a slave. The pre-Socratic philosophers had expended all their intellectual energy-speculating and disagreeing about the origin of the universe. Thales, for example, had postulated water as the substance of the 40 Road Companion to Democracy and Meritocracy universe, while Anaximander argued for the apeiron, an indeterminate undifferentiated primal mass, and Anaximenes, after careful observation of the processes of rarefaction and condensation, had settled for aer (air). For Socrates, this type of theorizing was useless because it was too far removed from what seemed to him as man’s chief and proper concern – knowledge of himself and of the right way to live his life. Accordingly, he sought to effect a shift from the search for beginnings to the search for a telos (end, purpose, goal), which coincides with a shift of interest form static external Nature to dynamic Man. For Socrates, if we cannot know the beginnings of the universe and of life in the unrecorded past, we can at least know the meaning, end and purpose of life here and now. Socrates was thus the first philosopher in the western tradition to introduce teleological considerations into Man’s restless search for meaning, understanding and knowledge in the world in which he finds himself. In his concern with man, the most important question became for Socrates, as it was for Fonlon in our own day, man’s intrinsically valuable end. The answer to this question is not only clear and unequivocal but exactly univocal in both philosophers: man’s summum bonum or the highest good – that which for man is worth seeking not merely as a means to some other end but as an end in itself – is the moral and intellectual personality of the individual. Between the three types of classes of human beings discernible in every society, namely, lovers of material gain/pleasure (philokerdeis), lovers of fame/honour (philotimoi) and lovers of wisdom/truth (philosophoi), both Socrates and Fonlon are agreed that the last is the best and only class worth striving to belong to. For both philosophers, the moral and intellectual faculties are one and the same; hence, the equation or identification of virtue with knowledge, vice with ignorance, and the attempt to inculcate virtue through calm reasoning and intellectual clarifications and catharsis. Bernard Fonlon’s remarkable moral courage and integrity shows that he was exactly like Socrates who, from all extant historical accounts, seems to have been such an extraordinary individual that he apparently never experienced what is commonly termed akrasia, weakness of will or backsliding in moral matters, which is the lot [44.200.193.174] Project MUSE (2024-03-29 12:13 GMT) 41 Folon’s Socratic Life of most human beings, but always acted according to the dictates of his rational...