On the Problem of Philosophic Learning

Visitor from Elea: 'But if an important issue needs to be worked out well, then as everyone has long thought, you need to practice on unimportant, easier issues first. So that's my advice to us now, Theaetetus, since we think it's hard to hunt down and deal with the kind (essence), sophist, we ought to practice our method of hunting on something easier first--unless you can tell us about another way that's somehow more promising.'

Theaetetus: 'I can't.'

Plato, The Sophist, 218cd.

From the first I regarded Oxford as a place to be inhabited and enjoyed for itself, not as the preparation for anywhere else. . . . At Oxford I was reborn in full youth. My absurdities were those of exuberance and naïvety, not of spurious sophistication. I wanted to do everything and know everyone, [but] not with any ambition to insinuate myself into fashionable London or make influential friends who should prosper any future career. . . . My interests were as narrow as the ancient walls. I wanted to taste everything Oxford could offer and consume as much as I could hold.

Evelyn Waugh, A Little Learning ¹

No spontaneous operation of intellectual relations protects the young philosopher against the risk of delivering his soul to error by choosing his teachers infelicitously.

Yves Simon, A General Theory of Authority ²

I.

THE PERFECT BREAKFAST, it seems to me, is a freshly baked, genuine butter croissant with a cup of coffee or chocolate. But the perfect croissant is hard to come by, at least if we are not in France where it seems miraculously to reappear every morning. We have croissants at breakfast where I live. They are rather smallish, not very flaky, generally doughy, flat-tasting, though certainly not inedible. I have kept my eye open for the perfect croissant. Walter Kerr once said that we should never eat "bad" ice cream. We may have to eat bad bread, or even dried-out croissants, to stay alive. But ice cream and croissants are eaten primarily because they are tasty and delicious. There is nothing sybaritic or epicurean about this truth. It is simply an acknowledgment of the being of a thing.

We do not "need" either ice cream or croissants, yet the things we do not "need" are often symbolic of the best part of our nature. Leon Kass, in his book, The Hungry Soul: Eating and the Perfection of Our Nature, has spelled this principle out with some elegance. ³ We are not only beings who feed or eat, but beings who dine together. Our bodies and lives are so attuned that they respond to our inner soul. We can make matter tasty, beautiful. And this making is perhaps our highest vocation in this world, as Plato taught us, when something that is, by being what it is, leads us to what is beautiful.

At the beginning of the Second Book of The Republic, we find a famous conversation between Socrates, Glaucon, and his brother Adeimantus about the praise of justice for its own sake. The two young men, Plato's brothers, are highly commended by Socrates for being able to state the case against justice so well, but still they were not convinced by it. Thus they wanted to listen to the philosopher explain why a worthy life was a good even if one suffered for it or even if no reward resulted from it. What interests me here are the reasons that young Glaucon gives to Socrates about how he sees the need for what I call "philosophic learning."

Glaucon begins the conversation: "Tell me, do you think there is a kind of good we welcome, not because we desire what comes from it, but because we welcome it for its own sake--joy, for example, and all the harmless pleasures that have no results beyond the joy of having them...