The Philosophic Life and Political Reality: A Humbling Dilemma
I was recently asked, by a student seeking to understand the full conditions and practical implications of the philosophic life, a question which has, in one form or another, probably occurred to, or rather preoccupied, the mind of every person attracted to philosophy in a serious way from the sixth century B.C. to the present. I paraphrase her question closely: “Let’s suppose everyone is doing the best thing, philosophy. Everyone is a philosopher. Do you think that world, as a result, would be the best?”
My short answer to the question: No I don’t think it would. But let’s examine why not.
Humans, we may say, have a natural perfection, meaning an essence that represents the perfect fulfillment of what they are. This is what “human nature” means. And this essence is a fulfillment of reason, which is the highest and therefore defining element of our soul.
However, we are born as material beings, meaning as bodies with unactualized potential. Human life in the proper sense — social development, education, and individual spiritual growth — is the gradual and continual process of straining against the limits of our material existence, seeking to overcome those limits until, at least in theory, we become, so to speak, pure soul, which is what Plato and Aristotle mean when they say that the goal of life is to become godlike, or “a friend of the gods.” This is wisdom in the fullest sense.
But in fact we are physical creatures, changeable creatures, full of desires and passions which should become the fuel of our philosophical development, but usually become sources of confusion, limitation, and even corruption which restrain most people to various levels of incompletion, and very far from philosophy, let alone wisdom.
Because our rational nature requires such a high level of development to lead to our true human fulfillment — the philosophic life — there are actually very few humans who can ever achieve this highest way of life, or even perceive its meaning at all. On the contrary, since we are all born as material beings (more matter than form), ruled initially by desires and material needs, it is inevitable that the vast majority of humans will fall far short of philosophy. But it is also true that even most of the people who have the potential for the philosophic life will achieve it only in a flawed or compromised way, a mixed way, or even a corrupted and failed way, as in the infamous example of Alcibiades, who is gifted and educated enough to see perfectly well that Socrates is his truest friend and philosophy the best life, but whose desires and ambitions are immoderate enough to draw him away from the best life so many times that he finally succumbs completely to the life of social success, personal power, and physical gratification. He becomes what Socrates would call “a tyrannical soul.” (We learn about this in The Republic.)
But because we are all born as irrational and material creatures who must grow into reason and spirit, and who can never fully escape the needs or desires of the body (for example, we will always need food, shelter, etc.), even the people with the best natures cannot simply live according to theoretical reason purely and exclusively. Therefore, on the path to becoming philosophic souls, we absolutely need people who can produce and provide the lower goods that are necessary conditions for becoming rational individuals: the goods of bodily health and security that provide the material foundation for moral and intellectual development; the goods of amusement and relaxation that provide the necessary rest and revitalization for souls with great and hard work to do; and the goods of emotional education (music, poetry, stories) that will hopefully prepare us for philosophic thought by making our souls moderate, inclined toward goodness, and aware of the subtleties, virtues, and follies of the human psyche.
In other words, philosophers cannot simply be born philosophizing. And they don’t automatically become philosophers just by reaching a certain age. They require the satisfaction of many material conditions that will gradually make the complex development of the philosophic mind possible. We may even see this historically, by observing the development of ancient Greek civilization. The complex historical developments that allowed the emergence of a broader society that could feed and defend itself, a poetic civilization with a shared sense of purpose and belief, and a collection of independent political communities learning to raise their citizens in a moderate and disciplined way — all of these stages were necessary background for philosophical investigation to be born. Philosophy could never come first, temporally. The theoretical activity needed very specific favorable conditions before it could spring up in an ancient civilization. Similarly, each individual soul, regardless of natural gifts, requires the satisfaction of certain conditions of the pre-rational or pre-theoretical elements of human nature before it has any chance of blossoming into the full theoretical activity of a philosophic life.
Hence, a society of philosophers — a society comprised entirely of mature humans living the philosophic life in the proper sense — could never arise organically in the first place, given that so many non-philosophical natures, and many generations of them, are needed in order to cultivate the soil in which philosophy may finally be sown and take root. And if, on the other hand, we try to imagine bringing a large group of already-developed philosophic natures together to live as a new, fully-formed society — comparable to the way Mustapha Mond in Brave New World describes the experiment of building a community made up entirely of Alphas — then we can quickly see a hundred problems that would arise.
For one thing, if everyone is a philosopher in the highest sense, truly devoted to the philosophic activity without compromise, then who will provide the food, who will build the houses, who will defend the society against outside aggressors, and so on?
Furthermore, who will raise their children? Will they have families in the ordinary sense, and raise their own children? Why would they have any wish for that, when everyone may see that having a family and raising children, especially in a society without a large number of non-philosophers to take care of the practical aspects of family life, would cause so many distractions, disruptions, and most dangerous of all, vested interests, therefore undermining their theoretical activity?
And if they would not desire the responsibilities and distractions of family life, due to being truly and entirely philosophical, then we arrive at an even more basic problem: Would these people ever wish to have children at all? And if not, then how would this community comprised exclusively of pure philosophers survive beyond the first generation?
Moreover, even if they did reach some sort of reasonable agreement to reproduce for the sake of social survival, we would be back to the problem of how they could raise the children without compromising their own philosophic pursuits. And here we meet an even more difficult issue: How could they be sure that their children would all have the same theoretical potential and therefore grow into the next generation of this philosophic community without diluting or weakening their society with all sorts of lower human compromises. For example, in the history of philosophy, we know of many legitimately great thinkers who did in fact have one or more children — Socrates, Aristotle, Rousseau, and Hegel for example — but there is no evidence that any of their children became fully developed philosophers, or even somewhat philosophical. In other words, there is no guarantee that the children of our philosophic community would have the kind of gifted natures that could be educated towards a truly philosophic life. Would these non-philosophical children have to be expelled from the society to keep it intellectually pure? But in that case, what standard could be used to judge which ones were talented enough to stay? After all, a philosophic nature is hard to identify with any certainty until early adulthood, at least.
We could go on and on with further problems that would make this imaginary society impossible, or nearly impossible, to produce or maintain in practice. But I think the above issues are enough to show why such a community would be implausible in the extreme.
What does this teach us? Among other things, it teaches us that philosophic individuals have a relationship to human civilization in general that is analogous to the relationship between the theoretical part of the soul and the material elements of human existence. No individual is born as pure theoretical reason — a rational soul without matter. We are born as material beings with various levels of potential that must slowly evolve, through the power of desire and passion, before anything like theoretical reason can even begin to emerge in us. And this implies that our material elements cannot simply be overlooked or dismissed in the development of a philosophic life. Rather, the key to such development — including the later, higher levels of spiritual growth, which means the philosophic education itself — requires careful attention to, and increasing spiritualization of, the desires and passions. This is the most difficult task imaginable, and hence it is almost a miracle that anyone overcomes all the obstacles to becoming a philosopher.
Likewise, by this analogy with the case of the individual, any real society requires its non-philosophical or pre-philosophical elements to function well enough to provide the necessary conditions for the emergence of a few fully rational souls. And this requirement entails many additional difficulties in practical reality, since of course the non-philosophers are always and necessarily the vast majority in any existing society, which means the irrational (or at least non-theoretical) elements of the soul will actually tend to have the greatest influence on the development of society itself. This is the reason why philosophers are always and inevitably viewed as standing apart from their societies in a somewhat threatening way, judged to be impious and strange, and sometimes hated and persecuted either by the many or by the powerful. Most societies are largely ignorant of, and even hostile towards, theoretical reason, in spite of the fact that theoretical reason is the proper fulfillment of our nature.
This is something of a paradox, and a humbling lesson of humanity’s unique existence as an animal species that is nevertheless defined by the element within us that is beyond the animal, and more like the divine.
