The Philosophic Temperament
In Book I of his Politics, Aristotle offers a rational argument for the natural legitimacy of slavery. A modern person, encountering this fact for the first time, is likely to respond in one of two ways: (1) “Well, that shows how much we have advanced since Aristotle’s time, and makes it hard to take his political theories seriously;” or, (2) “I wonder how he argues for that.”
The first of these responses is by far the more common, because it exhibits the most natural prejudice of the human soul, namely the bias in favor of the present (i.e., in favor of current norms and customs), as well as being the response to which we are all now conditioned by progressive education, which is merely the institutionalized, sophistical reinforcement of the soul’s most natural prejudice. The second, rarer, response indicates a soul inclined to the naïve presumption of good faith, which reacts to unfamiliar ideas not from the perspective of the innate human weakness for privileging the present, but rather begins with questions about the source and context of the strange opinion, and then, if these are found not to be inherently dismissable, proceeds to an examination of the theoretical argument itself.
Those who respond in the first way — the vast majority, not merely in the specific example noted above, but in general — may be presumed to be temperamentally unfit for philosophical pursuits, since the most essential prerequisite of philosophy, aside from natural intelligence, is a spirit of open-minded inquisitiveness, which entails a willingness to approach the uncommon, antithetical, or challenging idea with a sincere desire to understand and evaluate the idea on its own terms. And this in turn requires an ability, almost a compulsion, to set aside one’s personal, comfortable presuppositions for the sake of seeking the truth.
Those who respond the second way — the happy few in all cases — approach all questions from the understanding, whether implicit or directly affirmed, that the comfortable and familiar is inherently deceptive, with the resulting, slightly desperate belief that there must be alternative notions worth considering, if only one can find and fathom them from a perspective liberated from the natural prejudice in favor of the present.
To say this another way: When the awareness that a great man of the past, a great mind, one of enormous influence, has taken a view, or argued for a position, that is no longer fashionable, and your response is effectively to reject that position from serious consideration on the grounds that “we now know better than that,” this indicates that you have fallen into the trap of assuming that today’s fashionable beliefs are the only plausible beliefs. This is not to say that those influential answers of the past are necessarily superior to the current answers, but only that on the point of judging who is intellectually open to the philosophic life, it is essential that one be capable of entertaining the possibility that an alternative view which does not jibe with today’s popular attitudes might have its own reason, power, and persuasiveness, if one were willing to investigate it.
The potential philosopher must adopt this attitude, whether from innate temperament or from rational training: “The fact that X is the current opinion in no way proves, to my mind, that it is true. Rather, I need to prove with my mind what is true, and the best hope of reaching such intellectual clarity is to keep my mind open to all genuine alternatives, especially the least fashionable or comfortable ones, unless and until they show themselves to be fundamentally less satisfactory, on rational grounds, than certain other alternatives.”
