The Principle of Charity and Philosophic Education
What modern discourse has designated the principle of charity ought properly to be renamed the principle of humility. That is, the word “charity” implies from the outset a position of superiority, such that by being “charitable” to an opposing argument one is merely trying to display kindness to the other position for the sake of intellectual good citizenship or moral virtue, rather than actually assuming the open-minded attitude that an argument which one finds immediately strange or even unpalatable might in fact be better than the established opinion in your own mind which is causing you to react negatively to this alternative view. Leaving aside this quibble about terminology, however, let us offer a few reflections on the meaning and proper purpose of the so-called principle of charity, as applied to theoretical disagreement, especially in the context of reading classic theoretical works. For it is in this context above all others that this principle gains its highest significance, being simply a modern way of expressing a spiritual condition most essential to genuine philosophic education, i.e., to the search for wisdom or self-knowlege.
What does it mean to be open-minded, in the sense required for serious learning and self-development? It certainly does not mean assuming that every idea is as good as every other, or that no one’s perspective is truer than anyone else’s. That is not openness; it is relativism. Relativism is the death of thinking, philosophy, and self-development, because it suffocates the desire that motivates all growth and intellectual investigation: the desire for the true, the good, and the beautiful. If those three things do not really exist, or are just whatever anyone happens to think they are, then anything you believe now (based on your nearest and most compelling influences) may be assumed to be as true as any other belief, such that seeking truth becomes irrelevant, or at least a lazy endeavor of filling in the picture you have already adopted; however you are living now (according to the trends or models of your social context) is as good as any other way, so improvement in any sense that might require fundamental change becomes as meaningless as it is uncomfortable; and whatever is attractive to you now (as habituated by what you have been exposed to early in life) is as beautiful as anyone else’s preference, so changing your judgments and tastes becomes purely a matter of whim or random pleasure. Thus, this modern sense of “openness” is actually a trap that limits a soul to the expectations, beliefs, and preferences of whatever environment she happens to have been raised in or found convenient. While people with this kind of “open mind” are inclined to claim that there is no single truth, goodness, or beauty, what this presupposition really means in their practical lives is that they will tend to readily accept the norms and attitudes that seem most familiar and comfortable for them, they will believe “what everyone says,” and they will see no benefit in experiencing, let alone embracing, the discomfort of hard challenges from alternative points of view. This is Plato’s cave, but with no way out. Its product, in spiritual terms, is Nietzsche’s last man, or the obedient citizen of Brave New World. Relativism narrows the soul’s horizon until it can see nothing beyond what is pleasant, safe, and comfortable, and therefore thwarts the development of the longing for real self-improvement or understanding, which is to say it blocks the only road to a fully human education.
Exactly opposed to that false notion of openness (the cultural relativism approach), to be open-minded in the proper philosophic sense means to seek the true, the good, and the beautiful in a way that resists the temptations of the familiar, the comfortable, or the popular. This means accepting, early in life, that we do not know what we used to think we knew, and that our previous assumptions about things (including ourselves) could be wrong. When, usually through the influence of a great teacher, whether in person or in books, we encounter hints of something else, exciting evidence of a wider world or deeper understanding beyond our current grasp, a desire is ignited in the soul for a life that is truer, better, and more beautiful than the one we inherited more or less passively from the social influences in which we were raised.
Of course, one of the primary sources of this widening horizon, and the experience of growth, is classic literature. When we read ideas and theories written by great minds from other times and places, we are confronted with new ways of thinking, new questions, or new approaches to answering familiar questions. At first, these early moments of discovery lead, in souls given to wonder, to a time of overwhelming thirst. We just long to “drink it all in”: all the new ideas, all these wonderful questions, all the great theories that we had never even imagined could exist. We may become almost dizzy with the thrill of discovery.
Gradually, however, as we become more aware of the theoretical world, and more excited about the freedom of learning to think for ourselves, we also tend to feel more capable of defending our views and arguing for what we believe. (Think of Simmias and Cebes in The Phaedo, for example.) The danger now is that when we confront new ideas that do not seem immediately consistent with things we already believe we know, or at least with things that seem more reasonable to us at this moment, we might feel an instinct to counter these new ideas in our minds. “But that doesn’t sound correct to me,” or “I don’t think he’s right to assume that.” Here is where the open-minded soul (in the proper sense) meets her great challenge and test: Can she remain open to new ideas, even when those ideas do not seem immediately consistent with what she, in her growing independence, believes she already knows?
This is where the so-called “principle of charity” becomes most important.
The phrase itself is a modern expression, but the idea it expresses is ancient, in that we can see it in the Socratic dialogues. The person who becomes closed to spiritual growth and philosophic development is the one who reaches a certain level of confidence in his thinking and then starts to become a “debater,” by which I mean a person whose reflex when hearing a new theory or argument that seems to contradict what he already believes, is no longer to respond with wonder and naïve curiosity, but rather to try to challenge it or show what is wrong with it. The danger is that at this moment the soul of the incipient debater has stopped trying to understand the strange idea or argument, and is merely assuming it must be wrong because it does not seem to match his own current beliefs. He has lost the built-in assumption he had in his earlier days of discovery, which was the assumption that “These great writers know so much more than I do that I should just listen carefully and try to drink it all in.” His growing confidence in his thinking has, paradoxically, reignited the old self-protective or rationalizing instinct of his pre-philosophical days (his “cave” period), when he, like all cave dwellers sitting obediently in their tethers, simply rejected anything that did not match the shadows projected on the wall that he mistook for reality. The difference is that now he has started to see himself as an independent thinker with knowledge of his own (although he often cannot explain where he got this supposed knowledge). As a result of spending fruitful time among the great intellects, he has understandably started to feel sure of himself, sure enough to read a new argument and immediately think, “I don’t think Socrates’ conclusion makes sense,” without even noticing how presumptuous that declaration sounds.
The principle of charity, stated simply and, shall we say, most charitably: When looking at any new argument by a serious thinker, especially an argument that seems unreasonable on its face or reaches a conclusion you do not immediately agree with, always begin by, as far as humanly possible, putting aside your own biases and beliefs and trying to understand that strange argument in the most sympathetic light. That is, approach the new idea in good faith, not instinctively rejecting or doubting its logic or conclusion, but rather struggling to make sense of it in the strongest possible way.
The “charity” (or generosity) involved here is the good-faith willingness to assume — to really assume, not as a matter of self-satisfied politeness but of honest intellectual humility — that, for example, “Socrates was a great mind, a man who has influenced civilization for centuries and inspired important developments in philosophy, art, and politics throughout the world. I am a relative beginner who is reading of Socrates’ great thoughts for the first time, and who has never accomplished anything remotely comparable to what Socrates accomplished. If his argument looks weak to me, or his conclusion invalid, I should assume that the problem could be mine. That is, rather than approach the unfamiliar idea, or incomprehensible argument, with skepticism or disagreement, I should approach it with the intention of trying to figure out why he is saying this. What are his premises? How is he defining his terms? How does this unfamiliar logic work? Why is he stating his position this way in this context? And (also very important) even if the argument ends up not being perfectly satisfactory in the final analysis, is it possible that Socrates himself knows this, but is offering it for some reason beyond a simple statement of ‘truth’?”
This principle should be applied in general to all serious thinkers and their works. This does not mean, however, that you must agree in the end with all of them — you could not agree with all of them at once, since they often contradict one another. Rather, what it means is that your approach, when encountering their arguments — not just the first time, but even the second or third or fourth, depending on how impressive the thinker is — should be to try to understand them not against the standards of present-day thinking, but on their standards. Try to understand them as they wanted to be understood, and as they understood themselves. Strive to be the perfect reader they dreamed of when they wrote their books, for example: the reader who would be able to see all the way into their secret minds and find the deepest wisdom they were hoping to reveal, reading between the lines, looking at the full picture rather than the isolated arguments, and sincerely attempting to see the world as that thinker was seeing it, as far as time and distance will allow.
In other words, when applied to the philosophic life, the principle of charity is just a modern, abstract way of saying, as a modern educator has put it, that we read classic literature to learn from the book, not about the book. To learn anything truly important and new to us — new especially in its foundations and principles — requires an openness to what is unfamiliar. And not only unfamiliar, but even implausible or disturbing. After all, it is easy to be “open” to ideas that do not challenge what you already think in any serious way. The hardest thing — and the essential talent necessary for the philosophic education — is to have an open mind for what is truly jarring and difficult to digest. This requires reading the great books with the assumption that the author deserves to be trusted and taken seriously on his own terms, because such an attitude is our only hope of overcoming the limits, not merely of earlier languages and historical contexts, but of our biases and cultural norms (our cave) in order to find the wisdom in what is strange and challenging. Presume, for example, that Plato knows what he is doing, and is wiser than we are, and keep reminding yourself of that, especially when you read something that causes you to doubt immediately. That reflexive doubt is not to be trusted, because its very reflexiveness indicates that it is likely a case of your own presuppositions or vested interests trying to trap you in the Now, and to “protect” you against what is uncommon or disruptive. But all the wisdom you long for, which is to say all the wisdom you lack, is to be found amid the uncommon or disruptive. Follow these uncomfortable thoughts sincerely, with a truly open mind, and see what you can learn from them.
As anyone who knows me may see, I love Plato and therefore I teach him with total enthusiasm and sympathy. But I did not always feel exactly that way. I resisted him at the beginning, because I could not see what he was doing, or why I needed to take all those convoluted and often inconclusive dialectical conversations seriously. It was only after being encouraged by good teaching to open my mind to an unprejudiced approach to his dialogues that I realized that Plato is the gateway to everything good and life-altering that philosophy can offer us, once we learn to turn around and accept the initial discomfort of looking at the fire behind us until we realize how untrue were those shadows on the wall, which we previously believed were realities.
More importantly, however, even with philosophers whose ideas I ultimately find less agreeable than Plato’s, I always try to read them in total good faith, giving them the benefit of the doubt when my self-protective instinct says “That’s wrong!” As a teacher, I have taught Marx, Rousseau, Nietzsche, and others with whose premises and conclusions I often had serious disagreements. But I always taught them as an advocate for the text. That is, I always taught those thinkers as though my goal were to convert the students to their philosophies. At the end of the class or discussion, the students could easily imagine that I was a great believer in Marxism, Rousseaueanism, or Nietzscheanism, or at least very sympathetic to them. This demonstrates the principle of charity. If the goal is to learn as much as we can from the important minds of the past, then we have to try to find what is most interesting in their thoughts — interesting not in the sense of being most immediately comforting to us, but rather most intriguingly challenging and unexpected — and approach it as though it might be true, and as though we must therefore try to understand it in the strongest possible light, regardless of our personal biases or previous conclusions.
In short, even as you become more confident and serious in your own thinking and reasoning, you must at the same time resolve never to lose that innocent thirst for understanding that made you want to just drink it all in at the beginning of your journey. Never lose the craving for wisdom that makes you an innocent and respectful reader of every important writer of the past. That’s an essential trait of the philosophic mind. There could be bits of wisdom and truth even in the most surprising and questionable places. Search them out, squeeze what you can out of every classic book or serious argument. Learn everything as those past thinkers wanted their ideas to be learned. The filtering process comes later, and quite naturally, as the best elements of everything you have found are infused into your soul and become part of your own understanding of the world. But that filtering process can never work its soul-expanding miracle if you protectively refuse to permit entry to the greatest theoretical challenges to your own sense of orthodoxy.
