Read an Excerpt
Liberal Arts and Sciences
Thinking Critically, Creatively, and Ethically
By Christopher A. Ulloa Chaves Trafford Publishing
Copyright © 2014 Christopher A. Ulloa Chaves, ED.D.
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4907-3699-0
CHAPTER 1
Philosophy: A Way To Human Development
The rest of the arts are called liberal because they befit free men, but philosophy is liberal because its study makes men free.
Vergerio (1370-1444)
* * *
Defining what we mean when we use the term philosophy, and its association with human developmental experiences, can pose a challenge since this term seems to only apply within ancient sociological contexts or be the sole province of the eccentric intellectual who engages in conversation about abstract ideas which seemly have no genuine relevance to the contemporary world. But if our intent is to begin to discern between truth and falsehood or between right and wrong, then philosophy has much practical value in the contemporary world. While philosophy has been described in many ways, it can generally be understood to involve a love for wisdom, an ongoing exploration for what one considers to be true, and these which inform a certain way of life.
Love of wisdom
Most philosophers and scholars simply define philosophy as the love of wisdom; this is usually what the official understanding is for the Western conception of philosophy. This word is essentially a contraction involving two terms, namely philo (love of) and sophia (wisdom). The word love has many conceptions, but as it relates to philosophy, we can understand it as a genuine affection for what is wise in the world; thus, wisdom is the object of our intellectual affections. Wisdom, on the other hand, can be succinctly defined as when a person has certain knowledge "to discern inner qualities and relationships" among people or systems or, described to represent "accumulated philosophic or scientific learning."
For example, Socrates would in one case employ key questions in his attempt to understand the inner qualities or essence of what true piety was. During his dialogue with a religious scholar named Euthyphro on the steps of the king-archon court, the former requests from the latter greater clarity about what genuine piety is, stating that "I did not bid you tell me one or two of the many pious actions but that form itself that makes all pious actions pious" (italics mine). For Socrates, it was only in understanding exactly what the inner essence, or definition, of what a pious action was that could give him the ability to develop an objective standard to apply when attempting to discern whether or not a person or a practice is genuinely good.
Wisdom can also be represented as a canon of reliable insights or scientific discoveries that continue to inform new questions or research. Thus, a teacher will use Confucius's Analects, Indian Upanishads, Plato's Republic, or chemical laws like the Law of Multiple Proportions to create new learning experiences for her students. So one kind of wisdom is philosophic, and the other is scientific, but they are both strongly desired for their continuing value and potential to inform new understanding in the world.
Many times, however, our insights or decisions are informed mainly by an emotional preference that eclipses the wisdom of logic or basic rationality, as in the case of love for an unreliable person, a material item, or support for a narcissistic and unethical politician. An overreliance on our emotional dimension to make most key decisions can often prevent our cognitive faculties from discerning the true inner character qualities of leaders, social dynamics, or the practical utility of a product or service. It is important to recognize that we or others will use the emotional dimension to persuade us about any number of issues or decisions. Generally, it can be a good thing, I suppose, if some type of balanced influence, involving both cognitive and affective processing, informs our initial understanding or decision making. The need to make wise decisions seems to take priority during a personal crisis in ours or the lives of those we care for; and so, strongly relying upon what we know to be wise, meaning reliable understanding, that we can apply as a way to enlighten our path forward, invariably becomes important to us.
Political philosopher and writer Robert Nozick argues that wisdom represents knowledge and understanding of many facets pertaining to the human experience; he writes:
Wisdom is not just one type of knowledge, but diverse. What a wise person needs to know and understand constitutes a varied list: the most important goals and values of life—the ultimate goal, if there is one; what means will reach these goals without too great a cost; what kinds of dangers threaten the achieving of these goals; how to recognize and avoid or minimize these dangers; what different types of human beings are like in their actions and motives (as this presents dangers or opportunities); what is not possible or feasible to achieve (or avoid); how to tell what is appropriate when; knowing when certain goals are sufficiently achieved; what limitations are unavoidable and how to accept them; how to improve oneself and one's relationships with others or society; knowing what the true and unapparent value of various things is; when to take a long-term view; knowing the variety and obduracy of facts, institutions, and human nature; understanding what one's real motives are; how to cope and deal with the major tragedies and dilemmas of life, and with the major good things too.
Nozick argues that wisdom constitutes a multitude of special knowledge relating to the complexity of the human life. He writes that wisdom helps us understand more about key values; what is realistically possible in life, goal attainment, and our personal strengths and limitations; and how wisdom can improve our relationships with others, regulate our motives, and help us deal with life's tragedies should they occur. An ancient example from Plato's dialogues can help us understand some of Nozick's ideas as they apply in the real world.
When we read the dialogue between Socrates and Crito in Plato's Republic, where the latter attempts to convince the former to leave Athens before the sentence of death on Socrates is carried out, we can begin to discern how a decision on the part of Socrates to leave Athens can trigger a whole series of related and negative consequences. Benjamin Jowett (2006) translates this part of the dialogue as follows:
'For just consider, if you transgress and err in this sort of way, what good will you do either to yourself or to your friends? That your friends will be driven into exile and deprived of citizenship, or will lose their property, is tolerably certain; and you yourself, if you fly to one of the neighboring cities, as, for example, Thebes or Megara, both of which are well governed, will come to them as an enemy, Socrates, and their government will be against you, and all patriotic citizens will cast an evil eye upon you as a subverter of the laws, and you will confirm in the minds of the judges the justice of their own condemnation of you. For he who is a corrupter of the laws is more than likely to be a corrupter of the young and foolish portion of mankind.
The consequences outlined above seem to impact on the personal, social, political, economic, cultural, and legal dimensions connecting Socrates, his family, friends, and the Greek Isles. Following through with Crito's advice would trigger what is generally known as an "international incident" with hardly any benefits to be realized by Socrates or his loved ones in Athens. Disliking, indeed hating, what is wise in this important case would create one more Greek tragedy in the city of Athens.
In the end, Socrates would not betray his commitment to the law but demonstrate his love for what was wise in his heart and mind; he would not regress on his professed way of life. He would not allow a prejudiced verdict against him to ultimately discredit, as he believed it, his God-given work as the gadfly of Athens. To Socrates, Athenian culture required deep levels of improvement, and he would accomplish this by entrenching an educational process that involved critically analyzing and evaluating many of the values, attitudes, and beliefs Athenians took for granted. Ultimately, Socrates secured his immortality.
The love of wisdom has moved many to initiate and inform discourse experiences wherein individuals can begin to ask, or engage in, questions and answers about wiser courses of action in life which actually begin to benefit ourselves and those we care for around us. Actually realizing genuine benefits from wisdom then, presumably, develops a strong desire, if not a long-term love, for wisdom of many sorts in our lives. Philosophy has also created the dialogical vehicle to engage in the search for truth, an ancient description that essentially connotes an educational process.
Searching for truth
Philosophy also can be understood to facilitate a search for truth. The act of searching in the intellectual sense generally requires careful and thoughtful study, dialogue, and investigation. Defined in this way, the search for philosophical or scientific truth often begins by engaging in an educational process including the definition of key terms and concepts, key follow-up questions, and an ongoing dialogue which tends to often produce greater clarity about what may be true or not. Merriam-Webster (2012) defines truth as "the body of real things, events, and facts." Philosopher and religion scholar Huston Smith posits that truth can be informally defined by each individual as the current reality, the way things exist, or how they actually occurred.
But truth, as beauty, is often in the eye of the beholder. This is perhaps why there can be related but varying accounts made by different witnesses to a particular automobile accident on a busy freeway system. There are both conflicting and related dimensions reported by different people at the same automobile accident. In the Christian Bible, specifically within the four gospels, we have seemingly different perspectives about the life and deeds of the man called Jesus of Nazareth. Indeed, the process of searching and determining what truth can be for a certain context or situation has often been controversial, enlightening, liberating, and occurring for at least 2,400 years in the Western and non-Western worlds; we see this process occurring within many sources, including Plato's dialogues, Cicero's De Republica, the Hebrew and Christian Bibles, the Koran, the Upanishads, or in the Confucian Analects.
The idea of what could be accepted as truth to live by has been different based on certain intellectual emphases. For instance, from Plato's Theory of Forms, we get the concept of idealism, the belief that the intangible ideas in our minds are the only true things in our world; thus, the fact that our light blue vehicle can be destroyed in a fire does not extinguish the truth that in our Western mindset the color concept of light blue is unchanging throughout time or that two plus four will always equal six. Moreover, the form of beauty is what can be considered common between peaceful sunsets in a desert, flowers in bloom, or a placid ocean scape. While it has been said that beauty is in the eye of the beholder, it usually cannot be denied that these three descriptions of nature can be a beautiful experience for human senses.
Conversely, those who subscribe to the concept of materialism believe as Aristotle that matter, or tangible things, are what can be counted on to be the only true things in this world. While it may be true that two plus four equals six, it is only in physically adding two blueberries with four blackberries that we touch and see that we have six total berries in our hands. Thus, for contemporary empiricists, the search for truth requires the application of a scientific approach or method that serves to explicitly confirm or deny the truth of a hypothesis, an informed idea which must be tested that is attempting to explain a physical phenomenon which may change over time.
Thus, in our current postmodern era, supposed truth claims must be empirically verified in a credible way in order for them, ultimately, to inform courses of action that will impact animals, human lives, or natural resources. Indeed, Yale University professor of medicine Steven Novella posits that, at a basic level, discernible natural effects (a form of truth) must be explained as having natural causes and not rooted in a category of the miraculous, supernatural, or, I might add, the emotional dimension. But do all forms of truth need to be empirically verified?
For many, the intangible dimensions of emotions or thoughts still carry legitimacy as we know that while thoughts and feelings cannot be tangibly seen, they are nonetheless real to individuals considered, for instance, to be in love with each other; for them, it is true that their partner's feelings of love are genuine, discernible, and being manifested through selfless or disinterested acts toward each other. And so, friends or family members make life-altering decisions or commit limited financial resources to benefit a loved one or even a stranger.
Thus, idealism, as initiated by Plato, belongs within that branch of philosophy called metaphysics; and materialism which often intersects with the scientific method, and necessarily accomplished independent of religious and political authority, belongs to the branch of philosophy called epistemology, the term that defines the method which enables us to better know what we know.
Whether one determines truth by giving more credence to the ideas in our minds or the concrete experience in the material world, what we accept as being the truth usually produces a learning experience in our lives; learning is synonymous with the experience of change in mind, body, or spirit. But for genuine learning to occur, an educational process involving a guide or teacher must be a part of the search for truth.
Plato describes the process of searching for truth or reality in his Allegory of the Cave. He describes this search, a form of intellectual development, as a process involving, first, the realization that most of us are born in the cave of intellectual darkness and the passive recipients of illusionary tales and myths delivered by others using, as it were, a movie projector. Plato's cave represents the inside of a modern-day movie theater whereby the film projector above and behind the audience projects various illusionary images onto a screen in front that tends to keep the viewers in emotional infancy and in a captive intellectual state.
One day, however, one of the prisoners decides to leave the cave by ascending nearby stairs that lead up and out into the light of the real world, but it is not all smooth sailing at the outset. Using Jewett's (1991) translation, Socrates explains the experience of discovering the genuine truth of the real world in his response to Glaucon, stating:
And now look again, and see what will naturally follow if the prisoners are released and disabused of their error. At first, when any of them is liberated and compelled suddenly to stand up and turn his neck round and walk and look towards the light, he will suffer sharp pains; the glare will distress him, and he will be unable to see the realities of which in his former state he had seen the shadows; and then conceive someone saying to him, that what he saw before was an illusion, but that now, when he is approaching nearer to being and his eye is turned towards more real existence, he has a clearer vision,—what will be his reply? And you may further imagine that his instructor is pointing to the objects as they pass and requiring him to name them,—will he not be perplexed? Will he not fancy that the shadows which he formerly saw are truer than the objects which are now shown to him?
It seems that the prisoner who chose to initiate a search for truth, a true educational process, began to experience what we now term cognitive dissonance, meaning, there is essentially a conflict between the understanding he has previously acquired and what he now has a "clearer vision" of. Indeed, his instructor is requiring that the prisoner actually name various objects being shown to him and this while struggling with his own doubts about what he already knows or takes for granted; it will require a sense of intellectual liberation and autonomy in order for the former prisoner to confidently name the new objects.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Liberal Arts and Sciences by Christopher A. Ulloa Chaves. Copyright © 2014 Christopher A. Ulloa Chaves, ED.D.. Excerpted by permission of Trafford Publishing.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
