Over and over again Socrates demonstrated that the people he met in the marketplace didn't really know what they thought they knew. A military commander would begin a conversation totally confident that he knew what "courage" meant, but after 20 minutes in Socrates' company would leave completely confused. The experience must have been disconcerting. Socrates loved to reveal the limits of what people genuinely understood, and to question the assumptions on which they built their lives. A conversation that ended in everyone realizing how little they knew was for him a success. Far better that than to carry on believing that you understood something when you didn't.
The word "philosopher" comes from the Greek words meaning "love of wisdom." The Western tradition in philosophy spread from ancient Greece across large parts of the world, at time cross-fertilized by ideas from the East. The kind of wisdom that it values is based on argument, reasoning and asking questions, not on believing things simply because someone important has told you they are true. Wisdom for Socrates was not knowing lots of facts, or knowing how to do something. It meant understanding the true nature of our existence, including the limits of what we can know. Philosophers today are doing more or less what Socrates was doing: asking tough questions, looking at reasons and evidence, struggling to answer some of the most important questions we can ask ourselves about the nature of reality and how we should live.
Athens as a whole didn't value Socrates. Many Athenians felt that Socrates was dangerous and was deliberately undermining the government. In 399 BC, when Socrates was 70 years old, he was sentenced to death. He was put to death by being forced to drink poison made from hemlock. Socrates said goodbye to his wife and three sons, and then gathered his students around him. If he had the choice to carry on living quietly, not asking any more difficult questions, he would not take it. He'd rather die than that. He had an inner voice that told him to keep questioning everything, and he could not betray it. Then he drank the cup of poison.
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He is often called a reactionary, whose primary aim was to restore the ways of antiquity and to bolster the authority of the hereditary aristocracy. In fact, he advocated and helped to bring about such sweeping social and political reforms that he must be counted among the great revolutionaries. Within a few centuries after his death hereditary aristocracy had virtually ceased to exist in China, and Confucius had contributed more than any other man to its destruction.
The essentials of his teachings were simple. Everywhere about him he saw men struggling against each other, but he refused to believe that that was the natural state of society. He thought it was normal for men to cooperate; to strive, not to get the better of each other, but to promote the common welfare. In his opinion a ruler's success should be measured by his ability, not to amass wealth and power for himself, but to bring about the welfare and happiness of his people.
After his death, as his teachings were handed down from one generation of disciples to another, the Confucian group gradually grew in size and influence. The doctrine was changed and elaborated until Confucius himself would scarcely have recognized it, yet two principles remained: the insistence that those who govern should be chosen not for their birth but for their virtue and ability, and that the true end of government is the welfare and happiness of the people. This latter principle made Confucianism popular with the common people, as war and oppression increased and life became more and more difficult.
What strikes us first is the amazing degree to which Lisa looks alive. She really seems to look at us and to have a mind of her own. Like a living being, she seems to change before our eyes and to look a little different every time we come back to her. Even in photographs of the picture we experience this strange effect, but in front of the original in the Louvre it is almost uncanny. Sometimes she seems to mock us, and then again we seem to catch something like sadness in her smile. All this sounds rather mysterious, and so it is; that is so often the effect of a great work of art. Nevertheless, Leonardo certainly knew how he achieved this effect, and by what means.
…Botticelli, for instance, had tried to emphasize in his picture the waving hair and the fluttering garments of his figures, to make them look less rigid in outline. But only Leonardo found the true solution to the problem. The painter must leave the beholder something to guess. If the outlines are not quite so firmly drawn, if the form is left a little vague, as though disappearing into a shadow, this impression of dryness and stiffness will be avoided. This is Leonardo's famous invention which the Italians call "sfumato" – the blurred outline and mellow colors that allow one form to merge with another and always leave something to our imagination.
…But with all these sophisticated tricks, Leonardo might have produced a clever piece of jugglery rather than a great work of art, had he not known exactly how far he could go, and had he not counterbalanced his daring deviation from nature by an almost miraculous rendering of the living flesh. Look at the way in which he modeled the hand, or the sleeves with their minute folds. Leonardo could be as painstaking as any of his forerunners in the patient observation of nature. Only he was no longer merely the faithful servant of the nature…
Mountains and water play prominent roles in Chinese art. Over the centuries, Western painters have boldly explored new themes and media, continuously striving to transcend the familiar and challenge the unknown, while their Chinese counterparts have relished the creation of timeless natural sceneries. Painting scrolls feature towering mountain peaks and pouring waterfalls, slopes receding far into the distance and gently rolling streams. No classical Chinese garden would be complete without mountains and water.
A profound faith in nature's powers to uplift and nourish the spirit and to purify the soul has been shared by the two great philosophies indigenous to China, Confucianism and Daoism. Although Confucius was mostly concerned with the ordering of social and governmental affairs rather than metaphysics, moral integrity and the continuous perfection of man through learning are cornerstones of his ideal of family and state. Confucius coined the phrase that "the wise take pleasure in rivers and lakes, the virtuous in mountains (Analects)."
Mountains and water are central to the Daoist conception of the world. This school of thought views man as an inseparable part of the universe. Harmony is attained if each individual's energy is attuned to the energy of the cosmos at large. Intimate encounters with natural phenomena are the path leading to this goal. Tranquility induces a relaxed condition in which the workings of the universe may be understood. In a state of heightened spiritual awareness, man's ability to adjust his rhythm to the pulse of the cosmos and to eventually merge with it will prevail.
Mountains not only offer a life in seclusion, devoid of restraints. A wealth of stimulating shapes, a multitude of colors and the ever changing moods so typical of mountainous surroundings – impressions of this kind are apt to reveal the all-pervading spirit of the universe to the perceptive mind. Nature's sheer power and grandeur is more easily comprehended in a setting with rugged peaks capped by misty clouds.
Continuously dissolving and solidifying, it attains an infinite number of fresh manifestations of unity by way of perpetual transformation. The superior qualities of water are to be emulated by man: It follows its own course and always fills the bottom level, equivalent to the wise man being true to himself and maintaining a low profile. Water is the emblem of the unassertive. Taking the path of least resistance, always yielding, its effectiveness is unsurpassed.
Buddhism began to find widespread acceptance in China at a time of political and social upheaval known as the Six Dynasties. During this period, the Confucian scholar, greatly esteemed and entrusted with high government posts in the preceding Han Dynasty, found himself at odds with a political situation abundant with intrigue, nepotism and corruption. For some high-minded literati, seeking refuge in the mountains became the only alternative to compromising their ideals. Individuals who were willing to sacrifice careers and luxuries in an immoral world for a frugal, pure existence in the mountains became models and were immortalized in poetry and painting for centuries to come.
Whether creating landscape paintings, gardens or penjing – Chinese artists have not sought to recreate nature in a realistic manner. Never has outward resemblance been a major objective. A superior piece of art possesses the quality to transmit life, to convey the very spirit inherent in nature. In pursuit of this goal, the artist concentrates on the essential, leaves out all superfluous detail, and eliminates anything that would distract the viewer's attention.
Why is "you" such a powerful word? Because when we were infants, we thought we were the center of the universe. Nothing mattered but ME, MYSELF and I. The rest of the shadowy forms stirring about us (which we later learned were other people) existed solely for what they could do for us. Self-centered little tykes that we were, our tiny brains translated every action, every word, into, "How does that affect ME?"
I'm sure when they recover the flight box from the Fall of Man under a fig leaf in the Garden of Eden, it will convince the world of the power of the word "you." Eve did not ask Adam to eat the apple. She did not command him to eat the apple. She didn't even say, "Adam, I want you to eat this apple." She phrased it (as all big winners would), "You will love this apple." That's why he bit.
Therapists calculate inmates of mental institutions say "I" and "me" 12 times more often than residents of the outside world. As patients' conditions improve, the number of times they use the personal pronouns also diminishes. Continuing up the sanity scale, the fewer times you use "I," the more sane you seem to your listeners. If you eavesdrop on big winners talking with each other, you'll notice a lot more "you" than "I" in their conversation.
My seventh-grade English teacher exhorted us to study vocabulary with the following: "We think in words. The more words you know, the more thoughts you can have." This compound notion that language allows you to have ideas otherwise unhaveable, and that by extension people who own different words live in different conceptual worlds – called "Whorfianism" after its academic evangelist, Benjamin Lee Whorf – is so pervasive in modern thought as to be unremarkable.
In fact, scientists have had so much difficulty demonstrating that language affects thought that in 1994 a renowned psychologist Steven Pinker called Whorfianism dead. Since then, Whorfianism has undergone a small resurgence. For instance, Lera Boroditsky and colleagues found that speakers of Russian, which treats light blue and dark blue as primary colors, are faster to categorize shades of blue.
This suggests a different way of thinking about the influence of language on thought: Words are very handy mnemonics. We may not be able to remember what 17 spools look like, but we can remember the word 17. In his landmark The Language of Thought, philosopher Jerry Fodor argued that many words work like acronyms. French students use the acronym "bangs" to remember which adjectives go before nouns ("Beauty, Age, Number, Goodness, and Size"). Similarly, sometimes it's easier to remember a word (calculus, Estonia) than what the word stands for. We use the word, knowing that should it become necessary, we can search through our minds – or an encyclopedia – and pull up the relevant information (how to calculate an integral; Estonia's population, capital and location on a map). Numbers, it seems, work the same way.
The second factor in determining the reactions of bystanders to emergencies is what psychologists call the principle of moral diffusion. Moral diffusion is the lessening of a sense of individual responsibility when someone is a member of a group. Responsibility to act diffuses throughout the crowd. When a member of the group is able to escape the collective paralysis and take action, others in the group tend to act as well. But the larger the crowd, the greater the diffusion of responsibility, and the less likely someone is to intervene.
For humans, helping is all about emotions. We help others out of the goodness of our hearts. As Abraham Lincoln said, "When I do good, I feel good. When I do bad, I feel bad. That's my religion." The kindness of strangers reminds us that humans are an altruistic species willing to help others even when there is no obvious payoff. We do so because it seems right but also because we feel better about ourselves and worse when we do not. When we help others we get a "warm glow" – an experience that registers in the pleasure centers of our brain.
This kind of speculation may seem pointless: After all, we are simply not going to turn our backs on writing, and computers will not be wheeled out of offices and replaced by fountain pens and reams of foolscap. But some things can be written by hand – it happens every day – and it is possible to discard that email draft, get up, and go looking for the person you were going to send it to. Technologies and practices that have been supplemented, or displaced from a prior centrality, do not thereby become unavailable. Thinking historically helps us to remember that fact, and to practice what Jacques Ellul called "the measuring of technique by other criteria than those of technique itself."
Finding a narrative on the Internet is rather different. Take the revolution in Egypt: As events unfolded, I sat in front of a television screen and a computer, following tweets as well as news broadcasts, synthesizing an understanding from a multitude of sources. No single voice defined my understanding. No one else's path through the moment was exactly like mine. This wasn't reading in the old style, but an attempt to create a broad picture for myself. This is the true modern Gutenberg moment: the decentralization of narrative authority. If I want to know what's going on, I'm going to have to find out rather than simply adopt a position from someone else. Somewhere, Socrates is laughing.