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August 21, 1999 Beware of the sophist by CHRISTOPHER PHILLIPS
His comments brought to mind a piercing essay that noted philosopher-scholar Roger Scruton published in The Times of London. In the essay, Scruton warns us of "the return of the sophist." He tells how today's sophists, many of whom appear to be philosophers pedigreed with Ph.D.'s seeking greener pastures by peddling their academic wares to the public, "no longer...guide us towards the truth, through awakening our inherent reasoning powers." Instead, Scruton writes, the new sophist "compares his goods favourably with those of the psychotherapist... He parades before us a catalogue of 'belief systems,' helps us to identify our own among them, and maybe encourages us to replace it with something more up-to-date. And no doubt in order to persuade the client that her money has been well invested, the favoured 'belief system' will be dressed up in suitable mumbo-jumbo, and priced at a rate that will make it psychologically necessary for the client to persuade herself that she is being cured." Scruton contrasts these new sophists with the timeless example of integrity embodied by "the great Socrates whom Plato immortalised in his dialogues," and who "was not a sophist, but a true philosopher" who "awakens the spirit of inquiry" and enables those with whom he is engaged in dialogue to discover their own answers to life's riddles. The philosopher who exemplifies Socrates, Scruton writes, "is the midwife, and his duty is to help us to be what we are -- free and rational beings, who lack nothing that is required to understand our condition. The sophist, by contrast, misleads us with cunning fallacies, takes advantage of our weakness, and offers himself as the solution to problems of which he himself is the cause." I've heard some such characters make sweeping statements like "psychotherapy has failed," and they proceed to offer themselves as viable (and costly) alternatives to their psychotherapeutic counterparts. It seems at least arguable that such soothing sophisms not only are irresponsible, but could endanger the lives of people with mental illness who might buy into them with the hope that somehow this is the magic bullet they've long been searching for. Though hard-won philosophical insights may indeed have their therapeutic components, as you gain certain kinds of insight by considering compelling objections and alternatives to your own point of view, philosophy itself is not principally therapeutic in nature and operates from an entirely different set of paradigms than decidedly psychotherapeutic approaches. Problems of a decidedly psychological nature would seem in most instances to need psychological intervention, though of course some form of "philosophical intervention" (perhaps among many other things) may well serve as a fruitful complement to this. But it is at least debatable that anyone who would utter any sort of claptrap that philosophy is a clear-cut alternative to psychology -- that embracing the former will enable you to dispense with the latter -- would in at least some instances seem to be offering a potentially treacherous, and perhaps even life-threatening, bill of goods. To justify bringing in the bucks, some who philosophize with their "clients" for a hefty profit take pains to disparage Socrates, maintaining that if Socrates earned no wages from his philosophizing, then he already had money or was propped up by wealthy friends. This is an argument I'm sure that Roger Scruton, not to mention Socrates, would consider a classic sophism. To say that only the rich or their coterie can afford to give short shrift to money-making endeavors is to ignore all the countless people who disavow material gain and who live on a shoestring budget or less in order to devote their lives to addressing the many perceived injustices that blemish this world. And for someone to say that Socrates already had money, or was propped up by wealthy friends, betrays the fact that either he did not read, or purposely chose to ignore, Plato's Apology, which students in every Philosophy 101 class hopefully had to learn by heart. Anyone who has read this dialogue has come across the passage in which Socrates says he willingly lived in extreme poverty in order to stay true to his ideals. And what I sadly suspect is that the Ph.D. philosopher who made that disparaging comment about Socrates knew full well that he was being fast and loose with the facts, and didn't care, because he knew full well that the audience he is attempting to reach would not know the difference. At the very least, he should have cited precisely where he found the information in philosophical literature to support his charge, or one would suspect him of carelessness at best. Scruton' s essay was predictably mischaracterized as "libelous" by one so-called philosophical counselor whose hair-trigger sensitivities apparently felt the essay hit too close to home. But of course, it wasn't libelous at all; it was, however, critical in the finest philosophical tradition. The bottom line, I suppose, is this: Let the new generation of sophists try to profit lucratively from whatever questionable brand of philosophy it is they claim to practice. But let there be an alternative to them as well, so thoughtful people can discriminate between the new sophists and the new Socratics. The new Socratics know that philosophical inquiry is no panacea or magic bullet for our problems and that it would be the height of dishonesty to portray philosophy in such a light. Indeed, has a problem ever been cured or solved that has not given rise to a host of new ones? But isn't that okay? Isn't that, in fact, wonderful? Isn't that part and parcel of the glorious and agonizing experience of being a human? To be sure, probing philosophical inquiry can enable us to develop new ways of seeing and experiencing and empathizing. A philosophical inquirer in the Socratic mold, in counterpoint to the profiteering sophists, might also ask such questions as: What is a problem? What are some of the jillions of different types of problems? Do they all share certain common attributes, or all they all as different as night and day? What is the difference between a philosophical problem and a psychological problem? What is the difference between a common problem and an everyday problem? Can't a person's everyday problems turn out to be very uncommon problems? What, if anything, does it mean to solve a problem? Is solving a problem really what we should strive to do? Or instead should we strive better to clarify and enunciate and rework a problem so it no longer matters whether or not it is solved so much as whether it can be encountered and embraced and seen as a vital part of existence? Or, at the very least, isn't a solution to one problem always the starting point for even more delicious problems? Coming up with tentative answers to such questions can cast our singular concept of problems -- what problems are, what they mean, what they do -- and our philosophy of problems, in a dazzling new light which in turn can sometimes cast even our most intractable woes in exhilaratingly new, enriching and life-affirming perspectives.
_____________________ Christopher Phillips is executive director of the Society for Philosophical Inquiry.
Copyright (c) 1999 by Christopher Phillips. |
I was pleased to see that
independent scholar Tudor B. Munteanu was able to wade through and
present an exquisite review of Plato Not Prozac! Munteanu
characterizes the book as "a dubious trivialization of philosophy
under the guise of 'Philosophical Practice.'" He goes on to say that
"Philosophical Counseling...bears an uncanny resemblance to the
sophist movement that Socrates, Plato and Aristotle despised so
much..."