10 - Why We Study the Past

     One of the rewards of studying Philosophy is the ability to name-drop. 

     In the midst of intense political debate, or of making a crisp first impression, or just casual conversation, one can throw out the name of a Famous One, with some iota of knowledge about that thinker's contribution, and bring to oneself immediate respect and intellectual recognition. If for no reason than pride alone, it is beneficial to learn a micro-dot about the best renowned.

  Like classics in literature, which are the regarded as the best fiction, poetry, and essays over time, so the classics in philosophy are those that have given the best expression to ideas, within the confines or limits of their own period, and that have won the respect as the highest or the deepest of written thinking over the generations.

    Socrates communicated solely in oral conversation, dialogues, and chronologically before him, we have only fragments of writing, saved in the greatest amount by the efforts of Aristotle and his students. Aristotle, the student of Plato, who was the student of Socrates, is said to have written forty books.

    Aristotle's teacher, Plato, was the prized student of Socrates. He founded the first school of the humanities, the liberal arts, and of Philosophy, indeed, the Western World's first university, which was called the Academy, from which we derive the name “academic."  The Academy survived nearly a thousand years. How few universities of today can make that claim of longevity? Plato wrote down many of the dialogues of Socrates, and his own political philosophy, The Republic.

  The story is that, long before the founding of the Plato's Academy, or of the much later school of Aristotle, called the Lyceum, Socrates commented on the need for spoken study of Philosophy.  He bemoaned the shift to writing ideas because it would lead to a lack of the quality of memory: We would become forgetful. Who now, who needs a list of one word items merely to go the grocery store, can argue against the observation that the Greek bards who could recite thousands of lines of verse were superior in the mental skill of recall?

    Nevertheless, technological progress prevailed.

    Soon after the death of Socrates these schools, one after the other, were founded, devoted to the writing and preserving of ancient Greek Philosophy.

    Because Philosophy is now a written art, we can converse through writing over time with the ideas that have come before, with the awareness that ideas challenging and elaborating on our own, will follow after us. These conversations can be translated, and have been, into many languages, including those that did not even exist at the time of Socrates.  

    The dust of our flesh shall disappear, but Philosophical writing can keep our mental exercises, if not in eternal being, then at least in long-lived existence.

    Like a wave upon wave in the ocean of time, written ideas relate to each other, change each other, and reach the individual on the shore of the here and how. Contemporary thought is sculpted by the past.

    There are always those who say they have “Their Own Philosophy,” and don't need to know Philosophy of the past, “The Old Stuff.”  They live in their own worlds, possibly with fleeting fame, but without lasting impression or comprehension. Why? Because our use of the names, vocabulary, and definitions of the past help us to communicate in the present.  Thought can be so difficult to express verbally that we need the aide of common understandings of the terms and concepts that have been carefully, artfully discussed, written, and studied by so many for so long. 

  I hate to be the one to convey this possible disillusionment to some people, but there really are very few new ideas. New technologies, yes; new systems of thought, rarely. Most of our insights have already been stated by some preceeding thinker, some more clearly than others, and some more famously than others. Do not dispair. There is always a need for re-statement, for clarification, for refinement.

    We need to use the terms, definitions, and concepts of the past to discuss the ideas we hold today. The better we use the concepts, vocabulary, and our knowledge of the thinkers of the past, the better we can express ourselves in the present. We can then be clearer, more precise, and more assured that our audience will understand what we are trying to communicate.

     These ideas from the past are like coins of gold that, ever and continually spent, are never lost. The more we use them, the richer we become.

     One thing we do learn from the past: The one thing upon which all the Philosophers of all times and places have agreed, no matter how far apart they were on the other issues, is that the study of Philosophy is the highest and greatest joy.

    The more we try out thinking, the more we discover this is true.