In a message dated 27/1/01 16:29:58, marble@inwind.it writes:
> I like the Socratic way of discussion: rising doubts, more than offering
> answers. The most important thing is to persuade people to search.
>
>
Too right, and socratic to the core. But of course, Socrates himself would
even raise doubts about this one: how can you persuade anyone to search who
isn't already searching, somewhere, deep down? Those in real need of
persuading, on this one, are precisely those who aren't going to listen.
Another famous argument in Plato: how can we look for knowledge that we don't
already have? - we would never recognise when we had found it, right before
our eyes. Compare Heraclitus "Uncomprehending when they have heard, they are
like the deaf. The saying describes them: though present they are absent"
[b34], or again "Unless he hopes for the unhoped for, he will not find it,
since it is not to be hunted out and is impassable." [b18]. There must be
some hope, some search, some inner directedness, epistemological virtue,
before men are even open to persuasion. And that directness is directed at
something, seen through a glass darkly. Since we MOQers say that morality
and ontology and epistemology are all one, it follows that with a merest hint
of the epistemological virtues, a man has already some shard of knowledge and
of truth, of the Good, of Quality, and it is with this first peice of the
jigsaw, so to speak, that he may recognise and reconstruct the rest. To
learn is to remember, and to know is to remember exactly what it is to learn.
So let us not hope to set people searching: they will do that for themselves,
if they will search at all. Rather hope to be helpful to such searching, and
not to hinder it by congratulating ignorance, or by asserting a final
complete doctrine for all to copy uncomprehending, or by setting any one of
the numberless bad examples of 'learned' [learn-ned] behavior that can
displace the true epistemic virtues. We can hinder enquiry in so many ways,
and to prevent ourselves doing that is such a task that there is hardly any
proper room for anything more ambitious. Enquiry flows out of minds like
water from a spring - there is no need for drilling holes and attaching
pumps. All you have to do is be wary of the dead flesh that might poison and
corrupt the source, and the loose boulders that might block it up. That
watchfulness is task enough, and often enough we fail.
Anon
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