One way of putting it is that classical thought is different from modern thought: so what would it look like if it were still a living tradition? Or in other words, supposing that we stripped classical thought of those cultural accidents that cling to it like barnacles: what would be left? Or yet again, in my collection of cycling quotes at the top of the page I have extracts from a number of ancient authors (Epicurus, Epictetus, and the like), but also from William Blake and Robert Pirsig. In what sense do they represent "classical thought"?
I'm tempted to say, "Heck, I don't know. It just sounded good." And honestly my sense for what is "classical" is in the first place a sense, not a reasoned theory. It is almost an aesthetic perception that these thinkers, or these kinds of thought, belong over here and not over there. But once I wrote it, I started puzzling over what I see common among them, and over what I find so attractive about classical thought as against modern. And I have begun to make out a few concrete points.
The first is that classical thought is naive, in the very technical sense that it looks at the world more or less directly and not through layers of theory. Socrates asks, "What is friendship? What is beauty?" Epicurus asks, "How can I be happy?" Pirsig asks, "What is Quality?" All of these are questions about the real world, about experiences all of us have had. You don't have to go read a stack of books before thinking about them. And you don't have to distort your experiences to make them conform to some kind of Procrustean ideology. It sounds a little strange to say that, because we are so often told that classical philosophers were cloudy-headed idealists. Everybody who knows nothing about Plato nonetheless knows that Plato proposed something called the Theory of Forms which said that the world we see around us isn't real. What is remarkable, though, is how little of classical philosophy has that kind of abstract flavor. (And in Plato's case it might be useful to remember as well that he was a very deep thinker; if he said something that sounds crazy to us, it is worth considering that perhaps we don't understand what he meant. I think I can make some common sense out of the claim that the everyday world is "unreal" and perhaps even out of the Theory of Forms, although my understanding might still be wrong. Remind me to come back to these points in a later post.)
Modern thought, by contrast, is heavy with theory. You can't expect to be taken seriously diving into a question unless you have first read what all the other important points of view have said. You want to know why you should tell the truth, and you haven't thought through Anscombe's critique of consequentialism, or weighed the competing claims of utilitarianism, deontology, pragmatism, postmodernism, Focauldian antihumanism or Barthesian structuralism? For shame! Back to the library with you! The problem with this approach is that it never gets off the ground. And even if you adopt a single theory and stick to it -- maybe you seize on Randian objectivism for all I know, and damn the torpedoes! -- that theory becomes a filter which limits what you can see. In effect, it blinds you to features of your experience which might otherwise be obvious.
Related to this is that classical thought is practical. Fundamentally classical philosophy is concerned with helping you to live a better life; understanding is secondary. Oh, understanding is still important -- to be sure! It is just that understanding your life is a means to improving it. Understanding is never a goal for its own sake. This is why the core of classical thought is ethics. The core of modern thought, by contrast, is epistemology; because what is important for modern thought is to have a clear understanding of everything, and this requires first having a clear understanding of what is the basis for any clear understanding. This quickly leads to an infinite regress that's a waste of time and helps one see why people make jokes about philosophers. But this special kind of narcissistic decadence is less at home in classical thought.
A third feature of classical thought is that it is willing to accept that things have a nature, and that at least some things have a purpose. This could be considered a special case of the naivete that I discussed above: since we all know in real life that things are what they are, and since we are used to asking what things are for, a naive approach to philosophy would consent to carrying that common sense understanding into the philosophical arena. Modern thought scoffs at both ideas: surely you can't be so simple-minded as to think that things have a nature! Or a purpose? Heavens!
And yet, they do. Take the idea of human nature, for example. Modern thought has subjected this simple notion to a withering assault, aiming to prove that the simple, naive idea of human nature is nothing more than an interpretation, a creative misreading, or an ideological mask designed to hide class interests or the will to power. And yet, no amount of ideological reinterpretation will ever allow humans to derive nutrition by eating rusty nails or ground glass. The biological reality of the body is a clear limit where nature becomes obviously real. And if there is a biological human nature, why not a social or ethical one? Doesn't modern thought also teach us that our minds are "merely" eiphenomena of our brains? And our brains have a biological nature. Surely it is only logical to suppose our minds might have a nature too -- or at any rate it seems arbitrary and willful to deny it. But this is a point of simple common sense that classical thought never gave up in the first place.
Or consider purposes. Yes, we are told that the physical sciences make it appear that things unfold (at the physical level) without purposes, and I do not propose to turn my back on modern science. That would be foolish, and the best classical philosophers were no fools; they accepted what science they had, and any revitalized classical thought today must accept the science we have now. But to concede purposelessness at the physical level does not entail purposelessness at any of the levels above that: biological, social, or ethical. We all know from introspection that we do things because we have reasons for them. And surely the easiest explanation for why cats have curved claws is that they are for catching mice. So again the naive or common-sense view is also the classical one. (The apparent conflict between a non-teleological physical science and a teleological understanding of so much else is a puzzle I am tempted to call Strauss's Paradox, because Leo Strauss highlighted it as a critical point in the introduction to his Natural Right and History. But I do think the paradox is more apparent than real. This requires another post that I'll ask you to remind me to write.) (Update on 2020-03-28 ... yes, over seven years later. I finally wrote that post and you can find it here.)
Is there more? I don't know. I am still feeling my way here. I do think there is a sensibility that can fairly be called "classical" as opposed to "modern" and that it provides a valuable perspective, one worth reviving. It may take me a while to characterize it completely.
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