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I’ve written a lot in this blog about my belief in the fundamental connectedness of people, of living beings in general, of things in general. And I suspect it has been a waste of time. There are only two likely reactions anyone might have to this notion at this point in history: “Duh, who didn’t know that?” or “Are you insane?”

If you look at the world around us right now, it certainly doesn’t look like what one might call “an organic whole.” The level of social fragmentation and conflict appears to be historically high and increasing, as does the level of conflict between human beings and Nature. No one seems to be able to agree about anything, especially in reference to how we might solve any of these problems –we can’t even agree what the problems are – but everyone seems to be ready to fight to the death to push the solution they like. It’s a situation I’ve taken to summing up like this: Where there’s a will, there’s a won’t.

Philosophically, theologically, ecologically, there’s widespread acknowledgment that everyone and everything is interconnected; that, indeed, all is one. But there’s also widespread antipathy toward that idea, widespread efforts to divide and conquer, to impose some form of absolutism or exclusivism, which means the conversion or eradication of everyone who believes in anything else: My way or the highway.

Even among people who say they believe in the kinship of all humans, the unity of existence, you don’t find many who behave accordingly. On the contrary, mostly they’re just promoting another absolutist/exclusivist ideology and contributing to the general fragmentation.

Now, if I suggest that the real solution to this problem involves each person looking inward and disengaging from mass culture and mass thinking, it might seem as if I’m promoting an even more intense degree of disintegration. After all, everyone else seems to think the answer is for everyone to unite, to join up, to enlist in some movement or other. But that’s just an invitation to choose sides in the war of exclusivisms.

Real unity begins at home, so to speak. People who are fragmented inwardly cannot bring about any kind of world except one that is likewise fragmented. Conversely (contrapositively, actually), a unified world can be brought about only by people who are personally unified.

This is, of course, the overall message of Plato’s Republic (see esp. 443d-444a), and it is a theme that has remained constant in the Western tradition from that time to the present. Plotinus, for example, reiterates:

“Know Thyself” is said to those who, because of their selves’ multiplicity, have the business of counting themselves up and learning that they do not know all of the number and kind of things they are, or do not know any one of them, not what their ruling principle is or by what they are themselves. (Enneads VI.7.41. Trans. A.H. Armstrong, Loeb Classical Library/ Harvard University Press.)

The message remains fundamental right through the Middle Ages to the Renaissance, as evidenced by a statement of the alchemist Gerhard Dorn (quoted several times by Jung): “Thou wilt never make from others the One that thou seekest, except there first be made one thing of thyself.”

And of course it’s a basic principle in the synthesis offered in the 20th century by Gurdjieff and Ouspensky: “First of all, what man must know is that he is not one; he is many. He has not one permanent and unchangeable ‘I’ or Ego. He is always different.” (P.D. Ouspensky, The Psychology of Man’s Possible Evolution, First Lecture.)

The tradition is, of course, full of advice and techniques for the individual to attain self-unification, but the overall idea is presented beautifully in my favorite passage from Plato’s Phaedo:

Now we have also been saying for a long time, have we not, that, when the soul makes use of the body for any inquiry, either through seeing or hearing or any of the other senses — for inquiry through the body means inquiry through the senses — then it is dragged by the body to things which never remain the same, and it wanders about and is confused and dizzy like a drunken man because it lays hold upon such things?

Certainly.

But when the soul inquires alone by itself, it departs into the realm of the pure, the everlasting, the immortal and the changeless, and being akin to these it dwells always with them whenever it is by itself and is not hindered, and it has rest from its wanderings and remains always the same and unchanging with the changeless, since it is in communion therewith. And this state of the soul is called wisdom. (Plato, Phaedo, 79c-d; trans. by Harold North Fowler. Available online at http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/.)

In today’s world, in which we are barraged 24 hours a day by stimuli from our immediate environment and even more from our expansive electronic environment; in which we imagine ourselves constantly “connected” with our friends, family and business associates by our wireless devices and other kinds of electrical umbilical cords; in which we turn our attention incessantly from one outrage to another, from the latest missing child report to the latest natural disaster to the latest celebrity scandal to the latest political uproar to the latest phony “reality” show development to the most recent “friend” update on our favorite social networking site – each one of our “interests” is just one more fragment of our soul torn off and sucked into the diffuse cloud that constitutes what we imagine to be our identity.

Strange as it may sound, the cure for this condition – and it is truly a sickness, of the soul – is to care less, to care about fewer things, to stop wasting our attention and our life-energy on things that don’t matter and which we can do nothing to change, and to focus on the one thing that is truly within our power to alter for the good: our own minds.

The Wall and the Gate

One of the criticisms invoked against philosophers in ancient times (by Christians, for example) was that the very idea of philosophy implied that they could never reach their goal. The word “philosophy” itself suggested this: It means love of or friendship toward wisdom, not the actual possession of wisdom. From at least Socrates on, the philosophers themselves seemed to acknowledge this open-endedness, denying that they themselves were “wise.”


The famous story of the Delphic Oracle’s pronouncement on Socrates, and his interpretation of it (as portrayed by Plato), seems to support this view. On being asked who was the wisest of men, the oracle replied, “None is wiser than Socrates.” This dictum, delivered presumably from the god Apollo, took Socrates by surprise, because he was convinced that he possessed nothing that he could convince himself was real and true knowledge.

And that was precisely the point. All other men thought they knew things that were true and important and wise, but they truly knew nothing. As a result, they didn’t seek to learn, but instead were content to rest in their false certainty.

Socrates, in contrast, understood that he knew nothing true and important and wise, and continuously sought to learn whatever he could of such things. This made him, in the view of Plato and pretty much all subsequent thinkers, the epitome of a philosopher: a seeker of wisdom.

We are accustomed today to thinking of wisdom as knowledge of a certain kind, and this appears also to have been the most widespread view in ancient Greece. In Plato’s dialogues, Socrates’ most implacable opponents were the Sophists, a group of generally itinerant teachers of what we would call today public speaking, persuasion, marketing, personal presentation. Their special forté was teaching the skill of arguing both sides of an issue with equal effectiveness; in other words, how to win an argument, regardless of the truth.

The Sophists’ claim was that they taught wisdom (“sophia” in Greek), and Socrates’ (and Plato’s) counterclaim was that they taught nothing of the sort – and indeed that wisdom could not be taught. But what the philosophers offered in opposition to the Sophists was not a different version of wisdom but instead a different way of thinking about what wisdom is. And their way of thinking about wisdom was in some sense an end in itself: To think about wisdom, what it might be, how to acquire it, is better than to believe one has it.

Then as now, people mostly preferred to believe, or hope, that they could pay a Sophist and in return receive the knowledge they needed to succeed (by whatever yardstick success might be measured). The career of the Roman statesman Cicero provides an object lesson in how the single-minded pursuit of sophistic learning could in fact pay off in the accumulation of wealth and the acquisition of power. But the philosophical question is whether such a life is truly good.

The alternative the philosophers offered was a life of constant self-examination with no tangible reward, and their refusal to admit that wisdom is something definable and teachable continued to be a point of attack by their enemies even after the Sophists had faded from history. Christian apologists took up the argument: The philosophers can only “seek” wisdom, but we know we “have” wisdom because God Himself gave it to us through divine revelation – and we have the divine books to prove it, providing us with a complete and final truth. Our task thus is not to find the truth but just to understand and live according to the wisdom that has been packaged and delivered to us so neatly.

There’s a Sufi story I ran across at some point, I forget exactly where, that seems to me to have some relevance here, though I might be wrong.

Once upon a time, there was a king who ruled over a city where farmers and tradesmen and so on came to sell their goods and services.

This king was genuinely determined to be righteous and virtuous. One day, walking through the marketplace in his city, he heard the sellers of vegetables and livestock and metalware and ceramics and fortune-telling and love potions and so on touting their products and performances, and he was appalled by the dishonesty of it all: Everyone, it seemed, was exaggerating or distorting or otherwise misrepresenting what he or she had to sell.

The king went back to his palace and thought about what he had seen and heard, and he decided that he would find a way to force everyone who came into his city to tell the truth. That night, he sent his soldiers to build a gallows next to the gate by which the farmers and tradesmen entered the city.

At dawn the next day, when all the peddlers and farmers and so on were lined up at the gate to come into the city, the king stood on the wall and addressed them. “All honest men are welcome in my city,” he said, in his archaically gender-specific way. “But dishonest men are never welcome here. So to guarantee the honesty of all who enter here, I have built this gallows. If you want to come into my city, you must answer one question. If you tell the truth, you may come in and do your business. But if you lie, you will be hanged from this gallows. Now, who wants to come in?”

Naturally, everyone hesitated. But after a moment, an old man stepped forward. The king saw him and said, “All right, granddad, where are you going?”

The old man answered, “I’m going to hang on your gallows.”

As far as I know, the king may still be standing on that wall and trying to figure out what he should do with the old man, because whatever he does, he will make himself a liar.

Those Who Can't

Quite a few years ago now, I spent some time as a college philosophy major. I realized pretty quickly that I had seriously misunderstood what that meant. I was a young man looking for answers, trying to understand the core of what life was about so that I could live accordingly. And while the great philosophers – some of them, anyway – offered those answers and attempted to explain that core, the academic approach was to regard all their ideas as if they were merely moves in some endless intellectual game: Plato says this, but Aristotle denies it, Spinoza offers this, but look at what Kant says instead – my rook to your queen’s pawn, my club to your heart.

Worse, as I later learned, the academic teachers of philosophy had for generations misrepresented the teachings of ancient philosophy. Ironically, this misrepresentation arose from the writings of scholars of the 17th and 18th centuries who truly admired Plato and Aristotle, but in an idiosyncratic and conditional way: extolling the philosophers as the originators of rationalism, but condemning them for failing to maintain the kind of hyper-rationalism they themselves wanted to practice and spread.

Another element not to be disregarded was the tendency – and not just among academics – to believe that “newer” automatically means “better.” For teachers of philosophy, this translates into the belief that the speculations of Hegel or Wittgenstein or Heidegger or Foucault must be ever more complete, more scientific, more true, than those of Plato, Aristotle or Epicurus, because we have built upon, we have surpassed, their groping attempts to explain reality. In a word, philosophy, like everything else, has “evolved.”

Finally, and most damagingly, we have the triumph of the belief that “learning” is a noun, not a verb; that knowledge is a sort of commodity to be acquired and traded in measurable chunks. It’s likely that this view was inevitable once the bureaucratization of education began within industrialized society, because it enables the creation of standardized curricula and lesson plans and all the rest of the apparatus required to turn schools into factories (sorry, “manufacturing plants”). What this meant for philosophy departments, as for all others, is that the professors taught the curriculum – in other words, the entrenched misunderstandings, misreadings, biases, tendencies – and not the subject.

The subject of philosophy is, of course, wisdom; or rather, the seeking of wisdom. Not surprisingly, professors of philosophy have for several centuries shied away from attempting to teach such things, perhaps in largest part because they are so open-ended. What they teach is not philosophy, how to “do philosophy,” how to be a philosopher, but what different philosophers have said and how to quibble with it. The measure of how far the professors are removed from the actual doing of philosophy is the fact that while every one of the teachers and textbooks I encountered in my time as a philosophy major happily defined the word “philosophy” as “love of wisdom,” not one ever tried to explain what “wisdom” might be.

What I took away from my experience as a philosophy major was the belief that Western philosophy had absolutely nothing to offer to a seeker of the kind of core understanding of life I mentioned earlier. It took me a lot of years and a long roundabout trip through Eastern religion and Western occultism and mysticism to realize that I had been completely misled. When I finally returned to ancient Western philosophy, to the philosophers themselves and not the professors, I discovered that what I had been looking for in the first place was always there.