Butler,
Passionately and beautifully said indeed.
As you know so well, probably even from Law School days, thme Socratic Method of analysis begins with first questioning of concepts of thinking, experience, other ways of thinking, etc.
Like serious thinkers in the Western World for the past few millennia, we old timers today generally started our serious educations by learning about and doing Socratic Dialogue. In the tenth grade my friend Bill Marina discovered the Duke list of 100 great books. From that I quickly discovered Ancient Greek thought, beginning with Jowett’s Plato’s Dialogues. I spent a year or more wandering around the Agora questioning with Socrates and Plato. It was a wonderfully, life transforming joy of discovery. I went on to Aristotle, et al. When I got to Harvard as a freshman I immediately took Demos’ Ancient Greek Phil. course. Demos even looked like Socrates and talked like him in Engish! And he had some fine section leaders who did Socratic dialogues with us.
As far as I know, even the Marxists and Socialist Ideologists in Harvard Law commonly still use some Socratic methods to wake up the young minds of legalists. But most Americans now live Politically Correct Mindless Lives. It would be helpful to remind them of the 2400 years of Western creative thinking they have trashed and thrown away, especially in the vast realm of human studies.
I always found the greatest value of such Socratic dialogue was not in questioning other people, who are now pretty comatose in their little ideological niches in America’s vast media prison of the mind, but in my questioning and analyzing things from all angles for myself. One example of this is like your questioning of Big Bang theory. I know the history of cosmology, so I know that astronomers have been through several basic revolutions in their thinking about the cosmos since roughly when we were born ca. 80 years ago, most of it in our lifetimes. There are now many basic, revolutionary discoveries that raise basic questions about Big Bangs, etc,, such as “What the hell is Black Matter that appears to make up most or our observable universe?” and “What in the world are we to make of all of Being that may be eternal and infinite?”
Since you are obviously a reincarnation of Socrates, kind of a Socrates of the San Fernando Valley, I will mention that in my courses over in UCLA a half century ago I tried always to open minds and inspire creative self-questioning very gently by asking them basic questions about human life, such as “What is morality and law?” Then when they offered answers, I would gently ask, “But how do you know that?” I think that was still common way back in that ancient age of pre-Marxist America.
Butler responds:
Jack:
Nicely stated, and thank you for the kind words. My retirement was hastened by the school’s pressures to abandon the processes by which we help students learn how to think, and to foster bar-preparation training. The contrast was well-expressed in Paul Bonnefon’s 1892 book in which he described the study of law as “a sort of search for truth, carried on by teacher and student in common, and which they feverishly undertook, opening up an endless field for philosophic speculation.” Prof. Kingsfield’s first day of class in Contracts law – in the film The Paper Chase – is a relatively recent example of how this used to be done. The emphasis, today, is on how to file discrimination charges against schools that do not provide for “transgender bathroom facilities.”
3:15 pm on July 16, 2016
