All the questions and some of the answers were already formulated in classical Greece or in The Simpsons, in Platonic writings or in the dialogues of mythical series. With the permission of Homer and his family, we will go to the cradle of Western philosophy to raise a question that Socrates poses to Callicles in the Gorgiasa Platonic writing in which they discuss justice, power and other elements that govern society. The question is: how should we live?
Socrates, whose method was based on dialogue, argues that the fact that a person is powerful does not make him superior and that in the case of leaders, the obligation of the politician is to work for a better society and to avoid rhetoric that only seeks to always agree with the people. Understand this summary as a starting point to reach today where prejudices shape (for the worse) many individual and collective identities.
Emilio Lledó analyzed in Identity and friendship (Taurus, 2022) concepts that we inherited from classical Greece and which are still equally valid, from freedom to education or truth.
Learn to understand
School was and would be good if it were a meeting place where one could learn to understand, feel and communicate. It is not something so different from the family environment. “It is interesting to note that one of the first times that, as an education (paid)“This term appears in Greek literature, it is linked, perhaps, to the most important concept of “love” towards what we are educated in and for the contents that this education undertakes”, recalls Lledó.
The fundamental elements of education, according to the Platonic vision, are the content and the interest in what is learned. For this, the language used is essential. Words, this weapon of humans to bring us closer to each other, according to Montaigne’s definition, contribute to shaping us as people and, therefore, also as a community.
The philosopher and winner of the Princess of Asturias Award in Human Sciences sums it up like this: “We depend on what we learn, on what we know, to shape our way of being in the world. Why not we are in the world, but are in the world.” What we end up being is, on the basis of this principle, what we have been taught to be. This is the “pedagogy of life,” which is not only school but cannot be understood without school.
Freedom of thought
If any film has ever accurately reflected the connection between education and freedom, it is probably Dead Poets Society. “When you read, don’t just consider what the author thinks, think about what you think,” Professor Keating teaches his students. This is not unlike the Aristotelian principle that all human beings are made to look and know.
What we know will condition, at least in part, our way of life as well as our perception of society, and being more or less nonconformist will depend on the mental freedom with which we have learned to think. This is the common thread that runs from the disciples of Socrates to the students of the strict school in the film starring Robin Williams.
Words against fanaticism
In his essay, to which he devoted a decade, Lladó warns of the risk that what he calls mental stagnation ends up provoking fanaticism. “The fanaticization of opinions, assumed by reflexes conditioned by education or by the information sent by the media, contradicts that precise intuition of Aristotle who submitted the problem of happiness and the meaning of life to dynamism and energy, to activity: ‘Life consists mainly of feeling and thinking’,” he concludes.
Words, in the form of tweets or distorting headlines, are the best instrument to spread hatred, but they should also be the best instrument to combat it, the means to combat prejudices and stereotypes. At this point we come, once again, to one of the fashionable concepts, although it is a word that has long been used in philosophy for centuries: truth.
Truth as comfort
“Truth is that kind of error without which a certain species of living being could not live,” Nietzsche simplified. Names surely come to mind to prove Don Friedrich right.
Truth began in the classics more as a method than as a concept and from this idea, Lladó, who resorts to Greece but also to the previous quote from Nietzsche, adds that the path to be taken, in the ideal of a rational world, must last “this error and also this horror” that threatens to make the truth a consolation to cure we do not know exactly what diseases of bad conscience.
Whether it is to console oneself or to better protect oneself against attacks on democracy, there is in any case no other choice than to fight against lies and “mental corruption” with truth and free thought. Having tried, it does not work.
