Socrates, Failure, and the End of Remote Learning
One of the more embarrassing details of Western Philosophy was that Socrates failed. To be sure, he undertook a large project, the demonstration of universal truth. But his failure is categorical: he left behind no great works, nor is he credited with any of the contributions that distinguish Aristotle or Descartes. He appears in 25 of Plato’s dialogues, and yet no incontestable principle emerges from any of his celebrated talks. He was executed by a jury of his peers at the age of 71, despite defending himself under the misguided belief that men are innately rational and will be ruled by reason when it is demonstrable.
Socrates’ failure is perhaps indicative of the general inadequacy of his beloved profession. He was a philosopher and a teacher. What — in 2,500 years! — has Philosophy achieved? Mankind’s greatest advancements are generally attributed to the natural sciences, the child who moved out of its parents’ ramshackle home, only to flourish elsewhere. No greater values have developed. Morally speaking, we’re just barely ahead of the Athenians who killed Socrates all those millennia ago. Metaphysics isn’t exactly a growth industry; the smart money in college is spent on engineering and med school. I’ve been teaching a Philosophy class for a decade and a half. In all that time — hundreds of students — not one has gone on to major in Philosophy. To paraphrase Woody Allen, “Those who can, do; those who can’t, philosophize.”
I bring this up because I suspect that some have come to view this semester as an extension of that failure. True, we met and had class. We read, discussed, and assessed our understanding, just as we have in years past. But, like the figure trapped in the Matrix yearning to ‘wake up,’ these past ten months feel somehow ‘unreal,’ a shadow of something greater that has passed and cannot be recreated. We all have long seasons of unpunctuated adulthood, but there is just one short moment to be a high school student, and it is hard to see this as anything other than a disappointing one.
But something funny happened as we spent all these months on Zoom. We began to peer around the edges of the screen, to take in the fleeting glimpses of one another’s homes. There’s something strangely transgressive when you enter someone else’s room, and at first I was embarrassed to be in my students’ basements or at their tables. But as the weeks passed, my diffidence gave way to curiosity. Who were in the photographs behind Jessica? What is Kristyne sitting on? If I looked out of the same window that Dhruv did, what would I see? I’m sure my students had the same questions about me — “Has Mr. Rossi really read all of those books?” (answer: nope!) — and the act of asking them had an important effect: it transformed me from a two-dimensional head on their screens into a three-dimensional person who had a home, a life, and, well, things.
See, that’s the thing about Philosophy — it doesn’t just happen. It comes from people — real people — not marble busts or faces on a Google image search. They lived in places, slept in beds, owned tables. Socrates was not an idea. He was a breathing, walking, defecating, lovemaking, nose-picking, wine-drinking, joke-telling man. He was fascinated by other people, and he thought we could be better together. And although he failed in his quest to describe the great truths of the universe, he succeeded through the colossal example of his imperfect humanity. He did, after all, inspire Plato.
The theologian G.K. Chesterton once wrote,
“How much larger your life would be if your self could become smaller in it; if you could really look at other men with common curiosity and pleasure… you would break out of this tiny and tawdry theatre in which your own little plot is always being played, and you would find yourself under a freer sky, in a street full of splendid strangers.”
It is a little ironic that by being forced into these tiny boxes, we instead come to recognize one another as equals, as parallel lives taking place simultaneously under different roofs in different neighborhoods. People, philosophizing, in spaces both like and unlike our own, as opposed to background extras in the everyday drama we’d all grown accustomed to. And the sheer awareness of one another’s lives generates the resource whose scarcity makes possible all great art and philosophy: empathy. We would never have had that in an ordinary year. And when I do meet my students — this time in person — I’ll remember that.
So we didn’t fail, and neither did Socrates. It’s just an unexpected victory, to recognize the personhood of others. To be together, alone (or is it alone together?) on a screen full of splendid strangers.
