I mentioned in the last blog that I would write in a subsequent blog about the recent lecturers that have been hosted at St. Vincent College. I’ll get to that later this week because I want to write about some interesting dinner conversation I had on Saturday night.
I was interrupted from my meal this past Saturday and asked to come to a nearby table to meet some people. After a quick introduction, one of the young man to whom I was being introduced said, “So they tell me you’re a philosopher. What are your views on life?”
As a brief aside, I’d like to comment that, while I am a philosophy major here and consider myself a philosopher (if only an amateur), I prefer to eat at dinner time and not get engaged in deep philosophic discussions. As I told the young man, it is difficult for me to engage in matters of the logistikon while I am currently focused on answering the needs of the epithumetikon. The look on his face told me that he wasn’t really familiar with Plato’s tripartite soul theory. (I should mention that, in fact, I used the English terms, not the Greek, mostly because I didn’t want to look like a show-off or something.)
Anyhow, he made some comment, the gist of which made it impossible for me to back out of the conversation without looking like a cop-out. So I asked Jill, with whom I had been eating previously, to join us and we began.
The conversation ranged far and wide. Among the seven or eight of us present, there were a fair number of philosophy and/or theology majors present. Philosophers touched on included Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Buddha, Jesus, Hume, Kant, Marx, Hegel, Nietzsche, Pieper, and John Paul II. I think Heidegger and Kierkegaard were briefly mentioned, but only as part of a brief anecdote. We moved from topic to topic with the fluid motion that only relaxed and comfortable participants can attain but with the depth and introspection characteristic of philosophic discourse. Moral relativism, the meaning of life, radical Islam, and the importance of personal conversion (supported by stories) all found their place in the discussion. At one point, we were discussing whether or not a particular professor’s practice of playing devil’s advocate was beneficial to the search for Truth. At another point, I turned from one thread of the conversation to hear the sexual philosophy of the pre-Socratic philosopher Democritus being discussed on my other side. Needless to say, we were still sitting at our table long after the cafeteria staff began cleaning up. Numerous trips were made to refill drinks, salads, or to snag some fresh fruit.
Although I found many points interesting, I’d like to share one idea that stuck out at me. The young man who started it all said at one point that he was sick of people quoting philosophers and philosophic texts to him. His criticism was that none of those people had any authority. Only of Jesus Christ could it be said that since He spoke words that they must therefore be true. Any other person’s words are simply opinion because they have no reason to be able to claim knowledge. The words they say may correspond with Truth and they may not. So, unless, the philosopher being quoted is Jesus, it is no different to say Aristotle said “…” and saying that I think “…”
I’m not advocating that Works Cited pages should no longer be stapled to the backs of research papers or anything like that. I simply found it interesting to have someone tell me upon meeting me that if I wasn’t going to cite Jesus, he didn’t care who I was citing because it didn’t matter. His idea was thought-provoking if nothing else. What his opinion did advocate was that people say what they mean and mean what they say, instead of simply pointing at five philosophic texts and thinking that they’ve been a philosopher. Lots of people memorize their favorite quote; not everyone lives by a set of principles that they’ve come to believe in through deep thought and/or prayer, not just by hearsay.
|
