Project Vision 21

I recently had the unexpected opportunity to briefly participate in an introductory philosophy class at a tertiary institution in the city where I live. Since I consider myself a philosopher (both in the academic and existential sense of that word), I accepted the invitation. The class was enlightening, but not in the way expected.

The teacher projected on the screen a five-minute YouTube video on the topic of the day. There was no other explanation than “Listen carefully.” In the video a philosopher appears reading a review of a book written by another philosopher about a dialogue by Plato (Apology) in which Plato quotes Socrates.

In other words, I (level 0) listen to a teacher (level 1) showing a video of a philosopher (level 2) reading a document written by someone else (level 3) of something another philosopher wrote (level 4). ) on Plato (level 5) citing Socrates (level 6).

The result, obviously, was similar to the well-known childhood game of “broken telephone” in which someone whispers a message into another person's ear and so on until the last participant shares the message out loud, only to discover that the final message It does not reflect the original message at all.

But, in this case, it was not a child's game, but one of Socrates' most profound observations about human existence: the unexamined life is not worth living (that is, it is not a fully human life).

Basically, that phrase from Socrates, filtered through Plato, then a philosopher, a review, another philosopher, and a professor, ended up being interpreted as “A life without the comforts or things we like is not worth it.” Nothing was said about the search for wisdom, truth, beauty, and justice, much less about the cultivation of virtue.

That approach reminded me that, in my days as a professor, whenever I asked my philosophy students to tell me what Heraclitus meant when he said, “You cannot enter the same river twice,” inevitably the answer was “ It is better not to make the same mistake twice.”

In both cases (that is, the recent class and my students), the situation is the same: people, including students and professors, can only understand what is presented to them from their own point of view and no other perspective.

The brief experience in philosophy class (actually, a superficial meeting over superficial arguments) made it clear how many levels separate us not only from ancient Greek philosophy, but from every other source of wisdom. For this reason, the thought of Socrates, Jesus, Buddha, and other teachers is trivialized and unprejudiced commercialized.

Even worse, philosophy is presented (as was the case in the class I attended) as a tool for winning arguments. Poor Socrates! He tried so hard to distance himself from the sophists (even paying for it with his own life) and now Socrates appears in a video precisely promoting the sophists!

The Spanish Enrique Santín said that “You think the future.” For us, then, there seems to be no future.