In ancient Greece and Rome, it was widely assumed that the life of a philosopher would exemplify in practice a specific code of conduct and form of life. As a result, biographical details were routinely cited in appraisals of a philosophy’s value. That Socrates faced death with dignity, for example, was widely regarded as an argument in favor of his declared views on the conduct of life. Just as Socrates puts it in the pages of Xenophon’s Memorabilia (An essential text for understanding Socrates), “If I don’t reveal my views in a formal account, i do so by my conduct. Don’t you think that actions are more reliable evidence than words?” Philosophers were looked up to as “wise men” rather than “wise guys.”
Today, The typical modern philosopher – the Kant of the Critique of Pure Reason (1781), say, or the John Rawls of A Theory of Justice (1971) – is largely identified with his books. Many schools in many countries, especially the United States, the classical philosophical curriculum has been largely abandoned. Modern textbooks generally scant the lives of philosophers, reinforcing the contemporary perception that philosophy is best understood as a purely technical discipline, revolving around specialized issues in semantics and logic. It is generally assumed that “philosophy” refers to “the study of the most general and abstract features of the world and the categories with which we think: mind, matter, reason, proof, truth etc., ” to quote the definition offered by the outstanding recent Oxford Dictionary of Philosophy. Moreover, in the modern university, where both Kant and Rawls practiced their calling, aspiring philosophers are routnely taught, among other things, that the truth of a proposition should be evaluated independently of anything we may know about the person holding that proposition. As the philosopher Seyla Benhabib puts it, “Philosophical theories make claims to truth that transcend historical and social context. From inside the discipline, the details of personal lives seem quite irrelevant to understanding or evaluating a thinker’ views.” These change most obviously started since Russell (1872-1970) and Whitehead(1861-1947)’s Principia Mathematica (1910-13), Wittgenstein (1889-1951)’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, in 1921, and Ayer‘s Language, Truth and Logic, in 1936, there has been a new conception of the task of the philosopher: Not to tell us what is, but to analyze the language of those who do; and in so doing to imitate scientific and mathematical thinking, rather than a way of living life.
Such a principled disregare of ad hominem evidence is a characteristically modern prejudice of professional philosophers. For most Greek and Roman thinkers from Plato to Augustine, theorizing was but one mode of living life philosophically. To Socrates and the countless classical philosophers who tried to follow in his footsteps, the primary point was not to ratify a certain set of propositions, but rather to explore “the kind of person, the sort of self” that one could elaborate as a result of taking the quest for wisdom seriously. For Greek and Roman philosophers, “philosophical discourse …. originates in a choice of life and an existential option – not vice versa.” Until quite recently, those able to read the Greek and Roman classics were routinely nourished, not just by Xenophon and Plato but also by the moral essays of Seneca and Plutarch, which were filled with edifying stories about the benefits and consolations of philosophy. An educated person was likely to know something about Socrates, but also about the “Epicurean,”the “Stoic,” and the “Skeptic” – philosophical types still of interest to David Hume (1711-1776), who wrote about each one in his Essays, Moral and Political (1741-42).
These attitude of “playing with words ” – the separation of speech from conducts can be clearly observed in the trial case during January 1998 impeachment of President Clinton. In the deposition, Clinton’s lawyer had quoted Lewinsky’s statement that “there is absolutely no sex of any kind in any manner, shape or form, with President Clinton”. Clinton’s rationalization to the grand jury about why he wasn’t lying because, “It depends on what the meaning of the word ‘is’ is. If the—if he—if ‘is’ means is and never has been, that is not—that is one thing. If it means there is none, that was a completely true statement. […] Now, if someone had asked me on that day, are you having any kind of sexual relations with Ms. Lewinsky, that is, asked me a question in the present tense, I would have said no. And it would have been completely true. ” (Excerpts From Clinton’s Grand Jury Testimony as Quoted in Starr’s Report to Congress.)
As I am not politicians, so I was not following in-depth analysis of the problems with current-day France other than headlines. But if France is no longer the spirit of the tradition, is the Greek Revolution of 1821, within the broader global context of the Age of Revolution and the radical transformations occurring in the Ottoman world new demonstration of how Europe has been forged ahead??? The book, the Greek Revolution of 1821 and the Making of Modern Europe, Author Mark Mazower argues that after the Greeks went through under Turkish oppression for roughly 400 years, the Revolution was a victory fora completely new kind of politics—international in its range and affiliations, popular in its origins, romantic in its sentiments, and radical in its goals. The Greek War of Independence was the first war in which a people claimed liberty for themselves and overthrew an entire empire to attain it, inaugurating a new world of nation-states, the world in which we still live. Another book, The Greek Revolution and the Violent Birth of Nationalism by Yanni Kotsonis also argued that Napoleonic Wars had far-reaching influence on Greece.
The spirit of French Revolution can actually also be seen from the Cuba Revolution led by Fidel Castro (1927-2016). (wikipedia cited his birthday as 1926, I have other sources indicated as 1927, just one case in point of the need for double check all information on this information war era.)
Son of a wealthy landowner, Castro was radicalized at the University of Harvana and began his revolutionary career with the failed Moncada Barracks attack in 1953. Trained as a lawyer, he invoked the nationalist, anti-imperialist heritage of Jose Marti (1853-1895), most famously in his trial defense speech after Moncada, ‘History Will Absolve Me.’ Although labeled a Communist by his critics, Castro’s friends in Moscow and Peking scoffed at his ideological purity. Most America heard of Cuba Revolution via the news on The Bay of Pigs and the Cuban Missile Crisis, 1961-1962. The Bay of Pigs Invasion, name after the beach where the battle took place, was a failed military landing operation on the southwestern coast of Cuba in April 1961 by the United States and the Cuban Democratic Revolutionary Front (DRF), consisting of Cuban exiles who opposed Fidel Castro‘s Cuban Revolution, clandestinely and directly financed by the U.S. government. The operation took place at the height of the Cold War, and its failure influenced relations between Cuba, the United States, and the Soviet Union.
Most Americans probably was misled by the propaganda due primarily to the anti-Castro bent of our US. federal government. Castro is actually a nationalist who follows no party line. Whatever lip service he may pay to Marx or Lenin, Castro’s real mentor has always been Jose Marti, the George Washington of Cuba. He once boasted that, as a student at Harvana University, he he read very little of Marx and Lenin but a great deal of Jose Marti. Whereas Marti’s career ended in a Spanish ambush on May 19, 1895, Castro has been a good deal more fortunate than his mentor. He had made Marti’s dream of an independent Cuba, free of Yankee imperialism, a reality for some time. In the process, he alienated the United States, but that’s par for the course in any Latin American nationalistic movement. There are many point of views, but one piece of statement do caught my attention: Roughly two-thirds of the almost eleven million Africans forcibly landed in the New World ended up working in sugar.”