The Practice of Excellence | Fr. James V. Schall, S.J. | June/July 2010 | Homiletic & Pastoral Review
“A man properly nurtured in poetry
will quickly spot shoddy, poorly made works and ill-grown things, and
his joy and aversion will be properly placed; he’ll approve beautiful
things, joyfully take them into his soul, and from their nurture grow
beautiful and good; ugly ones he’ll hate and properly condemn even as a
child before he can grasp the reason, and when reason comes he’ll know
her and embrace her as one of his own.”
—Plato, Repub. III.401e-402a
“I guess you don’t hear Phocylides’ saying that when a man has enough to live on he should practice excellence.”
—Plato, Repub. III.407a“Well, I suppose you agree that people are deprived of bad things voluntarily and of good things involuntarily. And isn’t it bad to be deceived of the truth, but good to encounter it? Or isn’t conjecturing the truth the same as encountering it?”
—Plato, Repub. III.413a
Near the end of the Second Book of Plato’s Republic, we find Socrates telling Adeimantus, “No one would willingly accept a lie in the most vital place about the most vital things. To have that there terrifies us more than anything.” Plato’s brother is still confused. “What where?” he says, “I still don’t understand.” Socrates explains, “You do not get the point because you think I mean something highfalutin. All I mean is that no one wants to be deceived and ignorant about reality in his soul; to have a lie there instead of the truth. Everyone would hate that” (382b).
Notice what is being said here. We might well lie to others in order to obtain what we want. Human beings do that, though all lies, like all error, are based in some truth. Otherwise it could not happen, since a lie presupposes that the truth is being spoken to a listener who presumes the truthfulness of the speaker. If everyone lied, we could not communicate. We would all have to shut up permanently. Thus in lying, we are, or at least we think we are, doing something for our benefit. We intend some good, usually what we think to be our own.
The question posed by Socrates, however, concerns not our lying to someone else but our lying to ourselves, a different nuance. Lying about what? Lying about the most important things. An objective order judges us. The assumption is that some things are of more importance than others. Life has to do with sorting them out, the important things from the unimportant ones, not that unimportant things are not also of considerable value. To deceive ourselves about what we are, of what is important, however, stands in a different category.
When I first read these remarkable lines of Plato, I thought that he
was right. No one would want a lie in his soul about the important
things, about his own being in the world. But, on second thought, do
people really want to know the most important things about reality,
about themselves, if it makes a demand on them that they do not want to
fulfill? The issue goes to the root of our own free being.
Read the entire essay...
How appropiate of Fr. James V. Schall to, let us say, wake us up with deep matters concerning questions that we rarely ask ourselves since we mostly look on the surface of affairs without thinking of the powerful and various truth which lies deep below.
How often thus we question that Socrates , via his most able mouth-piece in the Academy, may be helpful to aid us finding the truth. The miracle of Plato's dialogues is that one meets the first type of knowledge-drama at the cradle of our civilization that has a surprising actuality for us, our thinking and logic if we apply ourselves to follow Socrates clear dialectic step by step. I find it not surprising that BXVI favored Plato, just like the fervid Augustine, over the subtle Aquinas.
Fr. Schall work is obviously directed to a readership interested or familiar with platonic investigative discussion however his work proves that the message about truth, virtue, knowledge, erring, power of our will, depends on choice, to pursue excellence or virtue that brings happiness, which is the activity of virtues.
I find his last paragraph as pristine in the sense that we ought to realize that no one owns the truth, that it is a gift to be found, often unexpectedly; we want to know the truth of things no lies in our souls.
Posted by: Manuel G. Daugherty Razetto | Friday, July 16, 2010 at 09:32 PM