Part I: Being wrong, being wronged, and forgiving
Each of my classes begins with the same promise: that if we can approach the practice of philosophy with an open mind, we will become convinced of its singular value in every dimension of our lives. What we quickly learn is that keeping an open mind is the essence of practicing philosophy. And to be convinced of the value of this practice means experiencing the weird mix of ecstasy and moral obligation that comes from it—we become convinced about our privilege and obligation (to our neighbors as well as ourselves) to think well. Discharging this obligation requires us to live a life of openminded inquiry—a philosopher’s life. A life of loving wisdom.
Practicing thinking well keeps our opinions from getting rigid, unreasonable, and stale. It helps us appreciate that our perspective ultimately determines the quality of our life; we may not have control over all, or even any, of the circumstances, but we do have a fair amount of freedom in how we work with them—namely, we can choose what methods we’re using to guide us and engage life with.
For example, we’re constantly faced with the choice of whether to accept the world, embracing it in all its turbulent, mysterious unfolding, or resist it and fight for change. It is perhaps the crux of human existence that both ways make sense but often seem to us as if they are mutually exclusive. Philosophy offers us a way to do both. But it also forces us to abandon our beliefs about the world, beliefs we hold dear, beliefs we didn’t even think to question, that we didn’t think could be questioned. So, it is a path that takes a kind of faith and courage—like perhaps any path worth taking. It is through this scrutiny of our beliefs, values, and selves that we appreciate how we are constantly building and maintaining our own realities through our judgments and the concepts available to us.
And while we’re limited in these efforts by a variety of obstacles, philosophic thinking is the way to augment our perspective to include more possibilities—to expand our realities.
So, no matter who we are or where we begin this process, progress is inevitable. Shifting perspective in this way offers a real sense of freedom. We develop profound humility and courage to face and work with anything we encounter. A thorough embrace of our world’s many limitations empowers us to push beyond them, to connect and heal and help others. Indeed, philosophic medicine helps us recognize all of these activities as one and the same.
Throughout human history there have been countless testimonials to the freedom that comes from keeping a radically open mind. Perhaps most important, certainly most influential, among these come from moral teachers who often wrote very little, if anything at all. Buddha, Jesus, Socrates to name only the most well-known. These figures perhaps most actively appreciated that we do not have to suffer (or even be fundamentally wronged by one another) if we use our experience to transform suffering into beauty and wisdom, furthering a practice of peace and compassion for all. What makes them such powerful teachers is that they themselves often underwent profound suffering of their own—albeit arguably avoidable or self-inflicted in some cases—but through it steadfastly exemplified their way of life for all of us to witness and emulate. Their lives serve as experiments for the effectiveness of tools to employ against suffering. And the depth and persistence of their teaching evidence their powerful effects. What gives philosophic systems and methods this depth and persistence is that they tend to require that adherents constantly question whether or not the method works for the task at hand and whether there are any better ones available.
So, by example and central for our purposes, we must ask now at the outset of this lesson whether or not practicing open-mindedness and on-going self-reflection is a worthwhile way of life. And how would we go about answering this question?
Because philosophic methods invite their own scrutiny, they are constantly adapting; they make us sensitive to the world as a system of relationships. By approaching our beliefs this way, we experience a kind of delight in learning we’d been wrong about something or that some feature of the world went unnoticed. These moments of realization show us that there’s a conceptual or ideological attachment that needs to be abandoned or connection made to make way for clearer, more effective thinking. And they are truly wonderful experiences; we simply need to learn to appreciate them for that, to appreciate the extent to which our perspective and emotional judgments have perfumed our sense of reality and how this perfume in turn informs these same emotional judgments and perspective.
Perhaps most urgently at this point in the world, we should examine our attitudes about being wrong, being wronged, and what it means to forgive.
We have been trained to consider being wrong (as in incorrect about some belief or prediction, as well as holding an unthoughtful, outdated, or morally problematic opinion) as something to be ashamed of. And, somewhat oddly, the same can be said of being wronged. The constant threat of resource scarcity and highly competitive nature of our predominant social order is ultimately to blame for this overall disposition to life. Fears about death, the unknown, and meeting our more basic human needs inform our emotional and existential dispositions and tend to make us cling fearfully to a specific way of thinking and being and then defend it as right simply because they’ve been the lifeboats that have carried us this far. Not surprisingly then, Philosophy—that is as it is studied in university classrooms—is frequently taught as a litany of men who spent their lifetimes forcefully arguing that they were right (but hardly any knew how to live!). But what we get when we learn to think philosophically in the classroom (library, or conversation) is an appreciation of the beauty of ideas, of the many complicated relationships between them, how the way we feel and think informs how we act, and how these actions and the responses they elicit then make us feel and think. Through openminded examination we develop a far deeper awareness of ourselves in relation with the world than would otherwise be possible. This in turn enriches our lives immeasurably, sharpening our senses to perceive more and more subtle expressions of beauty, infinite variations of reality within the infinite void!