body language

To begin at the beginning: Rodin’s “Thinker” graces the cover of our Intro to Philosophy text, thinking no doubt about Big Questions.

But I don’t really like that image of the philosopher. He should be speaking and listening too, and perambulating a bit like Aristotle’s peripatetics…

not just sitting like a bump on his solitary stump. He’d be more animated, expressive and upbeat if he did. Might even be happy.

As our text notes, Hegel and his students in the early 19th century lived in a world of great storm and stress (Napoleon’s troops were on their doorstep) but nonetheless remained confident and cheerful through it all. Why? Because their philosophy gave them a vision and a firm sense of themselves and their place in the scheme of life.

The Charlie Brown cartoon on my office door proclaims: “We all need a philosophy.” The student who was sure he did not exist sure did.

There’s another image in our text, facing the Introduction, that I do like: Raphael’s justly-famed “School of Athens.” It really captures the essential Plato and Aristotle, caught  in a perfect body language freeze-frame that epitomizes the subsequent centuries of disputation between what we’ve come to call Rationalists and Empiricists. “Transcend,” thunders Plato’s emphatic gesture . “Calm down, keep it real,” Aristotle rejoins. Or so I like to imagine.

Alfred North Whitehead got it only half right (at most), I think, when he wrote that “the safest general characterization of the European philosophical tradition is that it consists of a series of footnotes to Plato.” The history of western philosophy has been a series of footnotes to both of these guys. The great challenge is to appreciate their difference and still do right by them both. Natural transcendence, perhaps?

Tags: Alfred North Whitehead, Aristotle, Charlie Brown, Hegel, Plato, Raphael's School of Athens, Rodin's Thinker, transcendence