Biography and Philosophy, or, Action and Thought

Is it important to consider the facts of the life of a man, or just what he said and did? Or perhaps, just what he did: Facta non verba, as Eric Blair sometimes phrases it?

The question is raised in reference to Derrida, but with a passing reference to Aristotle, whom Heidegger described thus: "He was born. He thought. He died." The point is that what he thought is divorced from time and space, and to a large degree it really is: we can evaluate him and his thoughts today, and we will in doing so find them highly relevant to our very different world.

Yet that is not the only model from the ancient world. Socrates is the clear counterexample. Plato took pains to establish that he had credentials to speak on matters of virtue such as courage, as he does in the Laches. Hannah Arendt, in the last century, singled Socrates out for special praise among philosophers because he was a man who not only contemplated but did.

What do you think?

2 comments:

Eric Blair said...

I have read it that all Socrates wanted noted on his tomb was that he stood in the Athenian phalanx at Delium.

So, yeah, I'll go with Arendt.

douglas said...

As a child I was always drawn to watching men work on things- arranging stone for a wall, or framing, or whatever- because I saw meaning and knowledge in what they did. I think that was part of my sense that the doing is where meaning really lay, and that ideas are ephemeral and transient. Now, when exercised in discussion with others that challenge them, and recorded in some way- the making of something, the teaching of something... then perhaps they also achieve the status of being a lasting object.

So, yeah, doing is what really matters.