Do you hear what I hear? / Listen to what I say

Further reflections/manifesto on possible podcasts/videos, elated by Sufjan's Christmas music again, and with Pullman's great essay Miss Goddard's Grave in the back of my mind as always:

For a long time, the questions have had the upper hand. The a of differance--what could it mean?

At a certain point it begins to seem that the true inheritors of Socratic inquiry, though, are not in the humanities at all, but in the sciences. Not stopping asking the questions, but with the courage to attempt to put forward answers to them, they do just a bit more with their words. The Righteous Mind, which I recently read, and 12 Rules for Life, which I haven't read yet, but have heard a lot about, seem to fulfill the Socratic statement of faith articulated in the Meno better than the 20C philosophy we've been reading in Tables and Chairs lately:

The soul, then, as being immortal, and having been born again many times, and having seen all things that exist, whether in this world or in the world below, has knowledge of them all; and it is no wonder that she should be able to call to remembrance all that she ever knew about virtue, and about everything; for as all nature is akin, and the soul has learned all things; there is no difficulty in her eliciting or as men say learning, out of a single recollection, all the rest, if a man is strenuous and does not faint; for all enquiry and all learning is but recollection. And therefore we ought not to listen to this sophistical argument about the impossibility of enquiry: for it will make us idle; and is sweet only to the sluggard; but the other saying will make us active and inquisitive. In that confiding, I will gladly enquire with you into the nature of virtue. (81d)

Dismiss Haidt and Peterson as sophists if you will, but it seems to me that would be dodging the issue. What is at stake is the possibility of meaning, not the implications of its impossibility.

What truth is it that seems to you to be at once metaphorically and literally true? Tell me that, and I'll tell you where your possibility is in its mysterious process of going, they seem to promise.

The account, of course only ever a likely one--whether given a Timaeus world of divine order, or a probabilistic multiverse of the dozen or so varieties proposed by the great popularizers of physics--anyway, this is the best we can do, to give our account, to see as far as we can and walk in the way as best we are able, to collect from what there is the material to become a bridge to those who will come after us in turn, and to tell them, above all: take heart!

Essential to this, of course, is a sense of humor, humility:

I do not know what I may appear to the world, but to myself I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the sea-shore, and diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me. 

-- Louis Trenchard More, Isaac Newton: A Biography (New York: Scribner's, 1934), p. 664. (quoted in Greene, The Hidden Reality, at the opening of the last chapter: The Limits of Inquiry)

Just as the essential thing for justice, for pursuing the good, for all truth-seeking, is the most joyous and wonderful and mysterious thing of all: friendship. In that spirit I write all this to friends real and potential, with--I hope, and not elation only--

Love,

Wes