A Companion to Socrates

原文摘录   · · · · · · 

• The idea that people have a superficial allegiance to what they say in public – that they present a false self to others in their daily social intercourse – is taken up again in Book II of the Republic, when Glaucon claims that most people, when given the chance to make themselves invisible (through possession of the ring of Gyges), would engage in wrongdoing, even though in public they condemn such wrongdoing. In their daily intercourse with others, they hide behind a false self, a mask used as a device for getting what they want. Not only do they fail to ask themselves what they should want – what is worth wanting – but they also give others a false impression of which desires they have and which they lack. They have no true self – a self of one’s own devising, developed through critical... (查看原文)

  Gardenia 2013-01-04 10:38:16

• One way to appreciate the force of Socrates’ demand that we live examined lives is to consider a similar sentiment found in Oscar Wilde’s De Profundis: “Most people,” he writes, “are other people. Their thoughts are someone else’s opinions, their lives a mimicry, their passions a quotation.” Wilde is getting at something important, but only if we take him to be saying that it is a defect never to form or to abandon a critical intelligence – an ability to evaluate ideas – and merely to accept, unthinkingly, what others say, what they do, the way they feel. It is a grave flaw to want to become like another person, if this is merely an unreflective imitative response, and not accompanied by an evaluation of whether that person is admirable and therefore worthy of imitation. If I love a paint... (查看原文)

  Gardenia 2013-01-05 10:45:03