Dr. Seuss and Philosophy - Jacob M. Held [9]
It’s pretty rare for most of us to undergo the kind of intense cross-examination of our beliefs and values to which Socrates submits the characters in Plato’s dialogues—we’re usually too lazy, complacent, or polite to “test every detail” of our lives, let alone someone else’s. So why does Socrates think it is so important? How does subjecting yourself to philosophical examination help you to live a better life?
According to Socrates, our biggest problem is that, most of the time, we just don’t realize how stupidly ignorant we actually are about the things that matter. Dr. Seuss puts it nicely in the passage above: We have to “make up our minds” about how to live and what paths to take, but it’s hard, harder than we realize. In Plato’s Apology, Socrates explains how he has devoted his life to talking to anyone he meets, young or old, rich or poor, and asking them questions about virtue and happiness, about what is good and worth pursuing in life. And he’s discovered that, although people almost always feel confident, for the most part they understand very little.14 They think they already know everything they need to know—in many cases, as we saw with Laches, they can’t imagine that there could be any doubt! But, when Socrates puts their ideas to the test and challenges them to explain or support their claims, or to show how their beliefs fit with other things they believe, they can’t do it. Like the Sneetches, Mayzie the lazy bird, and King Derwin, it turns out that they don’t know as much as they think they do, and they often have to learn the lesson about their intellectual arrogance the hard way.
This wouldn’t be a serious issue if the things about which people are ignorant were trivial or if we could muddle along well enough with our half-truths and conventional clichés. But, according to Socrates, our situation is much worse than that. The matters upon which people are the most ignorant are, at the same time, the most important and fundamental questions about life. Moreover, the beliefs people have about these matters are often not just ill considered, incomplete, and inconsistent, but disastrously false, so that they end up wasting or ruining their lives. As Socrates says, they come to “attach little importance to the most important things and greater importance to inferior things.”15 In other words, our priorities wind up being the opposite of what they should be.
For example, many people with whom Socrates talks believe that happiness comes from wealth, possessions, and social status. They think that the more you have—the bigger your estate, the fancier your chariots, the more power and influence you wield—the better off you are. We see this attitude (and its consequences) in Dr. Seuss’s story “Gertrude McFuzz.” Gertrude is “a girl-bird” with “the smallest plain tail there ever was. One droopy-droop feather. That’s all she had. And oh! That one feather made Gertrude so sad” (McFuzz). She is sad because she defines her self-worth by the quality and quantity of her tail feathers, and when she sees another bird with two fancy feathers, she wants more. She thinks that if she had more and prettier feathers, she would somehow be better than the other birds. She therefore eats pill-berries from the pill-berry bush until she has so many tail feathers that she can’t fly.
Yertle the Turtle, the king of the turtle pond, makes a similar mistake. Life on the island of Sala-ma-Sond is warm and happy for the turtles, but Yertle wants more. He decides that he needs a higher throne: “If I could sit high, how much greater I’d be! / What a king! I’d be ruler of all I could see!” (Yertle). Yertle defines his worth as king not by the wisdom of his decisions or the well-being of his subjects but by how high he sits and how much he can see. In pursuit of his goal, he calls in hundreds of turtles for him to sit on, to make his throne higher and higher so that he can see and be king of more and more things.
Why do people define themselves and their self-worth in this way? In part, it’s because they believe (in a vague,