sociological?

I can imagine what it's useful to say when you want to communcate with undergraduates in North America if one attempts to teach philosophy...I can imagine the sort of thing...

So, when George Rudebusch adverts to a hollywood style image of bombs exploding in his explication of Socrates, I'm not surprised.

Of course Rudebusch is a responsible scholar, and knows what he is doing, controls his exposition with appropriate qualifications.

Nonetheless, I don't find the image of bombs exploding (or was it bullets firing?) and people dying to be a useful metaphor when it comes to explaining the idea that what we do makes a difference. And I actually recoil away from the sort of high style language we need in English to talk about this--phrases like "the importance of morality"....too abstract, hopelessly abstract, it seems to me.

(hastily added explanation: I've not got the text before me, but as I recall the basic point was that our actions do impact upon the lives of other people, and that this gives an urgency to a kind of moral seriousness and inquiry as typified by the life of Socrates. I shall have to come back to this entry and fill it in, I fear....---it's that important for us to get our thinking straight about how to live! how important? as important as it would be if our thoughts could bring about the immediate death and injury to innocent people, people we didn't even know...)

I prefer the literary style of Elizabeth Bowen in "The House in Paris" where two young people fall in love, bringing with it a host of consequences, and a child.

There's not the flash of explosions, but there is, first of all a dreadful excitement due in part to plunging into the unknown, and later a growing awareness of how little one understood what one was really doing, and, later, an attempt to deal with what's become of one's actions....all truer to reality than anything like the Hollywood style....

(Kundera says something like this: we try to portray ourselves when we act, but when we look at the results of our actions, it's hard to find ourselves in what we've made.)

But, then, again, how many North American undergraduates would bother to read a book like "The House in Paris"? (I suppose that last remark was said in Rudebusch's defense.....) Then again, how many philosophers would consider a novel to be irrelevant? (I don't know the answer to that last question....)

Note: (A somewhat political remark.) It's a point made by Ted Honderich (though, I suppose, not only him) that our fascination with violence makes us less aware of the slow dying of starvation....That's another way to begin to express discomfort about Hollywood style drama. It reminds me of the complaint that mere books or articles or blogs change nothing.....a disguised appeal to the Hollywood rapid change picture of history...... as if words were ever mere words.... (I end this remark with an unpleasant feeling that I've not yet begun to get to the bottom here...)

Further note/after-thought; Then, again, there is something bad in a life that lacks conversation--or, as we are wont to say, lacks honest conversation. I'm not sure (though I say this without great confidence) that we find this portrayed in Plato's dialogues: the halting, self-censored conversations we find in Bowen's "Death of the Heart"... but there too what's portrayed is badness in a human life, an absence of a certain good--and, once again, it lacks the simplicity of a Hollywood portrayal....(and by "simplicity" I do not mean clarity, but, instead a kind of inappropriate childishness... a kind of over-simplification...)