March 24
Socrates never stopped asking: What is piety? What is justice? Whoever does not examine the words he uses builds his actions on fog.
Memorabilia (freely rendered)
Listening mode
Socrates never stopped asking: What is piety? What is justice? Whoever does not examine the words he uses builds his actions on fog.
You probably use a word like “reliable” without hesitating. You praise someone with it, you demand it of yourself, you write it into an agreement. Only when two people appeal to it and still quarrel does it turn out that each meant something different: one punctuality, the other being reachable in an emergency.
Such words are not chosen carelessly. Precisely because they are vague, many people can assent to them. A group can agree on fairness long before it knows whether everyone understands the same thing by it. This agreement is not mere illusion; often it is what gets a shared undertaking going in the first place.
When you ask further, you put it at risk. Perhaps you notice that your own notion mainly covers your own cases. Or that the other person uses the same word to defend something you reject. After that the conversation gets harder, and some understandings do not hold.
In return, you then know what you disagree about. Before, you only met in a word that each of you had furnished for your own use.
