Plato on Hunting II

Does the analogy still hold between hunting and philosophy?

Plato's image of hunting strikes us as strange today. Our methods have changed. And natural selection would work against hunters who tote guns and form a tight ring around a thicket. So, we don’t run deer off cliffs or into an ambush; we sit in tree-stands drinking coffee and hope for one to walk by. We don’t shoot at moving targets; we devise ways to get deer to stop so that we can get our gadgets set and line up our sights. And for all intents and purposes, we hunt, or rather, each one hunts alone.

Our practices are determined more by our technologies than by the nature and habitat of our quarry or by our own skills. Those with means can even purchase a “hunt,” that is, pay to have themselves inserted in a locale where they have spent no time, to harvest game whose patterns they have not studied, with equipment built and adjusted by people they do not know.

By many measures our practices appear to be progress. Have you ever tried to chase a deer through a thicket while carrying a bow in one hand and a quiver full or arrows strapped to your back? But perhaps the activities have become so dissimilar that the change marks not progress but an equivocation in the word “hunt.”

This image of hunting, so dissimilar from the one employed by Socrates, may, nevertheless, still provide an analogue for the activity of philosophizing. For most of us in modern universities it is all we have ever known. We sit alone in offices drinking coffee and hope for a concept to float by.