THE RIGHT MISTAKE: The Further Philosophical Investigations of Socrates Fortlow
Walter Mosley
Basic Civitas Books
Fiction
ISBN: 9780465005253
Many would argue that philosophy has gone south since the Greeks. As subsequent thinkers became muddled with questions of categorical imperatives, moral relativisms and systematized ethics, they lost the almost childlike simplicity of the discipline’s original questions: What is good? How can I act right? More importantly, in a discourse of prosaic academic papers and windbag treatises, the act of gathering strangers around a table to discuss issues face to face has been deemed quaint --- so much for Socratic ideals.
Mosley’s reincarnation of the philosopher is surprisingly faithful to the original: he is old, fat, poor, wise and highly aware of his limitations. He is put on trial for his ideas and defends himself superbly. Granted, he lives. And granted, he has raped and murdered women. Most damningly, he lacks most of Socrates’s characteristic arrogance. But these are things we can let slide, especially since Mosley is out to create a new character, not a second coming. As a modern-day street-wise philosopher, Socrates Fortlow, ex-con and all, is a fictional and philosophical hero well worth rallying around, and his story of engaging others into questioning right action speaks to the very soul of what philosophy is about.
Newly out of prison, Fortlow opens the Big Nickel, an old house in the LA ghetto that opens its doors on a weekly basis to everyone interested in discussing moral problems of the day (the free gumbo also helps). The Thinkers, as they come to be known, are mostly from the bad parts of town, but that doesn’t stop them from jumping right in to high-stakes moral debates about violence and compassion for other men, all under the common goal of bettering themselves. As the Big Nickel grows in renown, it sparks public interest in the goal of self-betterment, as well as attracts police spies suspicious of potentially seditious activity. Fortlow opens the Nickel as a site for peace talks between gang leaders; predictably enough, the bulk of people, too ignorant to conceive of such a hopeful establishment, just assume it’s another crime den. While Fortlow is eventually put on trial for suspected murder, it’s his honest moral activities that seem to be on trial.
Mosley deftly brings Fortlow to life as a modern man, a murderer with unknowable guilt and a Socratic figurehead. He is equal parts wise and humble, and while he’s certainly inspirational as Socrates, he’s most powerful as a troubled man looking for any salvation left to him. While Mosley goes a little overboard in referencing Fortlow’s ubiquitous shame for his crimes, there’s an honesty in the character that’s hard not to admire.
The novel’s other characters are nowhere near as well drawn, but considering the book’s subtitle, “The Further Philosophical Investigations of Socrates Fortlow,” they aren’t expected to be. THE RIGHT MISTAKE is half-novel, half-philosophical dialogue in the style of Plato. But shockingly, it works. Mosley’s tale is completely unpretentious, single-handedly sucking the wind out of academics everywhere. And at the same time, it’s an engaging novel.
THE RIGHT MISTAKE presents a superb populist vision of philosophy as something anyone can do to better themselves. But it could have benefited from some more actual philosophizing. There is some narrative time devoted to the discussions at the Big Nickel, but it’s mostly summary. Fortlow and his friends do apply their ever-questioning mindset and ideas on moral right to their everyday lives in many chapters, but these too are a little subdued. As a philosophical work THE RIGHT MISTAKE is lacking some meat, but this is a side issue. Mosley --- not too heavily --- forces us to consider what we know, and more importantly, what we think we know that isn’t the case. Fortlow inspires not just his contemporaries but his reader as well. Mosley has reclaimed philosophy for those who need it most: people in the world, of the world, and far too often victims of it.
--- Reviewed by Max Falkowitz
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