Theaetetus II

In the Theaetetus, at 183b, Socrates says,

“One must not use even the word ‘thus’; for this ‘thus’ would no longer be in motion; nor yet ‘not thus’ for here again there is no motion.  The exponents of this theory need to establish some other language; as it is, they have no words that are consistent with their hypothesis …”

This passage is interesting because Plato here seems to be showing an awareness of what Kierkegaard later called the “mediacy” of language.  Kierkegaard argued that what we experience is the immediate.  But as soon as we put that into language, language becomes a kind of mediation.  It mediates the immediacy of our actual reality into a kind of fixed or static reality.  In the passage cited above, I Socrates seems to be recognizing this very kind of thing.  The quote is set in the context of a discussion about whether everything is in a continual state of “becoming” or “flux”.   Plato here notices that language is not really suited to speak about a world which is always ‘becoming’.  He says to really talk about this we would need some other kind of language.  And while he makes this realization, he fails to see one of its possible implications.  Namely, perhaps that it is language itself which is the problem.  Perhaps everything really is in motion, in flux, and it is only that nature of language prevents us from speaking about it so.  Many of Socrates arguments are based on things that seem static, or seem like opposites (blackness and whiteness, hotness and coldness, knowledge and ignorance) but what Socrates fails to do is question whether or not this seeming is only because language represents these as such, or because that’s really the way they are.  I think some explanation like this has been given in the 20^th century as to where Socrates went wrong, but I can’t remember who.  I think this is an important topic; one I’d love to pursue in class. 

Theaetetus I

One might characterize the textbook version of Plato’s theory of recollection to be something like this:  The soul is eternal.  Prior to entering our embodied state we had knowledge of the forms.  We forget these forms at birth.  Learning is the process of recollecting the truth we already know.  This recollecting happens when we see things for ourselves, possibly through the help of a teacher, or as Socrates presents himself, “the midwife,” and reason is what is responsible for our coming to truth.

I would like to point out that in this sketch of recollection, although I’m sure incomplete, Socrates can be, and I think has been, interpreted to mean that dialectical reason is the only thing we need to come to the truth.  I found it interesting, therefore, that in the opening pages of the Theaetetus we find several references to some kind of supernatural involvement in aiding this process of recollection.  Perhaps this is something like Augustinian “illumination.”

In two passages this is explicitly communicated:

“And yet it is clear that this is not due to anything they have learned from me; it is that they discover within themselves a multitude of beautiful things, which they bring forth into the light.  But it is I, with God’s help, who deliver them of this offspring.” (150d, italics added)

“So begin again, Theaetetus, and try to say what knowledge is.  And don’t on any account tell me that you can’t.  For if God is willing, and you play the man, you can.” (151d, italics added)

In a third passage, Socrates speaks of those who think their ideas were all their own and do not give proper credit to God’s willingness and Socrates’s help, leave Socrates sooner than they should and often miscarry. (150e)

Some of these people realize their folly and return to Socrates.  Socrates says,

               “When that happens, in some cases the divine sign that visits me forbids me to associate with them; in others, it permits me, and then they being again to make progress.”  (151a)

All three passages are found within a few paragraphs of each other and right at the start of the dialectic with Theaetetus; before the heavier argumentation begins.  Because of this repetition, it seems to me that we should not ignore the emphasis Plato is putting on divine help in giving birth to our ideas.  The fact that the divine sign prevents Socrates from continuing to work with some pupils could be symbolic of at least two things: (1) that God is the ultimate giver or withholder of knowledge and understanding, or (2) that the power of reason is not unbounded.  Maybe there is important role that God still plays in Plato’s epistemology that is too quickly dismissed by naturalistic interpretations.  I think this should also cause us to question those who want to draw a hard and fast line between philosophy and theology.  I suspect that modern thinkers – post Descartes – tend to project backwards, that knowledge must be something that we, as autonomous thinking things, must arrive at ourselves.  But this textual evidence should give us pause before we attribute such ideas to him.

Socratic Lessons on Teaching Philosophy

In Socrates’ discussion with Phaedo between 90b and 91b, we find him role modeling two very important aspects of how to teach philosophy.  First, Socrates is very attentive to the fact that philosophy can be a frustrating enterprise, where one ends up in contradiction, or in aporia, lacking the answers that one set out to find.  Socrates warns Phaedo saying, “We should not allow into our minds the conviction that argumentation has nothing sound to it.” (90e). Socrates tells Phaedo that this can happen if one does not have the proper skill at argumentation.  In one’s distress and frustration, the student can “shift the blame away from himself to the arguments, and spend the rest of his life hating and reviling reasonable discussion and so be deprived of truth and knowledge of reality” (90d).  I think this is very pertinent to how we might teach any introduction to philosophy class.  I think even in my own philosophical journey I have at times asked myself, “well if we never get to a final answer what is the point?”  We need to make sure that we help students through this process, so that they find the right perspective on the matter.  I would be especially interested in discussing this issue in class to get Nathan and Anne’s take. 

Two ideas I had were as follows:  One, make sure to not always discuss such difficult subjects that answers do seem impossible.  Make sure to give some easy wins, for instance, like how we can rule out straight utilitarianism in ethics.  Even if we can’t determine a final theory we all agree on, we can make important progress by ruling things out.  Two, we should make sure to emphasize the lifelong process of learning and philosophy.  I.e. that it is a journey that never ends.  Third, getting students comfortable with the fact that it is okay to change their minds even if they were once convinced of something, and that refinement of our positions and arguments is a good and normal process.  If they don’t understand that refinement is a normal part of the process, this also could lead to a kind of despairing.

The second warning Socrates gives is that we must train students not to relish in argument for the sake of arguing, winning the debate, or convincing others.  Rather, we need to train and remind our students, as well as ourselves, that we should be focused on getting to the truth that we can really accept ourselves.  Socrates says, “I shall not be eager to get the agreement of those present that what I say is true, except incidentally, but I shall be very eager that I should myself be thoroughly convinced that things are so” (91a).   I think this perspective is really important.  Students (likely ourselves included) can be so concerned about writing a good paper or finding a good criticism of another argument, that there can be a tendency to start arguing for argument’s sake alone, without even thinking whether or not one's position is a truth one is convinced of oneself. 

The Dialectic of Givenness in the Myth of Er

The Myth of Er has been subject to numerous interpretations.  In this essay, I argue for an interpretation which I call the dialectic of givenness.  In this dialectic, the Myth of Er holds two concepts in tension.  One the one hand, there exists a givenness to each of our embodied lives.  This is represented by the soul’s journey after the River of Unheeding, where it inherits the life circumstances that have already been chosen.  I argue that we may interpret Socrates as exhorting us to recognize how the given particulars of our lives impact who we are, as a corrective to some interpretations of Plato’s body/soul dualism.  On the other hand, the recognition of this givenness leads to recognize that there are some things still under our control, and choices regarding these things affect who we become.  Thus, inasmuch as we do have the power to choose our external conditions, we must do so with the utmost care.  This is represented by the choice one makes at Lachesis for the kind of life one will enter into next.   Because of this second principle, I argue that Socrates shows us how moral transformation cannot be achieved simply through exposure to philosophy or attention to the forms.  The practical choices that affect one’s everyday life and circumstances will ultimately affect the moral formation of the soul.  I conclude by showing how this understanding of the Myth can produce an ongoing dialectic in the life of one who attends to its exhortation.  This dialectic may produce a cyclical structure of moral transformation in an agent, utilizing the resources of philosophy while respecting its limits.  

Love & Temporality

I found strange, and unsatisfactory, the Socratic argument that one cannot love what one already possesses.  This argument makes me suspicious about Socrates’ theory of love. His argument goes something like this. 

Love is desire for what is loved. 

It is necessary that desire is always of something of which one is in need.

If one has something, it is no longer in need of it

Therefore, one cannot love something that one already possesses

Socrates says that (given the previous argument) if one thinks one desires something already possessed, this is a kind of illusion that must be given a temporal explanation.  Socrates says that if you are already in possession of something, what you want “is to possess these things in time to come, since in the present, whether you want to or not, you have them.”  (200d) Therefore, it is more appropriate to say, “I want the things I have now to be mine in the future as well” (200d).  According to this theory, there seems to be a kind of odd temporal dimension to love.  For the things we do not possess, we can desire now, but for things we do possess, what we desire is really some future state.  This temporal effect also seems to have an impact on the metaphysics of what is loved.  The referent of what is loved switches from something actual to something possible, from an actuality to a potentiality. 

There does seem to be something intuitive to the claim that Love desires to possess what is loved through time.  It would hardly be worth arguing that love desires what love possesses now also in the future.  But what seems unacceptable is the notion that one cannot love what one possesses now, in this very moment.  If this is a result of the “love is desire” thesis, then the worse for that thesis.  If anyone has ever been in love, one knows that the fullest joy of love is the very moment of loving and being loved in return.  In this moment, one does possess what one loves, the beloved.  Perhaps we need to augment Socrates theory with something like “enjoyment”.  That Love is the desire and enjoyment of what is loved.  Perhaps I’m way off base here.  I would be interested in discussing this in class.

Republic X

In the first part of Republic 10, Socrates takes up a sustained attack on poetic “imitators,” using Homer as his case example.  He challenges the assumption many people have about writers and poets: that because “a good poet produces fine poetry, he must have knowledge of the things he writes about” (598e).  Socrates first asks a series of questions.  (1) If someone has both the ability to make a thing itself and an image of a thing, would he really bother about making images and “put this at the forefront of his life as the best thing to do?” (599b). The obvious answer here seems to be no.  He would make real things, not images and stories.  Also, (2) wouldn’t someone with such skill be more serious about actual life deeds rather than writing about such deeds, so that he could be “the subject of a eulogy [rather] than the author of one?” (599b) (3) When Homer was alive, Socrates asks whether or not he had a following of people?  Were there people who were compelled to live with him and learn from him? Apparently there were no such reports of Homer, unlike other famous philosophical figures such as Pythagoras. 

Socrates point seems to be that if one truly has the skill of virtue, great deeds, or the good life, one would not busy themselves with simply writing about it, but doing it.  He does allow for an exception: that of a teacher.  A teacher may busy herself with communicating her knowledge to students.  But the proof that one’s teaching is worthwhile can and should be seen in the lives and the communities of those who are following.  If one is a knowledgeable teacher, and not just an imitator, then there should be followers, and these should be affected in a tangible way by one’s teaching.

Socrates attack continues; this time on a slightly different front.  In his first examples and questions, his panegyric was directed at the life of a person with skill – the craftsman – as being informed by knowledge, rather than the imitator.  But now Socrates shows that even the craftsman is not the one who has true knowledge.  The person with true knowledge is the one who uses what the craftsman builds.  The cobbler and the flute-maker take instructions from those who actually ride and play – the horseman and the flute-player (601d-e).  These are the people with true knowledge who tell others what makes a thing good and bad (e.g. good and bad bridals, good and bad flutes).

While I think Socrates criticisms of imitative poetry in Republic X is certainly aimed at the discipline of poetry itself, I think it may be doing more than that.  The obvious point is that we should recognize our love and enjoyment of poetry can be detrimental to living a healthy life of moderation (see 605b).  But I think he also shows us that philosopher can and should turn this same attack on herself, asking the same questions.  “Am I, as a philosopher, only busying myself with words?  What sorts of life deeds am I producing as the product of my philosophy?  How have the lives of those I’ve taught been impacted?”  In Socrates view, the heart of philosophy is about finding the good life for oneself and developing it in others.  This was a Socratic characteristic that Kierkegaard would later pick up on and admire.  Kierkegaard saw acutely the necessity for a connection between one’s lived experience and one’s ideas.  He thought it ludicrous to build up a philosophical “world-system” that one could not oneself inhabit.  I think both Socrates and Kierkegaard are right about this, and it is a challenge to all of us as future teacher and scholars. 

Republic VIII: From Oligarchy to Democracy

What I found most interesting in book VIII of Plato’s republic was his account of the transition between an oligarchy and a democracy and how unfettered freedom has a disastrous effect on a society.  I think his insights have much to speak to our culture today. 

The oligarchy is ruled by those who have wealth.  The oligarchic soul is characterized by the love of wealth and one’s willingness to suppress all unnecessary desires and be ruled only by the ones necessary to pursue an orderly life and increase wealth.  One can see that the United States, although perhaps formed under the pretense of democracy, was founded as a kind of oligarchy as Plato describes it.  Only white male landowners could vote, securing the rule to be with the wealthy.   Wealth was the chief aim, and the cotton trade and commerce were pursued even in the face of self-evidently immoral behaviors, from the elimination of Native Americans to the treatment of African Americans.  A love for wealth characterized the primary goals and aims of the society, which arguably lasted from America’s founding through the current baby boomer generation.  But over time there has gradually been a transition from this white male landowner ruled society to a true democracy, where every man and woman, rich and poor, has a free voice.  Now “freedom” in American has come to be “define[d] as the good” (562b).   America people, now that they have “full freedom and freedom of speech” and “license to do what [one] wants”; it has become a place where one “arrange[s] his own life in whatever manner pleases him” (557b). “Tolerance” (568b) is now the key word, where acceptance and equality of everyone has become the chief aim.  Affirmative action programs, the LGBT movement, the sexual revolution, and the shameless actions of celebrities and cultural figures (e.g. Miley Cyrus) all show the moral erosion which happens as a result of valuing freedom as the ultimate good.  Unlike the baby boomer generation and its protestant work ethic, whereby people were willing to be ruled by “necessary desires” in pursuit of the American dream, all desires are now given equal footing.  Socrates says, “For if someone tells him [the democratic man] that some pleasures belong to fine and good desires and others to evil ones and that he must pursue and value the former and restrain and enslave the latter, he denies all this and declares that all pleasures are equal and must be valued equally” (531c).  This effect of putting every desire on equal footing has become so pervasive, it is not just limited to the masses or uneducated; we even see desire-fulfillment theory held up as ‘the good’ in metaethical philosophical accounts of morality!