Busman's Holiday- Hoped too. (Some Homecoming Weekend Music)

The Structure of Socratic Ignorance

I mentioned this in class Friday--a little piece I whipped up for a Philosophy at Mama Mochas meeting.  It should seem familiar, since I was working from memory of it Friday.  We will bear down harder on knowing and acknowledging tomorrow.

Plutarch on Alcibiades

Read it here (in the North translation).

William Temple on Plato's Vision of the Ideas

To us the Ideal Theory is myth, as it was to Plato in the later period.  Prof. Burnet wrote recently of the myths–“They have their roots in something older than philosophy, and possessing a vitality which is denied to philosophical systems.”  And just before he had pointed out that Aristotle, who begins with accepted facts and ends in myth, has always been a pillar of orthodoxy, while “most heresies come from Plato” because he insists on scientific treatment of ultimate questions.  This is no doubt true; but this distinction is rooted in another.  Here, as in all departments of human activity, the ultimate fact is temperament.  Aristotle was bound to produce a philosophy which would be a basis for orthodoxy, for, colossal as was his intellect–perhaps the greatest in history, –he was by temperament a churchwarden; and Plato was bound to be the philosophic father of many heretics because he was by temperament a Titan.  There is an inspiration in the spectacle of the old philosopher tearing in shreds his proudly built philosophy and beginning it all afresh.  But among his actual works what I have called “the old Ideal Theory,” which he himself rightly discarded, is worth more to mankind than the method of division elaborated in the Sophist and the Politicus…[This] may be of great scientific value, but [it imparts] no impulse.  The Ideal Theory, as held by Plato in his middle period, may be myth; but it is the outcome and expression of something more valuable than any specific doctrine, however true–of intellectual courage that refuses to allow any sphere to be set beyond the reach of knowledge, of mystic vision in which all that is mean and sordid disappears, and the temperamental fire without which no great achievement is possible in action or art.  –Mind 1908 (Vol 17 No 68)

Allan Bloom on the Erotic

http://deakinphilosophicalsociety.com/texts/bloom/closingoftheamericanmind.pdf

The line I had in mind today is on the top of pg. 4, beginning with "What a thrill it was..." and ending with "An admirable confusion."  Bloom's book was controversial in the 80's; I think it is largely forgotten today.  Still, the chapter I've linked you to connects up interestingly with what we have been reading and discussing.  I hadn't thought about this book, or this passage, in years.

Socrates and Alcibiades

Jowett on Socrates' Midwifery

But Theaetetus has never succeeded in attaining [a satisfactory] conception of knowledge, though he has often tried; and, when this and similar questions were brought to him from Socrates, has been sorely distressed by them. Socrates explains to him that he is in labour. For men as well as women have pangs of labour; and both at times require the assistance of midwives. And he, Socrates, is a midwife, although this is a secret; he has inherited the art from his mother bold and bluff, and he ushers into light, not children, but the thoughts of men. Like the midwives, who are 'past bearing children,' he too can have no offspring—the God will not allow him to bring anything into the world of his own. He also reminds Theaetetus that the midwives are or ought to be the only matchmakers (this is the preparation for a biting jest); for those who reap the fruit are most likely to know on what soil the plants will grow. But respectable midwives avoid this department of practice—they do not want to be called procuresses. There are some other differences between the two sorts of pregnancy. For women do not bring into the world at one time real children and at another time idols which are with difficulty distinguished from them. 'At first,' says Socrates in his character of the man-midwife, 'my patients are barren and stolid, but after a while they "round apace," if the gods are propitious to them; and this is due not to me but to themselves; I and the god only assist in bringing their ideas to the birth. Many of them have left me too soon, and the result has been that they have produced abortions; or when I have delivered them of children they have lost them by an ill bringing up, and have ended by seeing themselves, as others see them, to be great fools. Aristides, the son of Lysimachus, is one of these, and there have been others. The truants often return to me and beg to be taken back; and then, if my familiar allows me, which is not always the case, I receive them, and they begin to grow again. There come to me also those who have nothing in them, and have no need of my art; and I am their matchmaker (see above), and marry them to Prodicus or some other inspired sage who is likely to suit them. I tell you this long story because I suspect that you are in labour. Come then to me, who am a midwife, and the son of a midwife, and I will deliver you. And do not bite me, as the women do, if I abstract your first-born; for I am acting out of good-will towards you; the God who is within me is the friend of man, though he will not allow me to dissemble the truth. Once more then, Theaetetus, I repeat my old question—"What is knowledge?" Take courage, and by the help of God you will discover an answer.'

Socrates the Midwife

[This was a class focused on Plato's Theaetetus, Wittgenstein's Blue Book and Bouwsma's John Locke Lectures (The Flux).  The class was entitled, "The Flux".  I taught it in the Spring of 1996.]

Back, now, to midwifery.

I recommend that Socrates be seen as logically clarifying thoughts.  His interlocutor says something–provides the datum clarificandum–and Socrates goes to work.  He pulls the interlocutor’s saying this way and that.  He compares it with first one sentence and then another.  All the while he’s asking his interlocutor to decide:  “Is this what you meant?  Could you have meant this?”  Sometimes the interlocutor keeps up for a while.

What is the midwifery comparison?  Call it an exhibitive theory of philosophizing. It shows us things we already know, but in a way that makes us see them afresh.

Socrates pictures his interlocutors as pregnant.  The have something inside them, although there is no way of knowing whether what’s inside them is going to be viable or still-born.  Socrates brings on labor pains.  He does this, I guess, by administering a potent medicine, by asking “What is x?”  Upon hearing the question, the interlocutor goes into labor.  The labor, like all labor, is painful.  (Try giving birth to Truth!)  Why is it painful?  Answering a question like “What is knowledge?” is a strenuous and hurtful mental business.

Let me try this without the midwifery idom.

Socrates knows how to ask questions.  The questions he knows how to ask are not of the “What’s his name?” or “What sort of architecture is that?” variety.  Such questions are not one that we are full of answers to, or think we are.  Sometimes we can answer them; sometimes we can’t.  As long as we aren’t taking a test or on Jeopardy, not being able to answer usually doesn’t matter much.  But when we can’t answer Socrates’ questions, it matters.  No test, no Jeopardy.  Socrates asks, “What is knowledge?” and we think we have to answer.  Why?  –We all know that we know what knowledge is.  That’s why!  We all talk about knowledge, use “know” or its cognates, all the time. 

Theaetetus is a learner.  Theodorus is a teacher.  Surely, they know what knowledge is.

Socrates askes “What is knowledge?” and we have an answer in us.  But the answer won’t come quickly.  Augustine:  “If no one ask of me, I know; if I wish to explain to him who asks, I know not.”  So we huff and we puff and we try things out:  knowledge is perception.  Knowledge is true judgment.  None of these comes easily.  We have the feeling that we force each out.  The forcing hurts; it ought to be unnecessary.  Socrates helps, if that is what he chooses to do, by asking still more questions.  Each time we force out another answer, Socrates tests it.  If it won’t do, he shows us it won’t.  This is no fun, either.  After all that work, after all those words, no one wants to see an apparent new answer, apparently fresh to the world and apparently full of promise, turn out to be nonsense–a phantom answer.  Don’t rob us of our darling follies!  But Socrates is a pro.  He’s on a mission from God.  He show us.  Sometimes we go back to work forcing out another answer.  Sometimes we take our phantoms and go home.

Socrates says he can tell those who are full of answers from those who aren’t.  Those who aren’t he sends to Prodicus.  (Prodicus has an office in our English department.)  The others he helps.  They profit from this help, even if they manage no viable births.  How?

All this is strange.  Midwifery is no glamorous role for the philosopher.  He’s only around to help bring answers to light and to get rid of them, if they are monstrosities.  (Philosophy:  confusiasm over abstrocities.)  The role is thoroughly negative.  The philosopher is barren, has no answers of his own.  He can’t adopt.

No pitter-patter of little answer-feet in the philosopher’s house.

High Stakes

Man’s world is infested by Sphinxes, demonic beings of mixed and monstrous nature which ask him riddles and eat him if he cannot answer them, compelling him to play a game of wits where the stake is his life and his only weapon is his tongue. --R. G. Collingwood

Some Encouragement?

Here's a bit from a handout of mine I have used in the past:

There are no shallows in philosophy, no knee-deep, shoreline waters. It is abysmal from horizon to horizon.

Nothing we read will be textbook-like. That is, nothing we read will begin easy, with starters, and proceed gradually through middling difficult intermediates, and on to truly difficult finalities. So you will not likely get better reading straight ahead. You get better backtracking, as you re-read: the intermediates come into view on a second or third reading; the finalities only after long frequentation, sometimes life-long re-readings. (You must learn to cultivate the pleasures while overcoming the challenges of re-reading!) Re-reading is the analog, in reading philosophy, of working through, say, a mathematics textbook.  You make progress in philosophy by disciplined regress.

To survive in philosophy, you need a high confusion threshold. You have to be capable of being, have to be actually willing to be, thoroughly confused--without falling into despair. And you have to be willing to enter into confusion again and again, even while not seeing any exit from it. The exit, if there is one, is always “across a step or two of dubious twilight” (to borrow a phrase from Robert Browning). No one who refuses to enter that twilight, that confusion, will ever be a philosopher.

Boldness and Education

Perhaps the greatest lesson the [18th] century learned from its long, scrupulous, and imaginative comparison of it own experience with the larger past was the value of boldness; not the soi-disant boldness of negativism, of grudgingly withholding assent as we seek to establish our identities, prate of our integrity, or reach into our pockets for our mite of ‘originality’.  None of us, as Goethe said, is really very ‘original’ anyway; one gets most of what he attains in his short life from others.  The boldness desired involves directly facing up to what we admire and then trying to be like it.  –Walter Jackson Bate

Moral education is impossible apart from the habitual vision of greatness.  --Alfred North Whitehead

Readings for Next Week, 9/22-9/26

For Monday, 9/22, read the Symposium 212c to the end, and read the complete Apology.  There is no reading assignment for Friday, but there will be a Quiz due that day.  Be sure that you have also read Hadot to p. 76.

"The Heavy Bear Who Goes With Me" by Delmore Schwartz (read by Tom O'Be...

Protect the Word (John Fowles)

Protect the word,
Protect and cherish the word,
Cherish and preserve.

The word has many enemies,
Things as they are
Are not of help.

Music lovers, lovers of art,
Empty shells, mere seeing eyes,
are not of help.

At the beginning was the word,
Before the image or the sound.
In chaos, order is its heart.

In order, freedom is its soul.
It is the art in which to feel
Is not enough, and yet in which

The best are not the most skilled.
There seemed many great auks
Until the last one was killed.

A Cautionary Heideggerian Note

There is a significant darkness in every philosophical endeavor, and even the most radical of these endeavors remains finite.

Life without Principle, Thoreau

Let us consider the way in which we spend our lives...

I hardly know an intellectual man, even, who is so broad and truly liberal that you can think aloud in his society. Most with whom you endeavor to talk soon come to a stand against some institution in which they appear to hold stock- that is, some particular, not universal, way of viewing things. They will continually thrust their own low roof, with its narrow skylight, between you and the sky, when it is the unobstructed heavens you would view. Get out of the way with your cobwebs; wash your windows, I say! In some lyceums they tell me that they have voted to exclude the subject of religion. But how do I know what their religion is, and when I am near to or far from it? I have walked into such an arena and done my best to make a clean breast of what religion I have experienced, and the audience never suspected what I was about. The lecture was as harmless as moonshine to them. Whereas, if I had read to them the biography of the greatest scamps in history, they might have thought that I had written the lives of the deacons of their church. Ordinarily, the inquiry is, Where did you come from? or, Where are you going? That was a more pertinent question which I overheard one of my auditors put to another one- "What does he lecture for?" It made me quake in my shoes.

The Forms (Reading)

If you want more on the Forms, look at Republic Bk X (to 612c or so, although you may want to just read the entire chapter), or at Phaedo 74a-84c.  If you are really up for a challenge, you might want to read the Parmenides (even its first few pages will give you a sense of Plato's own perplexity at his Forms).

Dare to be Wise; Begin!

[From Montaigne]

To examples may fitly be applied all the profitable discourses of philosophy, to which all human actions, as to their best rule, ought to be especially directed: a scholar shall be taught to know—

["Learn what it is right to wish; what is the true use of coined
money; how much it becomes us to give in liberality to our country
and our dear relations; whom and what the Deity commanded thee to
be; and in what part of the human system thou art placed; what we
are and to what purpose engendered."—Persius, iii. 69]

what it is to know, and what to be ignorant; what ought to be the end and design of study; what valour, temperance, and justice are; the difference betwixt ambition and avarice, servitude and subjection, licence and liberty; by what token a man may know true and solid contentment; how far death, affliction, and disgrace are to be apprehended;

["And how you may shun or sustain every hardship."
—Virgil, AEneid, iii. 459.]

by what secret springs we move, and the reason of our various agitations and irresolutions: for, methinks the first doctrine with which one should season his understanding, ought to be that which regulates his manners and his sense; that teaches him to know himself, and how both well to die and well to live. Amongst the liberal sciences, let us begin with that which makes us free; not that they do not all serve in some measure to the instruction and use of life, as all other things in some sort also do; but let us make choice of that which directly and professedly serves to that end. If we are once able to restrain the offices of human life within their just and natural limits, we shall find that most of the sciences in use are of no great use to us, and even in those that are, that there are many very unnecessary cavities and dilatations which we had better let alone, and, following Socrates' direction, limit the course of our studies to those things only where is a true and real utility:

["Dare to be wise; begin! he who defers the hour of living well is
like the clown, waiting till the river shall have flowed out: but
the river still flows, and will run on, with constant course, to
ages without end."—Horace, Ep., i. 2.]

James Haden on Socrates

I posted this on Canvas too.  I strongly encourage you to read it before we finish the Apology.  Link.

Mentors and Love

Never forget that Plato's mentor was Socrates.  Never underestimate the life-changing effect of Socrates on Plato.

In the Phaedrus, when Plato talks about the relationship between mentor and mentee, he models his discussion on his relationship to Plato.  (Consider how much like Phaedrus young Plato was likely to have been!)  For Plato, time to talk with Socrates must have been both the most exciting and the most terrifying time of his day.  He could not wait to be with Socrates, to be talked to and talk to him, and yet he also knew Socrates to be his judge, so to speak.  And this is not because Socrates spent his time passing judgment on Plato, but because Plato had internalized and continued to internalize Socrates as his model, his ideal--and each confrontation with that ideal left Plato aware of some still uncorrected or some newly discovered deviation in himself from Socrates.

I do not know if many of you have had a mentor, but, if you have, you should have experiences like Plato's to draw on and to make intelligible Plato's seeing of mentor and mentee under the concept of 'love', of the 'erotic'.  Speaking for myself, I was very lucky in my teachers, and can count a number of mentors.  But first among them for me is James Haden, who was my philosophy professor my freshman year of college.  Jim was a big guy, in his early 70's, white-haired and white-bearded, wearing heavy glasses, and he represented all that I wanted to be--embodied my aspirations.  I couldn't wait for his classes; I found reasons to hang around to talk with him (or, if lucky, to walk along with him as he headed home); I looked for him when I crossed campus.  My pulse rose when I saw him--even across campus.  I loved him.  (Is there any other way to say it?)  I wanted nothing more than for him to think that I was succeeding at philosophy, nothing more than for him to make me better at philosophy.  We lived out our relationship in a mutual love of wisdom.

He took a special interest in me.  He was willing to delay his retirement until I graduated.  He sought me out.  He invited me out to lunch.  Had me to his house for bacon and onion pizza.  When I dropped out of college (long story), he kept in touch, wrote me faithfully.  Visited me.  When he died, about 6 years later, he left me his library. 

I venerate his memory.  Our relationship, obviously, involved no sex.  But to say that the relationship lacked an erotic dimension is clearly wrong.  I was in the presence of someone who participated in a mystery I wanted to participate in, and who radiated the reality of that mystery to me.  He saw something in me, something, well, worthy--something worth developing.  And I needed him to develop it:  such things develop in an apprentice only under the tutelage of a master.  To use an image from the Phaedrus:  I was moulting, itching and sore and restless, overburdened by a desire I really did not understand how to satisfy.  He had suffered from that desire too; he had found a way, if not of satisfying it exactly, then of living well while in its vise.  I loved him for what he loved and knew how to love.  He loved me for what I loved but did not know how to love.  --As with Jim and me, so with Socrates and Phaedrus, Socrates and Plato?

Ten Rules for Teachers/Students

This list is attributed to John Cage.  Although he didn't create it, he loved it and kept a copy on his wall.  Put it on yours.

RULE ONE: Find a place you trust, and then try trusting it for a while.
RULE TWO: General duties of a student: Pull everything out of your teacher; pull everything out of your fellow students.
RULE THREE: General duties of a teacher: Pull everything out of your students.
RULE FOUR: Consider everything an experiment.
RULE FIVE: Be self-disciplined: this means finding someone wise or smart and choosing to follow them. To be disciplined is to follow in a good way. To be self-disciplined is to follow in a better way.
RULE SIX: Nothing is a mistake. There’s no win and no fail, there’s only make.
RULE SEVEN: The only rule is work. If you work it will lead to something. It’s the people who do all of the work all of the time who eventually catch on to things.
RULE EIGHT: Don’t try to create and analyze at the same time. They’re different processes.
RULE NINE: Be happy whenever you can manage it. Enjoy yourself. It’s lighter than you think.
RULE TEN: We’re breaking all the rules. Even our own rules. And how do we do that? By leaving plenty of room for X quantities.
HINTS: Always be around. Come or go to everything. Always go to classes. Read anything you can get your hands on. Look at movies carefully, often. Save everything. It might come in handy later.

A Final Word on the Euthydemus?