Dec
3
On the intersection of poetry, politics and philosophy
Filed Under philosophy, plato, poetry, politics, xenophon | Leave a Comment
I’ve owed all of you an explanation for this blog for some time, but I dread writing posts like these. The best discussion of how poetry, politics and philosophy relate is Book X of Plato’s Republic. What is below is obviously not meant to replace that discussion in any way. All I want to do is quote a few passages from an essay by Seth Benardete, “Strauss on Plato,” and add a comment or two where appropriate:
What philosophy is seems to be inseparable from the question of how to read Plato. Now almost no philosopher after Plato wrote at length about philosophy, and from antiquity at least there are few notices that inform us about the principles of Platonic writing. Three, however, stand out; the first two, in Plutarch and Cicero, respectively, point directly to the issue of esotericism; the third, in Aelian, to the very nature of philosophy. Plutarch implies that by the subordination of natural necessities to more divine principles Plato made philosophy safe for the city (Nicias 23.5); and in the Tusculan Disputations (5.4.11), Cicero remarks that he followed the way of Socrates, as it was made known by Plato, in his own dialogues, in concealing his own opinions, relieving others of error, and seeking in every dispute what is most like to the truth. Aelian tells the story of the painter Pauson who was hired to paint a racehorse rolling in dust and instead painted it running, and when his patron objected Pauson told him to turn it upside down, and Aelian says that there was much talk to the effect that this resembled the speeches of Socrates (Varia Historia 14.15). (Benardete 407)
The temptation is to skip right to the last part of Benardete’s “notices,” and it is probably true that the very nature of philosophy is right in front of us at that point. But to get any sort of clarity, we need to pay close attention to the leading-up: “the subordination of natural necessities to more divine principles” is by no means obvious, especially since the import of that phrase is about making the mere love (Gk. philo) of wisdom (Gk. sophia) “safe” for political life – more specifically, safe for life in general. Once you get a hint of the darkness underlying this proposition, one to which a crude atheism would be utterly insensitive, one can see why Socrates and Plato decided that philosophy should stay hidden in a most important way. Cicero – not the most shy of individuals, and one we have to thank not just for trying to save republicanism, but for helping give us access to Plato and Aristotle – moves beyond concealment, but in this listing, also moves beyond the thorniest, most interesting questions regarding nature and the divine. He relieves others of error, but only seeks what is “most like to the truth.” That’s not an insignificant thing; no less than God is concerned with the disposition of the heart more than the contents of the mind; but. Finally, I’m not going to comment significantly on the story Aelian recites. Amazing how the most serious things are almost nonsensical, mythical stories. In the story of a painting of a racehorse is a comment on how one could conceive of life (and death) itself.
Everything is on the table, and the essay by Benardete steps back. The title is “Strauss on Plato,” the point is to pay homage to one’s teacher:
It was the extraordinary merit of Leo Strauss to experience the import of these three remarks (among others) and render them to the life in his own writings on Plato and elsewhere. This achievement amounts to, in my opinion, as great a recovery as that of al-Farabi, who rediscovered philosophy in the tenth century. The common thread in their recovery was no doubt their common understanding of revelation as the alternative to philosophy; but since after paganism the three revealed religions were already infected by philosophy to various degrees, they had to recover revelation in its true form at the same time as they recovered its opposite. For both purposes, Plato’s Laws was their guide. As a recovery, theirs might seem of less significance than the original discovery; but as al-Farabi and Strauss knew, the original discovery was itself not at the beginning of philosophy. Philosophy had to be rediscovered by Socrates long after there had been philosophy. Plato has Socrates call his rediscovery a second sailing. The second sailing is philosophy, and it is never first. The false start of philosophy can alone jumpstart philosophy (Benardete 408).
One way of discussing the true form of revelation is to discuss tragedy and politics – yes, both together. I’ll let you know when I’m done rereading the Laws properly, sometime in the next 30 years or so. Skipping far ahead in the essay:
One has to turn to Xenophon in order to understand the double sense contained within Platonic dialectic (Memorabilia 4.5.12). Xenophon says that to converse (dialegesthai) meant for Socrates the coming together of men for the purpose of deliberation by dividing (dialegein) the things (ta pragmata) by kinds (gene). The middle voice dialegesthai contains within it the active, dialegein. The communication among men involves the articulation of things. This Heraclitean insight into the double nature of logos was the basis for Strauss’ reading of Plato (Benardete 408-9).
We’re going to consider this quote and stop: the way Benardete develops this insight is particularly dense when one reads ahead. In The Rhetoric of Morality and Philosophy, the same saying of Xenophon is discussed, but with a seemingly different end in mind: Socrates’ interlocutors revealed their nature by how they spoke. In their speaking, they divided themselves into “kinds:” logos (hidden within legein, “to speak”) led back to gene (yes, “genesis” is a related word). A discussion of logos/legein as a kind of natural “collecting” is in Heidegger, Introduction to Metaphysics, “The Restriction of Being” and is highly recommended. There’s more: the speaking/reasoning (logos) is not airy talk; it is the “articulation of things,” and in pragmata – from where we get “pragmatic” – you can see this is nothing less than command of reality. No wonder other philosophers are continually looking for principles with which to justify the existence of the material world; philosophy may be too powerful a tool. Then again, the division is had within oneself: the middle voice in Greek moves beyond subject as doer of the action (active) and subject as receiver of the action (passive) to something like “subject is the most integral part of understanding the action/state.” To what degree is the philosopher only conversing with himself, seeing his opinions as other people? Natural science was originally philosophy; perhaps if truth involves certainty, the one thing we know to be true is that we can never underestimate just how much darkness surrounds us.
References
Benardete, Seth. “Strauss on Plato.” The Argument of the Action: Essays on Greek Poetry and Philosophy. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000. 407-417
Nov
1
Briefly Noted: Plato’s “Menexenus”
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The dialogue this is a commentary on is reasonably short – a copy with section numbers is here if you’re interested. The translation quoted below is Jowett’s.
The Menexenus ends with Socrates promising to tell more grand political orations to a young up-and-coming politician if the latter will not reveal to the source that he is giving the speeches away. The secret pact for the future between a philosopher and a youth is forged because of what is explicitly political; the source of Socrates’ funerary oration in the Menexenus itself is Aspasia, the mistress of Pericles of whom Socrates not unsubtly hints is responsible for the funeral oration of Pericles himself. It is curious that the Menexenus is so hopeful: not only is the central event of the dialogue a speech marking death, but Socrates tells of events that occurred only after his death (Bruell 202). The dialogue is entirely imaginary; the character Menexenus was discussed in the Lysis, where he was much younger and said to have promise; one of the issues here is the legacy of philosophy as opposed to history (201). But that legacy involves a dependence on the historians – not just Thucydides, from whom we get the Funeral Oration of Pericles that the dialogue is a comment on, but also Xenophon’s historical depiction of Socrates. In Xenophon’s Symposium, Socrates defends philosophizing outright against the man from Syracuse at a most playful moment (Symposium VII:2 – VIII:1), and the very playful beginning of this dialogue – Socrates jokes that Aspasia beat him if he didn’t recite the lines she dictated correctly (236b-c) – indicates that Socrates is perhaps most forthright in a sense here.
We see Xenophon and Thucydides being cited in terms of philosophical content at the opening of the speech – the beginning is an announcement that “There is a tribute of deeds and words” (236d). For Xenophon, what is crucial to know are deeds, speeches, and what men silently deliberate. For Thucydides, a preoccupation with words tends to ignore the fundamental importance of deeds: if one knows how others acted, one can reconstruct the speeches they gave to others or themselves to a reasonable degree. Now Pericles opens his own Funeral Oration with a questioning of the ancestral law requiring a eulogy: great deeds can only be rewarded properly by other great deeds, such as the very elaborate funeral given at the occasion. Speech, according to Pericles, is potentially dangerous to the truth of actions; it makes the truth a battleground, and if people hear of too much greatness, they become envious and incredulous (Thucydides 2.35). Pericles is not opening himself to a charge of undermining his own speech necessarily: the ancestors were not perfect in creating this law, but he will make the most of the opportunity and create something significantly better. After all, his generation is greater than those before: the military achievements of the past do not even need to be mentioned for the present purpose (2.36).
Socrates’/Aspasia’s speech is of immediate contrast. Words matter: “noble words are a memorial and a crown of noble actions, which are given to the doers of them by the hearers. A word is needed which will duly praise the dead and gently admonish the living, exhorting the brethren and descendants of the departed to imitate their virtue, and consoling their fathers and mothers and the survivors, if any, who may chance to be alive of the previous generation” (236e). Logos connects the living and the dead, nothing less: through logos is fulfillment of nature (“imitate… virtue”) as well as a sense of wholeness (“consoling”). An even greater implication is how we know those who have departed at all. One has to wonder if this is a shadow of philosophy – in loving wisdom, do words end up fusing “what is” and “what is not?” More importantly, for our purposes: the ancestral is not dismissed in Socrates’/Aspasia’s speech; in order to know how someone is good, one must account for their good fathers and ancestors. If Pericles is dismissive of the ancestral – the basis of justice in any given political order – for the sake of empire and glory, it seems like the movement of the speech in the Menexenus is from nobility and glory to piety and justice. We get a hint of this with the regress of ancestors: it turns out the most important ancestor for Socrates is the earth – the country from which Athenians are sprung, who of course is a goddess and discussion of which requires an accounting of gods and men toward her.
Bruell points out something most curious about all of this: facts which Pericles stays silent on, facts which discuss the unjust acquisition of empire by the Athenians, are distorted by Socrates perhaps in order to exhort the Athenians to virtue and justice (Bruell 208). This is a notion of prudence completely alien to us: we want everyone to swallow the hard, bitter truth all at once on any given issue. The fact that each time we make someone else eat what is bitter we conveniently ignore what we ourselves are avoiding is lost on us; I don’t think it is a coincidence Socrates speaks of civil strife in his speech, and cannot praise those involved in it at all, even though he can praise a number of other suspect deeds (243e – 244b). Socrates appeals to the “veritable tie of blood” creating “among them a friendship as of kinsmen, faithful not in word only, but in deed” as making the civil war fairly mild. Still, he asks for remembrance of those who died and how they died, and prayer for their reconciliation and gratefulness for the reconciliation among Athenians now. The link between between untruth and justice we have discussed before (law gets its strength primarily from its age); the link between untruth and fraternity is perhaps more related to piety than we assume.
Obviously, there’s a lot more in the dialogue than the points which we have touched on briefly; it is recommended because it does not shy away from the most pressing issues at the foundation of politics. One of those issues is the relation of family, honor and the city (209). Socrates ends the speech with two addresses of fathers going to war: to their sons, they speak as if already dead; to their parents, they speak as those about to die. They warn their sons about an honorless life: “life is not life to one who is a dishonor to his race, and that to such a one neither men nor gods are friendly, either while he is on the earth or after death in the world below” (246d). To their parents, they say “the gods have heard the chief part of their [their parents'] prayers, for they prayed, not that their children might live forever, but that they might be brave and renowned” (247d). The sons are told virtue is necessary to get anything out of wealth, beauty, strength and knowledge (246e – 247a); the fathers alone are told that happiness resides in having one’s life “ordered for the best” simply: temperance, courage and wisdom are displayed in remembering a proverb and accepting loss as one would gain (248a). The city is dependent on the family in the most critical way: if one of the problems of law is that its punitive aspects reflect human nature negatively, and its positive aspects shape man into something that doesn’t grasp his potential appropriately, we can see how the family works with that tension. The sons are threatened with punishment but are aiming to achieve and secure goods; the parents are exhorted to bear loss nobly but understand virtues which lend themselves to preservation. Perhaps law as a practical matter finds coherence within the scope of the family, i.e. “who one is” and “who one can relate to” (want to be). As a purely theoretical matter or purely individual matter, it can contradict itself in the most basic way: witness the typical discussion about Hobbesian sovereignty and the right of self-preservation.
References
Bruell, Christopher. On the Socratic Education: An Introduction to the Shorter Platonic Dialogues. Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield, 1999.
Nov
11
Just finished a Straussian ritual, Aristophanes’ “Clouds:” Preliminary Notes on the Limits of Comedy
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1. Consideration of comedians: they use laughter to make everything ridiculous. The good things, while made ridiculous, still are essentially good and cannot be dismissed. They are necessary no matter how much we laugh. The bad things, made ridiculous, fall away quickly. All comedians – including those who believe all is spin, such as Jon Stewart/Stephen Colbert – think they are defending the truest, perhaps the oldest goods in practicing their art well.
2. A more sophisticated consideration of comedy comes about in “The Birth of Tragedy” when Nietzsche associates Socrates with the comic. Strauss on Nietzsche’s “Socrates:”
“He [Socrates] is the prototype of the rationalist and therefore of the optimist, for optimism is not merely the belief that the world is the best possible world, but also the belief that the world can become the best of all imaginable worlds, or that the evils that belong to the best possible world can be rendered harmless by knowledge: thinking can not only fully understand being, but can even correct it….
Rationalism is optimism, since it is the belief that reason’s power is unlimited and essentially beneficent…. Rationalism is optimism, since the belief in causes depends on the belief in ends, or since rationalism presupposes the belief in the initial or final supremacy of the good. The full and ultimate consequences of the change effected or represented by Socrates appear only in the contemporary West: in the belief in universal enlightenment and therewith in the earthly happiness of all within a universal state, in utilitarianism, liberalism, democracy, pacifism and socialism.”
- Leo Strauss, Socrates and Aristophanes, p. 7
We must keep in mind that Strauss is only sticking to Nietzsche’s surface here for a purpose. Strauss is putting us in the Aristophanean position of defending the ancestral and seeing Socrates from that viewpoint. Socrates is not Rousseau, and the latter half of the quote is pure Rousseau. Moreover, we have noted from Natural Right and History the truer teaching – reason cannot correct “being.” The whole of being is itself beyond being; reason’s ability to merely apprehend “what is” in all cases is dubious.
However, I bring up this more sophisticated view of the “comic” to make the point that comedy, in appealing to what is “common sense,” begins with the ancestral but is beholden to reason as progress without knowing it. “Common sense” can be concerned with immediate effectiveness, after all. This is an enormous problem because people who love wisdom or are very rational – people who can see 10 steps ahead of everyone else – are not necessarily embraced by the comic. The comic only embraces rationality as optimism: it confuses the two and misses that reasonable people can sometimes see problems the rest dismiss as paranoid ravings.
3. The plot of Aristophanes’ “Clouds” is simple enough: a father, Strepsiades, is of moderate means and is going broke. His son, Pheidippides, is using all the family money to become a superior horseman. These lavish tastes stem from the merger of old and new Athens – Strepsiades didn’t have much money but married rich, and his wife instilled lavish tastes in the son.
So what Strepsiades wants to do is get Pheidippides to go to Socrates and learn sophistry, i.e. the “unjust speech.” With that he can win any lawsuit against creditors and can go back to his son wasting tons of cash and himself, well, sitting around farting (I kid you not. Aristophanes uses this sort of joke every other line). He goes to Socrates’ thinkery himself and runs into new deities Socrates introduces – “the Clouds.” The “Clouds” promise Strepsiades quite a bit if he listens to Socrates, and even give Socrates a hint or two about how to deal with his new pupil. He almost becomes decent enough to defend himself, but doesn’t have the natural ability. Socrates expels him but the Clouds get him to enroll Pheidippides and Pheidippides learns the unjust speech. The father holds a feast for the son but they argue about the pious things; needless to say, son is a lot less pious having worked with Socrates, and beats his father up after the verbal exchange becomes heated. Father encounters the Clouds again and learns from the Clouds that his initial want of injustice brought this on. He turns to piety of a regular sort, and in this turning, decides to burn Socrates’ “thinkery.” This he does, and the god Hermes appears to drive him to expel Socrates and his disciples even from the theater.
4. The structure of the play is very complex – Aristophanes is featured himself as a character, the Clouds are selective in what they tell and don’t tell the audience and other actors. It is possible to get a reading of the play that is very sympathetic to Socrates.
5. I am not in the mood for such a reading. While eros unites all comically in the Symposium, where Aristophanes and Socrates seven years after this play was performed don’t seem to hate each other, the ending of this play is absolutely brutal. The god Hermes condones arson and encourages violence against Socrates and his followers, and Strepsiades, an unthinking brute who was more than willing to treat creditors like dirt when he thought his son could win any lawsuit, is given not a “last laugh” but a rather serious role in the polity. His piety is good enough to get Athens horsemen it will need for war, and makes him useful to the city’s higher purpose of throwing the distracting and unnecessary out.
Aristophanes comes before us as a character in the midst of the play to declare his wisdom; he too is a devotee of the Clouds, who can mimic everything. Only: Socrates believes the Clouds to be a stand-in for human reason – imitation is the province of the imagination and refers back to the uniquely human. Aristophanes sees the Clouds as genuinely divine and claims to be a disciple of Dionysus, the god of wine, himself.
It’s hard to see how Socrates isn’t correct in this debate: how on earth are the Clouds gods? Strauss notes that the Clouds want to be gods that don’t wander, but find a home. They want to reside in Athens. Socrates is their only devotee, but a flawed one. His willingness to consider them divine stems from a rejection of divinity in any traditional sense. What Socrates doesn’t see is that reason is a tool for divine, not just human, purposes. The Clouds may reduce to reason, but it isn’t human reason exclusively – the Clouds are everywhere, and are literally above man.
The Olympian Gods and the city that bears the name of the goddess of wisdom have a stake in the Clouds. Reason can never divorce entirely from “common sense” for Aristophanes. If you look unhealthy, you must be unhealthy – Socrates’ gauntness doesn’t reflect moderation as much as hubris: he thinks himself beyond the human.
But we’ve seen above that “common sense” can be fatally flawed: it doesn’t even realize its own grounding. And fathers, wanting the best for their sons, can end up throwing away years of tradition that might help the city as a whole. Strepsiades is an arsonist at the end of the drama; his pious revelation is just as destructive to the city as the sophist that Socrates is purported to be. Except that it wasn’t Socrates who came into the thinkery asking if he would teach injustice.
Point is, Aristophanes is between a rock and a hard place in defending his comic art. He wants to defend all the good things the city wants at once – wealth, martial virtue, reason/superior speech, piety. Guess what? No matter how much awareness your play may show as to the tensions between those things, even the exaggerated, poorly represented Socrates is in a better position to address the issue of the good. He’s at least honest about the things that aren’t compatible with each other.
So the question we’re left with is: Does human reason, which allows actual apprehension of the good, require a “beating up” of one’s own father? How radical is the questioning of “common sense?” The Platonic and Xenophontic Socrates, the one that would never teach an unjust speech or hold “clouds” to be responsible for all phenomena, keeps the critique very radical. That much Aristophanes got right; what he missed is why it is essential to not give up on lines of questioning. People are going to ask questions about authority no matter what, and it is when they don’t have any questions one has to wonder: either they’re frittering their money away on luxuries like horses, not caring for the debt. Or maybe they’re perpetually at war, with their neighbors and other cities. Finally, if they have no questions, maybe they’re in the most dangerous state of all, thinking they know everything when they can’t even articulate what they believe.
Nov
5
Post-Election: A Practical Agenda, and Consideration of a Passage from Plato’s “Cleitophon”
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I. I wasn’t going to say anything about the election until I saw this nonsense being spouted, and realized that I have to practice what I preach. I can’t allow my fellow conservatives to indulge in the paranoid “everything is a conspiracy against us” narrative complete with a “if McCain had run further to the Right and said everything bad all at once about Obama we would have won” garbage. That narrative is too complicated, first of all: if you look at the link posted, the author says openly that the Democrats had the media, the academy, a ton of cash and an unpopular President. That’s a lot for Senator McCain to confront. The article calls him honorable, then proceeds to implicitly bash him the whole way through, as if every little thing he could have done “correctly” in his campaign would have made a difference.
Look, I’m more right-wing than John McCain, but the forces arrayed against Republicans this year were too much. There is no conspiracy, though – forces are merely that, forces. Sometimes they can be overwhelming, but to a degree they can be controlled. This time out they were overwhelming. We do have ways of taking control. We have an alternative media via talk radio, the Internet, and even a TV station and a newspaper (FOX and the WSJ) that are at least contrarian enough to get conservative ideas out there. There are schools that are not as liberal as others, you’re talking to a product of the University of Dallas, which isn’t exactly liberal in temperament. Finally, the money and resources for political power are there – they just need to be spent properly.
So a practical conservative/Republican agenda would be:
- Get more candidates. A great idea would be if Republicans who have run for office before and campaign staffers would organize seminars anyone could attend, to teach them how to run for office and what papers need to be filed, what experience is necessary to have a good resume, what kind of understanding of issues is necessary, how to assemble campaign staff, etc. I know a lot of lunatics would show up to these seminars, but it’s worth trying – there are lots of decent people who should be running who don’t know where to start.
- Educate – make “What does it mean to be Republican?” a real question. I’ve spoken at this at length before: you want the people who vote with you to have some understanding not just of particular policies, but also of our heritage as Americans and Republicans. This is the party of Lincoln: why should that be hidden?
- Get the candidates to know the voters and vice-versa not just at election time. The conservative blogosphere has been dismissive of Kos even as he has become one of the most powerful men in the world. One reason this has happened is because he’s got some common sense – he does blog about candidates and their districts and the prospects for the party as a whole there. I’m not going to do this for you: ultimately, while I’m conservative, education is non-partisan, and that’s what I do here.
If you do these things recognizing that there is an alternative media, that there are alternative schools, and the resources are there, you can do more than win an election. Anyone can win an election – that’s the real lesson of this debacle. All you need is some cash and support. What we want is to build a party we’re proud of, and maybe make our political opposition better by leading by example.
II. I’ve preached enough. What I want to do now is just sit, discuss and think through a text with you. In a Platonic dialogue called “Cleitophon,” Socrates is reported as having given a public speech, not merely having spoken in private as he does in nearly every other dialogue. Whether or not Socrates actually gave the speech is an issue: Cleitophon reports it to us almost as if it were an abstraction from all other (private) Socratic speeches made into an all-too-public exhortation. Nonetheless, here is the speech:
“Whither are you borne, O human beings? Know you not that you do nothing of what you ought, you to whom all that matters is laying up riches for yourselves? While that your sons, to whom you will bequeath them, will know how to use them justly, that you neglect. Nor do you find them teachers of justice – if indeed it is to be acquired through study – or, if through exercise or training, people to train them and exercise them sufficiently. Nor have you even first provided for yourselves in this regard. But when you see that you yourselves and your children have learned sufficiently letters and music and gymnastic – which indeed you regard as a complete education in virtue – and that you are as a result not a whit less vicious where riches are concerned, how is it that you neither disdain the present manner of education nor search for people who will put a halt to this unmusicality? Yet surely it is because of this dissonance and heedlessness, and not because of a want of measure in keeping step with the lyre, that brother strives with brother and city with city, clashing without measure and discordantly, and in the heat of war do and suffer the utmost. Now you claim that it is not from want of education or from ignorance but voluntarily that the unjust are unjust. But then to the contrary you dare to declare that injustice is disgraceful and hateful to the gods. How then could anybody voluntarily choose an evil of this kind? Somebody, you reply, who is no match for pleasures. But then surely he is so involuntarily, is he not, if to prevail is voluntarily done? So in every way the argument proves that injustice is done involuntarily and that we must pay greater attention to it than we now do, every man privately and at the same time all the cities publicly.”
- from Plato’s “Cleitophon,” trans. Clifford Orwin
Again, I’m not sure how Socratic this speech actually is: “every man privately and at the same time all the cities publicly” ignores a middle term, “public men,” and we know Socrates did exhort people to be more active in public life. The treatment of piety is strange here, too. Socrates would tell people to take the gods seriously. Here, the gods are ancillary to reason, and the latter seems self-sustaining given the emphasis on “volition.” Knowledge allows you to act, period: not-knowing means that actions taken aren’t truly actions in a sense. Furthermore, I don’t recall Socrates being this explicit about the dangers of materialism and wealth: in Plato’s Symposium, any critique of Athenian lavishness is implicit. Being a proper guest is paramount.
Anyway – “whither are you borne” suggests human passivity in the face of greater forces. “Laying up riches” makes us sound like bees (cf. Homer, Illiad). We may think we are all-conquering because we store things despite those forces, but the seasons change. The next season is literally that of the next generation, and the implicit bee metaphor drops away.
Justice becomes the explicit topic. It is neglected, but could be taught by “study,” or through “exercise” and “training.” The difference between the latter two is that one isn’t guided, whereas the other is. “Study” was identified with “teachers,” and so the very next time “exercise” and “training” come up – within that very sentence – we get the order reversed, resulting in “study” (guided), “training” (guided), “exercise” (not formally guided).
Now comes the question: do “letters,” “music” and “gymnastic” correspond with the first ordering (“study,” “exercise,” “training”) or the second? “Letters” – implying “logos” (Gk. for “speech, reason”) – absolutely goes with “study,” no matter what. I think all of us look at “music” as a matter of training, and “gymnastic” can merely be a matter of exercise. So the second ordering is the most plausible. Why does the first ordering exist then?
Truth is, the first ordering isn’t implausible. “Music” can be a matter of inspiration; “gymnastic” is fundamental to the art of war. Socrates is keeping this correspondence away from his listeners purposely, if this is indeed him speaking.
If the “bees” (the question of acquisition) led up to justice – and indeed, a large part of the Illiad is the question of justice (Troy is the fundamentally unjust city, not even realizing there’s anything wrong with taking another man’s wife away) – then the human arts (“letters,” etc.) lead up to virtue (Gk. “arete,” meaning “excellence”).
However, people thinking those arts alone are a “complete education in virtue” are nuts: they are still vicious with regards to wealth, do not see any faults with education presently, and put up with tunelessness. Given the correspondence between wealth and war, study and letters, we can say that there is another iteration of the list here – gymanstic/exercise, letters/study, music/training. Central is the failure to see any problems with present education, and that’s the Socratic point: mere theorizing would be very beneficial to Athens. As it is, they “do” more than “reflect,” and their “education” just emboldens their moral failure.
“Dissonance” and “heedlessness” are the problem – gymanstic rules all, since everyone is striving in violence to conquer the other. There is no musicality, and education has been replaced by purposeful ignorance. All of this has the added irony, of course, that gymanstic is for naught: the well-trained body “suffers the utmost.”
[Incidentally - there may be a hidden way to read the philosopher into this passage. A philosophic mind doesn't really get trained (Seth Benardete holds there are 3 moments in the dialogues where we can witness the education of Socrates), but it does exercise. Orwin points out that only the negative effects of injustice are mentioned here; what about the nature of justice and higher goods? "Do no harm" is characteristic of philosophy to a degree.]
After “war,” where virtue has been inverted and used to destroy humanity, comes again “justice” (“Now you claim that it is not from want of education or from ignorance but voluntarily that the unjust are unjust.”), and now instead of “bees,” “gods” – another Homeric invocation I can’t make sense of yet. What gods bring into play is the notion that people can choose instead of merely acquire: we are more than self-interest.
Socrates makes a strange argument when bringing in the “gods.” He says people say what is unjust is done voluntarily, and then argues this contrasts with the belief gods hate injustice. The surface idea is that truly voluntary actions are what the gods themselves would do. The hidden argument is that everyone in Athens is really an atheist and doesn’t know it: their materialism means they can’t distinguish between gods and bees.
So what does this critique tell us? The surface of the passage tells us “go get an education, and that’ll take care of injustice.” I’ll toast to that, definitely. A closer reading tells us the specific problems which led to Athenian education failing, and points at the solution – Socrates has a very clearly defined hierarchy, where justice governs acquistion, and is used to lead to greater virtue that establishes peace among men. That hierarchy can barely be conceived by Athens, which in addition to warring with Sparta, wasn’t above class warfare of the nastiest sort.
Mar
30
Exhortation: Why the Liberal Arts? Is There A Lasting Good? (And Why the University of Dallas?)
Filed Under plato, politics | 3 Comments
After seeing a whole class of undergraduates sit like bumps on a log and not say anything or register any sort of reaction when the Gettysburg Address was being introduced, and then seeing more bumps on a log at the graduate level when the class was focused on Rousseau’s Second Discourse/the problem of whether any eternal truth exists concerning the nature of man, I think it is time for yet another exhortation.
And yeah, I’m pissed off. I’m realizing that many of you in my blog audience would be better students at this University than the ones who are here, because your willingness to learn is genuine. The evidence for this is that you’re putting up with my arrogance and saying “thank you” to me and asking good questions when you can. I half-joke that I’m trying to make the world my classroom through blogging, and keep forgetting that the audience I have now is amazing and showing what they’re learning from this blog and the others they read in every post of theirs I see, in every comment and e-mail they write for me and others. You are the proof there is a lasting good for reading and writing well. If this blog didn’t exist it wouldn’t matter: the liberal arts are alive and well in the blogosphere, and I’m happy to be a part of that.
1. To the undergraduates at the University of Dallas who did a very good job of making me nearly despise the human race through their lack of class participation:
What you are getting in Politics 1311, “Principles of American Politics,” seems rather strange. The Literary Tradition courses where Homer, Virgil, Dante, Milton, Shakespeare, Melville are taught seem strange at first, but at least there is a continuity among them. Dante and Milton directly reference Virgil who himself references Homer; Moby Dick can be read as an epic, too. Shakespeare seems a bit out of place but his themes are continuous with the other works, even if the genre he writes in is different.
Furthermore, the philosophy classes you are required to take, which cover Plato’s Republic and Symposium, Aristotle’s Ethics and De Anima, Augustine’s Confessions and introduce medieval and modern (meaning, for here, Descartes) philosophy in some form also make a loose sense. All those works talk about the right way to live, what knowledge is properly speaking, what the soul is, and what God can or cannot be.
So of course one class in politics is required of you, and while you probably understand nothing deep about all the other works mentioned above, the Federalist (the main text of the course) seems quaint and a rather pointless exercise. You live in America, after all, so you must understand the order that defines us intuitively. There’s like a President and stuff and people vote for him because wrestlers and actors and all the nice people on MTV say it is important to vote.
What you miss entirely is how the Federalist represents a crucial aspect of an intellectual heritage you are being made to understand. The whole of Homer is in the first line of the Iliad: the wrath of Achilles brought the plan of Zeus into being, and caused the destruction of all the heroes, the god-men who through their divine origins involved the gods too personally in human affairs, and caused us regular people who didn’t have divine blood to be subordinate regardless of our virtue. The strength of will which creates the ability of the heroes to dare and to rule has literally descended to Hades, and their bodies are all that is left in the first line of the Iliad. By the end of the Odyssey, all the heroes are dead except Odysseus, who seems to represent the human soul. Telemachus will rule as a constitutional monarch of sorts, but although he has been guided by Athena, he can never see her directly, and we note that the gods generally are making fewer and fewer appearances as the Odyssey moves to its conclusion.
The rough point is that rule of gods over humans is a problem: it orients virtue towards gain, whether that gain is material or honor throughout the ages. We see the virtues change remarkably from the Iliad to the Odyssey, and again, that is all part of Zeus’ plan.
But is rule of man over man the solution to all our ills? Perhaps there is a natural inequality among us, given that one man might be better at one art (techne) than another, and some arts are more important than others. If that natural inequality exists, who would end up ruling? Glaucon in the Republic absolutely falls in love with the guardian class of the city-in-speech, those who are best at war and have an art which makes all other arts seem like a deficiency. It looks like if you’re good at anything else other than war, your job is to be a slave to people who can conquer.
What Socrates does in the Republic is offer a “philosopher” as the founder of the city-in-speech, the one where one man/one art would lead to rule of those who can conquer. Strictly speaking, the proof that reason would conquer spiritedness (strength of will/courage/the basis of all martial virtues) in some way is offered by Socrates’ ability, despite the mock arrest and inability to ascend to Athens, to dominate the conversation however he wants to. Socrates hints at what a real philosopher would be all throughout the conversation, but cannot say what real philosophy is to Glaucon directly since Glaucon would quickly lose interest in the conversation. To moderate Glaucon, Socrates has to keep the conversation going, and the problems of moderation, justice and the search for the Good are there for those of us who wish to contemplate them all throughout.
Classical thought can be said to involve the creation of virtuous citizens for the sake of a body politic that is peaceful within itself, appreciative of the virtues of other cities, and receptive to wisdom and knowledge even while being pious. The introduction of Christianity changes this dramatically: Christian thinkers fall in love with the talking about “Being” and “Truth” that classical philosophers engage in, but see no need whatsoever for politics.
In dismissing the political teaching almost entirely, they create the world of Dante’s Italy, where people stab each other in the face and the Pope tries to give various Italian cities to his illegitimate children and no one cares. Christians can say with a clear conscience that this isn’t their world (Augustine, City of God, Preface) as it is defined by the lust for pride as opposed to humility. You would have to be bold to be virtuous, and God would be mad at you for being so prideful. Best thing to do is turn the other cheek and let some other schmuck get killed.
Dante in the Comedia isn’t just brutal to the Popes. Near the end of Inferno, a Cardinal is accused of locking a father and his sons up and throwing away the key. I think the father ate the children to survive and then died of starvation himself. You can go through and ask good questions about Virgil’s definition of love and whether it is pagan or Christian, what Beatrice actually teaches (and whether she is loveable in the Comedy), whether Dante’s pride is truly a problem at the end of Purgatario or not, and I think the net result will be this: the Church is a danger to politics and a tyranny of the worst sort. All secular power it wields has to be taken from it, in order for politics to be possible. I’m not sure of this reading, but I urge you to consider it, especially given that the problem of “pride” is that of “spiritedness” before – the question is whether man is fit to rule man, whether self-governance is possible or desirable. Dante isn’t exactly unsympathetic to the Roman Republic: consider Cato’s placement.
After Dante comes Machiavelli who openly talks about killing the Pope as being a desirable thing, and has none of Virgil’s qualms about material acquisition. Dante isn’t considered a modern because he is returning to ancient thought in some way. Machiavelli breaks with ancient thought decisively, and his thought in Hobbes and then Locke is reflected in the Federalist. Any exhortation to “virtue” or the “good” in the Federalist is very suspect given how much depends on human ambition stemming from self-interest. Ambition, of course, is pride stripped of any nobility that it might have had in ancient thought or the thought of Dante. Ambition is meant to make the actors discussed in the Federalist predictable: majority factions will always seek to oppress, the President will always seek a name for the ages (without being able to figure out how that’s done exactly, i.e. by founding a regime as opposed to serving in one), Congress will fight amongst itself, etc.
The point of this rant is simple: if you bothered for a second to put it all together, you would know how the Federalist is relevant to your studies. And you would know that even though this narrative can be disagreed with, you’re getting pure gold. Back when I did poli sci in undergrad, I was taught there were 100 senators and 435 representatives and 50 states and sent on my merry way with a diploma. The emphasis on practical education that defines most schools denies one the ability to take any other line of thought seriously. If you just absorb this narrative, though – addressing the inadequacies of it later, but recognizing that they’re there – you have the best of chances to have that rarest of things, an open mind. To be able to at least imagine an order devoted to a very different notion of the Good than your own, not just mere “goods,” is of enormous significance. Here, at the University of Dallas, we offer you at least two such orders.
2. To the graduate students who think they know anything at all (includes me, who is more guilty than most of doing nothing):
I am beginning to realize how slavish all of you are, that you need compliments and to be pampered and told where your opportunities are all the time. And I’m frustrated because I’ve been teaching anyone and everyone at any opportunity for years now, even without a classroom. Many of you know far more than I do and have an awful lot to teach me. Yet there’s a bigger task awaiting you than understanding the nature of the cosmos, which you wouldn’t understand even if you could have it anyway.
You need to get out there and show the liberal arts matter. I don’t care if you’re teaching your 5 year old niece or nephew about Heidegger. You have no idea what dire straits we’re in, that we don’t have the luxury of time if we want our generation to at least be able to think of something better.
And that’s what this is really about – other than the liberal arts, I’m not pushing an agenda right now (I do have my equality rhetoric, but that’s for another time). I personally believe that if many people read Rousseau or the Federalist carefully, candidates like Obama or Clinton won’t exist. There won’t be populism of this sort, complete with the consequences of what happens when that populism fails. That doesn’t mean things will be perfect: the same policy debates will still be there, this country will be divided 50/50 liberal and conservative.
But what will be missing is the extraordinary amount of passion going into… what, exactly? Is an Obama or Clinton vote an anti-war vote? Really? Is a vote for Obama a vote for “change” and “hope?” Does that mean Clinton or McCain is the enemy of “hope?”
Again, I’m not looking for perfection. Just a politics that reflects the fact that maybe not every American has an IQ of 60. Something that tells me that the richest, most powerful country in the history of the world can have citizens who can talk amongst themselves, and the speech makes sense and isn’t just bullet-points from some campaign operative’s Powerpoint.
I need to give you something to aid this project, something that will give you an incentive to go out and talk to people other than yourselves. What follows is very preliminary and subject to revision, but I think vital since politics – the creation of noble citizens – is not the only aim of the liberal arts:
If, as Dr. Parens has noted, the name/object distinction is crucial to materialism, inasmuch it is our naming that isolates and identifies objects, then we need a rough epistemology in order to show that the classics saw our materialist method as inherently immoderate and had an alternative.
I think the alternative actually exists: it’s Plato’s Ideal Forms. If we go to Heidegger and consider that the limit of a being is what defines a being, and that the Nature of a thing “holds sway” in its striving to achieve its own limit, what we get is this: it is possible to know an object in its end, without knowing all the particulars. It is possible to hold that literally limited knowledge as a possession, even though it is composed of more questions than answers.
The inquiry into the Nature of things that we conduct dialectically, then, allows us to “possess” the subjects we inquire into. Inasmuch as we strive to find out what justice is and ask good questions about it of each other, eliminating bad opinions as we go along, we create a body of knowledge about justice which seems like it is being recollected. It is as if we are probing our individual memories to find out more about them, and the knowledge we’re getting is in the memory itself, not coming from external sources that conflict so finally that it is one way or another entirely.
I think you can see how this “epistemology” is inherently moderate, as it depends on us as social beings and gives weight to authority even while questioning authority, and is a far cry from demanding Cartesian certainty, or the certainty of Revelation, for Truth to be had. Such certainty depends on outward criteria, i.e. actual control of things in the world or miracles and visions. Here, on the other hand, if you have doubts about the dialectical wisdom you receive, you can keep asking questions and its fine. In fact, it is more than fine – one might become very happy doing such a thing, making all others better in the process, and get to see how theoretical knowledge gives those who achieve it something lasting. The possession one achieves, after all, is purely one’s own, unique to the individual, and yet held sacred by all.