Nov
11
Just finished a Straussian ritual, Aristophanes’ “Clouds:” Preliminary Notes on the Limits of Comedy
Filed Under philosophy, plato, xenophon | Leave a Comment
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”
Filed Under philosophy, plato, politics | Leave a Comment
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
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 Illiad: 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 Illiad. 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 Illiad 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.
Mar
1
Socrates at the University of Dallas
Filed Under education, philosophy, plato | Leave a Comment
Glen Thurow thinks it important to emphasize that “self-evident truth” isn’t known to all, but is something that all can know. After a discussion with a very capable freshman tonight, I think he’s onto something to which I should pay more attention.
Tonight was the Graduate Mixer, notable for its “free booze.” I skipped out on it completely to talk about Plato with said freshman for 2 or 3 hours. I didn’t even realize it was going on because the discussion about Plato had taken a weird turn. I thought the things I was saying about the Republic were obvious, namely that the criticism of the poets Socrates advances has less to do with him and more to do with his interlocutors. It is the unrelenting desire of Glaucon’s to be a tyrant, and whatever his brother’s desire is (Strauss, The City and Man pg. 99 asserts that Adeimantus is concerned with justice, but doesn’t know what justice is yet) , that ultimately push Socrates into attacking Homer and the gods as currently constituted.
When I mean “obvious,” btw, I mean “it’s impossible to get anything out of the book if the possibility that Socrates doesn’t quite mean what he says is at least contemplated.” I’m not saying that he doesn’t mean everything he says. It’s just that something might be strange about that part, where are all the gods and poets are torn asunder for an imaginary city.
In any case, what motivated the freshman, I think, to argue that Socrates was being literal was a certain sentiment. See if you can trace out what connects these ideas:
- When there are many gods, there are many notions of piety or justice. Therefore, the gods cannot be used as a standard of piety or justice. (This was a misreading of one of the opening arguments of Euthyphro, where Socrates, after pointing out divergences among the gods about these things, pushes another line of reasoning about piety/justice).
- Socrates must mean the criticisms of the gods, because we all know that the older stories about the gods are preposterous and any movement towards rationality would result in the dissolution of those stories.
- Socrates’ having the Truth means that what he holds is truly just and truly pious, as the city and other people have no claim on him.
Dear reader, I need not explain any more.
The deep question is how to get these kids to drop their presuppositions without pushing them into unbelief. The question is crucial because the nature of this sort of belief is wrecking the ability to take books seriously in any way.
Or maybe the question isn’t crucial. Plenty of people are ignorant and life goes on. Stuff gets done, and gets done well, despite ignorance that is far more threatening than this. So what if one can’t read a book well? There are plenty of books I’ve read badly. And if it’s self-evident there’s one God, and that there’s Truth which is more important than immediate political concerns or petty jealousies, and that people being mean to each other is all we have to really fear, well then who am I to say anything? Socrates was put to death because there are mean people, not because there’s a tension between the intellect and getting things done practically which is inherent to all of life. Stupid me! For some reason, I never realized that, when it was on bumper stickers all over the place. You’ve seen them, they pronounce that “Mean People Suck.” All I needed to do was assent to that wisdom.
We need to appeal to piety at UD once more. We need to make it clear that God’s love is only manifest in love for others, and having complete and total respect for their voices and opinions. These books need to be treated as if they were other people speaking to us right now, and as if it would be a disservice to them and all of the past and everyone thoughtful in the present and God Himself if people weren’t striving to read them as best they can.
The freshman is bright and is far better about these issues than I’m letting on. I’m just ranting because one day, this dissertation will be finished, and I wonder if it will have an audience of any sort.
Feb
1
An Introduction to the Politics of Philosophy, Part Final: On Plato’s Crito, The Personification of the Laws, 50a onward
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Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 5 | Part 6
50a-b: Socrates tells Crito to suppose the “Laws and communal interest of Athens” were to confront him, and ask him whether he would deny that he is injuring the Laws and the City if he attempted to escape.
Now we noted that from 48b-50a, Socrates conflated injustice with injury purposely - he said it is wrong to injure anyone for any reason, since all injuries are injustices. He got Crito to agree to this logic and its consequences. From there, the word “injustice” dropped out entirely out of Socrates’ statements - Socrates argues that he is injuring the city only: that is the true argument Crito is assenting to. Whether or not Socrates is committing an injustice depends on whether you think all injuries are unjust or not.
So at this point Socrates is personifying the city to show that yes, the City is a person like you or me who could be hurt or killed. This move hearkens back to the beginning, somewhere around 44b, when Socrates described his dream. Perhaps the Laws and communal interest are a beautiful woman dressed in white, arguing that Socrates’ private interest could nullify and destroy her, the public interest of Athens.
What it takes to make this argument is an explicit identification of the public with the divine. This will not hold if the divine and the public are at odds about what is just, hence, 50c: Is the City not guilty of an injustice, as it gave a “faulty judgment” at the trial?
50c-51c: The Laws of the City argue that Socrates is bound completely to its judgments because:
- The Laws gave Socrates life, as they married his father and mother.
- The Laws gave Socrates an education in “music and gymnastics.”
This creates a hierarchy that Socrates is bound to (50e). All his ancestors and him are bound to the Laws because they were born and brought up through it. They are all “children and slaves” of the Laws. Socrates has no “equality of rights” with his father, why would he imagine he has any with the Laws?
Since Socrates is “the true devotee of goodness,” he should recognize that the Laws are “more precious, more venerable, more sacred, and held in greater honor among both gods and among reasonable men” (51a-b), and quit trying to “destroy [his] country and…its Laws” just because they’re trying to put him to death (51a). The anger of his country is greater than his father’s anger, and Socrates is therefore bound to “respect and placate” it (51b). Persuasion is Socrates’ only recourse, and obedience is necessitated in all other cases: after all, it is just to go to war with one’s country. Anything else Socrates attempts, it is implied, is violence against his country.
If you have a suspicion that you have heard these arguments before, you have. The opening salvo of the Laws about bringing children into the world and rearing them echoes Crito before. Like Crito’s argumentation, Socrates is accused of being unjust, except this time the issue is not his having kids. Rather, the issue is his own existence. His very existence is unjust as he owes the Laws for it, but since a part of existing is wanting to exist even when confronted with death, he is in tension with the Law.
Because Socrates wants to live rather than obey, he is inherently not good and therefore misunderstanding his own quest for goodness - again, see the comparison with Crito’s rhetoric in Part 3 of this commentary. This time, though, instead of being accused of betraying his friends for the sake of his enemies’ wishes, he is being accused of betraying the Law for the sake of self-interest. The general charge is that he does not recognize who has genuine authority.
Finally, Socrates’ inability to persuade mirrors the dishonor he caused his friends before: going to court, making that awful defence, and then not being willing to escape. Whereas in “war and in lawcourts,” if you do what your country says, you’re fine, right?
Socrates is forcing us to see beyond Crito’s emotional state, and ask where his logic is really coming from. The truth is that public opinion both supports the bully that is the Laws of the City and Crito’s gushier argumentation (”we can get you out at no cost! That must be just!”). Is this a public opinion that is open to persuasion?
The darker teaching is readily apparent: public opinion is as good as divinity in the majority of cases. This explicit contradiction can be ignored by many - like Crito - and yet their lives can still said to be “just” in the sense of “justice is avoiding doing injury.”
51c-end: The Laws argue that once any Athenian citizen is fully grown, he can leave the city if he so chooses and go anywhere. The argument is completely disingenuous: if that’s true, how come ostracism for the most prominent Athenians is a punishment? Plenty of great Athenians - Themistocles, Aristides, Thucydides, etc. were forced into exile and got better positions working with other countries. Somehow, they weren’t really happy about this and a few tried to destroy Athens. Furthermore, how Athens treated her colonies in the latter half of the Pelopennesian War, i.e. completely enslaving them, is not some small point that the Laws can argue away.
The Laws say that leaving the city is OK, but then at 51e say that because the city brought people into this world, raised them, and then got them to pledge obedience (which they did, by staying; yes, Locke’s argument about consent is vulnerable to everything we’re discussing), it can do whatever it likes in terms of the administration of justice if one wishes to stick around. The contradiction is that open and bizarre. It does appeal to its “mildness” - it does not issue “savage commands,” and does allow one to persuade if he feels something is unjust. But I think that same description can be used of Oedipus’ rule, which was absolutely a tyranny. Tieresias got his attempt to persuade Oedipus, after all.
At 52b, Socrates describes his own emotions towards Athens, and puts them in the Laws’ mouth to indict himself. He says he stayed in Athens, and lets the Laws assume that meant Athens was pleasing to him - he never attended a festival (except for the one trip that resulted in the Republic, where Socrates convinces Glaucon to not be a tyrant and fight for the democracy), he only went out on a military expedition (see the Laches for the story of Socrates’ bravery in combat), and he has never “felt the impulse to acquaint [himself] with another country or other laws” (this the Laws is assuming. What are the laws of the heavens?). Socrates has raised children in Athens, the Laws say, and he chose not to be exiled when punishment was offered. Therefore, Socrates is a slave if he tries to break the “contract” the City made with him and he “agreed” to.
At this point in the argument, obviously, Socrates is making it very clear when a city is wholly unjust, when its argument is based on nothing more than having power and being fearful. What is the City fearful of?
At 53a, the Laws assert that Socrates thinks that Sparta and Crete are his favorite models of good government. See Plato’s Laws - set after this dialogue - for a complete trashing of that claim. See also criticism of Sparta in the Laches (Nicias, according to Strauss, is Thucydides’ Spartan in Athens), the equation of Sparta and Persia in Alcibiades 1, the thorough and complete ridiculousness of the guardian class in the Republic, the class that most resembles Spartiates. The list goes on. Liking one aspect of Sparta does not make one a Spartan, and the only aspect of Sparta Socrates likes, perhaps, is the “moderation” inasmuch as it is conducive to peace. Sparta’s warlike ways are in no way a model for emulation.
From 53b-54d, the Laws outline all the bad things that will happen to Socrates’ friends if he tries to escape - they can be banished (wait a second. I thought that wasn’t so bad?) or have their property confiscated (the Laws argue earlier that they usually don’t mess with people’s property. Funny, that). Socrates’ own credibility will be hurt in other countries, and he’ll look to them a danger to their Laws. If Socrates talks about goodness and justice, no one will take him seriously, because a reactionary Athens that lost a war and has a mob mentality clearly has Laws that demand respect under any and all conditions. He will not be able to raise children, even, in all the lawless places he could escape to. The Laws, from 53d-54d, assume they are superior to the Laws of every other country and that Socrates’ power to persuade others is just as terrible outside of Athens as it is in Athens. Their argument is weakest at its conclusion, that the next life will see Socrates as having done an injustice for leaving a clearly unjust Athens.
And yet, this argument persuades Crito to at least be silent. This is why there is a distinction between courage and philosophic courage. Crito has the former but none of the latter: if Socrates does escape with Crito’s help, it is because Crito really is a very good man despite his utter lack of wisdom. It is what is not spoken in this dialogue, as we have seen, that matters most. The divine can give sanction to just laws, not necessarily every instantiation of the law. And the divine can work in unexpected and marvelous ways, even as tragedy unfolds before us, to make sure our efforts are not in vain.