August 2020 – Philosophy Scare

7. Who Killed Socrates?

The death of Socrates, Hannah Arendt observed, continues to traumatize philosophy. I found out how right she was when I wrote two books on the damage done to philosophy by raging anti-Communists in the Twentieth Century. Their accusations against academics (corrupting the youth and failing to honor the gods of the city) echoed the charges made against Socrates two millennia earlier.

But Socrates was different from modern American philosophers, indeed downright inspiring, for he was willing to die for philosophy. This fact alone confronts us today as a mystery, for philosophy has changed in the meantime. What sane person would die for formal semantics, or for deconstruction? But if philosophy has changed so much, what right do these disciplines have to call themselves by its ancient name? Are they trading on their ancestors, like some feckless fourth-generation heir to a major fortune? Socrates stares at us today as coldly as he stared at that jury who convicted him; and like them, we do not know where to hide.

It’s hard even to say who really killed him. Certainly not the odious Anytus and Meletus—they merely brought the charges. So was it the jury—approximately 5000 of his fellow Athenians? He could have escaped them on a couple of occasions. For one, he was allowed, as were all defendants sentenced to death, to propose an alternative penalty. Juries in Athens often accepted such alternatives, if they were painful enough—something like lifelong exile. But Socrates didn’t even try: his “alternative” was that he and his family should be put up at public expense while he resumed the activities that had gotten him into trouble in the first place.

So was he himself responsible for his own death, de facto committing suicide by jury? Well, in the Phaedo he condemns suicide: we are the possessions of the gods, and a possession should not destroy itself unless its master indicates that it should (61b-d). Socrates’ master, he says, is god (singular but not capitalized, not the monotheistic God but a sort of generalized divine realm, perhaps a “godhead”); and what god wants him to do, clearly, is not to kill himself but to philosophize: to inquire, together with others, into the nature of things.

This brings us to Socrates’ other chance to escape death, which is presented in the Crito. There, he refuses the escape his friends have arranged for a number of reasons, one of which is that escaping would discredit his whole life. The people to whom he flees (the Megarians) to will not allow him to resume his work because they will not take him seriously when he says that what really matters is virtue and justness and institutions and laws, not individual lives. And the people of Athens whom he leaves behind will decide that he didn’t really mean it when he said that a life without philosophy wasn’t worth living: when the chips were down and he had to choose, life was more important to him than philosophy. The two should never have diverged in the first place.

Socrates’ escape would discredit him, to be sure—but more importantly, it would discredit philosophy itself. So he has to accept death for the sake of the future of philosophy, which means for the sake of the future philosophers, to whom he will inevitably serve as an example of the philosophical life.

And the need to die holds for any teacher: teachers must pass away so that their students can be freed from their very teachings and investigate on their own. So Socrates dies for the sake of his students; they are the ones who force death upon him. They are his murderers.

But what about those students in their turn? They, too, if they really are philosophers, will have to die for their students. Socrates dies for his students so that they will be able to die for theirs. And theirs. And theirs….

Back when I still taught Plato, I would end this part of my lecture by saying, “Who killed Socrates? I am looking at his murderers, sitting at their desks. He stayed in Athens and died for your sake.”

And so in general, to study philosophy you have to be ready to kill your teacher. There are several ways to do this; not all deaths are physical. Socrates’ willingness to die for his teaching mission snows that he identified with that mission: he was a philosopher, and nothing more.

You can, therefore, also kill a philosopher by killing their philosophy—by refuting it. Each generation of philosophers has to be willing to do this. Plato did it to Socrates when he abandoned Socratic skepticism and started teaching a positive doctrine, the Theory of Forms. Aristotle did it to Plato when he rejected the “separation” between forms and sensibles. We will look at these things shortly. But for the moment: philosophy moves ahead by magistricide—the killing of one’s teachers.

6. Plato and the Slaves

“Wait up!”—The first words spoken in Plato’s Republic, which in its entirety is a report of words spoken, come from a slave child, asking Socrates to remain where he is so that Polemarchos can catch up with him and ask him to dinner.

But after this very prominent beginning, slaves disappear from the Republic. Plato doesn’t even mention them until Books VIII and IX, where they come up briefly four times in the discussion of other subjects. What happens to them? Are they perhaps present. but under another name?

I think Plato want us to look for them.

Some who have done so think that the lowest denizens of Plato’s tri-level state, οἱ πολλοί for whom Plato has such contempt, are his rethinking of ancient slavery, but that cannot be. The lowest, business-oriented layer of the Platonic state is presented, not as a kind of slavery, but as a laissez-faire society, in which people are free to live as they wish—on the one condition that they not seek or exercise political power. It’s an ancient version of a libertarian dream, a sort of Mediterranean Dallas where everyone lives trying to get rich (or richer, like Polemarchos’ father Cephalos) and to have fun (until, like Cephalus, they realize they have to die).

So let us look further. Who, in Plato’s city, lives like a slave?

How does a slave live?

We all know the basics. A slave’s entire life is in the service of their master. Slaves do not choose what to do with their lives; they spend them working at assigned tasks. They own no property and are allowed no legal marriages; even their children may be taken from them if the master decides.

And who lives this way in the Platonic city? Its rulers, the “guardians.” They spend their lives working for the state, their communal master (communal ownership of slaves was the rule in Sparta, which was the model for many aspects of Plato’s ideal state). They beget children, as arranged by the state, but are not allowed to raise them. They have no private property—aren’t their dwellings without front doors, so anyone can look in and see what they possess? Even their meals are taken in a common mess hall.

Plato, in sum, is making the argument that social stratification is justifiable—if the people at the top live like those at the bottom.

What if we tried that here? According to Nicholas Lemann in his The Big Test, we did. Sort of. James Bryant Conant, the president of Harvard from i933 to 1953, believed that Harvard’s job should no longer be educating the scions of fine old families, but the forming of a moral and intellectual elite, who would selflessly manage the country that, after World War II, would manage the world.

Conant’s idea was that just as the leaders in Plato’s city examined young people throughout their early education to see who was worthy to become a guardian, so American educators should test the young to see who was worthy of American society’s most important jobs.

In accordance with what I call Cold War philosophy, “worthiness,” aka “intelligence,” was defined as the ability to make choices quickly and correctly, so the scrutiny came importantly in the form of multiple choice tests. Thus originated the SAT’s, whose influence on American life is hard to overstate. (If you know that someone scored over 700’s on their SAT’s, you can be pretty sure they are living a comfortable and pleasant life; if you know that someone got a 400 or so, you know they are much less privileged.)

But Conant had not read Plato well or thoroughly enough, for there was one big difference between his plan and Plato’s: Conant did not realize that he was asking the young people whom he educated to live like slaves, sacrificing any chance at wealth and family life for the austere pleasure of benefiting their country.

Plato, by contrast, understood quite well that turning young people into guardians requires that they be molded, lied to, and finally forced into it. The education they receive has (like Spartan education) a strong component of indoctrination, inculcating the view that the only worthwhile life is one lived in the service of the state. Like all young people in the Platonic state, the future guardians are also told that human souls are either iron, brass, silver or gold—and they themselves have souls with a lot of gold. They are designed by nature itself, in other words, to be guardians, and so can be nothing else. Even then, they will accept guardianship only under compulsion—the strongest compulsion a truly noble soul can accept, which is that of a good argument: if you don’t become a ruler yourself, you will be ruled by your inferiors.

All this, to say the least, was incompatible with American ideas of freedom, which are more akin to the live-as-you-please mentality Plato assigns to οἱ πολλοί. Plato’s systematic indoctrination, lying, and intellectual compulsion were out of the question; and Harvard graduates, living as they pleased, flocked to the big money and golden life of Wall Street.[1]

It’s all a case of Plato gone wrong, and with a moral for us all: if you are going to take cues from the history of philosophy, you’d better get it right.

We’ll see more of this.

[1] In 2007, 58% of male Harvard graduates, and 43% of the women, took jobs on Wall Street; in 2014, 70% of Harvard seniors sent résumés to Wall Street and consulting firms: Amy J. Binder, “Why Are Harvard Grads Still Flocking to Wall Street? Washington Monthly September/October 2014, accessed August 5, 2020

https://washingtonmonthly.com/magazine/septoct-2014/why-are-harvard-grads-still-flocking-to-wall-street/

5. Plato as Putzfrau

Plato invented his forms, I suggested in #2, by cleaning up the gods; and “cleaning up” deserves slightly more discussion (actually, a lot more; but I’ll keep it short). First, they must be made self-consistent: instead of a mass of impulses and projects, a god must become a pure unity. It therefore cannot be as multifarious (or as interesting) as Zeus or Hera, but must be identified with a single basic property or character, from which it never departs: it becomes an unchanging “form” (εἴδος). Death, of course, would be a change; so the form, like a god, exists forever. Since a form never changes, what it causes is always the same: a form always affects human affairs in the same way. Not only is it eternal itself, but its eternal causal activity can sustain us forever.

We now have a much more positive vision of the afterlife than Homer’s, but one bought at a price: the need for immortality has led us to postulate another realm, one where things are perfectly what they are and so never change. (There are, to be sure, other motives for, and problems with, the theory of forms; see H. F. Cherniss’ famous “The Philosophical Economy of the Theory of Ideas” for a starter on this.)

But even cleaned-up gods must be kept away from our minds; if we are merely the forms’ playthings, as we were the gods’, the whole idea of ethics is undone. This runs Plato against a problem, for he never sorted out the nature of the human mind. Soul not only exists, for example, on both the level of the forms and that of experienced things, but somehow rises and falls between them—a “fact” which for Plato remains inexplicable, an “ordinance of necessity” (Phaedrus 248c).

In particular, as I have argued elsewhere (Metaphysics and Oppression, Appendix 1), Plato never assigns stable boundaries to the mind: things perceived at a distance, such as a beautiful body, can enter into the soul (in the Palinode of the Phaedrus, as a flow of particles) and affect its inner core. If bodies can do this, can’t forms do so as well?

The problem can be solved by locating the forms, not merely outside our minds, but outside our world altogether. Easy enough to do, once you have placed them outside of time. Time thus becomes the defining property of the human and natural worlds, and its absence helps define the world of the forms.

A form resembles itself in all aspects: it is self-identical. So the predicational philosophy practiced by Thales (at least as Aristotle reads him) is restricted to the higher, formal level of Plato’s bifurcated cosmos. The variability and passions of the gods now inhabit the human world, where variability and passion have always existed, and where they now exist exclusively. And so we find ourselves in the wonderful, variegated world of the Platonic dialogues, from which no human emotion is excluded.

The characters there are memorable. You have the hilariously stupid Hippias, who thinks the form of beauty—the one thing, supremely beautiful itself, that makes all other beautiful things beautiful—might be gold. There is Thrasymachos, whose energetic cynicism and vigorous argumentation are, in the end, terrifying. There is sincere Phaedrus, whose enthusiasm for learning is as touching as his judgment about whom to learn from is risible. There is gorgeous Charmides, who—right in the middle of his eponymous dialogue—sets off a homosexual group grope.

Reading Plato in Greek is actually scary, because eventually you must admit that you are putty in his hands. If he wants you to fall in love with someone (Socrates), you will fall; if to hate someone (Anytus, Meletus), you will hate them; if to pity someone (Cephalus), you will pity them. If Plato wants you to laugh, you obediently laugh; if to cry, you cry. If he wants you to pick the book up and dance around the room with it, you will do that too.

But for all his genius, there is a flaw in our author. Socrates never defined a single form, because he didn’t think we could have such knowledge until we died; such was the main promise of the Socratic afterlife. And Plato, in his later writings, doesn’t really revoke this: when he turns from presenting Socratic aporiai, concluding bafflements, to his own “positive” ideas, the emphasis turns as well, from attempting to define single forms to more general discussions of their common status. No individual form is ever, then, defined by Plato. It can’t be; for while the forms themselves are pure and unchanging, we, our language, and the things around us are not. The best we can do, according to the Timaeus, is use a “bastard discourse” (λογισμός νὀθος, Timaeus 52b; cf. 29b-d) to treat these “likenesses” (εἰκόνα, 29c).

So there are two kinds of philosophy in Plato: philosophy among the forms, which deals in realities and attains truth—and which we are incapable of; and philosophy as we practice it, which deals in things similar to the forms and achieves likelihoods.

One seeming exception: the definition of justice in the Republic,which is as clear as can be: justice consists in each part of the soul or state doing its proper job. Plato never actually says, in the Republic, that he is discussing the form of the state and so of justice; but it’s hard to say what else it could be.

But there is something off about this definition: etwas stimmt nicht, as the Germans would say. Plato keys his treatment to two kinds of justice, justice in the state and in the individual. But rather than present these two cases separately, as Homer might, and then wrestle their commonality out of the presentations, Socrates stipulates that justice is the same in both cases. His warrant for this is that we say (φάμεν) that justice exists both in the individual and in the state; that we (Greeks) might speak ambiguously here is summarily excluded. That certain features apply to both forms of justice is therefore not wrested from the facts, but presupposed. The presupposition becomes a premise for the investigation, and argument suddenly replaces simile.

So the “bastard” discourse is abandoned—by simple decree. From first to last, Plato’s bastardly presentations of human inquiry—with all their humor, sorrow, fear, and desire—are tragic depictions of a group of people who cannot have what they most need—knowledge of the meanings of moral terms.

4. Philosophy’s Watery Beginning

Western philosophy is traditionally held to have begun with Thales of Miletus, which was a city on the Ionian coast of what is today western Turkey. According to Aristotle, who is our main source for the little we know of Thales, he held that all things were basically water. Not exactly promising as the first philosophical utterance. But, as Aristotle points out in Metaphysics I.3, pregnant all the same, for Thales is at least trying to find a single principle behind the impossibly varied material of experience. Just why he settled on water is perplexing even to Aristotle, who speculates that it was perhaps because seed and nutriment in general, the two things that begin and maintain life, are moist.

Kirk and Raven point out that none of the ancient discussions of Thales’ views enables us to decide whether water is an immanent principle of things, that which they somehow really are, or merely their source and destiny in the sense that they come from water and resolve back into it, without being water themselves.[1] Aristotle himself, to be sure, holds the former; but Kirk and Raven point out (loc. cit.) that the few actual quotes we have from Thales do not say this—and Aristotle’s whole project here, as he makes abundantly clear, is to read his own doctrine of material causes into his predecessor.

Either way, most things don’t look or act like water, and we see that Thales agrees with his fellow Ionian Heracleitus that “nature loves to hide” (Diels-Kranz, “Heracleitus” B123): since nature is not obviously water or from water, nature’s true nature is hidden from us. Indeed, we do not even know the true nature of water itself, because we do not experience it as what it really is: the underlying principle of everything else. The true unity must be wrested from the manifold of experienced facts; the true nature of the nature of nature, we might say, is hidden in them.

Once, we saw, such wresting-of-unity was done by poetic similes. We don’t know how Thales does it, for Aristotle’s account by way of seeds and moisture is, we saw, speculative. At the very least, however, it requires, like similes, an act of what we would call the mind, which turns different things into one thing.

It wouldn’t take much to read Thales as formulating a simile: when Aristotle says Thales claimed the underlying nature of everything to be water, ὕδωρ εἴναι, all we have to do is prefix ὡς, “as:” then Thales is claiming that all things are as water, or like water, or watery. This reading has zero textual support and I am not advocating it; but thinking about it shows us some things about similes.

If he had included ὡς in his formulation, Thales would be presenting, not an identity but a resemblance. The aspect in which water and other things resemble each other would not lie in the things themselves, however, but in how we are to take them. Its justification would then be pragmatic: Thales would be suggesting that we would do well to treat all things as water, even though they do not seem to be water. The suggestion would not be a predication, which tell us how something is, but a case of what Heidegger, much later, will call “apophansis:” an utterance which bids us to treat something as something.

But what does it mean to “treat” something as something? Answering that would take us deep into the Teutonic thickets of Heidegger’s Being and Time (and eventually we may come to that); for the moment we can say, minimalistically, that we “treat” things when we try to do something with them. A treatment thus has a future, the goal we are seeking to realize with our doing, and a past, which produced the thing we are presently treating.

When we read Thales’ utterance, not as a simile but as a predication, pasts and futures drop away. What we want to do is irrelevant to the fact that Thales asserts, and what brought us to the assertion is as well. ”We” too, without past or future to define us, drop away. The utterance loses its pragmatic dimension and is viewed as something spoken and understood by people who are not “treating” anything, people who, as far as the utterance is concerned, do not act at all. An emphasis on predication is thus part of the appropriation of thought by what Aristotle calls the “leisured” class (Metaphysics 981b20-23).

Aristotle holds that philosophy resulted from that appropriation, and so was that way from the start; I will be claiming, off and on, that philosophy was almost never that way. Philosophy has, from the start, been a way of “treating” things, working them over, making them amenable to a certain set of projects.

The above tells us, I hope, some things about similes as a mode of thought. As a reading of Thales, it does have one thing to recommend it: Thales’ silence on the “location” of water with respect to other things. If things are not necessarily water, but are to be taken as water, we don’t need to worry about whether they really are water or merely come from it: our treatment of things should resemble our treatment of water, and that’s the end of it. Philosophy is not an absolutist set of identities, but traffics critically in the resemblances our language deems important enough to have names.

But Thales didn’t say this. Philosophy sets off on an anti-Homeric track very different from the pragmatic/apophantic one I have just indicated. Just who put it on that track remains a mystery: Thales or Aristotle’s account of him?

Or Plato?

[1] G. S. Kirk and J. E. Raven The Presocratic Philosophers Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1960 pp. 89-90

3. Similes

Beginnings are not beginnings until something grows out of them; but what you grow from is never left entirely behind. Even today, Western philosophy begins with Homer, in the sense that it begins against him.

Homer began a peculiar sort of turn to λόγος. The turn is already implied in the Homeric view of immortality: if you are going to spend eternity as a gibbering ninny, the one worthwhile thing that might outlive you is your reputation—your κλέος ἀθανατός, the undying fame which, in Homer’s Mad Max-ish culture, can be won only on the battlefield. Even there, however, your exploits will need to inspire some bard to put you into a poem, so that you can be sung about forever. The salvific λόγος for the Homeric hero is thus poetic.

So consider this passage from Book IX of the Odyssey in the Samuel Butler translation:

… We bore the red hot beam into his eye, till the boiling blood bubbled all over it as we worked it round and round, so that the steam from the burning eyeball scalded his eyelids and eyebrows, and the roots of the eye sputtered in the fire. As a blacksmith plunges an axe or hatchet into cold water to temper it—for it is this that gives strength to the iron—and it makes a great hiss as he does so, even thus did the Cyclops’ eye hiss round the beam of olive wood, and his hideous yells made the cave ring again.

Typically for Homer, the simile in this passage compares something strange and awful to something familiar, even routine. The wild thrust into Cyclops’ eye and the everyday action of a blacksmith are revealed to have certain similarities.

A simile is, then, the evocation of a resemblance. Resemblance, in turn, is a matter of aspect: two or more things which resemble each other (here, the living eye and the cold water) do so in some ways and not in others; so to form a simile is both to liken and to contrast. Thus, while Homer’s simile likens the thrust of the heated log into the wet tissues of Cyclops’ eye to the thrust of the heated blade into the cool water, it also notes the contrast between the strengthening of the iron and the wounding of the giant.

Since resemblance is a matter of aspect, a simile likens two things in view of a third thing, which is the specific set of likenesses that are applied to both things. We can call that third thing, common to the other two, a “concept,” though as Gilles Fauconnier and Mark Turner have argued, such a set of likenesses is often much more complex than we usually take concepts to be, incorporating such things as practices and expectations.[1] Similes thus lean on concepts; but since similes, especially literary ones, are supposed to be fresh, we can say that a good simile is the genesis of a concept: it collects a set of resemblances between two things which have not been collected before.

This leads us to the standard representational controversy: to what extent are the similarities unlocked in a simile invented, and to what extent are they discovered?

The question would not have made much sense to an ancient Greek, whose language contains no word for “invention,” though several for “discovery.” We may say, even today, that the resemblances revealed by a simile must actually exist, phenomenologically, in the experiences it compares; if two things are extremely different, like the blinding of Cyclops and a hand of canasta, there simply is no simile. So the resemblances were there before the simile is formulated; but they were unnoticed, unrevealed.

This is not a minor change. The Platonic elenchus, the argumentative give-and-take that recurs through Plato’s early dialogues, is often presented as a refutation: someone advances a thesis and Socrates shows its falsity. But this is not always the case. Look at Charmides: after being asked to define temperance, he at first refuses to answer; but eventually, at the urging of Socrates, he responds: “It seems to me, in sum, that what you are asking about is a kind of quietness” (159b). This claim is not refuted subsequently, because it cannot be; it is an incorrigible report of what temperance appears, to Charmides, to be. Same for Euthyphro: “I say that the holy is what I am now doing” (5d). Of course he does; again the elenchus is begins from something irrefutable.

What the dialogue achieves is therefore a movement from private truths, matters of seeming and saying, to a publicly shared situation, which in Plato’s early dialogues is defined by the recognition that no one knows what he is talking about. Better shared bafflement, Plato is saying, than private certainty.

So a simile works like this: the poet becomes aware of a set of resemblances between two things; this set is a sort of ”concept.” She puts that concept into words, often for the first time, so that others can become aware of it as well.

A simile also includes, typically, a selection: any two things that resemble one another usually do so in more than one aspect (they are at least both things, and whatever more interesting resemblances they may exhibit are added to that). A simile rarely mentions all of these. Thus, my Homeric example mentions the wetness of the eye and the cold water and the sound of their conjunction, but other things go ummentioned. Both the blacksmith shop and the cave, for example, presumably get warm from all the heating that goes on in them; but Homer doesn’t mention it. The simile thus selects from a number of resemblances the ones which it asserts to hold.

Taken as a whole, we may say, the names which exist in a language select, from among all the ways in which things resemble other things, those few which receive names. It is long known that different languages do this differently: the English word “mind,” for example, has no analogue in French or German.

Similes traffic in resemblances, which are aspectual (and also matters of degree, but that is not of concern at the moment). They wrest unity from disparate experiences, and in so doing create what I here call “concepts.” Philosophers such as Gilles Deleuze have occasionally seen the critical creation of concepts as their job, which puts philosophy into the same league as poetry; but most philosophers have abjured this Homeric orientation and have gone down the path, not of simile and resemblance, but of two absolutes: identity and truth. To such an extent that when Derrida and Heidegger placed those absolutes into question, philosophers saw nowhere to go, and thus reached—or, in some cases, ran from—the shared bafflement that might have defined philosophy’s situation at the end of the 20^th Century. If philosophers had only let it.

[1] Mark Turner and Gilles Fauconnier “Conceptual Integration and Formal Expression” Metaphor and Symbolic Activity 10:3 (1995) pp. 183-203

2. Before the Beginning…Homer

An axiom, previously mentioned: Everything that philosophers can talk about is there replacing something else that did not work out. Philosophers can talk about philosophy. What does it replace? Why didn’t it work?

Answer: Myth, religion. Cornforth and Hatab have written well about them, but the most influential presentation of pre-philosophical Greek wisdom comes to us from a Greek himself, Homer. Homer’s world is as dismal and violent as the one depicted in The Road Warrior. It follows on another, more developed civilization (Mycenean). which has decayed to the point that the only social structures left are small groups living together—what Aristotle will call “villages” (κώμαι). The Iliad tells the story of how, once upon a time, those small groups united to avenge the kidnapping of Menelaus’ wife, Helen.

Two aspects of Homer’s world are particularly ghastly. First, the Homeric view of the afterlife (which is not the same as Homer’s personal view; there is plenty of evidence that Homer hates his world) is wretched. Good and bad people alike lose most of their life-force when they die, and by the time they arrive in Hades are nothing but shades of their former selves. Hence Homer’s formulaic way of referring to death in battle: “The strength left his knees, and his soul went gibbering down to Hades.”

So when Odysseus visits Hades, he recognizes old comrades from the Trojan siege, but they can only dance and jabber. Only Achilles himself retains enough life-force to speak coherently, and he tells Odysseus that he would rather be the slave of the poorest sharecropper in Greece than king of the underworld.

This vision of the afterlife may be better than the tormented Christian hell, but it is far worse than the atheistic (and Socratic) vision of death as an eternal dreamless sleep—and in Homer’s world, everyone will eventually come to it; there is no hope of anything else.

The other problem is the gods. They are much like what we would be if we were immortal. There are no constraints whatsoever on their behavior except the will of Zeus. They do what they want, with and to whom. Zeus himself is more than a seducer—he is a rapist. He rapes his sister Demeter, then has sex with their daughter Persephone, who gives birth to Dionysius. And so on, and on, and on; for Zeus, of course, is immortal.

Imagine being a young Greek, who has been taught by your religious authorities to worry that the Lord of Heaven may show up and rape you.

Another scary thing about Homer’s gods is that they are not outside us: they have complete access to our minds. They make us feel and think things with such intimacy that Julian Jaynes located them as parts of our minds; in modern terms, they were hallucinations. That category, to be sure, is anachronistic: a hallucination, to us, is something inside the mind which seems to be outside it. But the Homeric mind seems to have no inside or outside: certain outside things have free access to it, for (as Plato puts it somewhere) the mind is, at least sometimes, unwalled—like a belfry with birds flying in and out of it.

And this cognitive dependence on the gods was scary because they were undependable; they might do terrible things to us, as when Apollo confuses Patroclus so that he dies at the hands and sword of Hector.

This whole religion is clearly not working out. The Greeks need a good vision of immortality to replace their horrible Hades, and they need to make the gods dependable and get them out of our minds, so that we can gain some control over our fates. The gods have to be cleaned up.

This became an urgent task after the series of Athenian disasters I mentioned before. Philosophers had already taken it on, beginning with Xenophanes of Colophon in the sixth century BCE, who complained:

Homer and Hesiod have attributed to the gods
all sorts of things that are matters of reproach and censure among men:
theft, adultery, and mutual deception.
Diels-Kranz, B11

Fixing this meant, first of all, making the gods self-consistent: instead of impulse and variability, each god should have a single basic character, from which she or he never departs. Exemplifying that character, a god can never change and so always affects us in the same way: what it causes in us is always the same, no matter the occasion. Furthermore, since nothing can come to be from nothing, a cause must exemplify the property it always causes; otherwise that property would come about from nothing (which means that it wouldn’t, really, have a cause at all).

Because the gods’ effects on us are always the same, they can also give us unchanging immortality, i.e. eternity. And since for Plato, as I noted above, the mind never gains stable boundaries, if the gods are going to be outside our minds they must be outside the rest of our world as well, for mind and world interpenetrate.

So the ancient gods turned in their togas, and became Platonic forms. Philosophy, replacing them, was well underway in the West. But Homer was the pioneer.

1. I Sing of Ideas and People

Notiones hominesque cano.

It may be time for philosophy to begin again.

It always does, after a major national setback—the kind that calls for a rethinking of the basic premises of an entire society. Athens went through something like that after a series of disasters: the Peloponnesian War with Sparta began in 431 BCE, plague hit in 430. Athens lost its moral authority by destroying the small and inoffensive island state of Melos in 416, finally lost the Peloponnesian War in 404, and finished it all off by putting Socrates to death in 399.

And that started the miracle: what had been a philosophical backwater produced, after Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, and Speusippus. Then it moved on to the Cynics, Skeptics, Stoics, etc.—still the greatest outburst of philosophical creativity in the history of the West.

Could something similar be on the horizon here? Our feckless response to CODIV19 has seen America go from “the greatest country in the world” to, in the now-famous words of Finian O’Toole, an object of pity. Its treatment of its African-American citizens has been conclusively exposed, yet again, as not only a horrible evil but one so deeply-rooted in American life as to be part of the national essence, which means that to cure it we will have to destroy and remake the country. And the whole disastrous panoply is presided over by a malignant clown whom no mature political system would have allowed anywhere near the seats of power.

Calls for a rethinking, all right. The big questions become unavoidable: What is a human being? What is the good life? Is the good life in any sense a moral life? What is America? What is a country? How can we know these things? What is knowledge, anyway?

And— can philosophy answer questions like these? This brings us to one more question: what, in fact, is philosophy?

The forty or so entries which will constitute this blog approach philosophy in terms of its history. They will demonstrate, I claim, that philosophy is much more path-dependent than most people think. Today’s philosophers believe much of they believe, and act as they act, largely because earlier philosophers (and others) did and believed what they did and believed. For nothing on earth drops from heaven, and what doesn’t drop from heaven comes from something else on earth—something that didn’t work out, or it would still be here. If we want to understand the nature and capacities of philosophy, we must look to its history.

But what if that history has been misunderstood? I will argue that it has. Understanding the history of philosophy is not enough: it must be understood rightly. These informal and un-scholarly reflections cannot, to be sure, provide that right understanding. But I hope they can instigate a search for it.

As might be expected, I too am path-dependent; but I did not choose this road. Many years ago, I decided to study the history of philosophy, in order to be sure that my own philosophical work—then still un-begun—would not reinvent any wheels. I never got out of it. First, in order to avoid the treason of translation, came a decade of drudgery learning languages. There followed eight years of sitting in a room in Toronto, making use of those languages. During that time I read the Presocratics, Plato, Aristotle, and Plotinus in Greek; Augustine and Aquinas in Latin; Descartes in Latin and French; Spinoza in Latin and Dutch. I read the other classical Empiricists in English, with some Hobbesian forays into Latin. Kant, Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Habermas in German; Derrida, Foucault, Deleuze, Badiou in French. And then, for the next forty-plus years, I made a career of it.

There are plenty of Europeans who get this kind of education; but as far as I know, very few Americans (outside of Catholic universities, a fact which will come up again).

I have learned some things. One is that the history of philosophy contains moments of piercing beauty, many of them. An afternoon reading, say, the letters of Spinoza is like an afternoon listening to Mozart, or looking at Cézannes. No one I know talks like this, and I sometimes think I wander through the beauty alone—as if the history of philosophy were a Secret Island hidden from humanity, like Wonder Woman’s, by eternal fog banks. Sitting in my room, in Toronto or Aix-en-Provence or New York or Chicago or Los Angeles, I wander my Island. I pause at a Plotinian waterfall, or come across the ruined stoa of Aristotle (or, indeed, of the Stoics). Now I sit in a Cartesian grove or a windowless Leibnizian cottage, now I take shelter in an Empiricist gazebo from a sudden Nietzschean thunderstorm—all the while looking, looking.

That is part of what I want to communicate: the beauty and the wonder. But there is more: the danger, the evil. My philosophical Island is also like Isla Nublar, the home of Jurassic Park: we are safe from its great and ancient denizens only as long as they are separated from each other. Universities, with their emphasis on specialization, contrive to keep them so. But when you break down the fences that separate them, when you see Parmenides (for example) in connection to Augustine and Augustine in conection to Kant, they gang up on you and become scary. Not only are women and non-Europeans excluded from their number—the exclusions are the point of the whole thing. Metaphysics is not some practically-irrelevant flight into the conceptual ether, nor is it a worthy project derailed by the racism and sexism of its practitioners. Rather, from its very beginnings and throughout, it is an effort to put certain people in their place. And keep them out of our place, the “space of reasons.”

So the happy views that we were taught—that philosophy is a search for truth, a set of opinions, a mine of arguments—are, at best, seriously incomplete. The piercing beauty of the history of philosophy is terminally dangerous, and that is another reason to know about it.