19. Descartes’ Guiding Dogma

Descartes begins with one of the guiding dogmas of modernity: that the nature of the mind can be understood independently of anything else. As is often the case, the doctrine contains a certain amount of ontology masquerading as epistemology. If I can understand the nature of mind without understanding anything else, then the mind would be what it is if other things were different than they are—even if they differ to the point of becoming nonexistent. The dogma thus implies that mind can exist independently of anything else. It may in fact require other things in order to exist, such as a body—but that has no effect on its basic nature. Essence (here, of the mind) and existence are as separate for Descartes as they were for Aquinas.

Thus, at the beginning of the Meditations we find the cogito: I think, asserted without any specification of what I think. What are the objects of thought? If they are things in the world, and if to understand a thought includes knowing what it is a thought of, then my thoughts, and so my mind, cannot be understood without regard to objects in the world. The objects of thought must therefore themselves be thoughts: ideas.

Descartes’ own way of articulating this ontological implication of his guiding dogma is to say that a substance (such as the mind) does not depend for its existence on any other substance except God. This is stated later in the Meditations (III. ¶26), but is, I suggest, implicit from their outset.

If the mind is independent of all things except God, then a couple of further things follow. First, thought cannot be dependent on language—unless language is God. Some German Idealists (e.g. Hegel: see my The Company of Words) will take this kind of tack, but not Descartes. One problem with it, for monotheists such as Descartes will claim to be, is that languages come in the plural: we don’t think in language, but in a language, and for some reason there are always other languages around.

So language is not God, and thought cannot be bound to it. We don’t think in words, but in ideas, which are not words but (conveniently enough) word-meanings. This enables Descartes to drive a wedge between two meanings of the ancient Geek λόγος, thought and word. And it opens the way to the view that mathematics is a kind of thinking—indeed, is thought itself. For mathematics eschews words—but it is full of ideas.

Communication is now utterly distinct from thought, and we circle back to the guiding dogma: our minds are not dependent on other peoples’ minds or what we learn from them.

Moreover, if thought is mathematical, thinking is something only a select few can really do. Thus, in his “Reply to the Seventh Objections,” Descartes writes that “Only wise persons can distinguish between what is conceived clearly and what only seems and appears to be such” (Édtion F. Alquié, Garnier Vol. II 1967 p. 960).

This fits right in with philosophy’s ancient drive to exclusivity, its desire to make the “space of reasons” our space (#1). It is still traded on by philosophers today, in the wake of people like Hans Reichenbach: unless you think like we do, you are not fully rational.

The guiding dogma surfaces yet again with Descartes’ claim of continuous creation, the view that the activity by which God sustains the world from moment to moment is the same as the activity with which He created it. This follows from God’s immutability, Descartes’ open allegiance to which is elusive but presumably follows from his claim that “in the case of God, any variation is unintelligible” (Principles I.56) and a couple of other texts. If God acted one way in creating the world, and acts another way when He sustains it, He would hardly be immutable.

However Descartes gets to it, continuous creation means that because a being is dependent only on God, it is not dependent on previous states of the universe—including previous states of itself. The “just now” that Augustine feared (“make me chaste, but not just now”) has come to be ontologically basic; and the Latin for “just now” (modo) gave its name to this whole approach.

On the “modern” approach, and in particular in light of its view of continuous creation, nothing is path-dependent, and to understand anything is to explain it in terms of God alone. If God is immutable, then to understand anything is to reduce it to something immutable—a doctrine at least as old as Plato. The doctrine of continuous creation thus works out to a denial of empirical causality. The question then is whether later philosophers who deny causality—such as Hume, who located it entirely in the mind—fully escape the theological roots the denial has in Descartes. Is path-independence a theological notion?

Finally, the guiding dogma threatens to place Descartes in a position which is not only implausible, but unendurable, a mind which has access only to itself. Such a mind is prey to the paranoid fantasy of an Evil Demon, which infects it with false ideas; and even if we escape that fantasy, it seems that the mind may be completely alone, bereft of its body and of all human relationships. Hence the desperation with which, in the later Meditations, Descartes seeks to restore the world to knowledge, by appealing to divine veracity: if I am all there is, then God, in presenting me with the ideas of external things and people, is deceiving me—which He would never do.

We thus get the modern project that Hegel characterized as “throwing a bridge” between the mind and reality—a project which came to be called “epistemology.” Epistemology came inevitably (given the desperation on which it is founded) to be the first and basic philosophical discipline.

Modern philosophers, engaged in this project, differentiated themselves according to the side of the chasm from which they threw their bridge. The “rationalists,” like Descartes, worked from the side of mind, in virtue of their guiding dogma; the “empiricists,” such as Locke and Hume, worked from the side of nature, from the givenness to the mind of what is not the mind (i.e. “experience”). The contrast between the two came to be viewed in terms of the kind of thinking each side valorized rather than of the kind of objects they claimed could be known. The fact that both sides were trying, in their different ways, to vindicate a special kind of object, ousia, was covered over, and the social importance of philosophy was lost.

18. The Births of Modernity

In the 1600’s, philosophy, and so Europe, came to look different. Just what brought the transformation about remains controversial; indeed, it even remains undecided whether the new epoch of philosophy was its third (following on Ancient and Medieval, as most people think, bobbing in the wake of Hegel, who was famously enamored of triads) or the second (as I think, rating the persistent dance of the Metaphysical Barn more important than the transition from the Greeks to the Christians).

My amalgamation of the medieval to the ancient is rooted in the fact that the medieval world, like the ancient, was ousiodically structured: it consisted of kingdoms, armies, fiefdoms, villages, parishes, dioceses, households, and the like, each resting within its boundaries and each organized and controlled from the top by a unified agent—indeed often, in theory anyway, by a single person. The whole arrangement looked to ancient Rome for its inspiration, as Rome had looked to Athens.

But now, in the 17th Century, it teetered.

For Aristotle, whose metaphysics dominated European social structures even during the long eclipse of his writings, the status of ousia as a model for all social institutions was justified by its being the basic structuring principle of the natural world:

In all things which are composed out of several other things, and which come to be some single common thing, whether continuous or discrete, in all of them there turns out to be a distinction between that which rules, and that which is ruled; and this holds for all ensouled things by virtue of the whole of nature…(Politics I.4).

All very fine—until the rise of science evicted ousia from the natural world. Galileo, who died in 1642, recognized that atomism was more compatible with modern mechanics than Aristotelian essentialism: a stone falling to earth is not striving to realize its heavy essence, but is merely being acted upon by gravity. Similarly, Newton discovered, for the earth itself.

If nature was not ousiodic , how could it underwrite ousia in the human world? Aristotle’s strategy collapsed, and modernity was born.

Some, such as Heidegger, have maintained that modern philosophy came about through a hubristic elevation of the human mind to a position akin to the one formerly occupied by God. Others suggest that the social and religious turmoil instigated by Martin Luther in 1453 eventually made philosophical certainty imperative, and that the surrounding confusion required that such certainty be sought in the individual mind—a hope realized when Descartes came across the cogito, the absolute certainty that I have of my own thought. These claims are all very well—in history, the more explanations we have the better, as long as they are consonant with the known facts—but left to themselves, I think they underplay two things.

First, the elevation of mind went along with a reevaluation of matter, which lost form; unformed yet somehow clumped matter, i.e. bodies, became basic to nature. Heidegger was half right, then: the elevation of the human mind he advocates for was in fact paired with the scientific eviction of form from nature.

Second, this double development provoked the new problem I mentioned above, a problem too basic to too many things to be seen clearly: if ousiodic structure could no longer be found in nature, what entitled it to play its traditional role in structuring the human world? How could Europeans continue to have their traditional kinds of families, states, churches, and so on in a world which had literally been de-formed by modern science?

Two general strategies emerged. Some philosophers concluded that since a natural justification for ousia was impossible, a supernatural one was required. Daniel Garber indicates how it worked:

Descartes rejects the tiny souls [essences] of the schools only to replace them with one great soul, God, an incorporeal substance who, to our limited under­stand­ing, manipulates the bodies of the inanimate world as we manipulate ours (Descartes’ Metaphysical Physics p. 116).

Descartes thus divinizes ousia in a monotheistic way and relocates it to the level of the entire universe. The strategy will survive him: Spinoza will absolutize it, and Leibniz will loosen it.

The other move was to abandon the entire project of formulating an overall justification for ousia, while salvaging various individual cases of it. Here we get Hobbes’ account of Leviathan, the modern state; Locke’s of the individual property owner; and Hume’s of the individual mind. All retain ousiodic structure, but only on one level of what had been the cosmos. The other levels are de-formed into mere matter, to be manipulated at will.

So the homo economicus of Locke steps forward in contrast to the homo politicus of Hobbes, and both confront the Humean individual, who overturns the entre ancient morality of reason: “reason is, and ought to be, the slave of the passions, and can never pretend to any other office than to serve and obey them” (Treatise p. 415). Ousiodic structure is still here, guiding Hume’s metaphor of master and slave, but it has been turned on its head.

These two opposing strategies—the divinization of ousiodic structure on the one hand, and its piecemeal abandonment on the other—were born together, out of the need to justify ousia as the structuring principle of the (European) human world after it had lost its status in nature and could no longer do the job in the old way. Their common birth, which was the birth of modernity, meant that the new, modern world was inherently conflictual.

It has remained so: Hobbesian homo politicus and Lockean homo economicus, for example, continued their confrontation all the way into the Cold War. This abiding conflict should not conceal the common concern of the parties to it with ousia, or the even deeper question which that concern raises: are modern theories of the state, the economy, and morality any less fantastic than the ancient theories of nature they supposedly replace?

17. Aquinas’ Polyphony

By the 12th Century Christian philosophy was almost a thousand years old; the Christians had almost as much philosophy behind them as did the Greeks at the time of Plotinus. Whether all that thinking had helped them understand the murky parables of a certain Jewish carpenter was a difficult matter. But some things were getting clear in Paris.

Two mysterious 12th-century composers attached to the cathedral of Notre-Dame, Léonin and Pérotin, were introducing what amounted to harmony into Gregorian chant. The idea that voices singing different notes could be pleasing to God was to have enormous consequences, not least (I submit) on the philosophy of Thomas Aquinas, who arrived in Paris from southern Italy in 1245.

Reading Aquinas is a chore second only, in its mind-numbing difficulty and its endless length, to what must have been the job of writing him. The format is unvarying: he lines up authorities on both side of a question, states reasons for their positions, then identifies his own view and his reasons for it, refuting those authorities who disagree with him. A small conceptual shift then produces the next question, and the process is repeated. The questions follow each other, creeping in their petty pace from hour to hour unto the last syllable…of recorded truth.

But as they do, as you work along all this, a vision begins painfully to emerge. In particular, Aquinas’ technical and tortured discussions of the actus essendi, the act of being, attempt to explain what Aristotle could not: how essence comes to inhere in matter. Plato required that a form be the same for everything that “participated” in it: justice is always justice, wherever it is found.

It is thus a crucial aspect of the relation of participation that many things can participate in one form;  but since Plato never clarifies the nature of participation (#8), we don’t know how that is supposed to work. When Aristotle converts form into essence by placing it within things, he agrees with Plato that all humans have exactly the same essence, humanity. But if that essence is one, how can humans be many?

For Aristotle, the answer is matter. That a single essence must bound, organize and control the differing matters of different beings means that the form’s activity itself modulates according to the matter in which that essence is, and the result is different individuals sharing the same essence. One essence acts in different ways at different places and times. Not very clear, but at least it’s an explanation.

But if essence “dominates” matter, then matter must, as we saw (#8), “resist” essence. It is the varying resistances offered by matter in differing times and places that modulate the activity of the single essence which controls them and so enables the one to become many. Such is the case for Aristotle, at least; but for Aquinas, essence comes from God. Resistance to God is sin, and only conscious beings can sin.

So Aquinean matter is inert, and cannot resist essence. Which leaves essence, so to speak, with nothing to do. Let me put it this way: for Aristotle, essence is in matter because essence is active, and its activity is to dominate matter. For Aquinas, essence is more passive: it does not dominate matter because matter does not resist it. So something else must “place” essence in matter.

Who is that something else? You know who. It is God Who places an essence in a number of bodies by constituting an actus essendi, an act of being—a notion for which Aristotle had no use. Because it pluralizes form, the actus essendi is not common to a number of things, as is the essence it posits in those things. Each act of being is unique.

The details escape me; let them go. The upshot is that the universe consists of an enormous number of beings, each unique at its core and each beloved of the God Who made it, and Whom it honors, just by being itself.

And the whole of reality, we might say, is like a giant choir in which each being sings its single note to God Himself, in an infinite polyphony.

This is surely one of the most powerfully beautiful ontologies ever formulated. And if it bears any truth at all, we moderns are in very serious trouble. For since we are not God, our manifold and growing interventions into the world God made are not improvements on His work. We are merely converting the divine polyphony into a cacophony which is, if human at the outset, virtually diabolical at its end. Every forest we cut down, every meadow we pave, every river we dam, and every lake we pollute becomes an insult to the God Who made them all.

Human interventions into nature must therefore be limited to those which enable us to be as God intended us to be—to those that enable us to be what we really are.

But who are we, really?

16. Augustine

The arrival of Christianity in the West brought profound and complex—and sometimes violent—shifts in values, as well as in beliefs. The body intensified from being a laborious distraction, as Plato viewed it, to become a seething locus of sin and temptation—not merely “bad” but “evil,” as Nietzsche would later put it. And yet Christians also maintained that every single human had been made “in the image and likeness of God;” humanity was now unified, instead of being split into Greeks (or Romans) and potential slaves.

But a question: if humans are images of the divine, how can the body be evil? Answer: if the imagery is not corporeal, but lodges in some component of the human being that is psychic or mental, and so opposed to the body. The human image of God is thus necessarily invisible. What can it be? i what invisible component of the human being does its likeness to God reside?

The problem came home for Augustine, a Christian from Hippo in Africa, when he tried to explain his belated conversion to Christianity. Motivation for this could not come from his bodily desires, which he well knew would have to be abjured should he become a Christian (da me castitatem et continentiam, he pleaded, sed noli modo: grant me chastity and continence, but not just now, Confessions VIII.7). Nor could it be a deliverance of reason, for reason clears up mysteries, while Christianity is founded on a mystery—that of the Incarnation (quid autem sacramenti haberet…ne suspicari quidem poteram, Confessions VII.19). But according to the ancients (after Aristotle anyway), reason and desire are the only two factors in human nature which can cause human actions. (Plato had complicated things slightly with τιμή, ambition—but is not the desire for honor merely, in the end, another desire?)

The sheer fact of Augustine’s conversion could only mean that Aristotle was wrong: there was something else in Augustine, a principle of action independent of both reason and desire—and therefore, it seemed, independent of natural causality altogether. Being independent of nature, it must be a direct gift from God; and, if free will is a direct gift of God, it must be that in virtue of which a human being is the image of God. We are thus made in the image of God, not visibly, but through something interior to us: what would come to be called “free will.” So free will received the job of establishing human likeness to the divine, and in such moderns as Descartes and Kant would assume the role of ousiodic form in the human self: the order of the mind;s various faculties would be maintained by an act of will.

But did Augustine discover free will, or invent it?

God, it seems, causes me to have free will in the first place, but if the choices I subsequently make really are free, even God does not cause them. An act of the free will thus has no cause beyond itself—it is in this respect causa sui, cause of itself, which is only fitting for what makes me, an image of God.

An act of free will is thus an uncaused commitment to a course of action, and this has implications for what choice itself is. When there is only one pathway forward, our choice of it cannot be free; so what we do freely must be something selected from a wider set of alternatives, other possible courses of conduct. This kind of choice, the uncaused selection of one alternative from a broader array, then becomes “choice” itself.

We do, i think, make choices in roughly this way. When I am in a cheese shop, I may see three or four cheeses which look equally appetizing and cost about the same. My choice among them is unmotivated, random. It does, to be sure, have causes—the color of one of the cheeses may remind me of a favorite sweater, for example—but these factors do not explain the choice: they do not help my justify my decision. The resemblance of a cheese to my sweater does not reduce the mystery of my choice of it.

What Augustine has done, I suggest, is apply this model of uncaused but trivial choices to a momentous one—the choice of a religion. Other models are possible: for Aristotle, such a choice would be made by taking one’s concept of happiness (eudaimonia), reasoning back to one’s present situation, and doing what, in that situation, would lead most directly to happiness (#10). No need, here, to choose among alternatives; only one course of action need be on the menu, because at, least sometimes, only one most fully manifests the moral identity (reason plus desire) of the (Aristotelian) chooser.

To be sure, such moral choices may on occasion require selecting among alternatives—there may be several courses of action which lead equally directly to happiness. But that is not a requirement for the choice to be moral, or the action to be free, for a “free” action is not one which results from a free choice, but one which manifests the moral identity of the chooser.

What Augustine has done, then, is what Homer did with his metaphors: he has fixed upon an existing similarity and elevated it into a social truth.

15. Where it Stands

This series of fragments, anecdotes, random observations, and high-flying speculations has now made it through Greek philosophy. Of course, Plotinus was not the last philosopher to write in Greek; a century after him, for example, Hypatia was publishing philosophical and astronomical treatises, but none of them survive today, and thereby hangs a sad and sordid tale. In any case, I have already omitted enough major figures to fill a philosophical library. Time for a little summing-up of my own.

I said in the beginning (#1) that the history of philosophy was bit like Jurassic Park: the behemoths of the past, interesting and even beautiful on their own, become something quite different when they get together. This metamorphosis confronts us already, here at the end of the Greeks, because when you look at the philosophers I have discussed—look well and long at them, rather glancing quickly as I have here—you see that something is missing from the group: there is no woman in it.

There were indeed woman philosophers in the ancient world—Plato’s mother, Perictione, has left us a few tantalizing pages, and Hypatia herself was prominent enough to be murdered and dismembered by a Christian mob in 415 CE. But the fact remains that 800 years of Greek philosophy contain almost nothing written by women.

This persistent absence of woman philosophers can hardly be an accident. Nor, I think, is it merely the result of ancient and long-lasting prejudice. It is, rather, specially intrinsic to Western philosophy itself, which has always tried to make the realm of rational discussion—the “space of reasons,” as it has come to be called—our space, open only to an in-group.

Plato—perhaps because of his mother—allowed women into his philosophically sophisticated guardian class, and openly claimed that at least a few women could be as bright as any man (Republic 455d). But Aristotle, far from refuting this possibility, does not even mention it. And his concept of being as ousia (#8) provided an enduring vocabulary for this tacit magistricide: women, slaves, and later people of color were assigned the role of matter in human communities; their very nature was to be dominated by gentlemen embodying the human form, reason. And so it remained.

Philosophy was, thus, not indifferent to the prejudices of its day, but structurally susceptible to them. Today’s exclusions of women and people of color is not merely a foul and self-serving habit, like American philosophy’s exclusion of Jews until the mid-20th Century, but was actively considered to be integral to the right order of the universe.

What to do about this? Ultimately, I suspect we will have to euthanize Western philosophy and give birth to a new, post-Western one; but right now, there are a number of things we shouldn’t do.

(1). We shouldn’t deny the exclusions—even to the extent of claiming, for example, that there is a corpus of philosophical writings by women and people of color that needs only to be collected and published. As far as we know now, there are very few writings in the Western tradition  attributable to women before the 17th Century, while people of color were basically excluded until well into the 20th.

All this for at least two reasons.

First, philosophy, unlike its ever-antagonist poetry, has always required a good deal of training, and exclusions already operated on that level: with very few exceptions, women and people of color could not get the education needed to do philosophy.

And second, when they somehow did get the requisite training, the resulting works were assiduously destroyed—like those of Hypatia, which were burned when she was murdered. Where not assiduously destroyed, those works were assiduously ignored, like those of Anton Wilhelm Amo, the 18th Century German philosopher from Ghana whose critique of Descartes might have been of value to the post-Kantians in Germany—if they had bothered to read them.

The great old libraries of Europe, such as the Vatican Library in Rome and the Süleymaniye Library in Istanbul, may have relevant manuscripts in their more distant vaults, but they are well-swept by now, and the outlook is not good.

(2). A common strategy for those who cannot deny their sins is to ignore them. One way of ignoring philosophy’ exclusions, abundant in the specialized hothouses of today’s universities, is to focus merely on this or that individual philosopher, overlooking the fact that he (!) belongs to a tradition that has excluded so many. It is only when you put the behemoths together, as I have noted, that it comes out clearly that they are virtually all men, and mainly Europeans at that.

(3). An understandable reaction to all this is to reject the Western tradition altogether: you can argue that philosophy has always been a global enterprise, with South and East Asia, Africa, and South America having traditions of their own. Which is true—but communication among those traditions was minimal until the modern era, presumably because premodern technologies did not allow for the transfer of writings from one continent to another; all Western philosophers could know of other kinds of thought was rumor and hearsay. Western philosophy thus developed as a distinct and isolated tradition, which certainly impoverishes it. But that poverty, for better or worse, produced today’s Westerners—and Westerners, by now, inhabit the entire world      .

 (4): Veneration of our intellectual ancestors is clearly out of the question. But condemnation is a moral judgment we are not entitled to make, for our moral superiority to our forebears is dubious at best. How do we know that we are not imbibing the prejudice and blindness of our age, as they did of theirs? David Hume was a wretched racist and we see through his racism, but how do we know that we are not committing other sins of our own? We hope to be better people than he was; but part of that is acknowledging that we may in fact be worse.

So Yes, the statue of Hume on Edinburgh’s Royal Mile ought to be taken down; it should never have been erected in the first place. We must remember our forebears, and study their virtues and their vices; but we must not venerate them. Some of their sins and errors live on in us; and we have probably invented a few new ones as well.

14. What Are the Blues?

No answer, of course; they are too many things. They are the cry of an oppressed people, and, as Amiri Baraka argued (in his Blues People), encode its very history. They offer wry wisdom about human predicaments, and became the mother-music of jazz, rock, and rap: America may look European, at least in its more privileged precincts, but it sounds African. And of course– the Blues are just the same three chords, over and over.

Look at this verse of Leadbelly’s:

Well good morning blues, blues how do you do

Well good morning blues, blues how do you do

I’m doing all right, goo morning how are you.

Formally, this is a standard A-A-B, twelve bar blues. The first two lines look the same; but when you hear them, they are not the same at all. Though the first and second lines are often sung on the same notes (Leadbelly does it that way), the instrumental accompaniment to the first iteration moves from the tonic, while that to the second moves from the fourth or subdominant. The music thus tells us what the words do not: the first two lines are in fact not identical, but only similar.

But they are not anything, of course, until the second line is actually there. As with the Homeric simile I discussed in #3, the blues verse compares something already acquired—here, the first line, there the humdrum action of a blacksmith—with something new—here the second line, there the blinding of the Cyclops. Only in the blues, the similarity is much more obvious: it is not even two things that are being compared here, but two phases of one thing.

As it unfolds over time, the verse coheres, not because of an identity, but because of a similarity. The contrast with Aristotle, and so with metaphysics through Kant, is clear: the successive stages of this verse, this blues-thing, are held together, not by the identity of an unchanging essence, but by the mere resemblance of the later stage to the earlier one. And this expresses, I submit, an important aspect of what it is to be in time. For if you are in time you cannot return to precisely what you were before; the circle remains broken. The relation of the two phases is not an identity or a circle, but a path (and the Greek oimos, one of my favorite words.

So path-dependency is incorporated into the very core of the blues-thing, for the second line exists in the verse only as reached from something else that resembles it—the first line.

We are approaching two monstrous insights, explicit statement of which is still almost two thousand years away. First, we see that Plato was wrong to say that changeable things, ta gignomena, are images—resemblances, eikona—of unchangeable identities. In reality, Hegel will try to say one day, what images resemble is only other images. It’s “phenomena” all the way down, and ontology muse become phenomenology in order to keep its spirit.

Second, similarity is in the eyes of a beholder. A similarity, we may say, does not signifcantly exist until it is publicly articulated (#4), and a resemblance is significant only when articulated by someone or something else. A point made by the verse’s third and final line, where the blues—astonishingly—replies, and politely, to the question in the first two, and does so by simply ignoring the fact that the question has been asked twice.

The third line of a blues verse explains, contextualizes, or critiques the first two; here, it contextualizes the first two lines by underscoring their similarity. (For Plotinus, these three functions are not distinct, but merely aspects of the epistrophe. Too bad.).

Once this reflection is articulated, the resemblance between the first two lines is recognized (explained, contextualized, critiqued) and the song moves on. The verse is now over, complete, done with, dead: The blues moves, if not by magistricide (# 7), by “versicide;” its individal verses, moving toward the explanations, contextualizations, or critiquea which hold them together, are revealed to have been moving, from their inception, toward their end. And this, too, seems to be an important aspect of what it is to be in time: to be moving towards your own non-existence. (Nietzsche called this Untergang, going-under: Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Cambridge 2006 pp. 159, 233).

What are the blues? Many things, and it is not too much to say that in some of its identities the blue has ontological import. They present an alternative to the metaphysics of identity, problematically founded by Plato (#5) and then fixed by Aristotle (#8). Replacing form and essence with the temporalized notion of path-dependence, they haul meaning—temporary unity and reflection on that unity—out of the remorseless brokenness of time.

Aristotle said that courage is the intelligent mastery of fear. The blues are the intelligent mastery of time itself.

13. Plotinus Gets the Blues

Stephen Toulmin, who was my colleague at Northwestern University for several years, once told me that Neoplatonism is the “secret glue” which holds together the history of western philosophy, and (he didn’t say, but I think) the entire history of the West. (Plotinus was, certainly, the glue which held my career together at its beginnings: my first publication concerned his take on what Plato called “recollection.”)

The main ingredient in Plotinus’ glue was his ambiguous nearness to the monotheism that would win out over the gods of the ancient world, and in so doing would eventually destroy that world itself. The One, the single principle on which Plotinus thinks the whole world depends, often sounds in his writings like the Jewish/Christian God, the Platonic form of the good, and the Roman emperors all rolled into one. Whether it is personified enough to be identified with the biblical God is unclear; but a lot of later philosophers, from Augustine to Avicenna, tried their best.

Plotinus did not set out to be a secret, but I think he did set out to be glue. Whatever his nearness to monotheism, Plotinus was dead set against the various irrationalities he saw in the Judaism and Christianity of his day, and to fight them he made his philosophy into the final summing-up of the Greek philosophical tradition, which by the time he wrote was almost 800 years old. The principles of his unification are simple enough: Plato was right, when understood correctly; Aristotle is generally right when he is compatible with Plato; the Stoics, Skeptics, and other schools are more-or-less right when compatible with the above two.

Plotinus pursues this exhaustively and with much ingenuity, and produces a single hierarchical system structured somewhat like the Rome in which he, North African by birth, lived and taught. There is little in his system, I think, that is true; but his rethinking and harmonizing of a near-millennium of philosophical tradition is stunningly beautiful.

Plotinus also fought the Stoics, whose relatively low rank in his hierarchy meant that they were wrong about many things. In the course of this battle, he recurs somewhere to Plato’s late and surprising suggestion that the forms are changed in being known, and this change in their being is a kind of life (Sophist 248e). This is applied by Plotinus to the intellectual (or formal) realm. For Plotinus, then, the forms (τά νοητά) are not only intrinsically knowable but intrinsically known: being thought (by a suprapersonal Intellect) is a kind of life necessary to the fullness of their Being.

This gets temporalized in the sensory world. A sensory being has its true origin or (as Plotinus has it) its ἀρχή in the Forms. Having gotten its start in the sensible world, i..e having come into being there, a thing becomes an instance of life, pure movement, and takes a variety of distances from its origin (in space, in size, in age, etc.). This movement is thus a προόδος, a “procession.” Being is merely its first stage.

And its last? We might call it, at least in the case of human beings, a complex of death and knowledge, which in the Platonic tradition are closely related. The human soul eventually loses its sensible being, its life, and returns to the forms; Plotinus calls this the ἐπιστροφή, the turning-about. To attain knowledge of the forms is thus to return to their domain, which is also the starting point.

Or, as Plato had it, all philosophy is “practicing death” (Phaedo 803)

The triad being–life–knowledge, moving from origin through procession to turning-about, applies for Plotinus, in varying guises, across the entire sensible world. The cycle of life is one example: the living thing begins as a seed, develops into an organism, and in dying produces new seeds. In that production, what Aristotle would call its “species” (his word is εἶδος, Plato’s habitual word for a form) transfers from one thing (parent) to another (offspring) and in so doing reveals itself to be the enduring and knowable reality, independent of any single sensory embodiment. Humans have knowledge of this; other beings enact it.

Contrary to the Stoics, with their recurrent drawing of definitive boundaries between the (thinking) self and a (purely) material world—between what is “up to us” and what is not—Plotinus thus maintains that knowledge is not independent of being, but constitutes its final realization. As his own philosophy was the final summing-up, and therefore signaled the death, of the Greek philosophical tradition.

It is impossible to overstate how important the Neoplatonic triad being-life-knowledge has been to western philosophy. One example: its association between knowledge and death is adopted in the Preface to Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, and is integral to his ensuing discussion of an idealized, and in his view dead, Prussian state.

But there is another kind of place where something like the Plotinian triad appears.

A blues verse has three lines. It begins on the tonic, with a statement:

My baby come a’running, she was holding up her hand.

It proceeds to restate this, on the fourth:

My baby come a’running, she was holding up her hand.

This procession from tonic to fourth continues to the third line, which provides knowledge of what has happened, rising to the fifth and then turning about and returning to the tonic:

Glad to see you Johnny, but I found me a younger man.

The blues is not Stoic: what happens to Johnny is not something outside him, but defines what he is—an elderly reject. The blues is Plotinian–or maybe Plotinus is rethinking a more ancient insight. Maybe he just “gets” the blues.

Plotinus, we know, was an African from Lycopolis, which was probably in Upper (southern) Egypt. The blues is African-American. Both penetrate to the core of the cycle of human life, which began in Africa, proceeded across the earth, and may now be awaiting its deeper understanding—or, perhaps, its death.

12. What’s With the Romans?

When we think of Roman philosophy today, what first comes to mind is a question: why on earth couldn’t they do it better? Why didn’t the energy and ingenuity which propelled the Romans to utter dominance in the known world move their philosophy beyond being a mere set of more-or-less elegant reworkings of Greek insights?

 It’s not that they were just so busy conquering the world that they had no time or energy for philosophical investigations; they did enough to show that a philosophical impulse was there, as it is in almost all cultures. Something about Rome must have restrained that impulse, keeping it from developing into the creativity of its Greek counterpart. We can, perhaps, identify the restraints by considering a few rough contrasts between Greece and Rome.

The most glaringly obvious of these is that unlike Rome, Greece was politically disunited. During the classical period (510-323 BCE), it contained perhaps as many as 300-400 independent cities or poleis, each of them sovereign on its soil.

One result of this multiplicity of political jurisdictions was that if you ticked off the authorities in, say, Athens (as Socrates did) you could always move to, say, Megara (as he refused to do: # 7). This reminds us of something we should never forget: that philosophy, well-pursued, is a radical, and so dangerous, activity. As Tom Foster Digby put it in 1989:

Philosophical works achieve canonical status because they are recognized as exemplars of philosophy as a social practice. In the Western tradition, this practice is purely, directly, and intrinsically radical, for it involves uncovering, studying, and criticizing the root conceptions that inform all of the more narrowly focused intellectual pursuits, as well as social practices generally.[1]

Merely focusing on your basic concepts and beliefs, let alone criticizing them, brings the possibility that those basic concepts and beliefs, and the practices associated with them, might be found wanting. Even if you eventually uphold them all (as Descartes did), you have done something most people don’t like.

Unlike Socrates, a Roman social critic had no place to flee to, for Rome ruled almost the entire world: if you displeased its emperor, you had to flee to the world’s very edges before you were beyond his authority.

Such repression was not merely a matter of governmental muscle. Rome’s centralization of political authority brought a centralization of culture as well. If you wanted to be a famous playwright or sculptor, all roads led to Rome. When it came to philosophy, which by this time required a great deal of preliminary training, the roads led not only to Rome but to some of its larger mansions. Thus, Lucretius was a client of the prominent poet/politician Gaius Memmius; Cicero and Seneca were from families just below the highest, senatorial rank; and Marcus Aurelius actually was the emperor. Among Rome’s best-known philosophers, only poor, lame Epictetus was outside the circle of privilege—he was a slave. But his master, about whom we know nothing other than that he was wealthy enough to have at least one slave, allowed him to study philosophy.

Roman culture was not only unified, but deeply hierarchical. All of these men, except Marcus Aurelius, were dependent on those above them in the Roman hierarchy, whose higher levels they knew intimately. They all lived the same privileged Roman lifestyle (except Epictetus, who observed it at very close quarters). And that lifestyle was not only unified and hierarchical, but deeply grounded in Greek philosophy, which everyone cultured was expected to read in the original. So they all had approximately the same Roman life experience, and the same Greek conceptual tools to articulate it. Small wonder that their thought conformed to their Roman peers, and moved on tracks originally laid down in Greece.

Culture and government can, of course, diverge; not all Roman philosophers were subservient to imperial authority. Beginning with Nero and continuing under the Flavian Dynasty (69-96 CE), certain Stoics systematically irked the emperors. Indeed, Vespasian, first of the Flavians, was sufficiently irked to banish philosophers from Rome (on the usual charge of corrupting the youth), which pretty much makes my point about governmental centralization. But philosophical  criticism of imperial Rome came from within its highest precincts: a number of the banished philosophers were senators.

Finally, Greek society also exemplified a special kind of diversity. Since the Greeks all spoke the same language, and were ethnically pretty homogenous, their diversity was primarily religious: Athena was worshiped at Athens, but other gods in other cities. These alliances could shift, so the Greeks had to compare their gods critically with those of other cities: what if Athena is the wrong goddess to be allied with? Maybe we should join up with Hera instead? Or Ares? Or Zeus?

People therefore had to justify and explain their choice of gods—which required justifying and explaining their basic values and aspirations to others who might not wholly share them. Plato takes this to a new level in the Euthyphro, when Socrates suggests that the holy must be pleasing to all the gods, not just to one or a few: to determine what was holy, you couldn’t just rely on the gods of your own polis, but had to figure out what was pleasing to all the gods of all the poleis. That would have been a philosophical task; Plato accomplished it, implicitly, in his general discussions of the nature of the forms and their common guidance to conduct.

Such issues did not arise in Rome, for its political unity also underwrote an official religion; the Roman gods were to be worshiped because they had overseen the rise of Rome to world domination. Since the gods had given Rome world domination, Romans had no temptation to worship anyone else. Subject peoples were allowed to keep their traditional gods if they wished; but if things got obstreperous their Roman overlords would perform an evocatio, which called forth a local god with promises of a larger temple or cult, endowed with Roman money. This invariably won that god to the Roman side.

Thus, we see two models of human living. One, the Greek model, is politically pluralistic and encourages forms of thought that will liberate individuals from local allegiances; the other is a monolithic system of power that binds each individual to a particular position within that particular system. So it is no surprise that Romans did not think for themselves as some Greeks had done, but conformed to the general and conceptually homogeneous view that surrounded them.

[1] Tom Foster Digby, “Philosophy as Radicalism” Proceedings and Addresses of the American Philosophical Association 61.5 (June 1988) pp. 857-863, p. 857

11. Dancing Around the Metaphysical Barn

Plato and Aristotle take opposed positions on the question of where the “principle” of a thing, that which makes it what it is, is located. For Plato, such a principle is a form separate from the thing, in which the thing “participates.” For Aristotle, the principle shapes and organizes the thing from within, as its essence.

So why, if they are so opposed, do Plato and Aristotle, when pushed, turn into one another?

For Plato, forms are things and so must have their principles outside them. Republic 509b tells us that the ultimate principle of all of them, which makes each form what it is, is the form of the good. And this form has no principle beyond itself: it is “sovereign” over the entire intelligible order. Plato finesses this conclusion by claiming that the form of the good has no determinate nature, and so needs no further determining principle, but the fact remains:  to understand the form of the good we must look to it, not beyond it; to that extent, Plato has become an Aristotelian.

For Aristotle, the principle of a thing is to be found within the thing; but what about the set of all material things, the cosmos itself? It is not only a thing, but an ordered thing, with earth at the center and the sphere of the fixed stars at the edge. Where does this unifying order come from?

It cannot come from anything within the cosmos, for everything within the cosmos contains matter, which means it can change. Anything which can change at all will eventually change, incrementally, into something else—at which time the thing it originally was will cease to exist. The world for Aristotle had no beginning in time; so if the principle of the cosmos were within it, like an essence, the cosmic order would have ceased to exist by now (see Phaedo 72b-d for a related argument).

So in Metaphysics XI, Aristotle concludes that the ordering principle of the cosmos is outside the cosmos: the immaterial, purely rational, and so consummately ordered, prime mover. The cosmos, we learn, “loves” the prime mover, but is unable to unite with it; so it imitates it by ordering itself. Whence this “love” (ἔρως), and what is it? We are not told; as Platonic did with participation (#8), Aristotle owes us a theory and gives us a word.

All of which was laid bare by Kant, most spectacularly in his “Third Antinomy.” The thesis of that antinomy states that everything has a cause; and since a cause for Kant at least partially precedes its effect in time, nothing can cause itself. The causes of a thing, the principles which make it what it is, are thus outside the thing, as with Plato.

The antithesis states, by contrast, that some things—free actions—are not caused by anything preceding them in time. To find the principle of a free act, you must look at the act itself, where you will find the atemporal moral law. So the antithesis is, broadly, Aristotelian .

Each of these two contradictory statements, Kant tells us, can be proven. What he doesn’t tell us is that his proofs are reductio’s: The proof of the thesis assumes the antithesis and demonstrates its falsity; the proof of the antithesis does the reverse.

So if you choose the (Platonic) thesis, you will eventually be forced into the (Aristotelian) antithesis, to avoid an infinite regress of causes according to which the form of the good would have a principle outside it, and that principle would also have a principle outside it, and so on…(This argument was known to Aristotle, who mysteriously called it the Third Man.)

If you choose the (Aristotelian) antithesis, you will be forced to adopt the (Platonic) thesis, on pain of locating the eternal order of the cosmos within the cosmos itself, where it cannot be because the cosmos contains matter. Matter brings change, and since anything which can change at all will eventually change into something else, the cosmic order would not be eternal.

These are not arguments (Kant’s “proofs” are notoriously bad) so much as ingrained tendencies. When we look at them that way, we see that Kant has sketched the structure of a metaphysical barn, around which Platonists and Aristotelians had been chasing each other for centuries—right up to the third antinomy itself, which abruptly stops the chase.

It does this by claiming that the thesis belongs, not to reality, but to one faculty of the mind (the understanding) while the antithesis belongs to another faculty, reason. Kant’s solution is not only abrupt, but more than a bit ad hoc (in spite of the hundreds of pages of argument intended to establish it). It also, as we will see, has other, and severe, problems—problems so severe as to impeach Kant’s entire “transcendental philosophy.”

But we also see, already, that if Kant had written nothing other than the “Third Antinomy,” he would have been the most important philosopher since Aristotle. Because it was he who uncovered, buried in the texts of the history of philosophy, an ancient and worrisome structure: the metaphysical barn.

10. Aristotle, Freedom, and Choice

One surprise when you read Aristotle is just how unimportant freedom is to him. It may be our central political value, but Aristotle rarely even mentions it. When he talks about the quality of being free,  ἐλευθεριότης, he just means the ability to spend money wisely: “liberality.” What we want from society is not freedom but justice: fair distribution of resources, fair punishment for misdeeds, and so on.

A lot of people are unwilling to countenance this downgrading of freedom, and seek in Aristotle’s pages a “higher freedom,” the ability to act, not according to desire, but according to reason.

Insofar as we are human beings, we should certainly act rationally, for according to Aristotle reason is our human essence. But in the opening chapters of Book III  of the Nicomachean Ethics, I think we find a more complex and interesting possibility.

There, Aristotle discusses a pair of concepts allied to what was later called freedom: ἑκών, voluntarily or happily, and ἄκων, under constraint or unhappily. Aristotle glosses what we do ἑκών as what we are responsible for. When we act ἄκων, or as we might say unfreely, we are in fact not acting at all, for something else is constraining us. In such cases we are not responsible for what we do.

What is it, then, to be “responsible” for one’s act? For Aristotle, as is typical of him, responsibility has various kinds and degrees; but in the strictest sense, we are responsible for things we choose to do. Freedom is then, most strictly, freedom of choice. How very modern!

Not so fast. What does Aristotle mean by “choice” (προαίρεσις)?

Choice for him—again, in the strictest sense—results from deliberation (βούλευσις). Deliberation, in turn, relates what Aristotle views as the two morally-relevant components of the human mind: desire and reason. Desire is an impetus toward something other than itself (desire, we may say, doesn’t desire desire). The overall name for what it seeks is ἐυδαιμονία, which is often (though controversially) translated as “happiness.” Basically, it denotes, not a feeling (as “happiness” does), but everything in your life going as well as it can.

Reason has (again, as is typical for Aristotle) different degrees and forms. In deliberation, reason begins from one’s overall concept of happiness and, using as premises what one knows about the world and one’s position in it, reasons back from that end through various means to it until it arrives at one’s current situation, determining what one can do here and now that will lead most efficiently to happiness. Since one desires happiness, one will then automatically perform that act. Reason and desire come to agreement, and their confluence produces the action.

When an act is performed after reasoning things out this way, then, it arises from the agent’s entire moral psychology, i.e. as the confluence of its two components, reason and desire. The source of the action is then (in the strictest sense) the person performing it, who is therefore wholly “responsible” for that action. If we go on (as Aristotle doesn’t) and call such an action “free,” we arrive at a definition of freedom: freedom is the ability to express your whole self in your actions, where your “self” is the totality of your desires (or at least the currently relevant ones) plus your reason.

Your desires tell you what you love, and reason tells you what you are good at: Aristotle’s “whole self” is not simply reason or desire, but coincides with what I call the “personal nature” of the individual (# 9). We may say that freedom for Aristotle is the ability to express your personal nature in your actions.

The whole point of deliberating is then to identify the single course of action that will most efficiently lead to happiness. It may happen, however, that deliberating arrives at a number of actions that I can perform right now that all lead, with equal efficiency, to happiness. In such a case, the alternative actually chosen has nothing rational to recommend it over its alternatives, and the choice is merely random. Choosing among alternatives, in fact, is servile:

But it is as in a house, where the freemen [ἐλευθέροις]are least at liberty to act at random [ὅ τι ἔτθχε ποιεῖν], but all or most things have been prescribed for them, while the slaves and the animals do little for the common good…(Metaphysics XII.10 1075a19022, my translation).

Freedom for Aristotle has nothing to do, then, with freedom, as (roughly) the ability to choose one of a number of alternatives, where the choice itself has no previous cause (and so is called an act of ”free will”). That concept of freedom, our concept, has theological, and—as we will see—specifically Christian, origins. It has to, because (as Kant argues) it implies a break in the chains of natural causality: as what Kant called the capacity to begin something truly new, freedom cannot come from nature, which—for Kant anyway—is causally governed through and through.

In the world of quantum physics, to be sure, there are uncaused events, such as proton decay. Kant, though he knew nothing of quantum physics, calls such events “spontaneous.” But, as Hume had already pointed out, who values such spontaneity? It cannot be anything other than a capacity for totally random activity; and who wants to act that way? For Hume, a free action is one that arises from one’s “internal character, passions, and affections”—or from what I call one’s “personal nature” (Hume, Enquiries, Oxford 1902 p. 99). Similarly for Aristotle.

Free choice in Aristotle’s sense requires extensive knowledge of oneself, while free choice in our sense requires only the power to act without cause. And you cannot know yourself without knowing a lot about the world and society you live in. Such knowledge was once summed up as the “liberal arts,” which is not an arbitrary name but tells us that such studies give us the knowledge we need to be truly free.

To say that something has theological, or even Christian, roots does not mean that it is false; but we see that there are at least two problems with the theologically-derived sense of “freedom:” it is an ad hoc revocation of natural causality, and it denies the necessity of self-knowledge. The latter makes it a philosophy which proclaims the irrelevance of philosophy.

9. Aristotle and Tax Avoidance

You don’t have to dig very deeply into American conservative thought before you come across the Rand Fantasy. This is the dream, explored by Ayn Rand in her Atlas Shrugged, that the talented and strong-willed few, who supply the rest of us with food, shelter, clothing, and such meaning as our lives can tolerate, simply stop working, annoyed by bureaucrats telling them how to run their businesses and taxing the wealth they create.

Rand may not be taken very seriously by academics, but beyond the ivory tower, arguments based on the Fantasy course through American society like the bulls through Pamplona. We hear it over and over again: taxes and government regulations must be kept to an absolute minimum, lest the gifted few—more recently baptized “job creators—” simply stop working, or at least stop working so furiously hard.

Rand famously claimed to find nothing of value in the history of philosophy except Aristotle. This is a bit extreme, given her obvious affinities with Nietzsche and his predecessor, Max Stirner (whose main work was actually entitled Der Einzige und sein Eigentum, “The Individual and His Property”); but there is certainly plenty in Aristotle that prefigures Rand. Much of humanity, he thinks, consists of “slaves by nature:” people who are bright enough to understand and follow orders, but not bright enough to figure out which orders to give (Politics I.5-7). The truly bright people, the “great-souled” ones (Nicomachean Ethics 1107b22-1108a3) have what Aristotle calls “active reason,” which enables them to make correct decisions in life. They do great things, and are entitled to great rewards—the greatest being the freedom to live as they think best.

All very Randian–as far as it goes. For like James B. Conant at Harvard (# 6), Rand did not read her favorite Greek philosopher all the way to the end. In particular, she did not understand Aristotle’s theory of human motivation.

While all humans share the species-nature of “human being,” he believes that different people are fitted, by whether by nature or by habituation, to do different things. Thus, some people are good at drinking; and since you enjoy what you’re good at, they love to drink. Others are good at hunting and love to hunt, others at philosophy and, as its very name implies, love wisdom (Nicomachean Ethics 1172a). Each individual, then, has what I will call a “personal nature.” One’s personal nature is the set of talents and aptitudes, partly natural (like height for a basketball player) and partly acquired (like skill in surgery)  that determines what she or he loves most in life, and becomes best at.

Since your personal nature determines what you love to do, it will (like any nature) inevitably manifest itself in your actions. A poet-by-nature, we may say, can no more dispense with writing poetry than a fish could abjure swimming, or a river could flow uphill. Someone whose personal nature makes them love something is willing to sacrifice almost everything else to it—and won’t even regard it as a “sacrifice.”

In such cases, monetary rewards are largely irrelevant. Poets rarely gain significant wealth from their poetry, but they write it anyway. Really gifted teachers often tell me they’d “teach for free,” if they could. Steve Jobs and Bill Gates made incredible amounts of money, but that was not their goal (if it were, Gates would not be giving most of his away).[1] They originally set out to pursue a vision; and what I am calling their “personal nature” is what generated that vision.

So what would Aristotle say about someone who seeks to increase their wealth by avoiding taxes?

He would say that such a person is not doing what they do “by nature.” If they can refrain from their work, then they don’t really love it. Which means that they have not devoted to it the kind of uncompromising and single-minded effort it takes to get really good at something in the first place. Such people can be worthy practitioners in their field, but the heights of excellence are reserved to those who love what they do. And if you love doing something, you’ll do it for free. Eisphoraphobia, fear of paying taxes, is for the second-raters.

One benefit of looking to Aristotle here is that we see how issues of tax avoidance differ from issues concerning government regulation. People who know how to do something really well usually don’t appreciate being told how to do it by others, who are almost certain to know less—not by the government, or by their board of directors, or for that matter by their mother. If the constraints placed on them actually change the nature of the work so much that it is no longer what they love doing by nature, one can certainly imagine them quitting. So the ani-regulation argument is more respectable than anti-tax arguments.

More respectable, but not impregnable. There are people, we know, who are really good at torturing and killing other people (some of them, indeed, make quite a bit of money at it). Not all personal natures are meritorious, and some need to be suppressed—by governmental force, if need be.

I don’t know if Ayn Rand thought that a killer-by-nature should be allowed to kill, but I am quite sure that if she did, she would be wrong. It is up go society to decide which activities it should countenance. Only once an activity has been approved by society can those who are really good at it in virtue of their personal natures be left to conduct it as they see fit.

[1] Jobs put it forcefully: “I was worth about over $1 million when I was 23, and over $10 million when I was 24, and over $100 million when I was 25, and it wasn’t that important,” Jobs said in 1996 PBS documentary. He co-founded Apple in 1976, as a 21-year-old. “I never did it for the money.”

https://www.cnbc.com/2018/06/14/steve-jobs-i-never-did-it-for-the-money.html

accessed August 31m 2020

8. Aristotle’s Fix

With Aristotle, philosophy is fixed: a problem with Plato is solved, with the result that certain tracks are laid, a certain intellectual prairie is fenced, and the mental grooves in which philosophy will move for millennia are dug out. Aristotle does this by hammering together two divergent rails of Plato’s system.

Plato posited unchanging Forms and changing sensibles. What holds these two realms together remains a mystery, yet together—somehow—they must be. How else will the forms have title to guide our actions, and how else can soul move between them, as it apparently must?

Plato is uninterested in such questions. His attention goes to the χορισμός, the spacing or separation between forms and sensibles, rather than to their necessary unity. So when it comes to the overall relation between forms and sensibles Plato owes us a theory but, as Aristotle points out (at Metaphysics I.9) gives us just a word — “participation,” μέθεξις.

Some might say (I did, in # 5) that this is a good thing—that it enables Plato to convey the human comedy in its tragic dimension. But Aristotle looks at it from the other side: the “separation” of Forms from the human world leaves them unchained from everything they are supposed to explain. Their whole domain becomes a limitless, philosophically unneeded complication of the sensory world. Individual forms cannot be defined, and morality becomes tragedy;

So Aristotle kills his teacher: he rejects, not the entirety of Plato’s theory of forms, but one of its core components, the separation of forms from the sensible, changing world. The eternals are to be found within the temporals. They are essences, not forms, and now Aristotle has to do what he thinks Plato should have done: not merely describe humans dealing with an unexplained separation, but actually explaining the relation between an essence and the thing whose essence it is. That explanation goes by way of matter, the other major component of a thing. Matter is so cryptic and  unstable that we might just call it everything in a thing which is not its form.

Explaining the relation of form, now essence, to things, now matter, is the core of Aristotelian metaphysics. The treatment extends through the three central and tortured books of his Metaphysics: Zeta, Eta, and Theta. I have followed it elsewhere (Metaphysics and Oppression, Chapter One), and have argued that in the end, the relation between essence and matter is one of domination. Or, seen from matter’s point of view, of oppression.

Essence for Aristotle exercises a threefold domination over matter: it draws a boundary for the thing, excluding most of the cosmos from it while allowing some matter into it; the proper amount varies with the kind of thing it is (elephant essences need a lot more matter than squirrel ones). The essence also establishes and maintains the order of events within those boundaries, arranging or disposing the parts of the thing; and it has the initiative to govern the thing’s interactions with what is outside its boundaries—the rest of the world—when those interactions are as they should be. Thus, a person’s interactions with other people and things are as they should be when they are governed by the human essence, which is reason (λόγος) itself.

  Boundary, disposition, and initiative—or exclusion, control, and isolation—are the watchwords here, the essential features of Being itself, or as I call it (following Aristotle) ousia. The three are found for Aristotle on the level of the human individual, whose essence is reason; in the household, where reason is found in the pater; in the state, where reason solves the conflicts that arise because human individuals have only very partial, and so perspectival, knowledge of the world; and on the level of the cosmos itself, where the ultimate essence, also known as the Prime Mover, orders the movement of the stars and so the passage of the seasons, and so human life.

Aristotle’s model of Being, as I have traced elsewhere (Metaphysics and Oppression), will become an obsession of philosophers. They will, down through the ages, explicate it, justify it, apply it, tinker with it, challenge it, and finally criticize it; but they will never leave it behind. This means that numerous engines of oppression in society—patriarchal households, capitalist factories, slave plantations, totalitarian states—will operate according to philosophical blueprints, established by Aristotle.

Who was only trying to kill his teacher.

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 20th 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.

17. 1983: David Lewis Breathes New Life into Cold War Philosophy

The Cold War integration of rational choice theory into philosophy brought a problem: Cold War philosophy holds that anything rational must be reached via a choice among alternatives, but philosophy has traditionally had little truck with theory-choice. From its very beginnings, philosophers have sought to eliminate all alternatives to their views, to come up with arguments which had to be accepted. This reached an apogee in Spinoza’s Ethics, from start to finish a single deduction more geometrico from first principles; but traces of it can be found wherever a philosopher seeks a knock-down argument. How to replace this ancient “necessitarian” approach with modern market choice?

David Lewis solved the problem in the Introduction to volume I of his Philosophical Papers (Oxford: 1983), by denying (in a Quinean spirit) what Hans Reichenbach called the “autonomy of problems,” or rather the autonomy of opinions. The aim of philosophy, for Lewis, is to bring one’s opinions into “equilibrium”—apparently a sort of Pareto-efficient state in which changing any of one’s opinions leaves one worse off. “Being worse off” is parsed as having opinions that contradict each other or that depart too greatly from compelling common sense—from what “we cannot help believing outside the philosophy room” (x).

Inside that room, philosophers determine which other opinions, philosophical or commonsensical, must be abandoned if we are to accept a given opinion. Philosophy “sets the price” for an opinion or a conjunction of opinions, an “equilibrium” (ix). This price-setting, as Lewis develops it (he develops it only slightly in this very short text). has two sides. Logic traces out the interrelations of opinions with respect to their consistency or inconsistency; “when all [this] is said and done,” the philosopher measures the distance between the resulting theory and common sense. The result is the price. Theories, or opinions, or equilibria, are thus opted for under preferences for consistency and consonance with common sense, which itself is another form of consistency among opinions.

With this, Lewis accommodated philosophy to Cold War rationality—but at a price. On the surface, the price seems to be the abandonment of the quest for knock-down arguments, a ban which Lewis openly announces. But abandoning philosophy’s ancient quest for knock-own arguments piggybacks on a deeper change, and Lewis’ innovations are far more radical than they appear.

Lewis’ account of quasi-Pareto-efficient equilibria of opinions sounds remarkably like a coherence theory of truth, right down to his thoroughly Hegelian remark that “philosophical theories are [almost] never refuted conclusively” (ix). But Lewis does not conflate such efficiency with truth; philosophy’s goal is not truth but logically consistent and empirically consonant equilibria among opinions. Lewis’ views on truth, here, implicitly trade on the idea that truth is a relation holding between opinions and matters of fact. Though truth can be had, logical method will not give it to us: facts of matters make theories true or false irrespective of how much consistency and consonance those theories have achieved (xi). Hence Lewis’ lament, in the third paragraph of the Introduction, that he is not nearly unsystematic enough. Coherence and consistency are great things, but apparently they are not truth.

The real price, then, is this: philosophy as the tracing-out of logical relations among opinions, and the gauging of their consonance with common sense, is no longer a search for truth. It is a search for a set of prices. The abandonment of knockdown arguments follows from a deeper abandonment: that of truth as philosophy’s goal.

Lewis’ Introduction is thus an epochal moment in the history of analytical philosophy and, I suggest, of philosophy in general (more on that in a subsequent post). It is foreshadowed in Quine’s metaphor of the web of beliefs (which touches reality only at its edges), and in Davidson‘s metaphor of meaning as truth-conditions (for that, too, is a metaphor: as I pointed out in my The Company of Words, Northwestern 1994, pp. 335-336, the locutions with which Davidson regularly discusses that doctrine are precisely those that, he says, properly characterize metaphor).

The idea that opinions can be brought into Pareto efficiency is also a metaphor, a carrying-over from economics. Opinions are *like* commodities; they can have positive or negative utility—depending on the logical price we pay for them.

If we take Davidson’s “A Nice Derangement of Epitaphs” (1986) to be the most radical statement of his metaphor, then we should say that between 1983 (the date of Lewis’ Introduction) and 1986 the nature of their discipline changed, and in a very fundamental way: philosophy ceased to be a search for truth and became the confection of metaphors.