The Ultimate "One"

The Essential Plotinus 

by Plotinus

“We must close our eyes and invoke a new manner of seeing, a wakefulness that is the birthright of us all, though few put it to use.”     ― Plotinus, The Essential Plotinus

Neoplatonism is credited with having its roots in the mystic philosopher Plotinus. He felt that throughout his life, he had repeatedly attained unity with the Supreme Principle, also known as the One. According to his idea, the Intellect, the Soul, and mankind were all manifestations of the One, as were all other material creatures and things. In his worldview, people should strive to achieve union (or reunion) with the One in order to escape the limitations of material reality. Plotinus was a well-known instructor who delivered lectures on this philosophy. One of his pupils, Porphyry of Tyre, eventually organized these lectures into six books with nine chapters each, which he termed Enneads. This book contains a selection from those lectures.

Plotinus’s interpretation of Platonic philosophy centers on his conception of the One, the creator-being. The One is that which makes all things possible; thus he claimed that the One is the penultimate element. It is made up of everything else, yet it remains in the purest form. Plotinus calls this state “the light before the light.” As this purest form, it cannot be described or discussed; living beings can only hope to realize that even with a sense of perfection in meditation, they must be aware that there is a greater perfection that exists.

The One is known only by what it is not; it is not comprehensible, but it is the source of both the intelligence and the soul. These three entities form a trinity that is hierarchical and to a great extent ineffable. The intelligence remind one of the forms of Plato's thought. In addition to clear connections to Platonic philosophy there are resonances with both the thought of Aristotle and the writings of Paul in the New Testament of the Christian Bible.

Plotinus' thought is paradoxical, yet through contemplation it appears to form a natural hierarchical structure that leads from the sentient world to the ultimate source of everything.

Games, Names, and Shadows

Part I 

Games

When we consider how to share our thoughts and ideas with those around us we turn to the abundance of language to express ourselves. If we have taken the time and made the effort to develop a command of our language, we believe we can say those things that we think and feel with the precision of expression that will leave some trail of meaning among our community.

How is it that our playing is like naming? A game of words becomes the life we live—or is it the reverse? So often our lives seem to be merely games with words—our conversations veer into debates over both the ideas represented by our words and the objects that our words seem to signify.

Is not this play a form of education? Education: from the Latin ducere, meaning to lead. Educate—out from ignorance. This is the movement from the shadows into the light (The Republic, 514a - 520a).

To learn, for Socrates, was to gain knowledge—to achieve wisdom (sophos). (Theatetus, 145d) Learning can be considered the “right use of words”, which is the way it is put in the Cratylus (277e). He also refers to the notion of learning as a game (278b). In the twentieth century the general use of language has become a game according to Wittgenstein (1989, para. 67).

When we are learning we put what we know into words. We name the thing as we play the game leading ourselves onward toward understanding (Theatetus, 146a)

Plato, Complete Works. John M. Cooper, ed. Hackett, 1997.

Wittgenstein, Ludwig, Philosophical Investigations. G.E. M. Anscombe, trans., MacMillan, 1989 (1953)

The Peripatetic Reader

Books on the Bus

an update 

I always have a book with me including when I ride the bus. When I am out and about I prefer to leave the heavyweight tomes at home so my current reading that includes: The Symposium, a dialogue by Plato;  The Brothers Karamazov;  and the Essais of Montaigne, all of which are left on a table next to my comfortable reading chair.

On a recent morning I was reading the short novel The Country of Pointed Firs by Sarah Orne Jewett as I rode the bus headed downtown.  Similarly, some years ago,  when I rode downtown and back to meet some former coworkers for lunch I took along Gene Smith's slight but fascinating biography of Woodrow Wilson's last years, When The Cheering Stopped: The Last Years of Woodrow Wilson.  Now what do these two disparate books have in common? They are both lightweight and easy to carry and it also takes a little less concentration to read them than that required for Dostoevsky or Plato.

While I enjoy reading as I travel I equally enjoy noticing what my fellow bus riders are reading. There are always a few readers on board any bus with more than a handful of passengers. Call me a biblio-voyeur if you will, but I cannot deny my interest. Usually the books are not worth the glance, for the buses are filled with people reading Twilight or its clones, the latest romance novel or some Ludlumesque thriller-chiller (all of which I personally find unreadable - but that's just one reader's perspective).

Not to long ago just after I had finished reading the novel Less by Andrew Sean Greer I was riding the bus headed downtown and the fellow who sat down next to me pulled out the same book - needless to say a brief genial conversation ensued.  This reminded me of previous occasions when I encountered people with various reading material including  Knowles' A Separate Peace, and Complications: A Surgeon's Notes on an Imperfect Science by Atul Gawande. Now those are both books worthy of consideration, in fact I've read A Separate Peace more than once. They provide evidence that there is a bit of gold among the dross of the many books being read on the bus. 

It reminds me of yet another time several years ago that I struck up a conversation with someone who was reading No Ordinary Time: Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt: The Home Front in World War II by Doris Kearns Goodwin. I had recently read it myself and could not help sharing the joy of the experience by discussing the book with a fellow reader - no stranger, for we were connected by our shared reading. While that does not happen often since I usually have my nose buried in a book, there is nothing like taking books with you and reading them on buses -  enjoying them while traveling to and fro.

Convention versus Nature

Cratylus/Parmenides/Greater 

Hippias/Lesser Hippias 

by Plato

"there is an ancient saying, that 'hard is the knowledge of the good.'  And the knowledge of names is a great part of knowledge.  If I had not been poor, I might have heard the fifty-drachma course of the great Prodicus, which is a complete education in grammar and language--these are his own words--and then I should have been at once able to answer your question about the correctness of names.  But, indeed, I have only heard the single-drachma course, and therefore, I do not know the truth about such matters; I will, however, gladly assist you and Cratylus in the investigation of them.  When he declares that your name is not really Hermogenes, I suspect that he is only making fun of you;--he means to say that you are no true son of Hermes, because you are always looking after a fortune and never in luck.  But, as I was saying, there is a good deal of difficulty in this sort of knowledge, and therefore we had better leave the question open until we have heard both sides." - Plato, Cratylus


This volume of Plato's works served as one of the sources for reading and discussion in a class on both Plato's philosophy and the nature of Words in the Basic Program of Liberal Education of The University of Chicago. 

The formal topic of the Cratylus is ‘correctness of names’, a hot topic in the late fifth century BC when the dialogue has its dramatic setting. Sophists like Prodicus offered training courses in this subject, sometimes perhaps meaning by it little more than lessons in correct diction. But that practical issue spawned the theoretical question, what criteria determine the correct choice of name for any given object? And in the Cratylus Socrates' two primary interlocutors, Hermogenes and Cratylus (the latter of whom is reported by Aristotle to have been an early philosophical influence on Plato), represent two diametrically opposed answers to that question. It was particularly interesting to see the defense, by Plato, of an objective view as opposed to the relativism of the Sophists. 

The positions of Hermogenes and Cratylus have come to be known to modern scholarship as ‘conventionalism’ and ‘naturalism’ respectively. An extreme linguistic conventionalist like Hermogenes holds that nothing but local or national convention determines which words are used to designate which objects. The same names could have been attached to quite different objects, and the same objects given quite different names, so long as the users of the language were party to the convention. Cratylus, as an extreme linguistic naturalist, holds that names cannot be arbitrarily chosen in the way that conventionalism describes or advocates, because names belong naturally to their specific objects. If you try to speak of something with any name other than its natural name, you are simply failing to refer to it at all. For example, he has told Hermogenes to the latter's intense annoyance, Hermogenes is not actually his name.

Socrates is the main speaker in this dialogue, and his arguments are generally taken to represent Plato's own current views. He starts out by criticizing conventionalism, and persuades Hermogenes that some kind of naturalism must be endorsed. In the final part of the dialogue Socrates turns to Cratylus and shows him that his expectations as a naturalist are set impossibly high: names cannot aspire to being perfect encapsulations of their objects' essences, and some  element of convention must be conceded.

This is one of the dialogues that reminded me of the integral connections between Plato and Aristotle in Greek philosophy.  Combined with readings of Hamlet and The Adventures of Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass, this class took on an ambiance and an aura that I have never forgotten (especially since it occurred more than two decades ago). The importance of words and the source of their meaning took on a new perspective as we discussed the use of language by these authors in light of Plato's philosophical dialogue.

Seeking Understanding

Tallyho - The Hunt for Virtue: Beauty, Truth and Goodness: Nine Dialogues by Plato: Phaedrus, Lysis, Protagoras, Charmides, Parmenides, Gorgias, Theatetus, Meno, and Sophist 
by Phillip Lundberg



"Bethink yourself, now, Theaetetus, that in a more prudent manner you won't beleive to know what you don't know.  For only to this extent is my art capable and of nothing more, no too do I understand anything like the others, thses great men of the present and of former times, those who are so worthy of marvel.  But this artistry of midwifery, this my profession was imparted both to me and to my mother from God"(210d, p458)




This is a refreshing new translation of nine of Plato's most important dialogues. The dialogues include Phaedrus, Protagoras, and Gorgias among others.

An informative introduction provides both explanations and a defense for the selection and, most importantly, describes the unique nature of these translations. The dialogues are all translated from the classic German translation of Friedrich Daniel Ernst Schleiermacher (1768-1834) . According to the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy "Schleiermacher's translations appeared during the period 1804-28 (though not all of the dialogues were translated in the end), and are still widely used and admired today."
Not only does the translator use Schleiermacher's translations as his source, he recommends and defends Schleiermacher's unorthodox categorization of Plato's dialogues which places Phaedrus and Parmenides in the first of three groupings with The Republic relegated to the third.

The dialogues are engaging and readable in this modern translation that benefits from using the German as its source rather than the original ancient Greek. This reader found the sectional introductions to each dialogue helpful, while judicious use of footnotes provided connections between dialogues of key ideas. The translation was used by our literary study group profitably as a source for a lively discussion of Plato's philosophy, Socrates as presented by Plato, and the importance of philosophy for our lives. Overall I would recommend this selection of dialogues with its unique translation, to all readers interested in enhancing their understanding of Plato's thought.

A Commonplace Entry

Phaedrus



“Only a philosopher's mind grows wings, since its memory always keeps it as close as possible to those realities by being close to which the gods are divine.”  ― Plato, Phaedrus







"Phaedrus: . . . But let’s be going, since now even the stifling heat is more gentle.

Socrates: Shouldn’t we pray to the gods here before going?

Phaedrus: Yes, surely.

Socrates: Dear Pan and ye other gods who dwell here, grant that I may become beautiful within and that my worldly belongings be in accord with my inner self. May I consider the wise man rich and have only as much gold as a moderate man can carry and use.

Is there anything else we need, Phaedrus? For me, our prayer was said with due measure.

Phaedrus: Make it a prayer for me, too. Friends have things in common.

Socrates: Let’s be going."

That is ending of the Phaedrus.   Here we find the beauty of a friendship portrayed eloquently. Plato assures us that they have indeed, not just in story, shared “with due measure” an outpouring of divinity together; Socrates offers this noble prayer that the beauty of soul they have turned round and round in their talking may be theirs, but Phaedrus completes, perfects the prayer making it also his own, showing in this small but decisive way that he has accepted Socrates’ offer of love, and will share the poverty and riches of his rhetoric, to guide and stir each other on the way to truth. “ἴωμεν” — “Let’s be going.” They have this way reached an agreement with each other and with themselves; they have arrived where now their conversation something holds in common, something divine. And more talk is no longer needful. “Is there anything else we need Phaedrus?” Nothing else, but to take the double riches of sharing the best things with one you love.


"Phaedrus" from the Dialogues of Plato.

Plato's Republic as recreated by Athena

The Just City 
by Jo Walton


“Know Thyself. It’s good advice. Know yourself. You are worth knowing. Examine your life. The unexamined life is not worth living. Be aware that other people have equal significance. Give them the space to make their own choices, and let their choices count as you want them to let your choices count. Remember that excellence has no stopping point and keep on pursuing it. Make art that can last and that says something nobody else can say. Live the best life you can, and become the best self you can. You cannot know which of your actions is the lever that will move worlds. Not even Necessity knows all ends. Know yourself.”  ― Jo Walton, The Just City


This was the latest book discussed in our monthly SF reading group.  The author, Jo Walton, presents a Utopian world modeled on the Republic of Plato. In doing so she creates a story that is a blend of fantasy and science fiction with the emphasis on the former. This raised a perennial question for the group: is this book a science fiction novel or not? My response is to consider it an example of speculative fiction as discussed and defined by Margaret Atwood and others.

In this book we have a new city created on an island by the Greek goddess, Pallas Athene. While Apollo, her brother, is involved as well (he chooses to participate in the experiment in human form), the main characters are young children, teachers, Masters, and some robots, all of whom have been brought together to form the Just City as defined in the Republic of Plato. Among the major characters is a student, Simmea, from Egypt who demonstrates a thirst for knowledge that would make Socrates proud. There is also a teacher, Maia, formerly a Victorian lady who is brought to the city by Athene when she makes a prayer to her. Other primary characters include a boy named Kebes and Pytheas (Apollo). There are other famous figures that are brought together as masters for the students, but none more famous than Socrates.

The masters are generally happy to build and live in the Just City, but not all the children are, especially since it’s suggested that the masters encouraged the growth of slavery in various eras by purchasing so many children. No matter that the children are well-treated and educated, they're not allowed to leave and must follow strict rules whose provenance they can’t entirely understand, since they’re not even allowed to read The Republic. The justness of the City becomes even more questionable when evidence accumulates that the mechanical workers used in place of slaves may actually be sentient.

It is when Socrates joins the city and brings his traditional questioning method that the utopian project really begins to experience significant growing pains. It is when the restraints imposed by the city as defined by Plato become too difficult for those in the city to follow that the story becomes both more interesting and sometimes unappealing. It is when the rigidity of the ideal city as defined by Plato creates a world where freedom becomes "freedom to obey", not freedom to question and act based on the reasoning of your own mind. This dichotomy is exacerbated by Socrates' insistence on dialogues with the students. After all, Socrates did not create the City or its rules. Here is an example from a dialogue between Socrates and one of the students about the system of taking children away from their parents and raising them together:
"'But you will say, will you not, that the purpose of the system is not to maximize individual happiness but the justice of the whole city?'
'Yes,' she said.
'And how does this maximize justice?'
'People do not form individual attachments but are attached to all the others, and people do not care about their own children than all the children of the city.'
'But that's nonsense,' Socrates said gently. 'They do form individual attachments, they're just pursuing them in secret. And they do care more about their own children, they're just prevented from seeing them.'" (p 352)
Athene interjects that there are good reasons for this such as avoiding the development of family rivalries. That does not persuade either the children or Socrates.

There’s often more thought experiment than plot here. The fictional and mythological protagonists have a certain appeal, but it’s disappointing that Walton barely sketches most of the historical characters who play minor roles in the story—readers will have to do the research themselves in order to flesh them out. The best aspect of this novel is the way that the students develop, socialize, and learn about the world. While the prose sometimes reminded me of a "Young Adult" novel, despite that possible drawback the combination of philosophic discussion and ideas was both entertaining and thought-provoking. It helps if you have previously read Plato's Republic, but if you haven't and are interested in the ideas presented here you may be encouraged to pick it up and read the original for yourself.



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Thoughts on Death and Dying

Philosophy as the Art and Practice of Dying



"While I thought I was learning how to live, I have been learning how to die."  (Leonardo Da Vinci, Notebooks, p. 65)




Are we all learning how to die as we learn how to live?  This is one of the questions discussed in a course I recently took on "Philosophy as the Art and Practice of Dying".  The view expressed by Leonardo is not too dissimilar from that of Plato as demonstrated in his dialogue, The Phaedo, about Socrates's death.  He argued that the best life is one where we practice the art of dying for we will be going to a better place.  This view was rejected by the poet Lucretius who expressed a more natural view in his poem On the Nature of Things.  He claimed that death was the end for both the body and the soul.
"you must concede, still, that the soul is mortal:  what matter whether it's lost, dispersed in air, or drawn in, crushed, contracted into nothing?  In the whole man, the senses more and more are failing, and less and less is left of life." (Lucretius, p 69)
Yes, for Lucretius, the world of nature and that of man were one and there was no soul that could depart upon the death of the body and continue on eternally.  But so what?  What difference does it make whether there is a soul that outlasts the body?  Apparently this means a lot to many thinkers, not to mention the religious whose faith in the afterlife is a dogma that is fundamental to their belief.

What do these differing views of death and dying suggest to us?  What follows are some of my disparate thoughts upon reading what several authors had to say about this.  While contemplating the death of Socrates I considered the importance of judging.  That is judging what kind of life one should live and whether it depended on your notions (or Socrates) of whether there is an afterlife.  Can we "free our minds" in any literal or physical sense?  It seems that metaphorically this would help us develop some objectivity towards ourselves and others.  Perhaps we could develop empathy for others.  This is certainly possible for thinkers like Adam Smith who argued for a natural sense of empathy in his Theory of Moral Sentiments.  In Socrates case he demonstrated his teaching by the conduct of his own life up to and including the final act of taking the hemlock.

Why should we live a life of reflection and examination?  Some later thinkers like Rilke and Heidegger argue for developing an authentic life through developing a life that is lived for oneself.  Here is what Rilke says:
"Who is there today who still cares about a well-finished death?  No one.  Even the rich, who could after all afford this luxury, are beginning to grow lazy and indifferent;  the desire to have a death of one's own is becoming more and more rare.  In a short time it will be as rare as a life of one's own." (Rilke, The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge, trans. Stephen Mitchell, pp. 8-9)
This suggests that an authentic death is connected with living an authentic life and one must care to live a life filled with desire for living to expect such an authentic life, much less a death of one's own.  Berthold Brecht put it more succinctly, "Do not fear death so much, but rather the inadequate life." (Brecht, The Mother, p 117)  And in his film The Seventh Seal Ingmar Bergman demonstrates through the actions of the Knight and his squire the importance of a meaningful act for one to have an authentic or adequate life.

Modern thinkers have managed to add to the complications surrounding these issues in their attempts to provide some answers or at least ways to frame the issues.  In literature Tolstoy seems to provide the most complete portrait of a death in The Death of Ivan Ilyich.  Yet Iris Murdoch takes another view of this: "It is not easy to portray death, real death, not fake prettified death.  Even Tolstoy did not really manage it in Ivan Ilyich, although he did elsewhere(Murdoch, Iris, "The Sovereignty of Good Over Other Concepts", in Existentialists and Mystics, p. 385)  Perhaps she was referring to the death of Prince Andrei in War & Peace.  The philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein suggested an altenative explanation when he said, "Death is not an event in life: we do not live to experience death." (Ludwig Wittgenstein, The Tractatus).

Some final thoughts on the art and practice of dying:
Paul Tillich had this to say about Socrates:  "The courage of Socrates (in Plato's picture) was based not on a doctrine of the immortality of the soul but on the affirmation of himself in his essential, indestructible being.  He knows that he belongs to two orders of reality and that the one order is transtemporal.  It was the courage of Socrates which more than any other philosophical reflection revealed to the ancient world that everyone belongs to two orders (The Courage to Be, p. 169)

Some of us are not convinced of these two orders and would turn to a view described by Paul Ricoeur in his criticism of Heidegger, "If it is true that the banalization of dying at the level of the "they" amounts to flight, does not the anguished obsession with death amount to closing off the reserves of openness characterizing the potentiality of being?  Must one not, then, listen to Spinoza: "Free man thinks of nothing less than of death and his wisdom is a meditation not on death but on life" (Ethics, part 4, prop. 67)?  Does not the jubilation produced buy the cow--which I take as my own--to remain alive until . . . and not for death, put into relief by contrast the existentiell, partial, and unavoidably one-sided aspect of Heideggerian resoluteness in the face of dying?"(Ricoeur, Memory, History, Forgetting, p. 357)

While this view is complicated by the reference to Heideggerian concepts the central comment by Spinoza is one that resonates with this reader.  I think it is a point on which to end this brief discussion and a point on which to begin a continuation of thinking about these ideas.

A Discourse on some Platonic Dialogues

Discovering Plato 
by Alexandre Koyré


"The reader would like nothing better than to learn the answers to the problems placed before him by Socrates.  But those answers are just what Socrates most often denies him.  The dialogues, at least the so-called Socratic dialogues, the only ones which will concern us here, leave us up in the air.  The discussion ends upon a note of impotence with an avowal of ignorance." ( p 1)



This short book includes much more "food for thought" than many tomes more than twice its' size. Alexandre Koyre demonstrates an incisive erudition in his commentary on four of Plato's greatest dialogues; these include the Meno, the Theatetus, the Protagoras, and the Republic. The Republic takes up about half of the short book presenting a focus on politics and on the just city.

Beginning with the lesson from the Meno that virtue is not taught, but it can be taught. The same subject is discussed in the Protagoras, yet in a different and, according to Koyre, more amusing way. The further discussions of Theatetus and Republic are equally inviting and challenging as far as they go.  They suggest ways we may conceive of knowledge and elucidate how theory and action may work in combination in both philosophy and politics.  Is there such a thing as a just city?  This book provides direction toward how to think about this and other topics.  Ultimately it is a good introduction to both the philosophy of Plato and the acute analytical thought of Alexandre Koyre. The result is both invigorating and engaging for the reader.


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No Man is an Island

Notes on John Donne, IV

Donne and Death

"Death is finished.  It is no more"  -  Last words of Ivan Ilych*

Holy Sonnet 6

Death, be not proud, though some have called thee
Mighty and dreadful, for thou art not so;
For those whom thou think'st thou dost overthrow
Die not, poor Death, nor yet canst thou kill me.
From rest and sleep, which but thy pictures be,
Much pleasure; then from thee much more must flow,
And soonest our best men with thee do go,
Rest of their bones, and soul's delivery.
Thou art slave to fate, chance, kings, and desperate men,
And dost with poison, war, and sickness dwell,
And poppy or charms can make us sleep as well
And better than thy stroke; why swell'st thou then?
One short sleep past, we wake eternally
And death shall be no more; Death, thou shalt die.

What is death?  In Donne's sonnet it is a person to whom the poet speaks directly, "Death, be not proud, though some have called thee Mighty and dreadful, for thou art not so."   Note the comma which segregates death from the characteristics which the poet attributes to death.   He follows these words in lines 9-10 with a seemingly audacious claim about death, "Thou'rt slave to fate, chance, kings, and desperate men, And dost with poison, war, and sickness dwell."  So be it, yes Donne was obsessed with death.  However this was limited to certain types of death.  His view minimizing the power of death went against the more popular view of death as espoused by Sir Walter Raliegh and others of the just and might of death.   Donne's arguments in this famous sonnet are not very strong, however, and seem to lack a recognizable logical order.   He is even confused as to whether sleep is better than death or the reverse.  The apparent self-assurance of the poem collapses with the final two lines:
"One short sleep past, we wake eternally
And death shall be no more;  Death, thou shalt die."

Elsewhere (in "A Hymn to God the Father") he has shared his anxiety regarding death more directly,
"I have a sin of fear, that when I have spun
My last thread, I shall perish on the shore."
We also see in the Holy Sonnet an attempt to minimize death through a reassurance that sleep achieved through drugs or magic is better than the "stroke" of death.
  
My own fascination with the poet and his poem reminds me of the attempts by others to reassure their friends and family.  Socrates did so in the Phaedo by describing his life as one long attempt to prepare for death.  His view was echoed and enhanced by Montaigne who, In his essay titled “That to Study Philosophy is to Learn to Die,”  turns to mortality and points to the understanding of death as a prerequisite for the understanding of life, for the very art of living. 
"[L]et us learn bravely to stand our ground, and fight him. And to begin to deprive him of the greatest advantage he has over us, let us take a way quite contrary to the common course. Let us disarm him of his novelty and strangeness, let us converse and be familiar with him, and have nothing so frequent in our thoughts as death. "(Montaigne, Essays)
This is different than the words of Ivan Ilych quoted above that instead seem to echo Donne.  
But one more example from my reading can be found in Rainier Maria Rilke's beautiful novel, The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge.  Through Rilke's fascination with faces and appearances the importance of constructing an authentic life is emphasized. This becomes a prerequisite for the prospect of a unique personal death. Death itself is a character in the novel, a "terrible rival", which may seem stronger than the living in its tolling.

The tolling of the bell in Rilke's novel signalling death brings us back to Donne who penned these famous lines:

"No man is an island, entire of itself;  every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main.  If a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as well as if a manor of thy friend's or of thine own were:  any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind, and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls;  it tolls for thee." (Devotions upon Emergent Occasions, 17)

Rhetoric as an Art

Persuasion, Seduction, and Con-jobs:

Rhetoric and Propaganda

a lecture by Michaelangelo Allocca

"The broad masses of a nation are always more easily corrupted in the deeper strata of their emotional nature than consciously or voluntarily," is chilling, even if you don't know that Hitler said it in Mein Kampf, about the efficacy of the "big lie."  Yet the nature of rhetoric as an art which sways audiences through emotional seduction, at least as much as through rational persuasion, has been recognized as far back as Socrates. (from the introduction to the lecture)

George Orwell wrote in 1944 that "Only a few exceptionally gifted speakers can achieve the simplicity and intelligibility which even the most tongue-tied person achieves in ordinary conversation." ("Propaganda and Demotic Speech").  While his point was that most speakers are unable to produce a speech in reasonably conversational English, his argument suggests to me a question:  what makes powerful speeches effective, above and beyond simplicity and intelligibility?

Last Friday Michaelangelo Allocca, Staff Chair and Instructor, Basic Program of Liberal Education for Adults , the University of Chicago, presented a lecture that provided an answer to that question.  The lecturer opened with a quote from William Penn on the potential for misuse of rhetoric:  "There is a truth and beauty in rhetoric; but it oftener serves ill turns than good ones.”  Throughout the lecture he used references to thinkers from the age of Socrates and Aristotle to the present one, thus providing a tour guide to the basics of rhetoric and propaganda with examples from "a few exceptionally gifted speakers". 
The lecture continued with the quote from Hitler (above) and a definition of propaganda proposed by Antonio Gramsci, the Italian linguist, sociologist, and Marxist theoretician.  He equated propaganda with the world view of a power structure.  In Gramsci's terms use of the media as propaganda enable a certain world view.  A popular example provided in the lecture was the Super Bowl as a cultural event.  

We can trace the origins of speech and rhetoric back to Classical Greece with in the dialogues of Plato.  For example, in the Phaedrus he describes speech as a type of seduction, an instance of the power of Eros in human lives.( Phaedrus, 258d)  The discussion in this dialogue highlights the connection between speech making and love.  Plato's student Aristotle defined rhetoric based on his observations in his book entitled On Rhetoric.  Here Aristotle categorized rhetoric into three types of persuasion, namely:  those derived from the character (ethos) of the speaker, when speaking he shows himself fair minded and trustworthy;  those derived from emotion (pathos) aroused by a speaker in an audience;  and those derived from true or likely argument (logos).  Rhetoric is seen as a sort of offshoot of, or counterpart to, dialectic.    Further, Aristotle identified types of rhetoric by the purpose for which it was used.  There are also three of these:  parliamentary  or deliberative regarding an action in the future;  judicial regarding an action in the past;  and praise or blame without judgement of a past or future action (epideictic).  



The lecture continued with examples from literature and history.  In Shakespeare's drama Julius Caesar we see Brutus followed by Mark Antony both making effective speeches demonstrating these principles.  Yet, there are modern examples in the speeches of Adolf Hitler (as documented in the film Triumph of the Will and elsewhere) and John F. Kennedy's inaugural address.  Perhaps the best examples of great rhetoric can be found in the speeches of Abraham Lincoln.  This was an enlightening and rhetorically pleasing lecture that truly demonstrated its subject.

All Art is Propaganda: Critical Essays,  George Orwell.  Harcourt, 2008.

On Rhetoric: A Theory of Civic Discourse,  Aristotle, George A. Kennedy, trans.  Oxford University, 1991.

Selections from the Prison Notebooks,  Antonio Gramsci.  International Publishers, 1971.

Impulse of Eros

Death in Venice 
by Thomas Mann


"Amor, in sooth, is like the mathematician who in order to give children a knowledge of pure form must do so in the language of pictures;  so, too, the god, in order to make visible the spirit, avails himself of the forms and colours of human youth, gilding it with all imaginable beauty that it may serve memory as a tool, the very sight of which then sets us afire with pain and longing." (p 44)



On the second page of this fine short novel the protagonist, Gustave von Aschenbach, goes on a walk to "refresh" himself and soon finds himself in a cemetery whose mortuary is "a structure in the Byzantine style".  Like a wind from the East the place mesmerizes him with mystical symbols until he is "brought back to reality by the sight of a man standing in the portico". This man presents an exotic visage with red hair and represents a motif that will recur several times during the story. The image of this man, perhaps, leads Aschenbach to a simple longing for travel and then a hallucination that suggests the impulse of Eros or the throes of Dionysus. Whichever it is the setting is ominous as we are reminded that "his life was on the wane" and he plans to travel south on a journey.

The narrative takes the writer Gustav von Aschenbach to Venice, where he falls in love with an adolescent boy before subsequently dying in the cholera-stricken city. Mann’s masterly command of language and play with mythology, his psychological profile of the artistic mind, and the novella’s contrast between cold artistic discipline and the power of Eros is magnificent both in its form and substance.

Aschenbach is introduced as an esteemed author who has produced literary works known for their formalism and neo-classical style. He has chosen an ascetic, disciplined life, a life of “noble purity, simplicity and symmetry”, for the sake of his creativity, success and national reputation. At the beginning of Death in Venice, we find the fifty-three year old writer unable to write a perfectly balanced work. The walk he takes at the beginning of the narrative occurs in an unnamed town that can be identified as Munich. The year, presented in the text as “19—”, is actually 1911. Since Mann opted not to provide a precise date, the narrative contains a timeless, ahistorical dimension despite being grounded in contemporary events.

In the figure of a stranger whom Aschenbach sees at the mortuary, Mann alludes to medieval personifications of death, and also to the Greek god Hermes, the guide to the Underworld. But the messenger of death is also a messenger of life. The text links him to the cult of life and the god of Asian origins, Dionysus. Mann's original intention was to write a treatise on the Nietzschean contrast between the god of reason, Apollo, and the god of unreason, Dionysus.  In his description of Aschenbach’s journey into Venice, Mann includes encounters with a Charon-like figure, and an old queen of a man bereft of dignity. These characters echo the original man he met in the cemetery and serve as messengers signalling Aschenbach’s looming fate, and as conspicuous representations of the transience and ugliness of life.

The Venice depicted by Mann is "the fallen queen, flattering and dubious beauty . . . half fairy tale, half tourist trap". It is a vision presented in its sordid reality and in its mythical splendor. At the hotel Aschenbach catches sight of a beautiful, fourteen-year-old Polish boy named Tadzio who is vacationing with his family. Aschenbach is immediately attracted to his idealized perfection, comparing him to a Greek statue and an artistic masterpiece. Although the sultry air of Venice makes him feel unwell, he reverses his intention to leave the city. From now on, his life is controlled by Eros, his desire, as he continues to observe Tadzio.

With references to the Platonic idea that physical attraction inspired by Eros leads to spiritual knowledge, Mann diverts readers from the fact that Aschenbach’s attraction to Tadzio is primarily physical, not metaphysical. The ability of Thomas Mann to weave together character and theme and setting to achieve this perfection is uncanny and I do not believe he achieved any better in his longer fictions, great as they are. This is also one of the few novels that received a superlative treatment on film though, in the end, Visconti's film does not surpass the original.

View all my reviews

Education: From Plato to MOOCs

With the internet, new education technologies are arriving at a quickening pace, such as the free online courses known as MOOCs (for massively open online courses). These have sparked intense debate about the role of the classroom and the long term fate of traditional learning institutions. Yet new technologies have long spurred such debate. With the advent of the printing press and textbooks in the late 1400s and 1500s, some predicted that classroom teaching would no longer be needed. In Plato's era (429-347 B.C.E.), writing had begun to spread beyond the elite scribes to a broader segment of the population after the introduction of a true alphabet by the Phoenicians to the Greeks. Famously, in his book Phaedrus, Plato decried that more widely spread use of writing as detrimental to the attainment of wisdom. In it, he used the character of Socrates to proclaim that writing "is an aid not to memory, but to reminiscence, and you give your disciples not truth, but only the semblance of truth; they will be hearers of many things and will have learned nothing; they will appear to be omniscient and will generally know nothing; they will be tiresome company, having the show of wisdom without the reality." The passage from Phaedrus where this quote appears is shown below:

 
"SOCRATES: Enough appears to have been said by us of a true and false art of speaking.


PHAEDRUS: Certainly.

SOCRATES: But there is something yet to be said of propriety and impropriety of writing.

PHAEDRUS: Yes. ...

SOCRATES: At the Egyptian city of Naucratis, there was a famous old god, whose name was Theuth; the bird which is called the Ibis is sacred to him, and he was the inventor of many arts, such as arithmetic and calculation and geometry and astronomy and draughts and dice, but his great discovery was the use of letters. Now in those days the god Thamus was the king of the whole country of Egypt; and he dwelt in that great city of Upper Egypt which the Hellenes call Egyptian Thebes, and the god himself is called by them Ammon. To him came Theuth and showed his inventions, desiring that the other Egyptians might be allowed to have the benefit of them; he enumerated them, and Thamus enquired about their several uses, and praised some of them a censured others, as he approved or disapproved of them. It would take a long time to repeat all that Thamus said to Theuth in praise or blame of the various arts. But when they came to letters, 'This,' said Theuth, 'will make the Egyptians wiser and give them better memories; it is a specific both for the memory and for the wit.' Thamus replied: 'O most ingenious Theuth, the parent or inventor of an art is not always the best judge of the utility or inutility of his own inventions to the users of them. And in this instance, you who are the father of letters, from a paternal love of your own children have been led to attribute to them a quality which they cannot have; for this discovery of yours will create forgetfulness in the learners' souls, because they will not use their memories; they will trust to the external written characters and not remember of themselves. The specific which you have discovered is an aid not to memory, but to reminiscence, and you give your disciples not truth, but only the semblance of truth; they will be hearers of many things and will have learned nothing; they will appear to be omniscient and will generally know nothing; they will be tiresome company, having the show of wisdom without the reality.' ...

PHAEDRUS: I acknowledge the justice of your rebuke; and I think that the Theban is right in his view about letters.

SOCRATES: He would be a very simple person, and quite a stranger to the oracles of Thamus or Ammon, who should leave in writing or receive in writing any art under the idea that the written word would be intelligible or certain; or who deemed that writing was at all better than knowledge and recollection of the same matters?

PHAEDRUS: That is most true.

SOCRATES: I cannot help feeling, Phaedrus, that writing is unfortunately like painting; for the creations of the painter have the attitude of life, and yet if you ask them a question they preserve a solemn silence. And the same may be said of speeches. You would imagine that they had intelligence, but if you want to know anything and put a question to one of them, the speaker always gives one unvarying answer. And when they have been once written down they are tumbled about anywhere among those who may or may not understand them, and know not to whom they should reply, to whom not: and, if they are maltreated or abused, they have no parent to protect them; and they cannot protect or defend themselves.

PHAEDRUS: That again is most true."


Author: Plato, translated by Benjamin Jowett 
Title: Phaedrus
Publisher: Actonian Press; 2.0.0 edition (January 19, 2010)

Phaedrus by Plato translated by Benjamin Jowett  pub. by Actonian Press; 2.0.0 edition (January 19, 2010)  

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Serendipity

Xenophon and Sterne

Last weekend serendipity (the faculty or phenomenon of finding valuable or agreeable things not sought for; also : an instance of this.) struck with the correspondence between a First Friday lecture "On the Socratic Xenophon" and a reading discussion Sunday morning of Tristram Shandy (Volume 2, Chapter XLVIII).  What you may ask do these two events share in common?  Well first I will briefly discuss the First Friday lecture and then conclude with an answer based on our reading of Sterne' Tristram.

The Lecture:

On Friday last George Anastaplo, Instructor in the Basic Program of Liberal Education for Adults at the University of Chicago, lectured "On the Socratic Xenophon".  He opened with a comparison of Xenophon's portrait of Socrates in his "The Apology of Socrates" and "The Memorabilia" with Plato's portrayal of Socrates in his own "Apology of Socrates".  Mr. Anastaplo conjectured that Xenophon, had he been present, could have persuaded the jury to not convict Socrates.  Xenophon's portrait of Socrates appears less offensive to the cultural norms of the jurors with a practical concern for everyday activities that does not appear in the Platonic portrayal.  Most importantly this reflected Xenophon's own reverence for the gods of Athens.  There are similarities between the two portraits including the presence of Socrates's "daimon".  Notable also is the importance for practical education in Xenophon's portrait of Socrates.  Again there appears a distinction between the Platonic Socrates who questioned to the point of disturbing many, Athenians about their possession of wisdom and the Socrates of Xenophon's writing who did not appear nearly as radical in his activities.  The distinction makes one wonder if the Socrates of Xenophon would reasonably be condemned to death.  On the other hand, as noted in Mr. Anastaplo's introductory remarks for the lecture, it was a wonder that the Socrates of Plato's Apology survived "into his seventieth year" with his critical questioning of Athenians as he was spurred on by the pronouncement of the Oracle at Delphi.
The lecture raised questions and successfully, for this listener, suggested further reading an thought is warranted on these and other aspects of Socrates' life and thought.

Tristram Shandy

To my surprise on Sunday morning as we discussed our continuing reading of The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman by Laurence Sterne we encountered the following statement:
"The first thing which entered my father’s head […] was to sit down coolly, after the example of Xenophon, and write a TRISTRA-poedia, or system of education for me…" (Vol 2, p 144).
Yes. Tristram was describing his father's attempt to collect "his own scattered thoughts, counsels, and notions", to provide an "Institute" for his education through childhood and adolescence.  This activity demonstrated some of that sort of practical advice that represents the Xenophon who was described so eloquently in the lecture I had attended only two days earlier.  Just as Walter Shandy had studied Xenophon and chose to pass on some of his wisdom to his son Tristram we too may continue to benefit from the lessons of this Greek author and thinker.  It is for me an example of serendipitous listening and reading and, hopefully, learning from the great writers of Western culture.

Tristram Shandy by Laurence Sterne. Everyman's Library, 1991 (1768)

A Theory of Bull

On Bull: Art/Truth/Lying 

a lecture by Michaelangelo Allocca

"One of the most salient features of our culture is that there is so much bull..." was the beginning of the philosopher Harry Frankfurt's seminal 1986 essay. He then observed that while most people feel they can recognize it, there was no theory on it, and attempted to remedy that lack. We will explore the ways that this category occupies a conceptual middle ground between truth and lying, and its overlap with similar borderline categories such as "art," "literature," and "rhetoric." (from the description of the Lecture at The Basic Program web site)

In 1986 the philosopher Harry Frankfurt,  professor emeritus of philosophy at Princeton University, wrote an essay, "On Bullshit".   Originally published in the journal Raritan, the essay was republished as a separate volume in 2005 and became a nonfiction bestseller, spending twenty-seven weeks on the New York Times Best Seller list.   Yesterday Michaelangelo Allocca, Instructor and Chair of the Basic Program of Liberal Education for Adults at the University of Chicago, gave a lecture on this topic.
The topic was introduced as a question of language:  Is Bullshit merely vulgar or indecent or more.  More important is the question raised in the prefatory comments for the lecture: what is the relationship between truth, lying, and bullshit?  There seems to be a cultural standard for the meaning for bullshit (or bull as it is abbreviated for the squeamish).  Most people recognize what is being referred to when somebody announces that "such and such" is bullshit, even if they may not choose to use the term themselves.  According to Professor Frankfurt the meaning of the term bullshit exists in a middle ground somewhere between truth and lying.  Bullshit is certainly not the truth, but its use conveys something that is not quite lying either.
Mr. Allocca referenced an earlier philosopher, Max Black (1909-1988).  Black, a British-American philosopher, was a leading influential figure in analytic philosophy in the first half of the twentieth century. He made contributions to the philosophy of language, the philosophy of mathematics and science, and the philosophy of art.  In one of his essays, "The Prevalence of Humbug", he concludes a rather thorough investigation of the use of the word with this definition:
"HUMBUG: deceptive misrepresentation, short of lying, especially by pretentious word or deed, of somebody's own thoughts, feelings, or attitudes."
This seems to be somewhat similar to what is referred to by many as bullshit.  Interestingly, Amazon.com pairs Max Black's essay Collection, The Prevalence of Humbug and Other Essays with Harry Frankfurt's essay as two books which are "frequently bought together".
The Oxford English Dictionary recognizes bullshit with a definition that states it is fakery  rather than falsity, with an emphasis on bluffing by talking nonsense.  That definition rings true since it seems reasonable to substitute nonsense for bullshit when describing such instances, especially if one prefers discretion as the better part of valor in the use of the English language.
When considering works of art the realm of bullshit seems to exist when the art is a fake.  Literary fakes and other phony artistic representations would seem also to warrant the designation as bullshit.  Art itself may be considered as inhabiting the middle ground between the truth and lying; one would hope on  higher aesthetic ground than mere bullshit.
The lecture also considered the philosophical aspects of bullshit.  The argument was presented that ethically bullshit is worse than lying.  This is because the liar is concerned with the truth, choosing falsehood instead;  forming an intention to not tell the truth is certainly dependent on knowing what the truth is.  The bullshit "artist", on the other hand, is completely unconcerned with the truth.  However, literature has has a tough time with the philosophers, starting with Plato in his dialogue on The Republic.  Though people would study the arts in Plato's Republic, he did not have much respect for the arts. Art was a copy of reality, which in turn is a pale representation of the exalted Forms. He believed that art did not belong in an ideal state. “No Artists Beyond this Point” would be prominently displayed at the gates of Plato's Republic.  Poetry would be banned as well. It speaks of the heart and inflames emotions, things that further entrench people in the material world. And the objective of the citizenry is to strive for the Ideal and avoid the animal passions that enslave people to this seriously flawed reality. Plato did not see art and poetry as inspiring and uplifting the human spirit. He viewed them as corrupting influences.  Poetry may not tell the truth, but it does not necessarily lie either.  Ethical philosophy may sometimes have a higher standard as in Kant's Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals where he puts forward the maxim that right action must be universally true for all. A will is good, Kant says, not because of what it achieves. It is good solely because of its willing. In other words, it must be “good in itself” without regard for consequences.  The truth must be adhered to no matter what the consequences.
What would a good discussion of bullshit be without some reference to political discourse.  Thus there were references to recent political campaigns of which the term malarkey reared it's head--quite appropriately, I believe.  One would hope that most bullshit is harmless, just as those little white lies may be harmless (although Kant would disagree).  The presentation by Mr. Allocca was alternately enlightening and humorous, with enough theoretical weight to lift it above and beyond any realm that inhabits the middle ground between the truth and lying.


On Bullshit by Harry Frankfurt. Princeton University Press, 2005.
The Prevalence of Humbug and Other Essays by Max Black. Cornell University Press, 1985.

Ambiguities of Eros

The Immoralist 
by André Gide


"The capacity to get free is nothing; the capacity to be free, that is the task."
    —from the first paragraph of The Immoralist (1902), by Andre Gide, who died on this day in 1951; the sentence became well known in the first half of the twentieth century, singled out not just by reviewers of the novel but by Camus and other European existentialists  

I read this book when I was in high school and did not appreciate it. Fortunately, I returned to it and have read it several times since then. While I think The Counterfeiters is a better novel I still hold this novella in great esteem. Gide's approach to the erotic continues to amaze me. The similarity of his demonstration of Eros here with Thomas Mann's approach in his novella, Death in Venice, is striking. Both are imbued with the influence of Nietzsche, but Mann takes a more classical philosophical approach with references to the ideal nature of love (see Plato's Phaedrus). Gide, on the other hand, has entered Freudian territory, not to mention his more existential approach, in his interpretation of the inner erotic man.
For Gide there is the search as embodied in the protagonist, Michel, who is trying to separate himself from his past. In North Africa, during a stay in Biskra, he watches in a mirror as a young boy, Moktir steals a pair of scissors. The scene does not disgust Michel. "Quite the contrary, I could not manage to convince myself that the feeling which filled me at that moment was anything but amusement, but delight."(p 44) His sensations build a sense of complicity between himself and Moktir and correspondingly enhances his separation from his past, from the European social milieu he desires to escape. Coming near the end of his stay in North Africa this episode is part of the culmination of his journey. It is a journey signified by reference to Homer's Odyssey (p 37), but more importantly one that is filled with a new freedom from his illness and his weakness, all engendered by a new ability to feel internal sensations.
"I had forgotten my exhaustion and my discomfort. I walked on in a kind of ecstasy, a silent happiness, an exaltation of the senses and the flesh."(p 39)
Michel's suppression of his homosexuality is more sensual and physical than the brittle death rattle of Gustave in Death in Venice. Yet at the same time he expresses this aspect himself by choosing favorites among the boys in North Africa. The search for the nature of one's self and a life of freedom has seldom been explored with such complexity as Gide does it here. There is an ambiguity throughout this novel that overpowered me on my first reading and continues to intrigue me and bring me back to The Immoralist again and again. I experienced a similar feeling upon encountering Edouard when reading The Counterfeiters.

The Immoralist by Andre Gide.  Trans. by Richard Howard.  Modern Library, 1983 (1902)