READING BERGSON - IV

READING BERGSON – IV

D. R. Khashaba

Bergson’s insistence on fitting the distinction between the qualitative and the quantitative into the Cartesian separation of mind and extension burdens him with needless complications and confusions. When Plato for a while took Socrates’ seminal distinction between the intelligible and the perceptible to imply separation, that created the perplexities and paradoxes he himself exposed in the first part of the Parmenides. Kant’s insightful distinction between the phenomenal and the noumenal, taken as constituting two parallel worlds, foiled his attempt to reconcile freedom and causality. Reality is one. Philosophy explores the inside, science describes the outside. But ‘the inside and the outside’ is a metaphor and, like all netaphor, when pressed, breaks down, Fur the subjective and the objective are not on the same plane of being: they are two different metaphysical dimensions.

Bergson writes: “What duration is there existing outside us? The present only, or, if we prefer the expression, simultaneity. No doubt external things change, but their moments do not succeed one another, if we retain the ordinary meaning of the word, except for a consciousness which keeps them in mind.” This is needlessly confused because Bergson mixes the scientific approach with the philosophical approach. All that is real is in duration, else becoming faces us with an unintelligible riddle. The present is a fiction. That the moments of external things “do not succeed one another” is the absurdity that Hume discovered in the abstraction of the objective approach. But to investigate things empirically we have to work with the fictions of time and simultaneity and discrete successive moments. The confusion is evident in the f0llowing paragraph which I quote in full:

“Thus in consciousness we find states which succeed, without being distinguished from one another; and in space simultaneities which, without succeeding, are distinguished from one another, in the sense that one has ceased to exist when the other appears. Outside us, mutual externality without succession; within us, succession without mutual externality.”

Bergson returns to criticizing Kant but I don’t find it necessary to add to what I have already said on this issue. Bergson introduced the notion of duration in philosophical discussion but left in Time and Free Will his presentation of this important notion is obscure and confused. Whitehead account of duration is richer and more profound. In Chapter Eight of Quest of Reality (2013) I wronged Whitehead for censuring Bergson for anti-intellectualism. I can now see Whitehead’s point.

Cairo, October 25, 2015.

READING BERGSON - III

READING BERGSON – III

D. R. Khashaba

Bergson heads Chapter 3 with a general outline of the conflict between mechanism and dynamism. I quote the opening paragraph in full:

“IT is easy to see why the question of free will brings into conflict these two rival systems of nature, mechanism and dynamism. Dynamism starts from the idea of voluntary activity, given by consciousness, and comes to represent inertia by gradually emptying this idea: it has thus no difficulty in conceiving free force on the one hand and matter governed by laws on the other. Mechanism follows the opposite course. It assumes that the materials which it synthesizes are governed by necessary laws, and although it reaches richer and richer combinations, which are more and more difficult to foresee, and to all appearance more and more contingent, yet it never gets out of the narrow circle of necessity within which it at first shut itself up. For dynamism facts more real than laws; mechanism reverses this attitude. The idea of spontaneity simpler than that of inertia.”

Independently of Bergson I have been asserting that causal necessity is a useful fiction of science and that all scientific laws are basically approximations. In place of dynamism I speak of creativity. In my philosophy creativity is an ultimate metaphysical principle. The simplest instance of becoming is creative and originative. To say that the antecedents cause the consequents is merely an empty manner of speaking that conceals the mystery of becoming; I say ‘empty’ because it is strictly meaningless. We are immediately aware of our spontaneity. The simplest voluntary act, though it requires its conditions and is inconceivable in the absence of its conditions, is yet creative and originative: it is a corruption of the term ‘explain’ to say that the antecedent conditions explain the act. When we come to the creativity of thought and the creativity of art it is only a superstition worse than all other superstitions that makes determinists deny what their immediate experience shows plainly. I have been saying this in all my writings: in “Free Will as Creativity” (The Sphinx and the Phoenix, 2009) I applied it to the pseudo-problem of the compatibility or incompatibility of freedom and causal determinism.

(Bergson’s terminology clashes with mine: I would never speak of “the fact as the absolute reality”, but that does not affect the fundamental agreement.)

Bergson’s further ‘explanations’ and his mixture of empirical investigations with philosophical elucidations confuse rather than clarify the issues. Philosophy should be concerned exclusively with creative notions that confer intelligibility on the dumb givennesses of experience. Further, as I affirmed repeatedly in my writings, the issue of free will is needlessly complicated by the confusion of free will and freedom of choice. Choice is an essentially human phenomenon; choice, like all happenings in nature, is always conditioned by its precedents and so is amenable to posterior reductionist empirical ‘explanation’, which does not however militate against its being in the end creative and originative like all happening and all becoming. Thus scientific ‘explanation’ reigns supreme in the fictional domain of scientific abstractions. Philosophy has nothing to do with all that beyond showing its fictionality.

The mind-body problem cannot be settled by controversy between the scientific and the philosophical outlooks. The mind is our inner reality; it is the integral integrative person, a metaphysical reality, not an entity localized in the brain or even in the whole soma. Every act, every feeling, every thought has an outside, an objective aspect that can, with sufficient sophistication, be subjected to objective observation and measurement, but however sophisticated, however ‘exhaustive’ our neurological observations and measurements may be they will never show the reality of the mind because that belongs to quite another dimension of being, the metaphysical dimension. Science studies the physical aspect, the outside side, of things; philosophy explores the inside that is inaccessible to objective observation and measurement. The scientific approach and the philosophical approach have no point of contact. Socrates said that two-and-a-half millennia ago but nobody is paying attention.

With Plato I call the subjective real, the only reality we know. I leave fact, existence, and truth to science. This clashes with common usage, but I find it necessary to separate the domains of scientific and philosophical thought, the confusion of which is harming both philosophy and science. Bergson’s futile arguments in defence of his philosophical insight provide evidence that mixing philosophy and science gets us nowhere. For instance, the principle of the conservation of energy is a fiction useful for the purposes of science, you can neither argue for it nor against it philosophically.

It is pointless to follow Bergson’s argument for “the hypothesis of a conscious force or free will” which may “escape the law of the conservation of energy”. This also goes for his arguments against psychological determinism.

The word freedom is unfortunate. The concept of freedom in connection with the free will issue is confused and confusing. Moral freedom is autonomy in Spinoza’s sense. But Spinoza accepted the Rationalist assumption of causal determinism unquestioningly. Autonomy does not preclude creativity and origination. On the contrary, autonomy is only intelligible as creative spontaneity. Kant too, for whom autonomy is the essence of morality, was misled by the assumption of causal determinism and futilely tried to reconcile freedom and physical causality. We have to realize that scientific causal laws are approximations that work well in the area of relative phenomenal regularities. That the sun will continue to shine is only true on the unexpressed proviso that no cosmic catastrophe befalls our galaxy. The concept of freedom has its proper place in politics and social life as absence of coercion.

Bergson says that “we are free when our acts spring from our whole personality”, which is to say when we act as free agents, but we are rarely that; most of the time we are fractions in a larger whole, physical, social, cultural. This is reminiscent of what is posited by scholars as the problem of Socrates’ ‘intellectualism’. Socrates says that when we know what is right we do what is right. To see the truth of this we have to equate knowing what is right with being a rational being, as Socrates does. When we are rational we act rationally. But when are we truly rational? The best of us only by fits and starts.

A section-rubric reads: “Fundamental error is confusion of time and space. The self infallible in affirming immediate experience of freedom, but cannot explain it.” I will leave aside the first statement for the moment. In my parlance, in our inner reality we are immediately aware of our intelligent creativity. This needs no explanation and can have no explanation because, like all reality, it is an ultimate mystery. I say we all have this experience; the humblest human beings know it; the sophisticated only deny it because they are deluded by the superstition of causal determinism. And to preclude a possible misunderstanding, let me emphasize that in speaking of superstition in science I am not anti-scientist; I am using ‘superstition’ as a technical term. All science is founded on fiction. Gravity is a fiction, inertia is a fiction. That 2 and 2 make four is a fiction because in creating the number series we made two and two to equal four: in nature there are no twos and no fours. This is implied in Kant’s affirmation that 5+7=12 is a synthetic a priori judgment. Scientific fiction is needed and useful in its proper sphere, but when applied where it does not belong it is superstition.

I cursorily glide over the rest of Chapter 3 without comment. Next we go to Chapter Four “Conclusion”. We will see if there is anything to add to what has already been said.

Cairo, October 25, 2015.

READING BERGSON - II

READING BERGSON – II

Chapter 2 is titled “The Multiplicity of Consciousness; The Idea of Duration”. So again the chapter title introduces two creative notions, integrative wholeness and duration. Besides Bergson Whitehead was the only other philosopher in whose philosophy duration was fundamental. But again Bergson proceeds argumentatively. Whitehead, mathematician and scientist though he was, did philosophy philosophically. Even in Process and Reality he does not seek to establish anything demonstratively but presents his creative notions affirmatively. He presents the notion of duration by appeal to the experience of short-term memory. The simplest sentence we utter is generated in the mind as a whole: it could never come to be if it were put together word by word and syllable by syllable.

Bergson says: “When we assert that number is a unit, we understand by this that we master the whole of it by a simple and indivisible intuition of the mind”. This says it all and no argument is needed, and this says no more than what Socrates said when he would not accept that two is made either by adding one to one or by dividing one into two; that two is two by the idea Two.

One section-rubric reads: “Does space exist independently of its contents, as Kant held?” This reveals a gross misunderstanding of Kant. I have been passing cursorily over the preceding sections. This section probably calls for detailed comment. Bergson begins by asserting “the absolute reality of space”: It seems that Bergson here is following Descartes. But what does that really mean? Only an insane person can doubt that we live in a spatial, spaced, or extended world. But the properties of space, that divisibility that Bergson has been referring to all the time, the geometrical characteristics that Euclid expounded, are they in the nature of things? Kant said they are concepts of the understanding. This is not to make “space exist independently of its contents”, which is an inconceivable absurdity. It is this absurdity that Bergson takes to be Kant’s conception of space — “endowing space with an existence independent of its content”! Bergson’s misunderstanding is doubly odd since he could have found support in Kant for his own view of extensity as a (conceptual) abstraction. He thinks Kant “disregarded the activity of the mind” along with the materialists. What was the Copernican revolution all about then? Perhaps it is a measure of Kant’s originality that he has been so little understood. There is no point in commenting further since Bergson’s argument is based on this gross misunderstanding.

Further on he says that for the co-existence of inextensive sensations “to give rise to space, there must be an act of the mind which takes them in all at the same time and sets them in juxtaposition : this unique act is very like what Kant calls an a priori form of sensibility”. How then could he read into Kant the absurdity he so confidently ascribes to him?

I can’t understand Bergson’s homogeneous time that is reducible to space. That is a conceptual abstraction. All we need is to distinguish between abstract time and real duration. It is the notion of duration that is original in Bergson and Whitehead. In Chapter XV of Quest of Reality (2013) I distinguished time, duration, and eternity — eternity not as endless extension of time but as creative transcendence. I believe philosophy badly needs to appropriate the creative notions of duration and eternity. The pseudo-problem of the freedom of the will cannot be resolved otherwise. (I am eager to see how Bergson deals with it in the next chapter.)

Bergson says that “the homogeneous is thus supposed to take two forms, according as its contents co-exist or follow one another”. The contents that co-exist and the contents that follow one another were the material out of which Zeno formed his paradoxes. Our clever logicians who find ways to unriddle Zeno’s riddles miss the point, that abstract space and abstract time are fictions; useful fictions that serve our practical needs and our scientific needs, but fictions nevertheless.Bergson, in discussing the ‘paradoxes of the Eleatics’ shows that he is aware of this. Further on this comes out more clearly where he says that “science cannot deal with time and motion except on condition of first eliminating the essential and qualitative element of time, duration, and of motion, mobility.” But he harms his own case by his involved arguments which obscure the creative notions he is introducing. Argument, demonstration, proof are the bane of philosophy.

“Outside ourselves we should find only space, and consequently nothing but simultaneities, of which we could not even say that they are objectively successive, since succession can only be thought through comparing the present with the past.” This is fine in so far as it indicates that the real is only to be found within us, in creative intelligence, But Bergson’s failure to understand Kant makes him speak of space ‘outside ourselves’. Outside us there is only an inchoate nebulous totality to imagine which we have literally to go out of our mind. Soon after our birth our mind orders the nebula in distinct things, patterns, distances, and we distinguish ourselves from our surroundings. That is why it is impossible for us to imagine what the world is like ‘in itself’, without the mind.

The rubric to the concluding section of Chapter 1 reads: “Conclusion: space alone is homogeneous; duration and succession belong not to the external world, but to the conscious mind”. Here again I think it a mistake to single out space as belonging to the world and not to the conscious mind. In the case of space it is more difficult for us to conceive it as “belonging to the conscious mind”, but I bel9eve that Kant was right in seeing space as a mode of the understanding.

It is odd that Bergson did not once refer to creativity as the best exemplification of duration. A lyric, a song, a drama, are examples of duration in which multiplicity and succession are transcended in a creative whole.

Cairo, October, 23, 2015.

READING BERGSON - I

READING BERGSON – I

D. R. Khashaba

Nothing shows the sorry state of recent and contemporary philosophy more clearly than the consideration that the most original philosophers of the twentieth century, such as Bergson, Whitehead, Santayana, are the most neglected. If they are read at all today, it is outside academia.

Bergson begins Time and Free Will (originally published as Essai sur les données immédiates de la conscience in 1889) by introducing the distinction between the quantitative and the qualitative. This distinction should be obvious to plain commonsense were it not that the whole progress of science, theoretical and applied, for the past four centuries has been founded on the quantification of all phenomena so that it is very difficult for the modern mind to see anything as real that cannot be measured, weighed, or numbered. The artificiality and illusoriness of discrete quantity was revealed in the paradoxes of Zeno of Elea two-and-a-half millennia ago, but so enormous have the practical benefits of quantification proved that the immediate testimony of our living experience and the immediacy of subjective awareness were denied in favour of the reports of objective empirical observation and the returns of measuring instruments. Whitehead tried to correct the falsity in the scientific picture of reality by his doctrine of the Fallacy of Misplaced Concreteness, but Whitehead’s approach was half-hearted since he could not free himself from the objective attitude od science.

Bergson needlessly exerts himself to establish by argument and by introspection the distinction between the qualitative and the quantitative, to show the error of thinking of intensity as a magnitude in the same sense as extensive magnitude, when all that he needed was to assert boldly that the subjective immediacy of the ‘what’ is the reality of which we are immediately and indubitably aware. Perhaps the fact that this was his doctoral dissertation explains why he was necessitated to go through all this needless argumentation. His introspective observations would be appropriate in a stream-of-consciousness novel but in a philosophical essay they merely obscure the fundamental insight.

Philosophy is creative thinking and should present its insights oracularly. Only Plato among ancients and Nietzsche among moderns understood this. In the first part of Jenseits von Gut ind Böse Nietzsche clearly spells this out, and I believe that this has not received the attention it deserves.

Bergson speaking of the subjective feeling of aesthetic grace, specifically in movement, says that we “could hardly make out why it affords us such pleasure if it were nothing but a saving of effort, as Spencer maintains”. I find this significant. Herbert Spencer could only see what can be objectively observed and measured. He would not see Bergson’s point as long as it was supposed that the two of them were speaking of the same thing. All philosophical argument about what is metaphysically real makes no sense to the scientific mentality when it is assumed that philosophy and science deal with the same world. Philosophers to gain any credibility with the modern mind must make it clear that they are concerned with a radically distinct world. But philosophers first need to come around to seeing this themselves. Scientists do not quarrel with poets about their visions: when it is realized that philosophers offer creative visions that claim no objective factuality the endless idealist-empiricist controversies should end.

Bergson gains nothing by his extended analyses of aesthetic feelings and moral feelings. He had no need to show that the increasing intensity of feeling is not quantitative. We should appeal simply to our intuitive experience to affirm that the qualitative and the quantitative are radically heterogeneous. Any translation of the one into the other must be an arbitrary artificial move to serve specific purposes. Bergson says: “There is hardly any passion or desire, any joy or sorrow, which is not accompanied by physical symptoms; and, where these symptoms occur, they probably count for something in the estimate of intensities. As for the sensations properly so called, they are manifestly connected with their external cause, and though the intensity of the sensation cannot be defined by the magnitude of its cause, there undoubtedly exists some relation between these two terms. In some of its manifestations consciousness even appears to spread outwards, as if intensity were being developed into extensity, e.g. in the case of muscular effort.” He apparently thinks this concession militates against his position and that he has to argue his way out of the difficulty. That would be so only if we assume that the subjective (intensity) and the objective (extensity) are two separate substances as in Descates’s system which gave rise to all the mind-body quandaries. But the human person is an integral entity: the subjective and the objective are the inside and the outside that can never be separated nor can the one ever be changed into the other. Dementia and brain deterioration go hand in hand but that does not mean that the brain is the mind. All the empirical arguments either way can be matched by counter-arguments and we get nowhere.

Cairo, October 22

THE LIE OF TRANSLATIONQ

THE LIE OF TRANSLATION

Mary Gregor in the Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals translates Kant’s “in mancher Absicht” as “for many purposes” and then says in a footnote “perhaps ‘in many respects’.” Did Kant mean this or that? Kant meant neither this nor that. He had in his mind a fecund whole, heavy with all the resonances, associations, and ambiguities of the German words, that can never be reproduced exactly in any other language. To remove the ambiguity is to falsify the original, and the poor translator must go through the torment of choosing between this falsification and that.

THINKING WITH WITTGENSTEIN ON LANGUAGE

THINKING WITH WITTGENSTEIN ON LANGUAGE

D. R. Khashaba

In the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus Wittgenstein was very much concerned with language. That should be a platitude since already in the preface we read that “the aim of the book is to draw a limit to thought, or rather—not to thought, but to the expression of thoughts … It will therefore only be in language that the limit can be drawn, and what lies on the other side of the limit will simply be nonsense” (tr. Pears/McGuinness). But in this paper it is not my intention to follow Wittgenstein’s treatment of language throughout the Tractatus but to focus on one key passage where he says:

“Man possesses the ability to construct languages capable of expressing every sense, without having any idea how each word has meaning or what its meaning is—just as people speak without knowing how the individual sounds are produced.

“Everyday language is a part of the human organism and is no less complicated than it.

“It is not humanly possible to gather immediately from it what the logic of language is.

Language disguises thought. So much so, that from the outward form of the clothing it is impossible to infer the form of the thought beneath it, because the outward form of the clothing is not designed to reveal the form of the body, but for entirely different purposes.

“The tacit conventions on which the understanding of everyday language depends are enormously complicated.” (4002, tr. Pears/McGuinness)

In “The Other Wittgenstein” (Plato’s Universe of Discourse, 2o15) I wrote apropos of this passage:

“In 4.002 we have what might have been the substance of the Philosophical Investigations. Unfortunately there Wittgenstein trapped himself in a maze of fictional language-game puzzles. Had he instead cared to elucidate and develop this passage, that would have been a more valuable contribution to the study of language. I was tempted to comment on many of the thoughts contained in this passage; I refrained, thinking there would be opportunity for that when examining the Investigations; unfortunately the Investigations took a different course.”

It occurred to me to go back to it and do now what I had meant to do then. On reflection I found that Wittgenstein’s text gives rise to extremely puzzling questions.

Can we properly speak of constructing “languages capable of expressing every sense”? Are we not putting the cart before the horse here? Does not ‘sense’ (meaning, idea) first spring spontaneously then finds expression in spoken word or sign or gesture? Or maybe it is better to say that any separation of thought and expression is a theoretical fiction that necessarily breeds absurdities if taken seriously or regarded as final. For me, mind, intelligence, is the primary reality, the only reality of which we have immediate awareness since it is our own inner reality. That is the inescapable mystery of consciousness for which there is no explanation. That primary intelligence is creative, ever breeding ideas, ideas objectified in one mode of expression or another. Thus the first question takes us beyond language and beyond epistemology to metaphysics.

After speaking of languages “capable of expressing every sense” Wittgenstein continues: “without having any idea how each word has meaning or what its meaning is”. Here we face once more the artificial splitting of what is one into a duality. The word is its meaning, the meaning is the reality of the word. It is by creating the fiction of a meaning that is other than the word that analysts, from Frege to Moore to the latest of the brood, have condemned themselves to going round and round in vacuous circles. Wittgenstein then adds: “just as people speak without knowing how the individual sounds are produced”. I think this is not the same. How each word has meaning is a pseudo problem, an empty conundrum, but how the sounds are produced is a physico-physiological problem.

“Everyday language is a part of the human organism and is no less complicated than it.

“It is not humanly possible to gather immediately from it what the logic of language is.”

I am not quite sure what Wittgenstein has in mind when he speaks of the logic of language, but here once again we are liable to having a problem of inverted priorities. Language is not formed in conformity to a prior logic any more than thought proceeds in compliance with Aristotelian logic or any formal logic. Wittgenstein may have been thinking of the impossibility of deriving the “perfect language” of Logical Symbolism immediately from common language. That is impossible simply because that logic is an artificial, arbitrary, product. I think my suggestion is confirmed by the next paragraph in Wittgenstein’s text:

“Language disguises thought. So much so, that from the outward form of the clothing it is impossible to infer the form of the thought beneath it, because the outward form of the clothing is not designed to reveal the form of the body, but for entirely different purposes.”

Language does not disguise thought. Even muddled language gives true expression to the muddled thought that gave it birth. That is what the Socratic elenchus sought to remedy.

“The tacit conventions on which the understanding of everyday language depends are enormously complicated.”

That is so true. Not only are the conventions (Wittgenstein’s stillschweigenden Abmachungen) embedded in common language complicated, but the simplest utterance is rooted in circles within circles of contexts that can never be exhaustively delineated, so that rather than saying that the conventions “are enormously complicated” we should say that the presupposed conditions for the understanding of any articulate statement are truly infinite. That sufficiently shows that the scheme of a “perfect language” is intrinsically flawed. No wonder Wittgenstein in the end found logic saying nothing.

Cairo, October 19, 2015.

NO MORE "NOTES ON PLATO"

NO MORE “NOTES ON PLATO”

I have decided to discontinue the series of “Notes on Plato” that I started a couple of weeks ago as comments on the collection of papers in A Companion to Plato (ed. Hugh H. Benson, Blackwell, 2006). To have started those notes was unpardonable folly on my part. Why unpardonable? Because ten years ago I knew better. By way of apology to the few readers who wasted their time following these notes and to do penance for my folly I reproduce below the opening paragraphs of the Preface I penned in 2005 for my Plato: An Interpretation.

“It has been said that Plato probably "has never been studied more intensively than in the late twentieth century." Unfortunately we can also say that Plato probably has never been more misunderstood, travestied, and disfigured than in that same period.

“Until late in the nineteenth century or early in the twentieth Platonists gave their various interpretations of the works of Plato. Later in the twentieth century, scholars no longer interpreted but dissected. They murdered Plato and were happily cutting up the cadaver into tiny pieces to examine them under their analytical microscopes.

“It was not the intention of Plato in his writings, or in his oral teaching, to expound a finished system of philosophy. Just as the sole end of the Socratic elenchus was not, as is commonly supposed, to arrive at correct definitions but to arouse that creative aporia which led his interlocutors to confess their ignorance and to look for enlightenment within their own minds, so it was the aim of Plato to ignite in the souls of his hearers and readers that spark of understanding which "suddenly, like light flashing forth when a fire is kindled, … is born in the soul and straightway nourishes itself", as he puts it in Epistle VII.

“It is therefore worse than useless – it is positively damaging – to subject the writings of Plato to minute analysis and formal criticism in an attempt to extort from them hard-fixed doctrines and a theoretical system. Plato's writings should be approached imaginatively, responsively, that we may glimpse in them the ineffable insights that could only be conveyed in myth and metaphor but never in fixed theoretical formulations.

“I neither pretend nor intend to arrive at what Plato thought or taught. No one is entitled to claim a monopoly on understanding Plato's 'true' meaning, and I certainly make no such claim. Plato has left us some thirty pieces of verbal composition, which he created for his own amusement, as the Phaedrus 276d would suggest. My purpose in this work is to present the philosophy I derive for myself from these, for my own satisfaction.”

D. R. Khashaba

Cairo, October 18, 2015.

NOTES ON PLATO - VII

NOTES ON PLATO – VII

D. R. Khashaba

26. Michael Ferejohn speaks of “the comparative assessment of different and competing analyses [of knowledge]” in modern epistemology. That, as far as it goes may be a good philosophical discipline, but it becomes not only pointless but also positively injurious if it does not have for its starting ground a clear recognition of the ultimate mystery of intelligence. Mind, consciousness, intelligence, name it as you will, is a reality we stand before in awe and must acknowledge that there is no explaining, empirical or philosophical, of how it comes about. We can explore that reality to the end of time and come up with sophisticated theories about it, but the mystery remains, and if we think that our theories explain it we deceive ourselves. Shouldn’t modern philosophers ask themselves why despite all their researches and their analyses no theory is found to be finally satisfactory? — Ferejohn understands nothing of Plato. I am passing on to the next paper. — I’m also dropping Terry Penner’s “The Forms and the Sciences in Socrates and Plato” which at first I thought promising. — I’m jumping to the fifteenth contribution, David Sedley’s “Plato on Language”: this should be hard to corrupt: let us see. No use! Try Michael J. White’s “Plato and Mathematics”.

27. I sampled and dropped several papers. I now go to “Platonic Religion” by Mark L. McPherran. McPherran speaks of “Plato’s conception of a singular God who is the source of order and goodness in the cosmos” (p.244). That would be the Form of the Good rather than the Demiurge of the Timaeus. Perhaps like Giordano Bruno Plato found that with our constrained human understanding we cannot avoid thinking of God on two planes, the common and the philosophical.

28. McPherran says that Plato took “the success of the methods of the mathematicians of his day … to overcome the limitations of Socrates elenctic method” (p.246). I think this misreads Plato who never abandoned the Socratic principle of ignorance. Plato did not entertain the illusion that reasoning can yield definite knowledge about ultimate Reality or realities. Hence he could not have a positive theology. McPherran finds that Plato was also influenced by “the aim at human-initiated divine status (especially immortality) as expressed by some of the newer, post-Hesiodic religious forms that had entered into Greece. Consequently, his philosophical theology offered the un-Socratic hope of an afterlife of intimate Form-contemplation in the realm of divinity” (p.245-7). It is true that the middle dialogues show that Plato was lured by the mystic religions and by the dream of an afterlife, but I believe that Plato did not allow all that to cloud his philosophical vision. In the Phaedo he makes Socrates argue for immortality, but he does not pretend that any of the ‘proofs’ were conclusive. The Phaedrus celestial realm of the Forms is sheer poetry and the ‘doctrine’ of Reminiscence is a mythical dressing for the Socratic insight that all knowledge comes from the mind. The eschatological myths (Gorgias, Phaedo, Republic) may indicate that Plato clung to the hope of personal survival, but they are not part of an articulate theology. I cannot accept McPherran’s interpretation of self-knowledge “on Plato’s scheme” (p.247). The ‘divinity/eternity’ of the soul is, in my interpretation, completely compatible with the principle of philosophical ignorance and with the rejection of immortality as personal survival. In my version of Platonism the God of philosophy is the God within us, a God we create to give meaning to the meaningless world in which we are immersed.

29. In page 246 McPherran had affirmed that for Socrates “piety is understood to be that part of justice that is a service of humans to gods, assisting the gods … in their primary task to produce their most beautiful product”, and in page 247 argues that in Plato’s scheme “there is little room for Socratic piety, since now the central task of human existence becomes less a matter of assisting gods and more a matter of becoming as much like them as one can”. That piety is to be understood as assisting the gods was one of the suggestions proposed in the Euthyphro and found unacceptable by Socrates. It is odd that McPherran takes it as a firm tenet of Socrates and bases on it his argument for distancing Plato’s position from that of Socrates.

30. Under “Plato’s Polis Religion” McPherran abandons the historical approach with which he began and slides into the analytical mode with all its distortions and misconceptions and misuse of logic. Plato’s assertion that God (or the gods) being good do no evil and is therefore not the source (cause) of all things is turned from a prophetic pronouncement into a flawed syllogism. I will not be drawn further into commenting on analytical foibles. I will try to run through the rest of the paper but will only comment if there is something worthwhile to say. Our erudite analytical scholars turn out to be worse than the worst kind of theologians.

Cairo, October 16, 2015.

NOTES ON PLATO - VI

NOTES ON PLATO – VI

D. R. Khashaba

22. Plato opens up to us the glories of the spiritual life and our learned scholars are happily picking holes in the heavenly vision turned into a systematic theory that Plato would not own as his.

23. Deborah K. W. Modrak (“Plato: A Theory of Perception or a Nod to Sensation?”) writes: “Both cosmic order and deliberate action can, Socrates argues, [in Phaedo, 96a-99d] only be adequately explained by an appeal to teleological causes” (p.135). This is not quite accurate. Socrates maintains that deliberate action can only be explained teleologically: this is the ground of his much maligned ‘intellectualism’. As for cosmic order, it was a youthful fond dream of his to find a teleological explanation for it, but he realized that physical investigation cannot give us that, and when we say with Plato in the Timaeus that the Demiurge formed the world because, being good, It wanted all things to be as like It as possible (29d-e), we have to confess, as Plato does, that that is no more than a ‘likely tale’ that lends intelligibility to the riddle of the world. Socrates’ renunnciation of physical investigation constitutes a radical separation of science that cannot reach any answers to philosophical questions and philosophy that can produce no factual knowledge about the world. I have said this repeatedly but find it necessary to say it again because neither our philosophers nor our scientists have grasped it.

24. Modrak follows the lines I quoted above by saying: “At no point in this critique does Socrates challenge the veracity of sense-perception or empirically based beliefs.” Again this is just but requires amplification. Contrary to a common misconception, neither Socrates nor Plato denies or ignores the actuality of the perceptual realm. But the perceptual, for Plato, even when illumined with ideas (forms) does not rise above the level of opinion ( doxa). The perceptible world, although the source of much illusion and delusion, is not itself an illusion; although never constant but always flowing, ever vanishing, and although it is the height of ignorance to take it for what is real, it is yet not nothing. To that extent Plato is a ‘materialist’: he is aware that we are immersed in a world that is and is not.

25. I had to fight a strong temptation to drop the rest of the papers in this Companion to Plato, but Modrak’s is the second essay (after Kahn’s “Plato on Recollection”) that engages directly with Plato’s text rather than picking on peripheral accidentals to subject them to analytical inanities.

Cairo, October 15, 2015.

NOTES ON PLATO - V

NOTES ON PLAYO – V

D. R. Khashaba

16. Analytical philosophers think they can extort the meaning of a statement by torturing every word on the rack. They do not understand that the meaning of a statement is in its transcendent wholeness and in the irreducible nuances of the living words. They do not understand Plato’s prophetic pronouncement “ho men gar sunoptikos dialektikos, ho de mê ou” (Republic, 537c). They did not learn from Wittgenstein anything other than to mimic his futile ramblings in his later writings. They take the words of Socrates out of their dramatic contexts and treat them as if they occurred in an academic dissertation, squeezed dry of all imagination and all wit. In the Charmides you cannot take a statement addressed to Critias in the same spirit as one addressed to the boy Charmides. Neither can you, in the Euthydemus, apply the same criteria to things said to Dionysodorus as to things said to Clinias. In the Gorgias there is a difference even between the dialogue with Polus and that with Callicles. Yet our scholars think all that comes their way grist for their analytical mills.

17. Gareth B. Matthews (“Socratic Ignorance”) says: “The subsequent history of philosophy has shown how maddeningly difficult it is to arrive at a satisfactory analysis of any philosophically interesting concept” (p.106). Not difficult, rather utterly impossible. For practical purposes (scientific, juristic, technical) we can have ad hoc definitions and transitory explanations. Following Plato, I say that philosophy does not give a final account (definition, analysis or explanation) of anything, but ever explores the mysteries of the mind: in the process of exploration (a) we exercise creative intelligence and live as intelligent beings; and (2) enjoy the only understanding that is given us to enjoy. This is what I call philosophical insight. As Plato insisted, philosophical insight cannot be encapsulated in any determinate formulation of thought. It can only be intimated in myth and parable. Philosophers who try to formulate definitive philosophies are ploughing the sand and our learned scholars are not even participating in the ploughing but are standing apart compiling statistics about the ploughed sands.

18. Matthews poses the question: “If Socrates does not know what piety or bravery or temperance is, … how can he know of any token persons or actions that they are pious, brave, or temperate?” Further on he quotes Hugh Benson’s formulation of what he calls “the Priority of Definitional Knowledge”: “If A fails to know what F-ness is, then A fails to know, for any x, that x is F.” Our learned scholars go on creating puzzles and dilemmas where there are none. Nothing in thought is given us, as Plato would put it, eilikrinôs (simply, unmixwd). For Socrates the intelligible ideas (Forms) come from the mind, are born in the mind. This is the insight behind the myth of reminiscence. It is by the idea of Beauty that we see things beautiful, by the idea Two that we see two objects as two. The most rapacious of human beings has an inkling of the idea of Justice, but the idea, even in the minds of the best of us, is befogged and entangled with other ideas. In the elenchus Socrates helps his interlocutor to see things somewhat more clearly. protests too much’. We are all in the dark but not without a glimmer of light.

19. Socrates spoke of the worst kind of ignorance, thinking one knows what one does not know. Analytical scholars (I can’t call them philosophers) make that worst ignorance pardonable. Their hubris is far worse: they shred meaningful speech and display the shreds as inconsistencies and fallacies and pride themselves on their shrewedness.

20. Under “The Aporetic Reading” (pp.109-110) Matthews finds a way out of the dilemma created by the assumption of “the Priority of Definitional Knowledge”, but he is still busy with the trumped up problem and we have already lost sight of any sense in the notion of Socratic ignorance. That is the reward of our analytical acumen.

21. All the attempts of modern and contemporary philosophers to solve the riddle of Knowledge have come to nothing. Gareth B. Matthews admits that much (p.112). With Plato I say that phronêsis (intelligence) and alêtheia (reality) are one and the same ultimate mystery. We have immediate awareness of that ultimate mystery, that ultimate reality, in exercising our creative intelligence in philosophical exploration. That intelligence that is the one reality of which we have immediate awareness is our own inner reality. That reality is ineffable, it can never be comprehended in a definitive articulation of thought or words. It can only be intimated in myth, myth that has to confess itself myth. That is Plato’s Form of the Good, beyond Being and beyond Intelligence, breeding all being and all intelligence. Unless we absorb this insight of Plato’s we will continue plodding round and round in vacuous theoretical circles.

I apologize for the angry tone of these notes, especially of the present batch, but analytical philosophers are not only blinding us to what is precious in Plato, but are also doing away with all genuine philosophy,

Cairo, October 10, 2015.

NOTES TO PLATO - V

NOTES ON PLAYO – V

D. R. Khashaba

16. Analytical philosophers think they can extort the meaning of a statement by torturing every word on the rack. They do not understand that the meaning of a statement is in its transcendent wholeness and in the irreducible nuances of the living words. They do not understand Plato’s prophetic pronouncement “ho men gar sunoptikos dialektikos, ho de mê ou” (Republic, 537c). They did not learn from Wittgenstein anything other than to mimic his futile ramblings in his later writings. They take the words of Socrates out of their dramatic contexts and treat them as if they occurred in an academic dissertation, squeezed dry of all imagination and all wit. In the Charmides you cannot take a statement addressed to Critias in the same spirit as one addressed to the boy Charmides. Neither can you, in the Euthydemus, apply the same criteria to things said to Dionysodorus as to things said to Clinias. In the Gorgias there is a difference even between the dialogue with Polus and that with Callicles. Yet our scholars think all that comes their way grist for their analytical mills.

17. Gareth B. Matthews (“Socratic Ignorance”) says: “The subsequent history of philosophy has shown how maddeningly difficult it is to arrive at a satisfactory analysis of any philosophically interesting concept” (p.106). Not difficult, rather utterly impossible. For practical purposes (scientific, juristic, technical) we can have ad hoc definitions and transitory explanations. Following Plato, I say that philosophy does not give a final account (definition, analysis or explanation) of anything, but ever explores the mysteries of the mind: in the process of exploration (a) we exercise creative intelligence and live as intelligent beings; and (2) enjoy the only understanding that is given us to enjoy. This is what I call philosophical insight. As Plato insisted, philosophical insight cannot be encapsulated in any determinate formulation of thought. It can only be intimated in myth and parable. Philosophers who try to formulate definitive philosophies are ploughing the sand and our learned scholars are not even participating in the ploughing but are standing apart compiling statistics about the ploughed sands.

18. Matthews poses the question: “If Socrates does not know what piety or bravery or temperance is, … how can he know of any token persons or actions that they are pious, brave, or temperate?” Further on he quotes Hugh Benson’s formulation of what he calls “the Priority of Definitional Knowledge”: “If A fails to know what F-ness is, then A fails to know, for any x, that x is F.” Our learned scholars go on creating puzzles and dilemmas where there are none. Nothing in thought is given us, as Plato would put it, eilikrinôs (simply, unmixwd). For Socrates the intelligible ideas (Forms) come from the mind, are born in the mind. This is the insight behind the myth of reminiscence. It is by the idea of Beauty that we see things beautiful, by the idea Two that we see two objects as two. The most rapacious of human beings has an inkling of the idea of Justice, but the idea, even in the minds of the best of us, is befogged and entangled with other ideas. In the elenchus Socrates helps his interlocutor to see things somewhat more clearly. protests too much’. We are all in the dark but not without a glimmer of light.

19. Socrates spoke of the worst kind of ignorance, thinking one knows what one does not know. Analytical scholars (I can’t call them philosophers) make that worst ignorance pardonable. Their hubris is far worse: they shred meaningful speech and display the shreds as inconsistencies and fallacies and pride themselves on their shrewedness.

20. Under “The Aporetic Reading” (pp.109-110) Matthews finds a way out of the dilemma created by the assumption of “the Priority of Definitional Knowledge”, but he is still busy with the trumped up problem and we have already lost sight of any sense in the notion of Socratic ignorance. That is the reward of our analytical acumen.

21. All the attempts of modern and contemporary philosophers to solve the riddle of Knowledge have come to nothing. Gareth B. Matthews admits that much (p.112). With Plato I say that phronêsis (intelligence) and alêtheia (reality) are one and the same ultimate mystery. We have immediate awareness of that ultimate mystery, that ultimate reality, in exercising our creative intelligence in philosophical exploration. That intelligence that is the one reality of which we have immediate awareness is our own inner reality. That reality is ineffable, it can never be comprehended in a definitive articulation of thought or words. It can only be intimated in myth, myth that has to confess itself myth. That is Plato’s Form of the Good, beyond Being and beyond Intelligence, breeding all being and all intelligence. Unless we absorb this insight of Plato’s we will continue plodding round and round in vacuous theoretical circles.

I apologize for the angry tone of these notes, especially of the present batch, but analytical philosophers are not only blinding us to what is precious in Plato, but are also doing away with all genuine philosophy,

Cairo, October 10, 2015.

NOTES ON PLATO - IV

NOTES ON PLATO – IV

D. R. Khashaba

13. Aristotle famously said that two things may be attributed to Socrates, universal definitions and inductive reasoning. I doubt that Aristotle had any ground for this attribution other than his misreading of the Platonic dialogues. Socrates did not invent or discover inductive reasoning which, it seems, is an inbuilt propensity in the human mind. Socrates often employs inductive reasoning, but it was not distinctive of his practice and he did not theorize it. However that may be, the assumption that Socrates is to be credited with the introduction of inductive reasoning is not of much consequence, unlike the assumption concerning definitions. This latter assumption introduced into the history of philosophy an error of interpretation which, supported by the formidable authority of Aristotle, has come to be accepted as unquestionable, and has seriously perverted the mainstream interpretation of Socrates’ position and of the Platonic dialogue. Any unprejudiced reading of the early dialogues (sometimes called the ‘definition dialogues’) will show that the proceeding of Socrates in these dialogues cannot be the proceeding of any sane person seeking a definition. It is true that these dialogues regularly start with a ‘what is x?’ question and it is true that ‘Socrates’ frequently helps his interlocutor with a sample definition, but then the discussion proceeds, not towards finding a definition, but towards elucidating meanings, clearing obscurities, disentangling entangled notions. Sometimes in the course of the examination a reasonable workable definition is proposed that could be accepted as good in specific contexts, but Socrates invariably finds the proposed definition inadequate. Why? Because Socrates is intentionally leading to the perplexity (aporia) pregnant with two profound Socratic insights: (1) The meaning (reality) of a creative idea can never be defined or explicated in terms extraneous to the idea. This is one signification of the principle of philosophical ignorance: we can never have theoretical knowledge of the inner essence of things. (2) An idea can only be understood in the immediacy of its self-evidence in the mind.

This may be a good place for me to explain my customary proceeding in these notes occasioned by my reading the contributions to A Companion to Plato (ed. Benson, 2006). Usually upon first looking at the title of a paper, I immediately explain in a note my position on the theme dealt with. Then while reading the paper I may or may not (more often not) have something to say. Thus I wrote the above note upon looking at the title of R. M. Dancy’s “Platonic Definitions and Forms”.

14. The ‘Theory of Forms’ is another fiction we owe to Aristotle. I have dealt with this often and extensively and have no desire to revert to it. If the reader is interested, he may refer to Chapter One of Plato: An Interpretation (an extensive preview is available in Google Books).

15. I just can’t let this go by. Dancy finds that ‘equal’ being treated in the Phaedo “as in some way parallel to ‘beautiful,’ … is peculiar because with ‘that’s equal’ we expect a complement unpacking ‘equal to what’ whereas we expect no such complement with ‘that’s beautiful’” (p.82). The peculiarity comes from Dancy’s smuggling in the impostor “that’s equal”: nobody ever says “that’s equal”; we say “those two are equal” which is the same as “this is equal to that”. Socrates was fully justified in taking ‘equal’ to be (not only ‘in some way’ but fully) parallel to ‘beautiful’: Equality and Beauty are both mind-born intelligible Forms that have no being in the physical world. What Dancy says in the lines following the ones I quoted completely reverses Plato’s understanding of the intelligible Forms: it is not the Beautiful (auto to kalon) that is relative but the many instantiations outside the mind.

Cairo. September 9, 2015.

NOTES ON PLATO - III

NOTES ON PLATO – III

D. R. Khashaba

6. Why does Plato keep to the dialogue form in the Timaeus where there is no place for dialogue? It is not, in my opinion, that Plato has become addicted to the dialogue form, but for the reason that made him choose the dialogue form for his writings in the first place. He would not give the reader anything ready-made, any doctrine or any theory. His intention in portraying a dialogue was to engage his reader in the discussion and leave her or him to come up with their own thought. He wanted hus readers not to receive knowledge or learning but to philosophize. So in the Timaeus he offers his ‘likely tale’ as a provocation to independent thinking. Thus I have said more than once that in my writings on Plato I enter into dialogue with Plato to develop my own philosophical position.

7. The significance of the aporia (perplexity) to which the Socratic elenchus invariably leads has been curiously neglected or misunderstood. In the first place it should have been seen as clearly showing the falsity of the view that the elenchus aimed at reaching definitions. In the second place it should have been seen that the regular recurrence of the aporia, far from indicating a failure, constitutes evidence that Socrates deliberately leads to it. Why should he do that? In my interpretation, Socrates aimed at two related ends. The first was to show that no theoretical formulation can be finally and definitively valid and that we have to confess our ignorance of the what (the essence) of things, and the second is to show the meaning of an idea can only be understood in the immediacy of the self-evidence of the idea in the mind. This is the insight Socrates crystallized in his oracular dictum: All that is beautiful is beautiful by Beauty. This coheres with the Republic demand that dialectic should destroy all hypotheses and with the demonstration in the second part of the Parmenides.

8. Modern scholars are so afraid of being caught affirming anything or favouring any point of view – a sin only equalled by that of failing to cite the latest secondary literature – that they end up being utterly trivial. But the ban on affirmation only relates to what is substantial. When it comes to superficialities, the wildest fancies are committed. Even though I am determined to avoid any direct controversial comment on the contributions to this Companion to Plato, I will permit myself to give one example. Mary Margaret McCabe finds a connection between Socrates “going down” to the Piraeus at the beginning of the Republic and the “going down” of the illuminated philosopher “to the city” in the body of the work (“Form and the Platonic Dialogues”, p.46). This is just too clever; it reminds me of the exploits of our “scientific” interpreters of the Quran who find the latest astrophysical theories in the verses of the Holy Book..

9. As I read the papers in A Companion to Plato I keep recalling an insightful essay I read lately, “Poetry as Enchantment” by Dana Gioia - http://www.thedarkhorsemagazine.com/danagioiapoetrya.html - which students of philosophy would do well to read attentively. I pick up the following random phrases from the latter part of the essay: “I suspect that one thing that hurt poetry was being too well taught.” “These writers developed brilliant methods of analyzing poetry as poetry …” “Every decade brought a new wave of critical schools and techniques, eventually culminating in mostly theoretical approaches to literature.”And I simply cannot resist quoting her closing words: “We need to augment methodology with magic. Blake asked, ‘What the hand, dare seize the fire?’ The answer is, of course, our hands — the skilled hands of teachers and writers. We’ve touched the fire of imagination, art, and language. We need to pass that fire on to the future. Why should we settle for a vision of literary education that does any less?” A like cry is what philosophy now badly needs.

10. At this point I must, exceptionally, break my resolve not to comment directly on the papers (in A Companion to Plato, edited by Hugh H. Benson, Blackwell, 2006). Charles M. Young, “The Socratic Elenchus”, proceeds as if it were the purpose of Socrates to establish logical laws. His argument under “Inconsistency” of the Charmides is quite beside the point. Socrates simply wants to help the boy to see that his ideas are hazy. At the close of the section Young tells us that

“Richard Kraut drew attention over twenty years ago to the fact that Socrates (in the Socratic dialogues, including the Protagoras, for the purposes of this point) thinks he has good reasons for accepting all three of these propositions:

A. Virtue is unteachable.

B. Virtue is knowledge.

C. If virtue is knowledge, then virtue is teachable,

even though he recognizes that (A), (B), and (C) are inconsistent (see Kraut 1984: 285–8). Again, Socrates knows that at least one of (A), (B), and (C) must be false, but he has no reason to give up any one of them in particular.”

I am afraid that both Kraut and Young understand neither the Protagoras nor the Socratic stance. In that dialogue Socrates counters Protagoras’ bold claim that he can teach virtue with scepticism, saying he nad thought virtue was unteachable. That was simply how the (then) young Socrates could, without offence, lead the eminent sophist to submit his claim to examination. Instead of engaging in controversy with Young’s (and Kraut’s) contentions, let me reproduce the closing paragraph of Chapter Four of my Plato: An Interpretation (2005):

“The Protagoras raises the question of the teachability of virtue and leaves it unresolved. That is as it should be. The problem has to remain an unresolved and unresolvable riddle if we are not to lose sight of the vital insight: virtue is sophia but it is not any particular epistêmê. Virtue is the sophia that knows its own ignorance and knows that the only safe course open to it is to hold fast to its internal integrity. In the Republic the highest wisdom is found in the mystic vision of the Form of the Good. In the Statesman the ideal ruler would not be bound by any law or constitution but follow his inner light. Jesus of Nazareth finds the sure guide to the good life not in the law but in love. Kant finds the highest moral principle in the autonomy of the good will. The insight (I shy away from the word 'truth' and the word 'intuition' has been spoilt by bad company) behind all this was translucently clear to Socrates, but we still find it difficult to grasp because it has been encrusted in layer upon layer of the errors of the learned.”

11. I will not be drawn into discussing what Young says under “Does Socrates Cheat?” To me it shows how erudition kills imagination. Our learned scholars are simply incapable of appreciating the dramatic context in a Platonic dialogue. In an earlerpaper, “Form and the Platonic Dialogues”, Mary Margaret McCabe speaks of Socrates’ “disconcerting deception of young Charmides into thinking that he has a magic leaf which will cure Charmides’ headache” (p.48) where no one reading the dialogue in good faith will see any ‘deception’ since the boy, as portrayed, was intelligent enough to realize that the fiction of the cure was merely intended to draw him into conversation.

12. I have expound ed my understanding of the Socratic elenchus repeatedly and extensively in my writings. Let me here reproduce the conclusion to Chapter Three of Plato: An Interpretation (2005):

“Socrates solemnly declares his life-mission to be to exhort all humans to care for the health of their souls above everything else. What part does the elenchus play in that mission? Since psuchê was for Socrates one with nous and its proper excellence was phronêsis, the removal of all that encumbers, befogs, or deceives the mind was a necessary step towards caring for one's soul. For people to care for their souls they had to be shown that their true good lay nowhere but in the goodness of their souls and that the goodness of the soul was nothing other than sound phronêsis . They had to be led to discover their true nature and their proper excellence. That could not be given to them in any ready-made formula; they had to find it within themselves. That is the function of the elenchus; that is why Socrates who cared for nothing but virtue spent his life engaging in seemingly fruitless theoretical refutations.”

Cairo, October 7, 2015.

NOTES ON PLATO - ii

NOTES ON PLATO – II

D. R. Khashaba

4. The “Socratic problem” is a historical enigma that can never be solved. Apart from some biographical details, the “real” Socrates is as elusive as the “historical Jesus”. The correct attitude, in my opinion, is to confess that any portrayal of Socrates’ character and thought, however thoroughly researched and astutely argued, must be openly confessed to be nothing more than an imaginative construction. For myself, I am thankful that Plato has given us the myth of “the best, wisest, and most righteous, of all men”. As to the question where Socrates’ thought ends and where Plato’s thought begins, again we must confess that this cannot be settled. In discussing the ‘philosophy of Plato’ let us say we are discussing the philosophy we find in or derive from the dramatic works left us by Plato, as we would discuss the philosophy of an anonymous work. When a writer ascribes a particular thought or sentiment to Socrates or to Plato let her or him humbly say it is no more than a personal guess.

5. I write as a philosopher. I interpret Plato philosophically. My purpose is not to ascertain what Plato said or what Socrates thought, but to find insight in Plato’s writings. When I say as I have repeatedly said that for Socrates what gives us our distinctive character as human beings is that we live in a world of ideas and ideals engendered by the mind and to be found nowhere but in the mind, I do not claim that there is anywhere in Plato’s writings textual support for thus view, but I maintain that this is implied by what I take to be Socrates’ philosophical outlook. When A. N. Whitehead said (in Adventures of Ideas, 1933) that Plato “in his later mood” held that “being is simply power”, a notable Platonic scholar, F. M. Cornford, thought this was an instance of how "a profound thinker may be misled by a translation" (Preface to Plato’s Theory of Knowledge, 1935). In this particular case I think Cornford was mistaken, but even had he been right, I maintain that Whitehead was discovering a valuable philosophical insight in Plato’s text whether scholars agree or do not agree with his reading of the text. So I read Plato naively to philosophize for myself, not to ascertain what Plato said or thought. That is the business of scholarship. Within its proper boundaries scholarship does valuable work, but I maintain that it becomes counterproductive when it pretends to exclude and to replace philosophical interpretation: and that is what modern scholarship does and does to excess. For instance, when scholars find that Socrates’ firm moral convictions contradicting his profession of ignorance, I say that shows how badly they need a dose of that redeeming philosophical ignorance. Let this be my apology for my frequent tirades against empty erudition.

5. Plato wrote dramatic pieces. He did not want these to be dissected and analyzed, nor did he want the speeches and arguments occurring in these dramas, with all their dramatic hesitations, evasions, posturings, and occasiona fallacies, to be subjected to logical scrutiny, except as a secondary intellectual exercise. He wanted his dramas first, to be read and enjoyed as dramatic works, and secondly and more importantly, to occasion free reflection on the part of the reader, reflection that may hopefully give birth to original insights and original thoughts in the reader’s mind. That is how Plotinus read Plato, how Shelley read Plato, and that is how I read Plato.

Cairo, October 5, 2015.

NOTES ON PLATO - I

NOTES ON PLATO – I

D. R. Khashaba

I am reading A Companion to Plato, edited by Hugh H. Benson, Blackwell, 2006. I had meant to abstain from making any comments, but I will probably find myself impelled to make some marginal notes now and then. τύχῃ ἀγαθῇ.

1. Except when expressing moral convictions or principles (e.g., in Crito and Gorgias), a dialogue of Plato does not advocate a ‘position’ but offers a question to be examined. The question is never settled but remains open for further exploration. I maintain that this is fundamentally so even in the late dialogues. This (a) is in agreement with Plato’s insistence in the Republic that all hypotheses must be destroyed by dialectic since no determinate articulation of thought can be definitively true; (b) agrees with the dramatic character of Plato’s works; (c) explains the apparent inconsistencies and contradictions in the dialogues.

2. Plato did not leave us a philosophy: Plato left us what is of far greater value; he left us the idea or ideal of the philosophical life.

3. I was afraid this Companion to Plato with its tens of learned contributors would prove as disappointing as my earlier (fortunately limited) encounters with scholarly ‘secondary literature’ about Plato. Plato has inspired poets and saints, theologians and mystics, reformers and revolutionaries, yet modern scholarship has turned him into a riddle if not into an absurdity, Christopher Row, “Interpreting Plato”, after an extensive and intricate discussion of rival interpretative approaches to Plato – skeptical, dogmatic, developmental, unitarian – and after expounding his own version of developmentalism and speaking of Plato’s supposedly baffling “strategy” in his dialogues and drama, tells us that “Platonic, and Socratic, thinking is extraordinarily radical – so radical that, if it were presented to us simply and directly, it would strike us, as no doubt it strikes many readers even when it is spelled out, as purely and simply false, and so obviously false as not to be worth investigating.” (p.22) I will not try to answer this charge at this point. All my writings, particularly Plato: An Interpretayon (2005) and Plato’s Universe of Discourse (2015), have been an answer to the misunderstanding or cluster of misunderstandings behind this view; but in the course of these notes I will probably be repeatedly addressing these misunderstandings.

Cairo, October 4, 2015

PLATO AS MATERIALIST

PLATO AS MATERIALIST

I would say without hesitation that among modern philosophers Santayana was the one who understood Plato best. Yet Santayana calls himself a materialist. I see no paradox or contradiction here. There is a sense in which it can be said that Plato is a materialist. It’s a common error to say that Plato regarded the physical world as an illusion. Plato was not an Idealist à la Berkeley or à la Hegel. We live in a physical world, encompassed by matter, whatever the final stuff of that matter may be. But Plato would not call the uncertain and inconstant things of the world real. Only the mind is real and what pertains to the mind. The reality of the mind and what pertains to the mind does not negate the actuality of the physical world. The metaphysical reality of the mind is a world apart from all existent things. The philosopher while not denying the actuality of the physical world gives wide berth to it while exploring the realm of metaphysical reality. This is what Socrates meant in insisting that investigation in things and investigation in ideas be kept apart.

D. R. Khashaba

Cairo, October 2, 2015.

ERRATA TU PLATO: AN INTERPRETATION

PLATO: AN INTERPRETATION - errata

My Plato: An Interpretation was published in 2005. Some five years later, while translating the book into Arabic, I found a number of errors. These were mostly minor typos, but there were also a couple of words that I wanted to alter and a couple of sentences that had to be reconstructed. I arranged with the publisher, Virtualbookworm.com, to produce a corrected version. This was I think in 2011. It occurred to me to post here the list of corrections as submitted to Virtualbookworm, in case any reader who has a copy of the uncorrected version may care to print out these corrections and pin them to the book. I would deem that a favour.

Page Para Line Present text Replace with

2 2 5 own garden. and offer own garden, and offer

2 4 last line consequence consequences.

2 5 7 intesity intensity

8 3 10 of Plato’a theory of Plato’s theory

11 2 4 in the Republic says in the Republic says

26 1 3 Ethics with his eight Ethics with his eight

27 3 11 phronêis phronêsis

27 4 4 phronêis phronêsis

29 3 17 (245e). (246a).

36 3 2 (choris men) (chôris men)

36 3 3 (choris de) (chôris de)

47 last line on page are not agred upon are not agreed upon

59 1 8 (29c-30a.) (29d-30a.)

66 2 2 but it does not give us but this does not give us

68 3 8 and readily agrees and he readily agrees

90 last 6 To lead people to care For people to care

119 1 2 neither adds nor neither adds to nor

135 2 8 comes Socrates warning comes Socrates’ warning

139 5 4 sense of proof. sense of proof

140 2 16 poteron on ê ouk on? poteron on ê ouk on;

141 1 5 poteron on ê ouk on? poteron on ê ouk on;

145 2 3 the greatest of studies the greatest of studies?

147 4 1 What gives truth to What gives reality to

164 2 18 anagkê toutous allelôn anagkê toutous allêlôn

191 2 7 (47a-e). (472a-e).

210 2 8-11

Present text : but since we say that reality and knowledge are a unity, we find one section also representing the lowest degree of knowing which we may call belief or opinion, and the other section the relatively higher degree of knowledge of things perceptible.

Replace with : but since we say that reality and knowledge are a unity, we find one section also representing the lowest degree of knowing, and the other section the relatively higher degree of knowledge of things perceptible which we may call belief or opinion.

228 last 1 imitator of imitators imitator of imitations

241 2 1 kai apodexesthai logon kai apodexasthai logon

251 1 3 Thales to Plato, 1914 Thales to Plato, 1914

308 1 7

Present text : dimension of reality, of the ultimate creative intelligence

Replace with : dimension of reality, these being two dimensions of the ultimate creative intelligence

312 6 9 and ship-buiding and ship-building

Explanatory remarks (corrections that could easily be missed):

2 2 5 Dot after garden to be replaced with comma.

2 4 last line Dot to be inserted at end of sentence.

2 5 7 Missed ‘n’ to be inserted.

8 3 10 ‘a’ to be replaced with ‘s’.

11 2 4 Italicize Republic.

26 1 3 Italicize Ethics [title of book].

27 3 11 Insert missing ‘s’.

27 4 4 Insert missing ‘s’.

36 3 2 ‘o’ to be replaced with ‘ô’.

36 3 3 ‘o’ to be replaced with ‘ô’.

47 last line on page Missing ‘e’ to be inserted.

135 2 8 Insert apostrophe after ‘Socrates’.

139 5 4 Delete dot after ‘proof’, sentence continues.

140 2 16 Replace ‘?’ with ‘;’, the Greek question mark.

141 1 5 Replace ‘?’ with ‘;’, the Greek question mark.

145 2 3 Insert question mark.

164 2 18 Replace ‘e’ with ‘ê’ in the word allêlôn.

210 2 8-11 The words ‘which we may call belief or opinion’ to be moved to end of sentence.

241 2 1 Replace ‘e’ with ‘a’ in the word apodexasthai.

251 1 3 Italicize Plato, being part of title of book.

308 1 7 Insert the words ‘these being two dimensions’.

312 6 9 Insert missing ‘l’ in the word ‘building’.

*

Subsequently I found that I had missed one typo: on page 196, para. 1, l. 7, the word eporexesthai appears with an extra h in the final syllable.

KANT'S AESTHETICS (4)

[I will resume posting these snatches about Kant’s Aesthetics: how often or for how long I cannot say.]

When Kant heads the first Section of the First Moment of the first Book “The judgment of taste is aesthetic” he has said all that there is to say on the subject. The judgment of taste is aesthetic, the judgment of taste is an immediate awareness, the judgment of taste is an intuition, the judgment of taste is subjective — all of these formulations say the same thing and that is the whole of Aesthetics. We can continue to create fresh articulations, fresh modes of expression, of this insight, but there is nothing to explain, nothing to analyze. We are face to face with a reality, a mystery, that cam mever be explained. Poets and lovers have for millennia been singing their love, but the mystery of Love remains unspoken, because Love is the root and source of everything but can never be a thing to be objectively examined, described, analyzed. This is not to banish or abolish Aesthetics, but it saves us much error to know what we are up to. Kant could have saved himself much trouble and saved his readers much bewilderment if he had given us his enlightening insights without the abstruse critiques, analyses, derivations, and dialectics.

Kant observes that in aesthetic judgment “what matters is what I make of (the) representation in myself” (5: 305). All apprehension, on the level of understanding, aesthetic feeling, emotion, or bare sensation, is creative: something from within us meets the incoming impression and gives it its colour, its meaning, its quality.

At the end of the First Moment Kant gives a definition of the beautiful. It runs: “Taste is the faculty for judging an object or a kind of representation through a satisfaction or dissatisfaction without any interest. The object of such a satisfaction is called beautiful.” This is a valid definition in terms of the classifications and distinctions of Kant’s theory. This is good as far as it goes, but no one will say that it throws any light on the nature of the beautiful. There is no going beyond Socrates’ foolish “All things beautiful are beautiful bt Beauty.” And that places us face to face not only with the secret of Beauty but also with the secret of our inner reality and of all the reality we are given to know. The rubric under §6 (Second Moment) reads: “The beautiful is that which, without concepts, is represented as the object of a universal satisfaction.” The specification “without concepts” stresses the immediacy of the aesthetic intuition, and that is good, but the rest of the statement is ambiguous, and we are still saying nothing about the what of the beautiful.

D. R. Khashaba

Cairo, October 1, 2015.