Dialogues

 Dialogues – 1 – Intermediaries

 

 

 

Pythagoras

Socrates

Plato

Aristotle

Aspasia

 

 

 

Plato: Please continue, my teacher. 

 

Socrates: Once I heard a man reading a book by Anaxagoras stating that Mind arranges and causes all things.  I liked this and began to read all his books.  I thought that if Mind is the cause then this would explain what is best for each and what is good for all in common.  But he actually uses no intelligence in what he has to say but begins talking about ‘air’ and ‘water’ and other absurdities (Phaedo, 97b).

 

Plato: This is how you became a philosopher – as you said, this is what set you on your ‘second voyage’ beyond just being born – Anaxagoras’ argument disappointed you and stirred you up to try to create something like it, but better, on your own.

 

Socrates: But I was worried about the approach – I was worried that the truth would blind me – I thought I should take it very slow – to step far back before jumping ahead too quickly. I was anxious to look, but I thought the brilliant light might overwhelm quickly my senses – something like looking at the sun.  So I looked for a middle way – a recourse – a strategy to pursue the inquiry.  After searching, I chose ideas.  I thought I could try to look into them to seek the truth of realities.  This is how I began to think. 

 

Plato: Perhaps Anaxagoras meant something similar when he started talking about ‘air’ and ‘water.’  He was trying to find the way of truth by means of physical intermediaries –we can follow him and call them ‘elements’ – rather than focusing on ideas.    He thought that the world broke down into these constituents, and that the game was to see how they fit together. 

 

Aspasia: Socrates, we were discussing this earlier – we wondered whether we could ever behold the divine directly.  We concluded that our earthly kind lives in a middle state, a between zone, and can only work its way by intermediaries.  So we can never really leave this place without ceasing to be who and what we are – intermediate – human.

 

Socrates: Yes – we understand one thing by another – we are consigned to the middle – even if we can’t help longing to swing over to one side or the other.  But if our principles are brute facts, like the elements, then for me anyhow I cannot call this Mind. 

 

Aspasia: Our Italian friend here offers a noble conception of the cosmos, and one that slyly offers to explain even itself.  He was the first to break the world into quantities – to undertake mathematizing our experience.  His basic intermediary was ‘number’ rather than ideas or even ‘stuff’ – this was his way of steering between heaven and earth – as when we take roughly the length of an arm, something we take from our life experience, and measure the great and small parts of nature by it – seeing the microcosm and macrocosm.   This is an example of taking a part of our lives and converting it into a symbol.  Perhaps the main point is not a category or a thing, but is more akin to an action.  Our thought lands on some cypher and we convert it into a meaning.  This is what we do.

 

Aristotle: Pythagoras was even adept enough to give up his guiding concept when he discovered the square root of two.  He gives us our sacred name – philosopher – and thus tells us that we have to go on, rather than ever being too happy about what has been said so far – whether just now or long ago – just as Socrates was unhappy with Anaxagoras. Number seemed a promising candidate. When it came to grief, we learned something.  Probably more important than ‘number’ or any name we give the proxy is the learning process itself – especially cases in which we try something out and it doesn’t work out. 

 

Plato: I wonder if we could try to think about the intermediaries themselves?

 

Aristotle: Is it possible even to look at them, since we must use them when we think?  Probably the point is what we do with them – not just to see, but to do, to act rightly. 

 

Plato: The intermediaries themselves – my name for them was ‘forms’ – broadly I was talking about archetypes, paradigms, principles – these could be conceptions, numbers, the elements – or kinds, categories, levels – however we read the signs – however we detect signals in noise – alphabets, models, algorithms – whatever we use as the main go-betweens for thinking, the idiom for thinking, the stuff of thought – the yardstick, the rule. – Let us at least try to think a moment about this go-between, and see where we get. 

 

Pythagoras: But we need a strategy, a way in, to set the wheel turning – as Socrates taught about ideas.   If we take in too large a territory, then we end up having to look at everything.  So, for example, we can say that man is an animal that talks.  When we are talking to ourselves – which Socrates calls the ‘silent conversation’ – we test out ideas and reason to a conclusion.  So we can try things out.  When we start talking to other people and getting into the dialectic, talk becomes a social practice – something we learn, teach and do together in society – so there’s more even room to make mistakes.  If our hypothesis is that the recourse has to be to words, then ‘looking closer’ means something like seeing what words mean, and how we use them, and whether they really fit when we try them out.  Philosophy becomes philosophy of language – this is what I called semantikos – semantics – the study of the relation between language and the world. 

 

Plato: I am drawn to look deeper at the proxies themselves – though Aristotle is right about action.  I see that it’s a difficult hold – your opponent slips out from your grasp – it’s hard to get at this X factor because it is the very thing we use to get at everything.  Aspasia: We are using a hook to reel in a hook.  It’s dizzying to look at it too closely.  Perhaps we are staring at the sun, as Socrates said. 

Socrates: Let us look in the mirror and see if we can stand it for a bit.  Let us ask the defining question – what is this thing?  What do we mean by the ‘intermediaries’ – these middling ploys and proxies? Do we never meet anything straight on – never feel the wind of Being in our face?   Do we always have to fall back on delegates, go-betweens, ruses – an infinite series of tryouts?

 

Aspasia: You remind us not to be satisfied, like eros still unable to achieve its apogee.  Then we begin to know ourselves, who we are, what we are made of.  We see how we fare with this fate of ours.  We begin to know ourselves as people who face hardships – who desire, and who experience loss – and if we can come back from loss.  Socrates did not realize it at the time, but his zeal for Anaxagoras set him up for heartbreak.  How else can we know ourselves, but by losing what we love and then trying to survive? … Perhaps you should forgive me – we were trying to speak clearly, and yet I started babbling about love.  Well, we become giddy about a thing because we hope so much.  This gives us a chance to see who we are, when it is quickly taken away.  Then we are snuffed out, or we become the flame – the intermediary – our own lives become the message we are trying to read.

 

Plato: Socrates’ teacher adds another entry on our list of middle states – our selves. Perhaps ‘selves’ are like puppets we fashion in order to think about thinking, and what comes out of our mouths, and all our supposed ‘actions’ – then this would be a proxy again and a ploy to get at something else – which is what? The same problem one step removed.  Well, Socrates reminds us not to be too happy with what we find – whatever it is – since we may set our hopes very high and then see them dashed – as in my case, after I started all the blather about ‘forms,’ and then had to destroy them.  I admit I still like the idea, even though it doesn’t really stand examination. 

 

Pythagoras: My approach was to envision the solution to the problem as ratio – proportion –

I suppose my comeuppance was to have to confront the reality of the irrational. 

 

Aspasia: In trying to answer a question, we don’t just want to invent something out of thin air – but in a way, seeing into our symbolism – this seems like exactly what we do.  We want to see the truth, even if it is something dark or forbidden.  We want it so bad that we starting inventing things.  Our weakness seems to be that we usually have to wait until a thing is long gone in order to see what it really was.  So we have a kind of vision that comes too late in the game.  Just when we are about to understand things, it darts away. It is because therre is always more for us to see. 

 

Pythagoras: I hated having to accept the reality of Radical 2, but I knew I had no choice.  I had no clue what it meant – in truth, I still don’t – I’m not sure anyone does. 

 

Socrates: Perhaps we were lucky to have had great problems that we couldn’t solve – especially, to know that this was the case – it’s a huge advantage and a wake-up call –Forward to ignorance!  The problem is when we don’t do this, when we think we ‘know,’ when we are ‘sure’ …

 

Plato: But is the point of the exercise to remind us to stay humble? – to push us back?  Or is it to keep daring us to know? – to push us ahead?  Understanding seems to be a little game we play with time, in which, at first, we don’t get it, and then, by some learning process, we begin to – or sometimes we do.  So we open our mouths and venture a thesis, quickly beginning the testing, to see if it measures up.  We can’t get to understanding by skipping the dialectic – we have to do the work.  As my descendent Euclid said, “There is no royal road to geometry.” 

 

Socrates: So the intermediary – or the way we look at it, an outlook itself made of intermediaries – may change through the course of the inquiry.  You might begin with one thesis and be driven to another.  Perhaps this is another way of getting at the problem of understanding via proxies. 

 

Plato: What do you mean?

 

Aspasia: I think I understand – let us consider the idea that several kinds of intermediaries might be at work.  We might need several, to see different things.  They might even be incompatible with each other – rivals, distant regions – using one hypothesis to see something, and using a completely different axiom which opens up something else.  The process resembles somewhat our own little discussion right here. 

 

Pythagoras: My descendants Heisenberg and Bohr seemed to have worked out some ideas like these in the 1930s.  They called it ‘complementarity’ – the ‘Copenhagen’ solution – the idea that we cannot see or measure everything there is to look at simultaneously, or at once, from just one point of view, or with just one measure.  We have to do much more than this.  As John Wheeler said, this is a participatory universe.  You have to do the work, and there is always more to see. 

 

Socrates: Well, let's look at this.  Apparently, these would all be ‘points of view’ – e.g., particles vs. waves – so even if they are incompatible, at least they have something in common – that is, they have a common measure – they all equally make ‘points of view.’ Or can we dig deeper and find something even more primary that makes them seem alike?

 

Aristotle: We want an experimental device to respond to electrons, and for some purposes we can think of this as measuring a wave, but using another picture we can think of it as detecting a particle.  Different experiments need different kinds of pictures.  So the problem is to put this information together into what I called a ‘system.’ But when we actually try to do this, we can’t put it together – the evidence appears to lead in opposite directions – incompatible but equally useful data sets – particles and waves.  So Heisenberg pronounces the ‘uncertainty’ principle.  Really this is more like a ‘certainty’ principle – it is certain, he says, that we cannot know the location and the momentum of an electron simultaneously.  So there is no possibility of seeing deeper into the atom in order to figure out how electrons move in their orbits.  So the conclusion just seemed to pop up that at a deep level there is a glaring inscrutable, that does not fit with our pictures, and so we have to give up the project of actually understanding it.

 

Socrates: This gets us back to the start with Anaxagoras and the problem of the cause. 

 

Aristotle: At best we can keep juggling several different views and try to focus on not confusing any of them with reality.  It’s somewhat like electron microscopy – we see by norming the readouts of an enormous number of events.  It’s kind of a statistical seeing – probabilistic seeing – handicapping the odds – maybe that’s about as close as we can get.  The main idea is just to think of what we are doing as just keeping track of what little is observable.  We have all kinds of instruments running that do this – lots of read-outs and data sets.  But this is not knowledge – it’s just information.  We are just listing off tallies. 

 

Pythagoras: So what we are looking at is roughly a piece of wood with notches on it. 

 

Socrates: Let us begin with notches on a stick.  We begin with a line – a slash, a cut, a mark.  Surely this is one of the primordial symbols of mankind – line and cross and snake, figures like the triangle and circle, images of animals, first man and woman.  This is a starting place for the question about intermediaries, which must reach back very far in history.  So: imagine a stick notched with tallies from the age before the flood.

 

Plato: I can see how a tally might become a number, a count, a piece of information about the world.  There were so many.  But a tally is also a mark, an impact in the world, an event or thing – or the personalization of a thing – say, a cut, a crest, a brand, a stamp.

 

Aristotle: The tally is an intermediary – a record – also a mark – an action – is it a point of view? – as if to say: this is my count; these over here are my property; this is mine – so the point was to make a separation, staking a claim – or simply a record that I was here. 

 

Aspasia: Tally, record, deed – the word ‘stroke’ seems to cover them all – ‘stroke’ is also both a blow and a caress – to stroke, to hit, to soothe – more recently a cause of death.  Appius Caecus, or Appius the Blind, as he was called, the Road-builder, coined the expression Homo faber, ‘man the maker.’  To coin an expression – to cut a wedge or stamp a coin – to make something common coin; to give it value, to set its value.  Making a tally, saying a word – these are actions – maybe we should be talking about tools? – So we are talking about making, a certain kind of making, and using tools.  Maybe we begin with tallies and etchings and words and numbers, but also with the stick as something to reach with, as a weapon, as something we use to do something, a tool – to defend ourselves or to measure something out – much later we get to formulae and algorithms and even enormous experimental devices, such as the LHC at CERN. 

 

Pythagoras: Let us say that we gain knowledge about the natural world by means of these proxies and intermediaries – via instruments, tools – cultural learning – on this account, ‘knowing’ is not about ‘being’ – science is not about nature – mind does not and cannot render an objective picture of reality – since that would require the impossible.  It appears we never interact with nature directly – but via ploys and proxies.   So our colleagues Protagoras and Kant argued …

 

Socrates: Well, there are some problems here. Maybe we are merging too many things together.  A thermometer does not have an opinion. 

 

Pythagoras: Perhaps it does in a way.  We enter into the world of belief and men – this is a human concern – Fahrenheit or Celsius, or Galileo’s thermoscope, before numerical scales, which could only measure a change in temperature, but not yet by any precise degree.  There is an interest, a history buried in every device which stretches beyond its simple reports; the proxy creates an avenue through which data can flow, which makes it possible for there to be a report of something.  There is a kind of claim in it.  Aristotle’s point was that, somehow, we should try to use all these devices together – tallies and tools, marks and points of view – so we begin to get a decent data set – setting interests against one another.  Perhaps this is what terms like ‘perspectivism’ are trying to get at.  Mathematically, it does make sense that we can model the same thing via different assumptions – Homo sapiens or the featherless biped or homo faber. 

 

Plato: The idea seems weird – like Kant’s – i.e., the idea that observable quantities come into existence only by the act of observing them.  At least, we need the proxy to get the report.  This reasoning seems to imply that natural law does not ‘describe reality’ – it’s not about things, but our knowledge of them.  Then it is no longer possible to ask whether elementary particles exist in reality.  – Doesn’t this seem like the ‘one step removed’ problem again?  We are using a ploy to get at something else, but then the thing we are after gets lost.  So we are riding an elephant to get to an elephant – the fifth wheel principle – which suggests that human consciousness is a kind of window dressing – the current buzzword is ‘confabulation’ – the ‘epiphenomenon’ hypothesis – roughly the idea that all this concern about Mind is just a thing off to the side, a bit of fluff, that doesn’t really mean anything.

 

Pythagoras: Well, there are some holdouts – Einstein, de Broglie and Schrödinger, for example – they rejected the ‘uncertainty’ principle and remained committed to realism.  So they went on trying to put a coherent picture together and kept floating ideas – they remained unsatisfied, as Socrates urges us to do.  They didn’t stop – they went on. 

 

Aspasia: The intellectual timeline of the twentieth century was crowded with shocks –

incompleteness, the uncertainty principle, special relativity, general relativity, quantum mechanics, the Big Bang, the expanding universe, quantum entanglement, dark matter, dark energy, primordial neutrinos, quantum fluctuations in the condensate – so many startling discoveries and new mysteries.  So much was happening.  It is not surprising that many – even some of the brightest – drew back, feeling that the problems were simply too big for human beings.  This could mean accommodation – dark obscurities instead of stirring mysteries – the irrational seemed to be taking over the world, or perhaps deeper down the world itself simply is irrational, whatever our wishes and concerns.  So we have to base our conception of science on incompatible pictures and languages; this suggests we end up normalizing unreason – which is exactly the opposite of what we intended.  It’s puzzling.  We really have to think hard about this. 

 

Pythagoras: Bridgman’s version of the complementarity principle was what he called ‘operationalism’ – the thesis that we do not know the meaning of a concept unless we have a way of measuring it – thus a concept reduces down to a set of operations.  This is helpful because we can now see the tally, the mark, the action, the tool, and the entire set of human concerns that motivate all of this, as operations.  But Bridgeman gave the whole thing up – he just couldn’t work it out.  “Nature is intrinsically, and in its elements, neither understandable nor subject to law” – he despaired of getting anywhere – so he actually reached a conclusion.  He ended up on the other side – not remaining unsatisfied – not going on trying to dig into problem, to try out ideas, to see how hypotheses work out – but, after a period of search, he ended up denying that the world can be understood. 

 

Socrates:  So opinion divides again – we are not forced into any orthodoxy, as Einstein teaches us – we don’t have to accept the Copenhagen interpretation – it’s just an opinion, as it seems realism is. An interpretation – a way of reading the data and a new piece of data all by itself.  Another point of view, another perspective, another notch on a stick. 

 

Plato: Operationalism seems like an accommodation to the condition of not knowing.

 

Aspasia: Maybe this kind of accommodation is too easy – it’s like a pain that doesn’t hurt.  If we are numb, we are not going to keep the flame of inquiry bright and hot.  The experience of going through the elenchus, working through the dissoi logoi – reaching the aporia and coming to agnosia – being made to feel a fool, discovering bitter knowledge, humiliation, not because one wants it, but because one is forced to acknowledge being wrong – this is supposed to hurt – it’s meaningless if it doesn’t.  It makes a mark in us.  Nietzsche is probably correct to connect real understanding with brutality and pain. 

 

Socrates: Pain wakes us up!  There has to be failure before any kind of renewal that is going to mean something. Copenhagen is an attempt to get around this – Bridgman too.  This is a way of giving up trying to actually know anything – to see the reality of things.  Then science turns out to be about us – as Protagoras argues – it’s not about the world – it’s almost as if, when we start looking at the process of understanding, we end up unseating understanding, and uncovering some kind of circle game in which we look for something but, at the same time, behind our own backs, we make finding it impossible.  

 

Pythagoras: I like Flanagan’s expression – ‘Mysterianism’ – Chomsky calls it ‘Truism’ – the claim that there are mysteries for us.  We can think about problems, but there are mysteries for us.  We should be wary about anything like a complete explanation.  Early Wittgenstein talks about complete explanations – late Wittgenstein talks about problems completely disappearing – both likely are wrong.  Complete, final, exhaustive – the last thing, the final thing, the truth, the essence, the quintessence!  These ideas are all misleading. 

 

Plato: So have we gotten any closer to understanding the intermediaries – words, numbers, tools – instruments tracking observables – our data collection devices?

 

Aristotle: I argued that spoken words are the symbols of mental experiences, just as written words are the symbols of spoken words.  All men do not write in the same way, nor do all men make the same sounds in speech, but all men have the same mental experiences, which examples like writing and speaking symbolize.  This makes translation possible. Some thread of meaning gets captured in our nets, which remains even after changing net to net.  We Greeks call everyone else Barbarians, as the Hebrews mark everyone outside their tribe Gentiles.  The terms have different origins and associations.  But as Frege said, speaking of propositions differently worded, whatever their difference in meaning, the agreement outweighs it.  So in various languages people talk about outsiders – strangers, foreigners, non-nationals, newcomers, immigrants, refugees, aliens – the ‘others.’ All these terms have different weights and histories, but the agreement supersedes.  The thing we are looking at – in this example – is that people X tend to look at everyone else as ~X.  This is a tally – a mark and a record – a memory of an event, and of its witness.  Different names pull us in different directions – but this is not something we just came up with out of thin air.  By using symbols, we get to a result: here is a fact.  The fact gets stated. By being stated, we have to deal with it – this may be the important thing – rather than the way we say it. 

 

Socrates: What do you mean?

 

Aristotle: I mean, that if I just use the symbol rather than getting hung up on it, the point remains what I am saying – rather than the way or the word or the how at play when I manage to express it.  The symbol is merely a symbol – the point is to look through it – there is no point in getting wrapped up in the symbol itself.  That is the big danger in entering into this subject.  Maybe by seeing so many symbol systems, and having to deal with their different histories and interests and connotations, gets us off the point.  Because there is so much to deal with, we get lost in the details – buried in paperwork. 

 

Socrates: Are you saying that you just want us to think, without worrying too much about how we are doing this?  Let’s think, but not worry too much about words?

 

Aristotle: If we use symbols, and manage to identify some contents of thought, and even manage to assert some thoughts, and reason out some of their consequences, we are beginning to make some progress.  This is a beginning.  From what we were saying before, we may need to use several different kinds of symbols, and systems of symbols, to see everything we want to see about a given problem.  Does it matter that we say alien or barbarian or gentile or ‘the other’?  The idea is that we are talking about people from outside our close group.  All of these terms can get us to the subject – despite their very different origins and histories – and we could list many more examples like the Diné, which means ‘the people,’ or the Hopi, which means, literally, ‘well mannered, civilized’ – basically every people which calls itself humanity.  So perhaps it is not so much how or why I came to study barbaros philosophia – strangers’ ideas – the important thing is that I got to this point at all – that I got outside my group and began to be curious about the world.  One of the things that one begins to see if one actually looks outside one’s own group is, that there are many sets of symbols, and tribes, peoples, languages, histories, and beliefs.  So we rode an elephant, as it were, and arrived somewhere else – not simply at another elephant.  So I am saying that, by using these proxies and go-betweens and try-outs, we actually get somewhere – we see something we did not see before. 

 

Aspasia: We take a thing and convert it into a meaning – that is, we fashion a thing just like that, completely at random – and then, by actually using it, we begin to know. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Dialogues – 2 – Conversions

 

 

Pythagoras

Socrates

Plato

Aristotle

Aspasia

 

 

Socrates: Phaedrus and I were once discussing this subject.  We had wandered out of the city along the river Ilissus and came upon the altar of Boreas.  The old story is that Boreas carried off Oreithyia when she was playing with Pharmacea and her other friends.  Phaedrus asked me how I regarded old tales like this – should we translate them into some more literal form? – Perhaps this was just a way of saying that a blast of the north wind had pushed a young girl off the rocks nearby (Phaedrus 229b). 

 

Plato: I remember that you preferred the symbolic version, rather than trying to cut the tale down to size.  Your argument was based on economy – you seemed to imply that if we take time to unpack all the storytelling in our language, we will end up missing out on the world.  It takes work to get from Boreas to the north wind – or, maybe, explaining lightning via Zeus’ anger vs. the theory of electrostatic discharge – but in the meantime, improving our understanding of physics, we may have forgotten about our own problems. 

 

Pythagoras: Ethics, of course, is your focus.  But did you mean to discourage science?

 

Socrates: Not at all – I just thought we had to figure ourselves out first – to understand ourselves. Let’s fix us before we set about landing on Mars.  So, I think if we are going to look at the subject – symbols – ultimately, we want to get to some kind of ethic. 

 

Plato: I think you were right to point us in the direction of making economies – the symbol is after all an efficiency engine just by itself.  Somewhat less work is needed to convert to the net work output – less heat, more work – less cost, more benefit.  The conversion is the thing we want to take a look at, or maybe even the conversion rate …

 

Aristotle: So we have an example of something that is not a symbol.  If I say a blast of wind pushed a girl off a cliff, I have stripped things down to facts.  If I say the Boreas carried off the beautiful maiden, I have a good story, and also a bit of purpose – an explanation rather than a report.  This wasn’t just an accident – there is some order in the world – Boreas fell in love and couldn’t help himself – thus the sad fate of the maiden. 

 

Plato: Socrates was disappointed that Anaxagoras’ book failed to explain things – not that his reporting was wrong.  ‘Just give me the facts – don’t waste my time with a fanciful tale.’ – But without the tale, there is no purpose. Fact doesn’t give us much of an ethic. 

 

Aristotle: Maybe it does – this could be the ethic of reality – of respecting what is real; objectivity; listening to the world, as Heidegger says, instead of idle chatter; unselfing, as Iris Murdoch used to say; letting Being be.  ‘A Free Man’s Worship,’ as Russell called it – scientific curiosity – wondering about things, asking questions, thinking about problems.  The ethic of actually wanting to know.  Awe, imagination, skepticism …

 

Aspasia: But the hunger for facts can send us down the wrong path – we end up with scientism or some kind of narrow reductionism.  Wittgenstein’s overcoming of the Tractatus position, and all its strictures about what reality must be, in the Investigations, where he acknowledges a much broader realm of reality, is an example.  Some say: stick to the facts.  But we also have to think.  The resort to ‘facts’ is a bit of a dodge. 

 

Plato: Speaking from the symbolic realm reaches into a timeless place – there is more room for thought and morality.  Efficiency takes us from the fanciful tale to the rock. 

 

Aspasia: There is a literal reading of a text and there is a symbolic reading.  Oedipus dreamt that he had wed Periboea – or all men dream of marrying their mothers. 

 

Aristotle: There is a compression there – in a single thing, to signify everything of a kind – Oedipus for all men, Zeus for the weather.  This is somewhat like 10² for 100. 

 

Pythagoras: Bringing compression into the question – reduction, economy, parsimony, simplicity – suggests – an original, say, and a slimmed down version.  But this ignores

the problem of the point of view.  There is more than one way to shrink things down from an original state.  100 is also C in Roman numerals and 百 (bǎi) in Pīnyīn. 

 

Aspasia: Ambiguity is central to the theme – a span between a univocal meaning at one extreme, and an equivocal meaning at another – a reference to just one thing or literally to everything.  Thus the art of reading signs.  There are both good and bad readings of the tea leaves – this means one has to learn both to read and write with symbols.  Perhaps we should consult Empson’s Seven Types of Ambiguity – laying out a few of the basic problems.  Consider the metaphor – which directly states a comparison – ‘Love is a battlefield.’ Then there is simile –which is ‘like’ or ‘as’ – ‘innocent as an angel.’ Some further cases are alternatives rolled into one (‘The A and B of C’), and the happy confusion (‘synchronicity,’ ‘serendipity,’ good fortune in an object of comparison).All the basic kinds of ambiguity represent compression.  She is an individual, a human being, but also an angel, a kind of ideal; we are talking about two things, and about one.

 

Socrates: Yet we see that a symbol is different than a literal account – Boreas vs. the north wind.  There seems more ‘extra’ in the Boreas story than in the ‘straight’ version – adding a vocabulary of purposes – putting meaning in what otherwise is accident.

 

Plato: That could be another place to begin – comparing the mere thing and the thing invested with meaning.  A symbol encapsulates this conversion – this was merely a thing, but now it is invested with meaning.  A name and a local habitation, as the Bard says.  So we are looking at a physical thing – a tally stick; a sound; ink marks on a page.  These are in some fashion mere things.  But if we look at them in human terms, they are much more than things – they are records, they are words, they are writing.  I think we all get that there is a different ‘spin’ in every formulation.  ‘Barbarian’ has a different feel as ‘not a Greek’ than as ‘violent, uncivilized, rude, uneducated’ or as ‘heathen, Neanderthal, pagan.’  So a symbol does something more than merely to point at something – there’s a relative reference group – violent people, people without religion, people without manners – and there is also a way of getting at them – the standard definition, the standard reference vs. the feeling evoked, the secondary association, something suggested, something implied – denotation vs. connotation.  So, e.g., an individual is enlisted into this group – something particular gets pressed into a general framework.  You telescope out from this person to this large group – or you zero in on this person by netting him into this group – ‘Jones is a Catholic’ or ‘Catholics like Jones.’ Then there is doing something that is ‘not quite Catholic’ or ‘catholic tastes’ embracing all types.

 

Socrates: I wonder if it’s possible that a symbol conveys something that cannot be completely spelled out – that cannot be articulated directly – this is what we were thinking when we saw that ‘Boreas carried her off’ gives us much more than ‘A wind blew her off the cliff.’  The difference between the literal version, which can be completely resolved into reporting, and the symbolic version, which is not merely a picture of facts, but includes a comment – this is the big space we are peering into. 

 

Aristotle: When we contrast ‘literal’ and ‘figurative’ readings, the natural assumption to make is that there is a ‘primary’ meaning and a ‘secondary’ meaning, as if the literal meaning is the baseline and the secondary meaning is something added.  Because the term has a primary sense, you can use it in a secondary sense.  But I think the timeline here is all wrong.  It’s not that we have a stock of literal ideas and then we get fancy and start using them metaphorically.  It’s more like the opposite.  We have to imagine an early state of human being still immersed in the half-consciousness of ritual.  Ritual is not the product of religious ideas; on the contrary, religious ideas are the product of ritual.  Before we lay a thing out in its sparse and scientific exactness, it resonates within a deep world of associations whose roots lie in prehistory.  This is the world of the oldest actions and pictures. Imagine, say, hunting rituals, which teach patterns for behavior, and which suggest motives, which suggest ideas – magic far older than science – this is what Heidegger was trying to get at when he explained the difference between the ‘ready-to-hand’ and the ‘present-to-hand’ (Being and Time, 1, 3) – things as we encounter them vs. things as we conceive them – things we use versus abstractions generalized from everyday actions.  So when we start talking about symbols, we are reaching very far back, back to the misty origins.  This territory remains beyond us to spell out completely – a place underneath our conscious awareness.  The topic of symbolism has an aura of mystery around it because what we experience in confronting the symbol is more than just thinking – a symbol can be a trigger – it calls up a feeling or experience – its impact on consciousness is only a part of its total impact.  There is something irreducible here – i.e., not entirely resolvable into concepts.  Perhaps symbols reach a little further back to the world of mysteries, before the world of problems. 

 

Socrates: Metaphors and similes get absorbed into the forms of our language – as our friend Wittgenstein held (PI §112) – which causes all sorts of havoc – misdirections, misleading expectations, false appearances, rigid requirements for how a thing must be, about which we have little awareness.  When we say for example that a wish was unsatisfied, this is surely a metaphor, since wishes do not feel anything – people do.  When we say things like not pleased, not content, not complete, not fulfilled – we are not really talking about ideas – this is not the sort of thing that a concept can undergo or experience.  When we say a wish was unsatisfied, we are bringing a kind of primal picture to everyday speech. This is almost like time travel.  So when the problems come up, they seem deep – they seem like “deep disquietudes” (§111), because their roots go down deep – down to the origin of mind – deep as we can go.  Wittgenstein mentions that jokes about grammar seem deep for this reason – the same depth as philosophy itself.

 

Aspasia: The past, present, and future met in a bar – it was pretty tense.  – Sorry! …

 

Aristotle: But I think Nietzsche was wrong when he said that “we possess nothing but metaphors for things – metaphors that correspond in no way to the original entities” – or that at best, we are working with a “host of metaphors” (On Truth and Lies in an Extra-moral Sense).  If we have nothing but metaphors, then we never make the transition that Heidegger is talking about – from things we use to abstractions – from Boreas to meteorology.  But science exists – we can tone down our ‘comment’ about everything, strip things bare, and begin to see things a bit outside our own interests, as they really are.

 

Plato: Well, I think the point that Nietzsche and Heidegger and Wittgenstein are all chiming in on, is to get away from the idea that language is any kind of mirror of reality – also Rorty’s point – thus to get back to the insight that language is about action – thus a conversion-process – in Austin’s terminology, we are talking about performatives, and speech acts, and all the kinds there are – phonetic acts, phatic acts, rhetic acts, locutions and illocutions – i.e., what we do, and the substitution machinery, and why. 

 

Socrates: So we have the problems of proxy, action and purpose – but we want to see more of what you are calling the ‘substitution machinery,’ to see more of the problem. 

 

Aspasia: We can see that it works by compression, which relates to our discussion about economy, but also to the deep background not entirely resolvable into concepts – the symbol’s impact on the unconscious – the symbol’s resonance at deeper layers of memory.  Because the symbol reaches back into prehistory and into our prehistory, what we experience in confronting the symbol has the characteristic of depth – as Socrates said, it’s like time travel – we are transported to a primal scene in the midst of everyday life.  There’s the recent part, and there’s the ancient part.  This is what Wittgenstein is getting at in PI §18: “Our language is like an ancient city: a maze of little streets and squares, of old and new houses, and houses with additions from various periods; and all this is surrounded by a multitude of new boroughs with straight regular streets and uniform houses.” 

 

Plato: When we peer into this depth, there is the temptation to set up a hierarchy – old and new, multiform-ambiguous to stipulated-univocal, primordial to scientific, figurative and literal, imagistic to literary – this may be the most disturbing part about it – what I mean is, roughly: the dangers it presents to our understanding. This is a very wriggly fish.

 

Pythagoras: Well, we can make out some boundaries.  A symbol that has degraded into a sign has a univocal meaning – at this point it is ‘nothing but x.’ A symbol that risen to become an ideal no longer has any worldly referent – at this point it is ‘no longer x.’ The letter ‘A’ descends from the hieroglyph of an ox, the letter ‘B’ from the hieroglyph for house – from Proto-Sinaitic to modern languages – but today ‘A’ has no connection to an ox, nor ‘B’ to a house.  They have become stipulated and fixed.  An octagon on its own is simply a shape – but today it resonates as a stop sign or a Taoist bagua or an umbrella or the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem – a mere thing, but resonating with human meaning. 

 

Plato: This is where we begin to see what’s going on with the ‘substitution machinery.’  Take the octagon.  There’s the thing – this shape – and there’s what it gets us to do – say, to stop.  A thing and a counterthing – a comparison, a matching, a tool to convert mind from something to something – from this shape to a certain thought – ‘stop.’ The symbol encodes an understanding that sees x not just as such, but also as expressing – a sensory input and, in addition, a reference to something else – an association to an internal mental state.  Take the snake form – a curvy line – this is thought to underlie the Proto-Sinaitic letter naḥaš, the basis of the Greek ‘ν’ (nu) and the English ‘n.’  So here is a record of a sensory input – seeing a snake – later codified to call up a certain sound: the ‘n’ sound.  There is no relation for us between the snake and the ‘n’ sound we make when we speak.  But there is a chain from a sensory input, to an internal mental state, to a thing, an action. Someone who spoke an entirely different language might seize on this mark – once a picture of a snake – to express the ‘n’ sound in a new language – maybe even in a place where there are no snakes.  This is roughly the ‘rebus principle’ in linguistics – using existing symbols, such as pictograms, purely for their sounds regardless of their meaning, to represent new words.  Consider my name, Plato, which is rendered 柏拉图 (柏 (Bǎi),  拉 (La), 图 (Tú)), which sounds like ‘Bolatu’ in English.  The first character, 柏, Bǎi, originally meant ‘cypress’ – a pictogram used in reference to certain trees – also to refer to an elder brother or senior male figure.  The second character, 拉, La, meant ‘to destroy’ or break, strike, hit, insult; also to playing an ancient bowed musical instrument (the erhu – what is sometimes called ‘the Chinese violin’).  The third character, 图, Tú, indicates a figure, a drawing, a map or chart or plan; as a verb it can mean to seek or to pursue.  My point is that by using these Mandarin sounds, one can approximate the Greek name, Πλάτων – which in English is rendered ‘Plato’ and in Russian, say, is ‘Платон.’  The word ‘rebus’ itself doesn’t really tell us anything.  ‘Rebus’ is a plural form of the Latin term res, which means ‘thing.’  So, with only these first ‘things’ before us, we can make out a deep layer of pictures of things, such as oxen and trees, and basic sounds – such as the ‘n’ sound and the ‘p’/‘b’ sound – and conventional relations between sounds and things – such as the association between a square shape with a small indentation, meant to be a picture of a house, with the sound bayt, a phoneme from Proto-Sinaitic, among the earliest forms of writing we can trace.  We can hear this sound in the Hebrew word בַּיִת (báyit) and the Arabic term بيت (bayt).  This sound, when indicated by a Hebrew or Arabic character, could also be used to approximate a word or a part of a word from another language – say, by someone trying to transcribe Urdu into Arabic. Thus we have pictures, sounds, conventions, and lots of different kinds of taking-from and applying-to, cut and paste – copy, transform, combine – roughly, ‘conversions’ that can take place using these pieces. 

 

Aristotle: Thus by conversions just like these, a symbol, at work in mental processes, can take on the significance of pointing out actual things in the world.  So perhaps we learned the ‘A’ shape from seeing an ox, but afterwards the pattern gets reversed: rather than travelling from a sensory reference to a constructed image (seeing an ox to the letterform of an ‘A’), but travelling from the constructed image to a sensory reference (the picture of an octagon to the action of stopping).  Thus we create models of (e.g., snake signs) and models for (e.g. traffic signals), as Geertz explained.  Thus Homer converts models of (thoughts of wolves or lions) into models for (men who threaten and attack) – a disease and an enemy like a disease – a shield and an island like a shield – Myrmidons like wasps. 

 

Pythagoras: To make the point explicitly, let’s see if we can distinguish the receptoglyph (the sensory input as the basis for the cipher: seeing a snake and the snake form) from the activoglyph (the cipher as the basis for the sensory action: seeing the octagon and then stopping).  Geertz’s insight is that once we create a vocabulary of receptoglyphs, we can begin using them as activoglyphs – inputs become outputs. 

 

Aspasia: So Heidegger was on to something when he said that by means of mathematical symbolism, scientific conception can “skip over” the details of phenomena to zero in on a reference we stipulate, in order to frame a hypothesis whose truth can only be determined by empirical testing (What is a Thing?, 1962).  With the right vocabulary, connecting the right receptoglyphs to the right activoglyphs, and asking the right questions, we can set up experiments to answer our questions about the deep workings of nature. 

 

Aristotle: So descriptions become directives and shortcuts encapsulate experiences. The octagon becomes a traffic signal, the crown becomes a king.  If pressure is p and volume v and temperature t, then volume is proportional to temperature over pressure, v ∝ tp^-1.

Volume suggests a receptoglyph – a sensory input.  Proportionality seems an activoglyph – the sign ∝ as a shortcut for the action of tracking how one thing changes with another.  At least these are some examples to begin with to look deeper into the ‘substitution machinery.’ It can be as simple as making a name for a thing (“she shall be called Woman, because she was taken out of Man,” “Call me Ishmael”) and it can be as complicated as seeing into phenomena by discovering relations between stipulated parameters (F=ma, E=mc²).  It can be a way to change the world by putting a label on it (a piece of land becomes property, becomes real estate, becomes an asset; a newborn becomes a ‘strong little guy’ or a ‘sweet little girl’; a woman becomes a ‘wife’; and what we used to envision as unbearable torture is re-spun into ‘enhanced interrogation.’)   The process changes us by revising our vocabulary (a ‘wolf’ becomes a ‘sexual predator,’ a ‘patriot’ becomes a ‘chauvinist,’ a tasteless boor becomes the ‘voice of the people’).  At a certain point we may have lost all connection to ‘receptoglyphs’ and only ‘activoglyphs’ remain – impacts from sensation fade away but ‘spin’ remains to emphasize a reading – just as Wittgenstein describes the city center as odd-shaped older homes and winding streets, and the suburbs as new, uniform buildings and straight lines for roads.  Datum to stipulation – photograph to blueprint – individual to form. 

 

Aspasia: Quine’s discussion in Two Dogmas of Empiricism (1951) makes the point that we may not be able to make out the difference between receiving and doing in quite this way.  Plato distinguishes between things and ideas, what Hume calls matters of fact vs. relations of ideas; Kant distinguishes synthetic vs. analytic truths, as the Latins separated a priori from a posteriori; and Leibniz defines truths of fact vs. truths of reason.  But all of this could be wrong.  The original mistake seems to be that of trying to match up one token with one thing – one name with one object.  The idea is that the term, to be significant, must be a name of a sense datum, or a compound of such names.  So each statement, taken in isolation, can either be confirmed or rejected.  And it does seem right that the truth of a statement depends both on language and extralinguistic fact.  But this does not mean that in any given case we can analyze a statement into a linguistic and factual components.  Thus it is misleading to speak of the empirical content of an individual statement.  Any statement can be held true, and any statement can be revised – this is why Quine said that physical objects and Homer’s gods differ in degree but not in kind – both are cultural posits – they are simply tools or devices for managing, for properly interpreting, the flux of experience.  They are symbols.  Thus the way we get at truth is not name by name, or statement by statement, but by our whole outlook.  Science is underdetermined by experience – the problem is one of choosing a convenient language, a convenient scientific framework, a convenient set of hypotheses – the convenient symbols – and a way to go about updating them.  Quine’s way of looking at the problem is that we are all given a scientific heritage, and we all experience a barrage of sensations, and we keep juggling all this, applying the heritage to new sensations, on the fly.  Doing so, he says, we should try to be ‘pragmatic’ – from our Greek word pragmatikos, relating to fact, from pragma, deed, and prattein, do – but don’t confuse the symbol for a thing in the world.  So we have to drop the whole pretense of receptoglyphs and activoglyphs – it simply doesn’t work like this.  It’s a human fabric – the whole thing – not a set of facts and a bunch of words.  A tracking device.  Back to notches on a stick. 

 

Pythagoras: So we are back to symbols, and degraded symbols, and idealized symbols, and symbols woven together, and lots of different ways to do this – terms, sentences, sciences – vocabularies, systems, versions – pragmatism and mistakes on either side – over- and under-interpretation, idealization and reduction – ‘it’s just this’ and ‘it’s more than this’ – the kinds of errors that linguistic beings would make.  Because we rely so much on symbols, we can get trapped inside them.  We can mistake a symbol for a thing, we can mistake the tool for the reason.  Thus part of our concept of human understanding must be a resistance to symbols – skill in not being taken away by them; skill in not mistaking them for the things they mean to signify – and it is not simply that we want to focus more on things, and less on names. It is easy to get confused about symbols – because they reach deep down – it is deeply puzzling to have an outlook made of symbolic conversions.  A symbol has a history – we have to keep this in mind.  This never ends, so neither can updating – we just have to go on juggling our heritage and our experience.  History reveals to us that when we encapsulate an experience into symbols, we bring it into our society.  It begins to change with the dynamic in our society – thus a sign which may once have been merely a design, became a sign of good luck, and of Buddha’s heart, and of the number 10,000, but then became a powerful symbol of hatred – a kind of scar emblazoned on the battle flag of a former German state.  Part of understanding is resisting the power of the symbol, and understanding its history can be a way to do this.  The fate of the symbol itself becomes a learning tool.  The tally becomes an utz – a prod, a goad, a tease.  A symbol pushes one’s buttons – symbol-reading is in part re-recognizing and associating and culling and collecting, but also an impact beneath conscious awareness – so we have to look at its total impact to get at any kind of real understanding.  We are looking for an understanding that will help us resist a symbol, or follow it, as we think things out – as we experience the urge abbreviated in the sign. 

 

Socrates: It appears we are connecting dots to get closer to an ethics for beings who live in worlds made of symbols ...

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Dialogues – 3 – Impositions 

 

Pythagoras

Socrates

Plato

Aristotle

Aspasia

Thrasymachus

 

Now Thrasymachus, even while we were conversing, had been trying several times to break in and lay hold of the discussion, but he was restrained by those who sat by him who wished to hear the argument out.  But when we came to a pause, he couldn’t hold his peace any longer, but gathering himself up like a wild beast, he hurled himself on us as if would tear us to pieces (Republic, I, 336b)

 

Thrasymachus: What garbage is this that you are talking, and why do you Simple Simons truckle and give way to one another?  I am sick of listening to this drivel.

 

Socrates: Thrasymachus please don’t be harsh with us.  If we have made mistakes in our consideration of the question, rest assured that we are unwillingly in error.  It is wondrous that you are here.  Please enlighten us on these matters.

 

Thrasymachus: Here again we have the well-known irony of Socrates.  I was sure you would dissemble and do anything rather than answer my questions. 

 

Socrates: No, ask away!  I am at your service. 

 

Plato: Perhaps I should step in here.

 

Thrasymachus:  Ah yes, our illustrious author.  Is this not the same Plato, friend of Critias, friend of Callicles, someone who admits that he sympathized with the cause of the Tyrants (Seventh Letter, 342d)?  You must have known many unscrupulous men, men of power, from your youth onwards.  Our German friend Professor Jaeger accuses you of needing to suppress in yourself exactly these same unprincipled feelings.  What was it you made Callicles say in the Gorgias (483e)? – “We mold the best and strongest among us to our will, catching them like young lions, and we enchant and enslave them by telling them that everyone must have equal rights, and that that is the meaning of justice.  But it is obvious if a man of truly strong nature comes along, he shakes it all off and bursts through it and escapes, trampling down our letters and spells and incantations and all our conventional laws, and he who was our slave now becomes our master; so then at last we begin to see the true nature of justice.”  Let us be honest – law is an artificial bond, a convention agreed on by organized weaklings, to repress their natural masters, the strong, and make them do their will.  The entire matter is about arbitrary power.  Whether any law should be obeyed depends solely on one’s power of resisting it.  So perhaps you did stray close to the mark when you started talking about resistance.  There is no inherent authority! – there is only what you can hoodwink people to believe. 

Socrates: I am glad we got something right. 

 

Thrasymachus: You have pretty consistently avoided the issue from the beginning.  Why all this blabber about intermediaries and conversions?  Is it not obvious that what we are talking about are individual acts – creative acts – acts of will, acts of power – the imposition of power – a symbol has to be taken as a symbol, and for it to be taken as a symbol, it has to be imposed.  You got closest to this when you noted that the symbol is arbitrary, that it must be fixed, stipulated, instituted.  There is nothing in the sign itself to suggest the relation to another thing.  There is nothing in an olive branch to make it a symbol of peace – there is nothing in a swallow to make it a symbol of hope – there is nothing in a sickle to make it a symbol of death.  Conventional symbols encode cultural knowledge.  They encode cultural posits, as Quine calls them.  These are tools, myths, convenient fictions.  These are all imposed.

 

Socrates: And what lesson do you draw from this? 

 

Thrasymachus: Is it not obvious?  I am talking about the imposition of power.  As you know, I argued that systems vary across cultures, over time, and among individuals and groups, so that there can be no absolutes.  Quine was right about positing.  In our ancient vocabulary, I argued that conventions, or nomos, laws, which we can all see are not universal, are quite different than nature, phusis, our being, which very obviously is universal – by nature individuals seek their own advantage, but by convention society tries to inhibit this capacity. 

 

Socrates: Then instead of examining intermediaries or conversions, we should be studying power. 

 

Thrasymachus: That is what our colleagues Machiavelli, Nietzsche, Clausewitz,     Sun Tzu, Musashi and Foucault direct us to do.  Power is the ability of a person or group to impact the behavior of another person or group.  Perhaps we can measure power in resources – wielding power by exhortation, inducement or coercion – what can we say, promise, or threaten.  There is something like hard power – the power to command, resting on economic and military strength – versus soft power – the appeal through culture and ideology.  But perhaps soft power is attractive because it is seen as a route to success – which implies that soft power rests on hard power.

 

Socrates: Our approach – like the authors who wrote mirror-of-princes books in the Middle Ages – was that power was only rightful if exercised by rulers of virtuous character.  First we solve the problem of virtue, then the problem of power. 

 

Thrasymachus: I think we have to question whether there is any moral basis on which to judge the difference between legitimate and illegitimate uses of power. 

Socrates: Then virtue adds nothing to the actual possession of power.  Authority is power, and whoever has power has right.  Likewise the good person has no power simply in being good.  Then we have no reason to complain if we are mistreated. 

 

Thrasymachus: That is the idea we are looking at.  I am asking you to drop all this moralistic nonsense and begin to look at the world the way it really is. 

 

Socrates: Well, in our previous conversation, I tried to show you that exercising power is in fact linked up with goodness.  The ruler does well if he does good. 

 

Thrasymachus: That was your contention.  But does this really bear examination? 

Machiavelli notes that there cannot be any good laws without good arms (Prince, 47).  Legitimacy rests on the threat of coercive force; there is no right apart from the power to enforce it.  Thus it is better to be feared than loved, and violence and deception are main tools of governing.  Machiavelli observes that men are “ungrateful, disloyal, insincere and deceitful, timid of danger and anxious for profit; love is a bond of obligation which these miserable creatures break whenever it suits them to do so; but fear holds them fast by a dread of punishment that never passes” (Prince, 62).  I can only choose not to obey if I possess the power to resist the demands of the state – so both for the state and for the individual, we are talking about power.  There is no ground for authority distinct from the ability to wield power.  Machiavelli advises the prince to develop a “flexible disposition” so as to vary his or her conduct from good to evil and back again, “as fortune and circumstances dictate” (Prince, 66). 

 

Socrates: Well then, let us look at arbitrary power.  Note that to be the subject of power – to be dominated – is typically to have cause for indignation and resentment.  By your argument, the subject has no ground for making this complaint. Likewise, when people exercise power, they somehow feel a need to justify it, as if to say – you, the subject of power – you deserve this punishment.  I see here a kind of underlying desire to square accounts and see justice at work in the world.  Also, your argument seems to make it impossible to distinguish the exercise of power from the abuse of power.  You propose to analyze power completely detached from ethics – my guess is that this is simply not feasible – ethics will slip in unawares. 

 

Thrasymachus: Let’s try to test this claim.  We are examining power, and we are led to ideas like domination, exploitation, oppression, subjugation – the one-down position vs. the upper hand.  Now the question is whether we can really look at any of these ideas apart from an underlying morality.  I recall Nietzsche’s claim that the love of the good typically swamps the intellectual conscience – we save the moral idea rather than finding the grit to look at the world straight on.  This is why our previous discussion was inadequate – so I am claiming – so test this idea. 

 

Socrates: You seem to be collapsing the human into the physical world.  The earth cannot complain of being prisoner of the sun.  There is no ‘abuse of power’ in nature. 

 

Thrasymachus: Go back to our previous discussion regarding the ability to resist symbols.  Here again I can only choose not to obey – choose not to be dominated by the symbol – if I have the power to resist it.  If I have this power, then I can resist.  I am not sure that virtue could add anything to the actual possession of this power.  Should we only teach good men to resist power?  Pass the moral test, and then we will teach you how.  This was Locke’s principle. “The great may learn to love truth, whereas day-laborers and tradesmen, spinsters and dairymaids, must be told what to believe. The greatest part cannot know and therefore they must believe” (See The Reasonableness of Christianity, 1695).  I hope you can see that this is sophistry of the highest order.  Who is John Locke, to tell me that I cannot think?  Who are you or any man to judge me, limit me, dictate to me? 

 

Socrates:  Well, here you seem to feel slighted – as if you had cause to complain.  This apparently would be a case of the abuse of power. 

 

Thrasymachus: Only because he is so duplicitous about it.  The presumption that I, John Locke, sitting on high, may dictate one fate to dairymaids, and another to philosophers, stinks to high heaven.  By what right?  Or do you think that only good men can complain?

 

Socrates: But by your train of argument, there is no right, anywhere in this picture.  It is all force.  I recall some ideas from Simone Weil from her study of Homer. 

 

“Gods wield force and man employs force.  Force enslaves man and force takes men's lives. Spirit is twisted by force; it is swept away, blinded, deformed, degraded, whether it fights or submits.  Force may turn a man subjected to it into a mere thing – he becomes a lesser thing; exercised to its limit, it turns the man who wields it into a mere thing – no longer a human being at all; in the end, in the most literal sense, force turns him into a corpse. There is an enormous pall of regret hanging over this entire canvas.  This whole way of looking at the world is suffused with revulsion – it is sick of war and death – it is a moral revulsion against the exercise of mere force.” 

 

What I mean is, unawares, you have begun to construct an ethic – roughly, rejecting hierarchy – rejection presumption – rejecting the trespasser, the interloper, the hypnotist, the cunning liar. Rejecting the outrage that anyone would presume to dictate to you …

 

Thrasymachus: Thus, by your argument, the power theory falls apart, because the person who enunciates it could never actually adopt it as a principle.  We cannot help preferring one outcome over another. 

 

Aristotle: Foucault then was probably closer to the mark in his idea that power circulates through everyone – it’s not the kind of thing that one person exercises but no one else has.  “Where there is power, there is resistance.” 

 

Thrasymachus: Well, let’s examine some of Foucault’s thinking, and see where it gets us.  I think he will end up supporting the way I am looking at the problem …

 

Aristotle: His investigation seems much broader than the one we started – he is not just looking at state power.  Power is not just the government – central power – reigning over people via force or the threat of force, as Machiavelli suggests.  Power is everywhere – everyone wields it – in effect absolutely every human being wields power.  The resort to a show of force looks more like a lack of power than real power itself.  Whatever we do, not just by denying, restricting, prohibiting or repressing, but also by making, producing, creating, encouraging – all of this is power.  In that sense, resistance is not just political mobilization and armed rebellion, but shows a thousand faces – sarcasm, dissimulation, false compliance, subversions, foot dragging, clowning around.  Even a hairstyle can be a form of resistance.  So we are looking at the whole network of relations in society, including the power in just getting defined as a ‘boy’ or a ‘girl’ – parenting, educational systems, examinations, basic training in the military, surveillance – the whole way in which people get defined in medicine, psychiatry, criminology – in the hospital, the asylum, the prison, the factory, the school.  There is an enormous power in being categorized and labeled and set upon by ‘experts.’  So the whole framework here is quite different than our ancient model, in which we set the conflict between the nobles and the people.  The older dichotomy between domination and resistance makes less sense – think of the corporate executive or political leader who is also a browbeaten husband – the same individual can be both powerful and powerless in different systems.  Some forms of resistance work to reinforce authority, some hollow it out.  Some forms of power seem palpable and physical, but others are more definitional or emotional.  There is no universal binary division of struggle. 

 

Socrates: Please don’t think of me as a browbeaten husband.  I chose Xanthippe because of her strong spirit, not in spite of it.

 

Aspasia: Foucault seems to portray society as a war of all against all.  Everyone is fighting everyone else.  Everyone is after something and everyone puts up resistance.  Also – there doesn’t seem to be any main axis in society.  Depending on where one is, and what role one has – mother, husband, sister, teacher, Republican, computer scientist, horse trader, electrician – the coalitions and conflicts keep shifting.  It isn’t noble vs. plebian anymore, but interests vs. interests. 

 

Plato: Foucault seems to regard everyone as perfectly free in all this back and forth – “power is exercised only over free subjects and only insofar as they are free” – so we are free to take the initiative and also free to take umbrage.  Social life boxes us in, defines us, jams us into a little cubbyhole, which pushes our buttons.  It’s like what the poet Audre Lorde once said – “I find I am constantly being encouraged to pluck out some one aspect of myself and present this as the meaningful whole, eclipsing or denying the other parts of the self.”  So, this tells us about freedom – freedom is not about discovering, or being able to determine, who we are, but about rebelling against already being defined, categorized, and classified – chopped up into little bits.  First there is the role – then the cry of freedom.  We are free – we are never trapped by power – we exercise it, we resist it, we can always change its hold over us – we can always do something, say something, make something felt and known.

 

Pythagoras: So overall, our first approach to the problem of power should be to define a kind of regime in force and then portray ourselves as passive recipients of an official system of symbols.  Then there is the possibility of rebellion.  So, if there is a dominant culture, there is also an uprising. 

 

Thrasymachus: Well, I think we can see how this is going.  At some point, decision replaces argument – the decision to take action, or the decision to resist authority.  In every case, what we see are people exercising will for themselves, against others, exercising power, imposing their will, throwing off the yoke.  In effect, histories triumph over history, cultures over culture as such, the nation over rationality.  The individual gets freed from the group – or not – a person gets defined, dictated to, cowed and subjugated and just thrown under the wheels.  Maybe he does something about it – as Sartre says, “To make something of what you’ve been made into.” Maybe not.  Just stories – numberless lives – more particulars, more difference, less of the universal.  Now we are finally getting closer to seeing society as it really is. 

Socrates: So we analyze the “noble lies” at the root not only of society but inherent in the making of people themselves – we see their power to unify a person’s experiences and their power to bind a people together and teach them an ethic – but we also see the dangers – the danger of trapping a person in a false version of themselves or of unifying society via some hateful lie.  Then we become more self-conscious about this whole arena of experience, which means we get cut off somewhat from our traditions and they wield much less power over us than they did over our ancestors.  Critias offered some arguments like these.  I see the exhilaration in this way of looking at the world – emphasizing the ways in which people can cut free.  I guess to me it seems to normalize bad conduct, when the whole point of looking into the matter was to get some hold over ourselves. 

 

Thrasymachus:  Let’s get back to the subject.  We are not talking about recognizing signs, such as the sound of running water or the smell of honeysuckle.  We’re talking about symbols – human creations, such as the snake form or a word.  I am arguing that they come about by being imposed, by being set down and instituted – there is nothing natural about them – they are free creations – in many cases it is simply a matter of being first, the first to say this or that, the first to seize a piece of ground.  In that sense, history is more like biology than physics – the order in which things happens matters.  So really what we are talking about are human creations and getting cowed by them and getting out from under them.

 

Aristotle:  If we compare our lives with our most ancient ancestors, we can see how far the question reaches.  Our clothes, the places we live and work, what we do with our time, the routines of everyday life – in all these worlds we are immersed in symbols.  It is hard to see what in our world is not made of symbols.  Even if we take in something from nature and place it in our homes – like a rock to set on a shelf – we have changed it and remade it into a symbol.  In effect, it is a fiction, which is treated as real, and becomes effective.  The fiction of a thing that is set and known – parents, family, money, clothing, jobs, housing, schools, armies, churches, prisons, hospitals – writing, culture, artworks, theater, cooking, décor – we create our institutions, we get trapped in them, but we can also break out of them and try something new.  But when we see the enormous reach of the symbolic, the game of culture in which things get names and purposes, we seem to have slipped unawares into merely describing the world, and have given up on the ethical theme.  We can talk about getting out from under someone’s control, or setting out on some cause and trying to make it powerful – maybe it works, maybe not.  It’s hard to find an ethic in all this. 

 

Aspasia: Maybe it’s the kind of idea we see in Hegel or Freud, that moral progress has to do with getting out from under the impress of power, and gaining freedom.  So it seems we are contending with impositions – as Thrasymachus calls them – and the possibility of changing things around.  Are we any closer to wisdom?

 

Thrasymachus: Perhaps the wisdom is to get out from under the moralism – the presumption that we know enough to say this is how it should be. 

 

Socrates: Well, let us recall that the power theory seems to depend on a principle that absolutely no one could follow.  We cannot really normalize mere relations of power because we take umbrage when power is exercised against us.  Think of all the language we have created to express what injustice is and how it feels – a myriad names for agony – all the language of outrage, vice, iniquity, sin, crime…

 

Plato: Is there anywhere a worm so low who does not feel some care about his life?

 

Thrasymachus: This is your featherless biped.  He does what he is cowed into doing.

 

Plato: Surely there is something more to look to than the decisions of some or other people.  Surely there is something higher, something more important, something that wells up in us in torrents, in unstoppable feeling, that says – This is wrong! – This cries to heaven for an answer!  Or is this just another relation of power, just another fact?  An even with all this language behind us to express the outrage of injustice, there is still more.  It’s way too big to be generalized or capped off as final.  We are nowhere near done creating language for injustice because we’re not finished facing it.  We create language for it because we react to life – it’s real.  Of course, there is a problem when we say this is real, because in a sense then we are done with it and have said what it is.  When we say instead this is a symbol, we have a better chance to grasp that this is entirely our problem.  My conclusion is that we have to get back to principles – to ‘forms’ – because they are real; that is, because they are more than just the decisions of people; even if we can’t quite figure out what they are, or in what way exactly they appear or exist, or how to talk about them.  This is why we speak in symbols. 

 

Socrates: We still have the problem of convincing Thrasymachus.  He sees your ‘forms’ as strictures, as chains from the past, which we will have to throw off like colonial masters.  We see power at work, we describe the world, we grasp that cultures create networks to help people steer through the maze of experience.  So the official set of symbols knocks us over the head – and a person of spirit tries to dig in a little and ask some questions. 

 

Plato: It is surely true that this is our creation.  But when you take a cool drink of water, for example, as Epictetus says, there is the sense of returning to something – here is something that needs a name.  So there is a latent capability for language, needing only to be introduced for someone to grasp it and use it immediately.  So, in a particular culture, one learns a word for water – let’s say we are pointing at a form – the conceit is that there is something ‘out there’ waiting to be named.  Cultures do pretty much overlap in naming the big structures.  Of course we can also name something that isn’t there – the capacity I am talking about, which is something we grow, reaches further than just the real – since we also live with wood fairies and nymphs.  So we need imagination and skepticism – trying a thing out, based on our various detectors, to see if it is there.  And of course we only get to see what we test for.   The ‘form’ is something like a grid or a test pattern – it’s not really a data collector in itself – more like a data filter – a ‘category’ as Aristotle would say.

 

Socrates: Then we have the answer to our question.  We pretty much have to treat everything as a test case – the life of the Mind is a series of auditions – we work through delegates, go-betweens, proxies and ruses.  The more we learn, the more symbols we collect, the more stories we tell, the bigger the group for comparison – so we should just keep growing the database.  We have more to work with, more ideas to play against each other. 

Thrasymachus: We live in a world of symbols whether we want to or not – it’s our own creation! – it’s still ours even when we give it up and let a thing just sit there and be ‘real.’ 

 

Aspasia: My thesis is, this is how we overcame the determinism that should have defeated us: by symbolism; since we do not speak with one voice; since we have been a conversation. 

 

Socrates: I suppose this solves the mystery of why human beings have such large brains.  It must be because they are such idiots!  They need all this heavy weaponry even to do the simplest things. We have this godlike power, but can you see what we do with it?  Someone, anyway, has to go on irritating people about justice, and skepticism, and trying to do some good in the world. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Dialogues – 4 – Interventions

 

Foucault

Kierkegaard

Nietzsche

Jaspers

De Beauvoir

 

 

Foucault: If I do not say what ought to be done, it’s not because I believe there is nothing to be done.  Quite the contrary.  I think there are a thousand things to be done, to be invented, to be forged, by those who, recognizing the relations of power in which they are implicated, have decided to resist or to escape.  I am an optimist.  I am not speaking in order to say: look how things are, you are all trapped. Sometimes I say things that sound like that, but really just in order to provoke change.  I am actually trying to be of some use (“Polemics, Politics, and Problematizations: An Interview with Michel Foucault,” Paul Rabinow, May 1984.)

 

Kierkegaard: So you have an ethic – something like, “question governmentality” – which has a nicely Socratic ring to it.  Your idea is, we get stuck.  Thrasymachus was right that the person of spirit rebels against the established order.  That means: there is no rebellion or moment of true individuality without a prior reverence.  We start out as Homo religiosis, religious man, sacred man.  It’s not really important to understand how things got set up in the first place, what the first magical object was, which we could never do anyway – when the first dawn of Mind appeared.  We have a few fragments.  We see well enough even in the dark.  What is important is to find a truth that means something to you.  And so my friend Michel here is correct.  We play the game of power, when we feel it, or to go on, or to break free. 

 

Nietzsche: We ply our will, as my friends Thrasymachus and Machiavelli argued.  I saw the problem of ‘reverencing’ a thing – we ply our will, but then our piety looms larger than our honesty.  We have to make our honesty big enough to take life on.  The world has already become powerful against us – so we have to become powerful against it.  We have to take everything in, store it up, use it, explode with it – to prefer time to eternity, becoming over being. 

 

Jaspers: We can’t do this by ourselves – we can’t become human by ourselves.  The truth begins with two.  I can’t really be free unless the other person is free – that’s why we have to get into conversation, to work things out.  To me it seemed obvious that when we enter into dialogue, we are not really alone – we are not just talking among ourselves – our culture is with us, ultimately the whole world is here – my idea is, to just go on, in company with our eternal contemporaries.

 

De Beauvoir: Who could have predicted Homo sapiens by looking at a tree shrew?  Since evolutionary changes are not completely predictable, I think we can make some room for freedom.  So, we are free – we are free to act – to make meaning – also free to fail.  I really can break out of whatever I have been up to now, and exist fully in my freedom.  To me the world seems a little bleaker whenever people don’t do this – if they just live in a box – or, worse, if they try to take somebody else’s freedom away. So much of life is devoted to taking freedom away.  But even freedom, of course, just by itself, isn’t enough.  There can be an empty freedom – freedom to be a nothing.

 

Nietzsche: Better to will nothingness than not to will at all. 

 

De Beauvoir:  Sure, sure.  We want the person engaged!  But I don’t think you would like all the garbage that floats up in this world of freedom we are talking about.  When I say there is an empty freedom, I mean that our personal enlightenment has something to do with this other person – the whole world – as our friend Karl was saying.  We can’t be human on our own. 

 

Nietzsche: I don’t know.  It’s a good question. We may not be able to make it to ‘human’ even with everybody helping, as Socrates seemed to feel.  Maybe ‘human’ itself is not enough.  How does the big, proud, self-confident I step forth from experience, begin to live life, and make some mistakes? 

 

Kierkegaard:  Please don’t tell us that this strength was forged in the icy fortress of solitude.

 

Nietzsche:  No, no, I see the point.  I had so many people – so many great spirits to bounce off of – Buckhardt, Rée, Wagner, Feuerbach, Rohde, Ritschl, David Strauss, Frau Lou, my crazy sister – you are right.  We cannot do this on or own.  Perhaps we learned this from our Greek friends. 

 

Jaspers: No, no – this is the same old idealization.  We have to open up to the whole world, to all of time.  This is very basic human stuff.  There are stories from every corner to illustrate the awakening of philosophical mind.  Let’s just keep telling the stories, refinding the past, remaking the case – rather than snoozing while the craziness goes on all around us, like I did last time. 

 

Kierkegaard: I like the idea that history is our fault!  Just kidding!  No, of course we can’t make unicorns appear or bring about world peace.  We’re just philosophers – not magicians or gods!  Our work is to drive people crazy, get ‘em up and at ‘em, our master Socrates taught.   Wake up, because we have forgotten what it means to exist.  To exist means: to feel it, and to take it on. 

 

Jaspers: I guess I was too serious – like our friend Kant – people told me so.  But our Danish friend here taught me the wisdom of the cosmic laugh – the virtues of the comic apprehension of reality, when the light of truth shines behind us – not staring us in the face. My metaphors were the encounter, the horizon, the encompassing – pretty remote stuff.  Spatial ideas, great spaces between people, which somehow I always felt.  I think I started to figure things out when I began seeing patients – and when I went into analysis myself.  Then the ideas kept coming.

 

De Beauvoir: I think there was a powerful spirit of the time that took us all by surprise. 

 

Foucault: Time is a factor.  The world was not ready to hear you or the message of feminism in 1949, any more than it was ready to hear my friend Zarathustra here, who knew that he came too soon.  Hegel teaches: philosophy is our time rendered into concepts. So we can send a message across time, but someone must be there to hear it.  Socrates used to say that it wasn’t much different to intervene in someone else’s thinking than intervening in your own.  Seeing and pointing out an error or a mistake in reasoning – he just assumes that everyone has his integrity of belief – everyone must feel revulsion for being hoodwinked, for credulity, for being taken in, for being under someone’s power – or for just being wrong and not knowing it.  I suppose when we expect this from people we are committing an injustice – as Fredrich once said about himself. 

 

Nietzsche: I could not help but feel that a life without an intellectual conscience is no kind of life at all.  It’s so empty! – so base! – not to question, not to dig in and look, not to imagine, not to fly through a soaring thought – not to doubt! – it is beneath a human being to live like this.  So I expected this from everyone – still, I see it is an injustice. 

 

Foucault: You end up denying people the very dignity you demanded from them.  Do I have to see the comedy in life?  Do I have to listen to music?  Do I have to question things?  Is this so important?  If the issue is breaking free, then we are contradicting ourselves in setting these absolute standards.  Time is a factor: being ready to hear it, being the kind of person who can hear it, having the fate that empowers hearing it.  One version of a person might hear something, but another might not.  It’s all out there, all these kinds of cases – just innumerable lives. 

 

De Beauvoir: Then we are back to describing things, rather than trying to do something?

 

Foucault: When we look at Socrates, if we reach even beyond epistemology and look at his whole impact on himself and on others, we can see that he really has no doubt that he is offering us a great gift.  We read symbols, but even more importantly – we live in them, we live in projects – for him, for example, life becomes the search.  This is already a solution and a huge jump forward beyond determinism.  Sometimes it more the plentitude of our own project, sometimes more the idiom in which it appears.  But if it’s no different to intervene in someone else’s thinking than with your own – just throwing ideas out there for comparison – then we are not just describing things.  We are trying to shake things up – to drive people nuts, as our Danish friend says.  We are trying to be of some use.  We have the power of freedom – but, it’s not once and for all.  We get it and lose it.  We just have to rediscover our freedom after the world takes it away.

 

Kierkegaard: Who knows how Socrates would fare today?  If you can come too early, then you can also come too late.  Aspasia may be right that we have a kind of too-late kind of intelligence – a retrospective intelligence.  I wanted to hold out for the future, as Husserl and Heidegger taught, so there’s more room to reassemble the furniture – more elbow room to shift around everything we’ve been saddled with.  Underneath the symbol is the world of motive, care, intention, aspiration, whose longings and reaches fill up these ciphers with meaning.  The person deep down underneath all the haze who actually exists. 

 

Jaspers: So it’s not just intermediaries, or conversions, or impositions, but interventions. We’re talking, we’re challenging ourselves, we’re challenging the argument, we’re challenging tradition and history and the whole world that is ready-made up to now. 

 

Foucault: Eventually we must turn to the vertical direction to grasp existence making itself.  The reason why the symbol is dangerous is that it threatens to overwhelm our imagination.  It does the work for us.  The dream experience, the ethical content, the underlying world of care – these powers in us – these are the powers of freedom.  Freedom can establish itself or alienate itself, it can constitute itself as radical responsibility or forget itself, abandon itself to the plunge into causality. 

 

Nietzsche: Looking at the times, and adding a few more premises to the thousand-year conclusion I was beginning to draw, I can see that there is the new premise that the upsurge of freedom, breaking away from society, and shaking up the social whole, becomes ever more dangerous, and seems now to peer over a chasm of lawlessness and violence.  Freedom is so terrifying – life takes our freedom, the world takes our freedom, and we simply let it happen.  

 

There is the new premise that it becomes ever easier to delude people – to empty out their spirits – as cave paintings morph into screen readouts.  Reality seems to be getting further away from people.  The noise gets louder, the tyranny waiting to decide for us how we should live our lives spreads out everywhere – into everything.  The fable of intelligible freedom keeps getting more complicated.  Hey – help me out here!  We have to figure out how to turn down the noise. 

 

From time to time, we absolutely must get a Sunday of freedom, or we just can’t endure life anymore (Human, All too Human, §291). 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Dialogues – 5 –

 

Statement

Application

Explication

Question

Contention

 

 

Statement: Milan Kundera reaches some conclusions about symbols in his 1986 work The Art of the Novel.  He noticed that many wars of symbols take place.  For example, Communist Russia succeeded for at least a half-century in providing the symbols for good and evil to an enormous number of people.  He noticed that some things are symbolically mute – the War in Afghanistan is one of his examples – or at least some things, some signs and causes, do not speak from the magic circle of mesmerizing cares that characterizes a time and place.  Some things resonate more in society and have an observable symbolic voltage – an image, a word, a meme – at a certain point, raising a certain flag, making a certain kind of signal, evokes a social tremor.

 

Application:  Consider a certain election day in the state of Georgia – another kind of war of symbols.  Socialism! Crazy left-wing radicals!  Defund the police! and on the other side Black lives matter! Restore decency!  Make government work!  We discover where the symbolic voltage is  – who wins the war of symbols in this case – and what remains symbolically mute and unable to win the people -- but this is simply one measurement.  

 

Explication: The world of symbolic forms extends from pictures, to words, to orienting knowledge.  The fundamental act is the conscious creation of distance between oneself and the external world.  Mediation breaks up immediacy – this is the defining human step, though we see it inchoate in zoology.  Everything depends on opening up this space.  In a way, it’s about wayfinding – separating out from where one is to locate where one is.  Entering this silence, feeling the weight of one’s life, the magic of this moment is probably something like awe, as Schleiermacher taught.  William James’ ideas about mankind’s “sense for the sacred” – the “Idea of the Holy” from Rudolf Otto – the numinous, the mysterium, the mystical experience.  There’s a connection between the development of religious ideas and the origin of language.  So the war of symbols, the greater symbolic voltage on one side, and concerns that fall away somewhere else, seems basic to the whole space.

 

Question: Does this help us any?  Can we predict future outcomes?  Suppose side R wins.  Does this mean that confusion wins the day?  Ideologues succeed in creating a language of good and evil and – perhaps – the people fall into line.  They couldn’t resist the symbols.  Suppose side D wins.  Does this mean intelligence wins out over confusion?  The powers that be waved the scary red flag in front of the crowd – but they didn’t fall for it.  They resisted the symbols.  So the big question of the day is what we can make of symbols -- how good we are with this.  Is stupidity growing – or are people beginning to wake up?  

 

Statement: We have to keep growing the database – working through the problems of the day.   It seems like, no matter what, we still have the problem of resisting the baloney or falling for it. 

 

Statement: Kundera defined the criterion of maturity – the kind of understanding we are looking for – as the ability to resist symbols.  But he thought we were getting younger all the time.  So his prediction would be – prepare for the defeat of the cause.  The shadow lengthens.  Bad stuff on the way.  

 

Contention: Then we are getting stupider – we are losing our ability to read of the old symbolic language – as Karen Armstrong has been arguing for years.  We have stuffed everything into the box of ‘knowing’ and tossed everything that doesn’t fit the model.  Getting stupider goes together with scientism and the vogue in equating wisdom with technical knowledge – more data but no clue what to do with it. 

 

Explication: We don’t want to get hung up on names – on labels – this gets us off point and leads us down the path of matching names to things.  This is not how symbols work.  Our discussions have revealed the intriguing idea that a symbol in isolation, a single symbol, is not useful.  There cannot be a symbol unless there are many symbols – which seems confusing.  A symbol functions in a symbol system – like a letter in a alphabet – and in effect has no character on its own.  Let’s get back to the idea that reference cannot be the main thing, as Frege and Russell showed.  We can refer to the same thing via lots of different expressions.  Denotation via connotation.  But even that is not the main thing.  It’s not that we can refer to the same thing with many names.  This emphasizes the attempted match between name and thing and thus the representational character of language.  But that is not really what is going on – not if we look a little closer.  We aren’t really just pointing to things.  We are conferring meaning – which points to a level of motive beneath just scoping stuff out in the neighborhood.  Look at the contrast between ostension – pointing things out – and semantics – meaningful involvement.  This is the difference between a basic framework of matching relations and a basic framework of possible states of affairs.  Things that are there vs. things that we care about.  Suddenly we see that the groundbreaking achievement here is not the naming relation but the structure of propositions.  We get pushed from the word to the sentence.  We are not talking about ‘vehicles for matching relations’ but ‘vehicles for the conferring of meaning.’  Therefore getting stupider is not about having fewer names – as in Orwell’s nightmare 1984 – or growing more confused about what stands for what – numbed-out as in Huxley’s Brave New World.  The existence of language is already a view about the world as a whole – less representative, more propositional.  Getting stupider implies oppositely getting smarter.  The resistance to symbols, the kind of intelligence we are looking for, is itself a symbol and a structure of symbols, so getting smarter looks like: not so much seeing into the structure and final secret of language, more the ability to speak and use the language. 

 

Statement: We are looking at the initial enchantment that happens in language – a kind of transfer to a magic realm of possibilities and purposes – beginning  with the original proposition, the world-disclosing advent of human being, which ensorcells, enchants, bewitches, and conjures up out of nothing a stage for the play to begin.  As the scientific process advances, the magical object gets stripped down to its material, physical, chemical, atomic, energic base.  Kundera seems to be arguing that as we go on with the propositional function of language, creating context after context for pursuits and outcomes, we lose a little bit of the ability to see what we are doing, the role we play in the drama, our own involvement – we don’t see that the reins of power have always been always in our hands.  The Greeks seemed to have known this – but we have lost it.  Epictetus – a nameless slave – knew this two thousand years ago:

 

“I must die.  I must be imprisoned.  I must suffer exile.  But must I die groaning?  Must I whine as well?  Can anyone hinder me from going into exile with a smile? The master threatens to chain me: what say you?  Chain me … you will chain my leg … but not my will.  Not even Zeus can conquer that.”

 

Application: If we sharpen up our awareness of the basic propositional function – Heidegger’s groundwork of “care” – and some of its related ideas – symbolic muteness, symbolic voltage, wars of symbols – we approach the problem of background noise, and scarce attention, and staying alert, wary of losing our autonomy – the threat that the environment may propose to do our work for us – the fear that our own minds become unused to thinking things out for themselves ... the conflict of worldviews, the messy pursuit of goals, meeting obstacles -- it may be that we should take on the opponent in an indirect way – not to argue them from where they are to some other place, but to enchant and encharm and wield symbols.  The problem becomes how to create symbolic voltage to match the social dipole, as values conflict, adding the electricity we have – whatever wizardry we possess – which means that we take some steps away from  rationalism ...

 

Contention: We inch a little closer to the magician, the sorcerer, the con man, the hypnotist, the flim-flam man … this seems like a descent from world of mathematics, logic, fact and evidence.  Maybe we don’t get stupider, but we become lesser -- we cave.  We come down, degrade.  The conversation gets poorer, the culture gets coarser – constantly grinding people down into coarser people.  Gravity pressing down a sliding incline ...

 

Question: The big truth is about this life -- waging the war of symbols -- so how to we work this magic?

Are we trying to scare people into being human -- or inspire them?

 

Explication: We do not have to take this whole thing on as a war -- despite Heraclitus – make love, not war.  Let’s try to educate for the other side – for love –.  Self-responsible skepticism is a hard sell.  Consider the principle of least action.  Basically – laziness – inertia – gravity.  The depiction of man we see in Hobbes, Machiavelli – this is the person we are trying to reach ...

 

Statement: Socrates and our other friends are trying to support us on the other side – taking it on, asking the tough questions, resisting simplifications, wanting to face the real stuff – the truth – the world the way it really is – thus we get back to the idea of intellectual conscience, and self-responsibility, and the basic integrity of actually looking at a thing – paying it the respect that each thing is due – to ask, what is this thing? What is its nature? – wanting to see it as it is. Reminding ourselves -- hey, we are alive!  We can actually think at least for a brief spell ...

 

Question: Have we drifted from the original question about symbols? 

 

Explication: I'm not sure.  We saw at the outset that we were looking at the subject in search of a basic ethics for symbol-makers, symbol-users, symbol-sufferers, symbol-resisters …  We got a little closer … the work we have to do, the wariness we require, the artists we must become … the clarification about our own values … the call to the examined life ... now raising the question, whether we can really stay awake long enough to learn anything 

 

Application: We ourselves become the focus in the inquiry.  We become symbols – we stand for something – this is the difference between just being there and having the powerful sense of being alive.  We come alive in caring about something, standing for something, becoming a symbol of it – which suggests a kind of obsessiveness, a persistence in the face of headwinds. Paradoxically, we become slightly less of an individual -- slightly more a symbol -- slightly more what we wish to be but slightly less real.  Thus to arrive at this powerful sense of being alive, we must become somewhat less real