Like Father, Like Son, or Like Mother, Like Son?

Recently I walked through Middelheim, the outdoor sculpture "museum" of Antwerp, Belgium, where I live. Middelheim is a beautifully landscaped grounds with sculptures dotting the pathways, sometimes even hidden amongst the trees, and only the discerning eye will catch all of them. It boasts of ranging from Rodin to the modern day, which it does deliver, and one could spend hours and hours wandering through the pathways, encountering various styles, manners, and media of sculptures. My daughter remarked that they were all naked as well when they were images of humans.

Some are in a very Neo-classical style, which made me think of how statues have been such a fixture in our society, especially those of human images. It is almost as if this is a way for us to freeze a moment or emotion in Time, trying to salvage it from the ever-changing world.

Socrates was the son of Sophroniscus, a stonemason, and his mother, Phaenarete, was a midwife, so far as we know, since Socrates himself never left us an autobiography, so we have to rely upon the few sources we have, most prominently, of course, being Plato.

However, that got me to thinking about the curious mixture of parental occupations and how one could (and I am merely playing a thought experiment here, nothing more...) imagine how each of them influenced his later Philosophy, and what an impact this has had on Philosophy ever since. For, it is a marriage of opposites, or perhaps it is a paradox, which Socrates was so found of using for examples.

A stonemason, if he does sculpt a statue of a human, is a Reductionist by nature and takes the material at hand and removes the outer husk of appearance to "find the reality" or "essence" of the Form inside. I believe it was Michelangelo who said that he always attempted to "free" the figure from the marble block, its silent tomb and to bring it to life. But, the life that even such a Master as Michelangelo was, can only bring a suggestion of life. This of course gives rise to the mythology of the likes of Pygmalion, the attempt to bring the inanimate to the animate world.

On the other hand, a midwife, such as Socrates' mother, brought the animate into the animate world. And, unlike a stone cutter, who chips away, the midwife is the conduit of that which is growing, not reducing.

Being raised by such parents, it is no wonder that a young Socrates might be curious as to the process of the Permanent and Impermanent, the Animate and the Inanimate, and the concepts of the Image versus Reality.

Unlike the Romantic version of the statues of Antiquity being ivory white statues with no eyes and stoic countenances, the statues of Socrates time were actually at the time painted with eyes and garments, and were more rather like Madame Tussauds House of Wax than the ghostly figures we see in the British Museum, or in Greece or Italy. They were more attempts to look human than not.

Socrates is often criticized, via Plato, as expounding upon the idea that men can be "pregnant" with an Idea, and that a Philosopher is merely a midwife for bringing such an idea to the world. This he learned from the initiated teachings of the only teacher Socrates ever mentions, a woman named Diotima in the Symposium.

Well, is that such a horrible thought? Does it have to be sexist? Pre-gnant, merely means, pre-- before and gnant--which comes from the root of "gen" which is to be born, or simply, coming into existence. So, a Pre-gnant Idea, is merely one that has not yet come to fruition, has not yet been delivered from its source. It is likewise, the block of marble without the sculptor's hand having "freed" the figure within.

Maybe we can imagine a young Socrates idly sitting by thinking about the two professions of his parents, the wheels beginning to turn, and instead of championing one or the other, he actually tried to fuse the two together, finding, like the connection between pleasure and pain, life and death, and being and not-being, where there was a common ground, an Idea, whose Time had come.

Perhaps...

I, I, and Not-I

I went to see the movie, “Looper” the other day, and I will say that movies and other narratives that deal with the aspects of Time and Time travel are amongst my favorite. Need I say that I am a freakishly ardent fan of Dr. Who?  (Tom Baker, Jon Pertwee, and Matt Smith at least)

I am not sure what planted the seed, though I suspect that it was the original “Cave of Time” series that I began reading in elementary school. No, in fact, writing that last sentence, I know that it was. That, and Mrs. Whitworth reading Madelaine L’Engle’s A Wrinkle in Time to us in the 5^th grade. Between those two events, I was forever stuck in a time-warped sense of reality. That is not to blame, by any stretch of the imagination, and my imagination was stretched by those books and has been ever sense—beyond many imaginations out there—but merely to trace the roots of this.

A Wrinkle in Time is celebrating its 50^th anniversary this year and I just purchased a copy for my friend’s 11-year old daughter, so I will be curious to see how it has stood the test of “time” in some regards. I just remembered being mesmerized by every chapter that unfolded before us as Mrs. W. read them, always leaving off a critical moment, leaving us to hang out there in Space. Though, the flipside was that because of the genius 5-year old Charles Wallace protagonist, she would always say, “even a 5-year old could do this…” much to our chagrin and dismay if we could not perform such feats of genius, though she challenged us like no other, and if you rose to the challenge, you were rewarded with rare praise. And, as you may know, rare praise is cherished oh so much more than mere flippant everyday praise.

Don’t get me wrong, I give positive feedback, encouragement and loving support daily to my daughter, but I make a distinction when she really does something special, and she knows it. And, there is no substitute for the beaming of your child’s face when she does something awesome and you acknowledge it. As a proud father, EVERYTHING my little girl does is worthy of praise, but I do know how to single out the really “super-cool” things too.

But, back to Time.

When I saw “Looper” I was very impressed, and as for “Time” movies, it is hard to impress me as I usually see the “loop-hole” in the plot or logic of the time travel as there always is one at some level. Although I saw a couple in this one, for the most part, it was pretty well done. The attention to detail such as the bandage on the ear and the missing piece of the older version of Joe was excellent.

However, there was one sentence that stuck out for me, oddly enough. It was the scene when Old Joe meets Young Joe face-to-face in the diner. Old Joe remarks how odd it is to look at Young Joe. Young Joe says, “your face is backwards…” or something like that.

Hmmm…I saw that in the previews and it meant nothing to me. When the line was delivered in the movie, it was interesting, but I did not really let it sink in.

Then, later, when I saw a picture of myself that my friend had posted online and thought of that as compared to what I see daily in the mirror, it did hit me. I know that this is no great revelation, but it is actually if you really, really think about it.

In the mirror, my rather prominent scar on my forehead appears to be on the right side of my forehead. In pictures, and to everyone who sees me in real life, it is on the left side of my forehead. For 30 years, I have become accustomed to seeing this scar on my right side. However, were I to meet myself, in the Future or the Past (or at least after I received the scar, of course), I would see it for the first time in person on the LEFT side!

Then it hit me.

How many times do people say, when they see a picture of themselves, “that doesn’t look like me!” Well, it DOESN’T. Because, what you see of yourself in the mirror is not what the picture shows. Nor is it what everyone else sees, so, no it does not look like “you” because “you” have been looking at a different “you” than everyone else.

So, what if you came face to face with “you”?

How would “you” view “you”? As a familiar from the mirror, falsely represented, or as a stranger, for the first Time?

That simple scene, very necessary in the movie’s trajectory, set off many thoughts in my mind when I was processing it later that evening. Much of my philosophy is based upon the Socratic/Delphic motto of “Know Thyself,” but in a flash, I realized that the “Thyself” that I have known in the mirror each day was not really “me”!

Jacques Lacan is well known for many things, but one of them is the importance of the “mirror phase” in which an infant finally recognizes his/her image in a mirror and thus gains a sense of “self” with respect to the “world order.” Well, that vision of the “self” is incorrect. It is distorted and well, simply put, an illusion. Lacan was brilliant, however, I’m not sure he took this into account (please correct me if I am wrong and missed something in his lectures). The mirror stage is merely furthering deception, not revelation, nor awareness on the visceral level.

So, where does that leave us with “know-ing Thy-self” and the “mirror stage” as a crucial philosophy or turning point in development if both of them are based upon a fallacy of perception?

Suddenly, I feel out of the loop…

Symposium

The final correspondence I had with a former student recently who died a tragic death, was the question of which definition of Love from the Symposium was the best one, or the correct one?

When Joshua asked me this, I replied that there cannot be an extraction of one definition of Love from the Symposium, but rather all of the definitions make up the composition of Love, as a whole, seen from many perspectives. In a pseudo-Socratic dismissal, I refused to say that I knew the answer, for I don’t. I believe that to define Love is to kill it, in a very Taoist sense.

Plato was not afraid to tackle the big questions, and in Joyce’s words, to take on “those words we fear the most,” such as Love, Death, the Soul, Beauty, Truth, Justice and so forth. However, Plato was also circumspective enough to have a very dismissive Socrates as his mouthpiece, one who claimed to only know that he knew no-thing.

What runs throughout the works of Plato is the careful attention to words and their ascribed meanings. In the Greek, it is very apparent, and in all honesty, most philosophical discussions fail to go back to the Greek at times, and to the drama and the literary nature of Plato, the Symposium being one of the greatest one-act plays ever written, aside from its philosophical nature. It was a drama, a drama about Love, and our inability to really know what that is for the most part. Though maligned at times by “real philosophers,” such literary critic/philosophers such as Derrida and Kristeva always went back to the Greek, to the words, and looked for the relations therein.

For me, the question of Love, goes back also to the myth of Er from Plato’s magnum opus, The Republic, which recounts a trip to the Afterlife and back, and the ultimate forgetting of the Soul of such journeys, leaving us to wonder and wander through a dark wood during the dark nights of the Soul. However, for me, what I think of is the root of Er, which also goes back to the Sanskrit or Rh, which ultimately means, to flow.

From Er, you obtain two derivatives, the o-base Eros, Love, and the i-base, Eris, or Strife. I cannot help to think that Eros and Eris are related and are communal, two faces to the same coin. That with Love there is Strife, and vice versa.

From the Symposium, we glean several definitions of “Love” that permeate our modern-day parlance, such as the separation of the Soul’s Mates, the unrequited Love from the Beloved, Platonic Love, and the Spiritual Love of the Divine, not to mention carnal desires.

The Symposium runs the gamut of Love, resulting in a riotous drunken revelry, leaving us with the image of Socrates walking away, after the last symposer has passed out from too much wine, to face a new day, paying homage to the sun, in a salutation, and carrying on with life, as we all must do in the face of adversity.

Sparked Notes

Collected within the works of Plato are often the so-called epistles, or fancy talk for "letters." These are highly disputed as to whether they are or are not of the Master's hand, but there are a few turns of phrases that have continued to turn many heads over the centuries and millennia. Although I am not a stylistic expert, I will say that the "Plato" of the dialogs and spokesman of Socrates sounds much different than the one of the "Epistles," I am also very aware of the difference I afford to writing a letter than I do say a post, or piece of fiction, or academic work. Different audiences, difference in language. If one reads the fully collected letters of James Joyce, that one person would be shocked to see the seemingly incongruent shifts between letters to creditors or to his matron, Harriet Shaw Weaver, or contemporaries such as Beckett, and then to his institutionalized daughter Lucia during the writing of Finnegans Wake. Taken separately, there is NO way that they are from the same hand, but they are.

With Plato, this will remain a mystery. We will not one day uncover his old files and hard drives like we can with modern writers and their archives. There will be things lost to Time, like it or not, despite all of the good and selfish intentions of scholars trying to make names for him- or herself with revealing the "truth."

That said, one of the most controversial string of words from Plato comes from what has traditionally come down as the "Seventh Letter," which details his interactions with the Soprano's type tyrant of Dionysos, a failed philosopher king, and his role in trying to groom the cosa nostra leader into some sort of educated and enlightened monarch, much to the absolute distress of all involved.

The lines, however, read, concerning the education, or the leading of a philosophical grounding, via a teacher as something completely illusive and elusive. Plato, or his pretender, writes:

oukoun emon ge peri auton esti sungramma oude mepote gegnethai: rheton gar oudamos estin os alla mathemata, all' ek polles sunousias gignomenes peri to pragma auto kai tou suzein exaiphnes, oion apo puros pedesantos exaphthen phos, en tei psychei genomenon auto heauto ede trephei.

Or, (translation mine, feel free to adapt/critique)

There neither is, nor ever will be, such a treatise by me about this, for there is no rhetorical expression of it, unlike other fields of knowledge, but from a continued presence with the subject (a philosophical life) itself, and a veritable communion with it, it is engendered as like a spark of light, kindled by its leap and is then nourished in the Soul.

In other words, to pursue a life of true philosophical inquiry, to Know Thyself, it cannot be taught. This is a blow to education, which, by definition, means to lead one from ... X. But what is X? Ignorance? Darkness? Or, does leading to the so-called "truth" cause the same result, being that it cannot be but transmitted like a spark plug arcing?

I have had amazing teachers. I have tried to be one. But, these few words do haunt me as I do believe them.

I have known far too many "intelligent" people who could not tie their emotional EQ shoelaces together to save their lives.

On the flip side, I have known highly "uneducated" people who could not recite a simple fact of "knowledge," yet had great insight into the human condition.

And, all types in between, including both students and teachers in my life.

I, by default, believe in trying to ignite the Spark, the arc light that bridges knowing and not-knowing, specifically with the concept of Know-ing One's Self, but that comes at a cost. Sparks cost energy, physical energy and need to be nourished, whether in the Soul or in the snow, like a Jack London novel.

As such, it is truly an on-going process, and in the absence of a perpetually motioning machine that re-generates power, it is exhausting, and yields exhaust and exhaustion.

But, can we afford not to fuel this particular fire?

I think not.

He Said The Oddest Thing

Last evening I was reading some essays by Aldous Huxley, whom I now count amongst the hallowed few writers by whose essays I have been literally mesmerized. Some years ago, I taught a course at the University of Antwerp on Dystopic Novels, which included Huxley's Brave New World. At the time, I was not overly impressed with Huxley, and neither were the students who much preferred Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale or Orwell's (who, as a young impressionable young Eric Blair was a onetime pupil of Mr. Huxley) devastating 1984.

However, once I discovered a few volumes of Huxley's essays from a quaint little bookshop in Amarillo, Texas of all places, I became a believer, or at least rather impressed and have since been deeply immersed in his essays which were written for Advaita Vedanta journals as well as more mainstream publications such as Esquire and The Saturday Evening Post.

Huxley's adroit hand is at its best when he begins with something quite mundane and then explodes out to the upper limits of human interaction and enterprise with soaring observations, only to come deceptively floating back to Earth, grounding his final thought with a jarringly solid, "thump" that is hard to ignore once he has made his point.

One of the essays that I was reading last evening while contemplating my own Sunday-morning posts, was "The Oddest Science," in which Huxley takes no quarter with Freud and Jung and their adherents to modern psychology and psycho-analysis of the time (the article was from 1956) and what Huxley sees as a most unforgivable oversight when dealing with the realm of the Mind, that is the Body. Elsewhere, most notably in his vastly scanning work The Perennial Philosophy, Huxley goes into more detail about his belief that body type (three in number for him) is part and parcel with how we are both received in society and how we ourselves act as a result. Endomorphs, Ectomorphs, and Mesomorphs rule the world of Huxley and this is what he sees as grossly missing from either the Freud camp or the Jungian field. In other words, how can a therapist even begin to approach the mind of a patient if the body has not even been taken into consideration?

Therapy itself, comes from the Greek therapeuo, which means to attend to, and originally a therapaina, or therapist, was a handmaid of sorts, taking care of the bodily needs. Psych-iatry, on the other hand, is the iatrics of the Psyche, in other words, the medical curative of the Soul. Psych-iatric Therapy, as a result, should really be a tending to of the Body and the Soul. However, as Huxley rightly points out, this is more often than not not the case at all. Huxley champions F. M. Alexander, the progenitor of the Alexander Technique as an example of someone who did recognize this connection.

However, I would like to introduce and unlikely participant into this discussion, namely Socrates. Socrates is much maligned by the proponents of the Body, saying that he haughtily casts aside the Body from the Soul like a dirty rag. Yes, and No. That would be too easy.

In the Phaedo, the supposed story of the final day of Socrates' mortal life, leading up to his drinking of the Hemlock and indeed sloughing off his mortal coil like the dead skin of a snake, the relationship of the Body and the Soul is discussed at length, for that is the final message that Socrates wished to impart before departing, namely, the Body is just a Body, but the Soul is Eternal.

Now, it would be quite easy to say that Socrates was a mere fanatical dualist, saying that the Body and the Soul were not connected, but that would a very cursory response to what he had to say. Throughout all of Plato, there is a distinction made between Logos and Mythos. We eventually smash the two together to get Mytho-logy, but for Socrates, the two could not be more different. And, in every single dialogue that Socrates makes some grand statement, such as that there is a Heaven above and a Hell below, as he describes in the Phaedo, it is ALWAYS followed by, something to the effect of, "or so the story (Mythos) goes." Not once does Socrates claim that what he says is Logos, or the Word/Argument/Story, later Truth. For to claim that he, Socrates, as a mortal, knew the Logos, would indeed be blasphemy.

And, this is quite easily seen in how Socrates treated his own body. One may say that he treated it as a necessary Evil, but that would be odd at the least, cynical at best. Socrates was in prime shape when he drank the Hemlock at the age of 70. Given the accounts, it seems that he probably would have pushed 90 had he not been condemned to die. He was widely known for being in excellent physical health and is praised for his physical exploits as a soldier and his ability to slough of a night of wine and food (both seen in the Symposium) and begin the day with his normal vim and vigor. Not really what you would expect from someone who supposedly did not care about the Body as much as the Soul. Rather, Socrates was acutely aware that with a sick body, the risk of having a sick mind could be the result. Detractors of such a theory can easily point to exceptions such as the truly remarkable way that Steven Hawking has cheated death and dementia, but he is that, an exception.

Socrates took care of his body for the very reason that at least while alive on this Earth, that is all we have, our body. Now, whether that Soul is completely separate from this Body and therefore immortal, that, at best is a Mythos, because, for all intents and purposes, Socrates was betting upon a sort of Pascal's wager that his Soul was immortal. However, what is also grossly overlooked is that within the Phaedo Socrates says that it MIGHT be the case that the Soul is immortal. He also says that it might NOT be, and in that case, Death is a Great Sleep, and No-thing more. Curious what is usually remembered from the Phaedo, namely that Socrates was dogmatic, by the Dog, about his views. Yet, he was aware enough to know that even his most cherished belief, the Immortality of the Soul, was as far as he knew, only a Mythos, a nice story.

When Socrates drinks the Hemlock, and the rapid Death spreads over him, he does utter one last phrase that has kept the Philosophers and Scholars scratching their heads for millennia.

The last thing that Socrates said was, "My dear Crito, we owe a rooster to Asclepius. Do not be careless, and see to it promptly."

Asclepius was the patron deity of Medicine, the medicine of the Body, not the Soul. There is quite a lot of speculation on these final words, but for me, I am inclined to think that Huxley would have perhaps agreed, that Socrates sees that his body had run its course, and it was a good run, and for that, he should be Grateful, for what lay beyond that Body, was at best a good Mythos, and as Socrates said, whether he goes to a better place after that, no mortal can know. But, while we are still running that course, we should be Mind-ful of the Body, for both the welfare of the Mind and the Body are essential for the collective health of our Soul.

I Smell Something Fishy

Hmmm...not sure what to think of this, but, I'm putting it out there, casting my line to see what happens.

Today, riding back home on my bike, I passed one of the various Saturday-morning markets. Traditionally these are itinerant merchants who travel in large trailer caravans from city to city throughout the region, plying their wares on specific dates in specific market locales. No market would be complete here, however, without the fishmonger. And, today was no exception.

By the time that I got to the market, they were cleaning up, which for the fishmonger, that meant emptying the ice into the street that had held the fish. Needless to say, it creates quite an aroma.

Like Proust's fictional madeleine epiphany, the smell took me back to many places. I remembered the fish markets in Venice, Bruges, and the old Fish market areas in Antwerp from twenty years ago when I first lived here as a student. Those old markets are gone, but the smell still brings back vivid visions of buckets of eels and other fish lining the streets which now house expensive antique stores and bric-a-brac shops. I remember the Fulton fish market in NYC, downtown Seattle from a trip nearly 25 years ago, and the port of Naples. I remembered seeing hairy-armed, balding Turkish men sitting around on plastic buckets, gutting fish in Istanbul from the Bosphorus, tossing the offal to a clowder of street cats. Most certainly the Rue du Bouchers in Brussels came to mind where touristy restaurants line the narrow street and its tributaries helmed by annoying barkers showing their seafood displays for inflated prices. And, more fondly, the Via Pescherie Vecchie of Bologna, which is every food-lover's dream street, filled with fresh produce, hand-made pasta, fresh fish and meats and cheese to satisfy any gourmand's appetite.

But, then, something clicked in my mind. For, when I started thinking about being in Greece and traveling the islands, I remember many fishing tackles on the beaches and boats aplenty, but then, when I thought of Plato and Socrates, I realized something was missing.

There are no fish in the works of Plato, save for a very scant reference here and there. Socrates has his favorites for metaphors, namely Horses, Cobblers, Harpists, Athletes, and Dogs, but, by the Dog, there are no fish!

The more I tried to think of an example, greater the lack of fish became. In addition, when I thought of the Odyssey, that is THE sea-faring epic of Greece, there are no fish, or very few of note. The best that I got from looking around the web was that fishing was considered to be a lowly trade. Well, that never stopped Socrates from using the common man as his champion. I am beginning to wonder now if there is something else here, or if it is merely a red herring.

Were Socrates and Plato averse to seafood I wonder? Or, was it just really not much part of the diet. It was one of those things that I think I just took for granted, mainly because I didn't think about it. It's like a trompe l'oeil that I imagine fishing and seafood when I think of Ancient Greece, and perhaps it was there aplenty, but my memory is actually from the fishing activity that I saw as a teenager backpacking across Europe, not from something I had read.

The mind can play funny tricks on us...and the power of suggestion is not to by underestimated.