Playing with Sticks

The last book I read was “The Sense of an Ending” by Julian Barnes. The irony of this is that I used to work at the Harry Ransom Center at The University of Texas at Austin, which houses the Barnes archive, and at the time, I had not read him. Now, I feel foolish, but with 36 million mss. and papers to chose from, some have to fall by the wayside. So, most likely next time I am in Austin, I may be going to the HRC as a visitor to view the archive…funny how that works.

The book itself is nothing spectacular when it comes to narrative and the prose is very subdued, but for a reason. It deals with Memory, or the lack thereof as well as the question of what can we really know about the Past and how reliable is History, or more so, how reliable are the sources of History, especially when it comes to personal histories of people whom we have known. How reliable is the Human Brain when it comes to re-constructing a personal history when suddenly what we had thought was the “truth” all along, suddenly 50 years later is challenged to its core?

In other words, what can we know, and what function does Memory really have in all of this?

I was “re-minded” of Plato’s pithy dialog the “Meno” when I read this because that is one of the main Platonic dialogs that refers to the function of Memory with respect to Knowledge, or at least understanding. It also champions Mathematics as the one pure episteme (something that Taleb seems to have missed as well) because it can be coaxed from the most unlearned of minds, whereas other areas of so-called “knowledge” cannot, or at least according to Socrates.

The core of the argument is that Socrates shows by using sticks and sand that a completely uneducated slave boy can “re-member” geometry because it is part of the world of Ideals and thus part of the Soul, not the material world, despite its consequences within that world.

But, here’s the rub, did he jump or was he pushed?

In other words, did Socrates inadvertently teach him, or did he re-member? It is a serious dilemma within psychology (originally was really the study of the Soul, psyche) and in situations of persuasive manipulation of one’s memory. We were having this discussion this past Holiday when I was visiting my family, and my uncle a Neurologist, said this is a serious issue to contend with in Neurology. What really do we remember, or what do we THINK we remember?

That was the crux of Barnes’s novel as well, and it can be a devastating event to have found out something that we believed to be true, was what we THOUGHT was true, but did not remember it, because we never knew the Truth in the first place.

In Greek, Truth is often associated as a-lethia, or the un-forgetting of things. It is no surprise then, that often in life, when confronted with a Truth that we did not know, and had believed otherwise, many chose to go back to the riverbank of the Lethe and imbibe its waters.

Plato's Black Swan

Recently I read Taleb’s “The Black Swan,” which is a book about the monumental impact of unexpected events. Taleb belabors this point to death, and by halfway, he is not really saying much more, but the same thing over and over and over again. Things happen that we can’t predict and those things can have a huge impact. In fact, according to Taleb, we cannot predict anything, but should always be aware that a “Black Swan” is just around the corner. He makes many good points, but if I read the phrase “Black Swan” one more time in the book, I was going to lose it.

Though with a seemingly vast array of knowledge of various subjects, and a very ironic self-deprecation, which is thinly veiling an “I’m smarter than you” core, it smacks of very superficial on a few things he seems most adamant against, most notably the term he uses ad nauseum, “platonizing.” For Taleb, this horrific event is when people try to find order in the Chaos, to find the Ideal amongst the riff-raff, to rarify the mess, or to make theories or prescriptions for how things ought to be.

Well, yes, but I’m not sure he’s read any Plato at all. For, if he had, there would be the finest example of a Black Swan in all of Ancient Greece, namely Socrates. Socrates did not conform to any doctrine and shook up a community so much that they wanted him dead. His appearance changed Western Philosophy for good. And, about those Platonic Ideals, sorry Mr. Taleb, read a bit closer, you might be surprised.

Most Socratic dialogues end, much to the horror and chagrin and dismay of many, in an aporetic fashion, meaning, there is no solution. Why? Because, it is impossible to Platonize as Taleb would say, but who is writing this but Plato himself?? Taleb self ascribes his philosophy to be an empirical sceptic. Ummm, that would be a pretty  good description of a Socratic investigation. Socrates rejected every established doctrine of the time for the simple reason, “we can’t really know.”

That is Taleb’s point and he brandishes this banner of “why can’t anyone see this?” throughout the book, seemingly ignorant that that was Socrates’ motto, Kant’s doctrine, and Nietzsche’s delight, all three being “Black Swans” themselves. The fact that the book is a best-selling seems to me that it shows how anything that smacks of the new, the bold, the more people will forget that it usually has been done and said before, in some other fashion, some other time, and has likewise been lost to the sands of Time.

In the Republic, Socrates spins a very long-winded detailed myth about the “perfect city” of Man that mirrors the real perfect city of God. Many of the ideas are quite “modern” today, including equality of the sexes, education for the masses, and a professional army that never has to return to civilian life, but is cared for unto death. However, after ten books of discussion, Socrates is asked if this city could ever be real. His answer is simply “No, it is a myth.” The only way that it could ever work is via the Noble Lie that is told to generation after generation about the perfection of the city, and within three or so generations, the Lie becomes reality, because, the Ideal is fiction on earth, because, there are “Black Swans.” 

Yet, what is even lacking further in the criticism of so-called platonizing, is the fact that within itself, whether black or white, it’s still a swan. 

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.