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.

Birth of A Notion

Socrates only once admitted to having a teacher, that being Diotima, a woman from Mantinea and who makes a singular appearance in the Symposium, Plato’s brilliant one-act drama on the nature of Eros, or Love.

Easily one of the greatest works of literature (and philosophy, and vice versa), the Symposium is pure virtuosity. In Graduate School I had the experience, for lack of a better word, of reading this work in the original Greek with David Armstrong at The University of Texas at Austin. Armstrong was one of those old school classicists who could compose at will in Greek and Latin and was able to cast a nuance on every single word. One of the most brilliant things I read in Grad School was a piece he wrote on Greek particles. Go figure. The course culminated in one of the more bizarre experiences of my entire graduate career at Armstrong’s house with many bottles of wine and our class recreating our own Symposium (which means drinking party) and translating ad hoc the entire dialogue over the course of many, many hours and much wine. Surreal would be appropriate.

In the text, Socrates, as I say, yields for his first and only time to admitting that he “learned” something from another person, that being Diotima, and his lesson was what love was.

The set-up of the symposium itself is that there is a drinking party that Socrates gets sucked into, somewhat against his will, and at which it is decided that each participant will give a eulogy to the oft-neglected God of Love, Eros. From this round-table approach emerge some of the most famous and rehashed versions of what “love” is. This is the dialogue from which the concept of Platonic Love comes from, but what is lesser known is that was not a view that Socrates, and possible Plato himself shared, but that is neither here nor there for the present, and again, for another post, another time.

What Diotima does impart to Socrates is the concept of the partuition of ideas, meaning providing the analogy of giving birth to progeny of the mind. This has set off millennia of vapid debate as to whether Plato is trying to appropriate the one truly female experience of childbirth, and has somewhat gotten lost in that discussion rather enjoying the idea of what its worth. Nowhere does Diotima say that women can’t be pregnant with ideas, thus still having a leg up on the male half of the population, but I digress. What Diotima does encourage Socrates to do is to become a literal midwife of ideas, quite in line with Plato’s recurring theme of maieutics, or mid-wifery as being the one true profession in life, that being also what Socrates’ own mother did.

What I found most interesting in the Symposium, however, is the concept that Diotima begins with, namely that Love is neither beautiful, nor ugly. When she has led Socrates to the revelation that Love is not about the beautiful, nor about be-ing in love, then Socrates has the typical knee-jerk reaction that therefore Love must be ugly and must be about the possession of the be-loved.

In Socrates own words (albeit via Plato...enter Derrida...but I disseminate...), Diotima quickly renders this idea as mere childish reaction. Instead, she poses a question, the dialectic, the gift that she parted with to Socrates, who then imparted to those who could listen without becoming annoyed.

Why must something that is not Beautiful be Ugly? And, why must something that is not Good necessarily be Bad?

Can there not be something in between?

I “love” the Beautiful. I do. I love to look at beautiful things, at beautiful people, at beautiful sunsets, at beautiful flowers, listen to beautiful music. But, that “beautiful” for me is not Love. On the contrary, I can “love” things that are not beautiful, but perhaps are downright ugly.

What is in between?

Love, without discretion, without judgment, without prejudice, with indifference.

In essence, the definition of Love that Diotima arrives at sounds quite suspiciously like the Buddhist concept of dis-interest. This concept usually receives quite the barrage of critique, clamoring for something to hold onto, for fear of losing the beloved. “How can you love something if you don’t care for it?” people will cry. To be dis-interested is not to not care. Rather, when you love the be-loved, it is not for your gain, not for your loss. You love it because it is. Because of what it is. Because of who it is.

Socrates recount of his encounter with Diotima is ultimately interrupted by the drunken entourage of his wayward pupil Alcibiades, who abruptly changes the course of the evening with a wine-enthused eulogy of Socrates, his be-loved, leaving Love, or Eros, far behind.

When all the others have later passed out from excessive drinking long before, Socrates rises, makes a salutation to the new day, and begins it anew, seemingly unaffected by the events of the previous night’s debauchery and ribaldry, leaving us with one last thought, that like Love, perhaps there is something that is between Tragedy and Comedy, something beyond Good and Evil that is the driving force behind what will call Life. But, before he can begin that story, the last remaining symposium participant passes out, leaving us to wonder, what is the Middle Way?

Love is ... 

Time Tells.

I have two tattoos.

One is a beginning, the other an ending, or perhaps vice versa.

On my right bicep, I have the words that were reputedly above the ingress and egress of the lair of the Oracle at Delphi. The Oracle, confined within a craggy crevice high in the mountains would hover intoxicated over a tripod of herbs and, for all intents and purposes, get high as a kite and dispense nonsense verses to all ye who entered to know the future, or at least an enigmatic horoscope of sorts to be decoded and interpreted through some nifty hermeneutic maneuvers to suit one’s needs. However, when one was about to enter the cave of Time will Tell, then you would see the words, “Gnothi Seauton” or, more commonly rendered to us anglophone as “Know Thyself .”

It is no surprise that I have put some stock into this phrase often via the gadfly noodlings of that waskily wabbit Socrates. He was just a messenger. I like the message.

Again, if you have visited this blog, it is no surprise that this is my mantra of sorts, even my weltanschauung perhaps. However, as Socrates wryly notes in the Protagorist of Plato, that most people only know half of the story, and not, as Paul Harvey would have said, “the rest of the story.”

After one would enter the hermetic cavern, he or she would receive the mantic and/or manic (that little “t” can cause many problems...) utterances of the stoned-out-of-her-bejeezus Sybil, then bewildered, would turn, to return from this liminal Space to the outside world, the real world, a changed man or woman. Yet, depending upon the dazed and confused state of the recipient, the second part of the mantra, the rest of the story, may or may not be seen, or more importantly, heeded.

Leaving, one would see “Meden agan,” less commonly rendered into English as “nothing in excess.”

At a certain point in one’s life, there comes a time for reflection and re-evaluation, for examining one’s moral fiber, or lack thereof. I knew that I had a bad penchant for drinking beyond my cups at times, and I decided to get my first tattoo, using both sides of the door, for it swings both ways, as my mantra. So, there it is on my right bicep:

Gnothi Seauton/Meden agan

Unfortunately, the best laid plans of mice and men...

Changing one’s life, I have found, does not happen over night. Though we may have epiphanies that indeed change our lives in an instant, as I have also experienced, the actually change takes Time, sometimes years.

I have learned to live the full mantra in all its fullness, but it took Time, and effort, and sustained belief in the former half in order to bring into effect the latter half. You cannot have one without the other, they are not in fact two parts, but merely one whole.

Every time I undress, or swim, or wear short sleeves, I am reminded about this quest for self-knowledge and self-overcoming. Yet, what I also don’t let slip ironically by is that you must also apply the second part of the mantra to the former.

We need to indeed “Know Thyself,” but even that must come in moderation, and there must be time too for just be-ing , a lesson that I have also learned, over Time.

As for the second tattoo, “dat, lieve kinderen, is weer een héél ander verhaal...”

The Curse of Socrates

A large part of Plato’s dialogues involving Socrates take place on the peripheral places in and about Athens. On doorsteps, outside the city walls, within a prison cell, at the steps of the palace of Justice, or in the suburb of Peirera, as with the case of the magnum opus, The Republic.

Socrates is often taken to such places by others to isolate him from the crowd, so that they might have his undivided attention. As in the case of The Republic, Symposium, and the Phaedrus, he is also frequently held against his will, even physically threatened by the self-chosen interlocutors. It is funny then that people consider him to be meddling when it is the people themselves who continue to drag him into the conversation, trying to refute him to show that they know more.

And, that is indeed the Curse of Socrates. The only engagement Socrates has is to ask that simple question of “do you really know more?” That does not mean facts, trivia, dates, and figures, but what special knowledge do you posses that is greater than others? For, for Socrates, there is only one knowledge that we can truly posses, self-knowledge, and that comes at a price.

To “Know Thyself” often means excluding others for periods of Time. There is sometimes a need to remove oneself from the familiar, the comfortable, the ordinary in order to achieve a sense of ex-stasis, or the virtual removal of the Soul from the Body, in essence, the origin of ecstasy. It is at those moments that the Self or Soul is exposed, stripped of its garments of job, social status, religion, gender, caste, and whatnot. All of those things are indeed part of “who we are,” but they can also limit our ability to see deeper, to see what we are without those things.

We have things that are part of us that are given to us by birth, such as gender, race, nationality, and so on, and then there are the accessories to life that we place upon our selves, such as job, social status and whatnot. But, who are we when we strip those away? Can we strip those away?

By searching to “Know Thyself” one often must alienate him or herself from others. To leave what is closest in order to find what is missing. I have done so several times in my life. Sometimes this removal has been by choice, other times by necessity, or yet other times by exigent circumstances beyond my control. Yet, not once has it been by pure indiscretion or to merely cause “chaos” in my life. Each time has been at a crucial moment, when a solution needed to be found, when I had lost touch with who I really was, when I no longer felt that I “knew myself.”

To be on the periphery can be exciting at first, a sense of liberation. But, to stay there, can be terrifying and very lonely. In the depths of that loneliness, however, sometimes, something quite profound can happen. We let go of our customary trappings and bare our Souls to the world, to say, “Here I am.” And, when we can do this, without fear, without anxiety, we can then re-enter the city walls, to go forth, and return to the marketplace with a renewed confidence and peace of mind. For each departure, there is also the prospect of a return. 

The Irony of Zen

Ten years ago, I was teaching a course called, “The Curse of Socrates” at The University of Texas at Austin. Two of the texts that I chose for the course as the primary texts were Robert Pirsig’s Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance and Plato’s magnum opus, The Republic, which is, on the surface, Socrates’ attempt to describe what the “perfect” city, would be like. He is ambushed leaving the port of Peiraeus by Polemarchus and his entourage after having attending the apparently inaugural celebration of the Thracian Atermis, known as Bendis.

Polemarchus coerces Socrates to come back to his house, where the conversation that is to be the discussion of the ideal city takes place. Plato’s own brothers, Adeimantus and Glaucon were apparently present in the discussion as is the main interlocutor, Thrasymachus, who turns out to be quite hostile to Socrates’ badgering of questioning and answering. Socrates had initially been asking the aged Cephalus about what he saw as being “Justice” with the advanced wisdom of his age. The discussion goes on a bit, but is inherited by Polemarchus, his son, taking up the definition that Justice is “doing good to your friends and harm to your enemies.” Eventually, as Polemarchus proves to not to be up to the taxing questions of Socrates as the Athenian gadfly eventual has him admitting that Justice is only useful in being useless.

Thrasymachus, a self-proclaimed know-it-all, cannot contain himself any longer and lunges into the conversation during a lacuna, like “a wild beast” and chastises Socrates for his usual way of escaping his own method of being questioned as Thrasymarchus says that he is clever enough to know that asking questions is easier than answering them. Socrates then agrees to allow Thrasymarchus to seemingly take control of the argument and yields by saying that it is Socrates’ own lack of ability that prevents him and that he should listen to one so clever as Thrasymarchus instead and from him receive pity rather than being berated.

To this, Thrasymarchus exclaims with a burst of “sardonic laughter,” that here is the “h eiothuia eironeia Sokratous,” or, the famous Socratic Irony. Thrasymarchus’ hostility and frustration with Socrates is not uncommon with those who are most confident in their own intellectual acumen. Yet, the harder they push, the more frustrated they become with Socrates asking “the wrong questions” and badgering them and annoying them. Yet, they chose to stay in the discussion because they claim to know something based upon the words of the so-called “experts” in the field. Socrates is not asking for a book-learned answer. Also, they may leave if they wish.

The mistake that Thrasymarchus makes, as do many a frustrated reader of Plato, is rather simple. Socrates is not looking for an answer. That is the irony that they fail to see. Instead, they keep refining their original answer, or saying it louder, becoming more and more irritated at Socrates, rather than possibly thinking that perhaps their own view is the one that is being stubborn. When asking, “What is Justice?” Socrates is not asking anything more than, “What is the sound of one hand clapping?” And yet, Thrasymarchus and his ilk will turn blue in the face being angry with the question, too blind with their own importance to grasp the irony of the situation. It is with little wonder that the generation of western scholars soon became known as “The Schoolmen,” preferring the apparent “scientific” answers that Plato's rebellious student, Aristotle provided and which served as a placebo for the gnawing inside them that Socrates had left them. 

What Are Friends For?

While Socrates was in his jail cell, during the day friends and family would come to see him and while away the hours with their normal discussions about virtue, justice, good and evil and whatnot. Given that Socrates now had unlimited scholia, or leisure time , to converse, his more well-to-do friends were more than happy to spend their days in the presence of their dear friend. However, to what extent were they friends, or were they more interested in being in the presence of Socrates for their own benefit is somewhat put into question with the odd, yet powerful, little dialogue known as the Crito, whose subtitle is Or, on Duty; Ethical.

Crito, the man, appears to have been in on the very inner circle of Socrates’ friends and acquaintances according to the dialogue, which bears his name. Moreover, the fact that Crito is the one to be bringing the message that he has to give to Socrates suggests that the others in this circle must have felt that he had a certain persuasion over Socrates or he wouldn’t have been chosen to confront him with the proposition that his they had been concocting.

What begins as Crito’s attempt to convince Socrates of this plan rather ends like Hopper’s demonstration to his fellow grasshopper’s when they try to convince him to stay on vacation rather than go back to Ant Island in Pixar’s A Bug’s Life. Socrates is “quite the motivational speaker” as well in the Crito in an uncharacteristic monologue on the nature of duty to one’s country when one decides to stay in that country with respect to obeying the laws.

However, in addition to the blatant message of the importance of Duty to one’s country (with the provision that one has freely chosen to remain in that country and/or city, as Socrates did with Athens), there is a rather subtle subtext of the question of what is a true friend. Crito has been there all along as we are to infer from the dialogue, yet in the final moments of Socrates’ life, this loyalty as “a friend” is squarely put into question.

Crito has come to see Socrates to tell him that there has been a report that the ship with the envoy to/from Delos is returning, which in turn means that Socrates will be executed the following day as per the law. The delay of the ship had caused the month-long stay of execution for Socrates, allowing his associates to come up with a plan to break him out of jail that night as a result.

Crito had been watching Socrates sleep and when he awakes, tells him that he wished that he could be as peaceful as him in such a time of sorrow and pain. Crito says that he had always thought Socrates to be eudaimonisa (normally translated as “happy,” but I feel strongly that it is more literally such as “well-spirited,” with an emphasis on the “spirit” aspect, referring specifically to Socrates’ frequent mention of his personal daimon) to which Socrates answers that he would be a fool to just now be afraid to die after all of the discussions they had had on the nature of the soul.

Crito continues to plead that it will be embarrassing to him and the others if people started to spread rumors that Crito and the gang had not tried their best to get their friend of out jail, especially when they had the financial resources to do so. What a public shame it would be for them if public opinion were to judge them as friends who did not help a “friend in need.”

That is about all that Socrates needs to hear, then, as to what “public opinion” has to say about their actions. Socrates asks for an agreement from Crito, however, before he launches into his full answer. He sets up the condition that one must never do wrong to another, especially if one has been wronged. To requite wrong with wrong is as bad, or perhaps worse than the original wrong done. Before Socrates will agree to continue, he asks if Crito thinks that this is to be agreed upon, for the majority of people would not go so far as to say this. However, for Socrates, if two people do not agree with this condition, then “toutois ouk esti koine boule,” (there is no common desire/wish between them) and that they would be in opposition. Basically what Socrates was saying is that if Crito did not agree to acknowledge what Socrates held to be his deepest philosophical conviction, then all of their decades of friendship would be for nought.

Yet, does that mean that Socrates was asking to agree with him? Not necessarily. Socrates makes it clear  that Crito is in no danger of being executed the following day, so he should be able to make informed, rational decisions, beyond emotional prejudices. In other words, Socrates asking Crito to agree with him, but rather if what he is saying is actually right or not. For, if it is not right, then everything that Socrates believed in and in which he had rooted his life’s philosophy would be in vain.

A true friend then, for Socrates, is not merely someone who agrees with him or not, but rather, if that person is willing to become his enemy by disagreeing with him if he does not think that what Socrates is saying is right or not. Not right by Socrates, but based on what that person knows in his or her soul in relation to be what is right according to one’s prakteos, or duty in life. In Sanskrit philosophy, this is known as Dharma, and is the highest form of action that one can perform in life. Socrates was not asking Crito to agree with Socrates, but rather at the risk of losing their friendship, to follow what he knew was his duty.

How many, indeed, are willing in the face of losing a lifelong friend to contradict him or her when faced with assessing whether that friend be right or not, but based upon whether it is in line with one’s prakteos or dharma to agree or disagree?

Sweet Surrender

When Socrates was waiting for his sentence to be carried out, which had been delayed by the Delian envoy, he did a curious thing, one that has ironically spilt quite a bit of its own ink over the years. He supposedly wrote something down, more precisely, he composed music.

This in itself would not be significant, nor even noteworthy, except for the fact that, as far as we know, Socrates never wrote anything during his lifetime, or at least nothing that ever came down through the ages. All of the words of Socrates, as with Jesus and the Buddha, were written by disciples, students, chroniclers, or scholars. These three men, however, did not put pen to paper, so to speak, and write down their thoughts, ideas or teachings. They spoke, using the oral transmission wisdom as their only instrument of instruction.

However, when Socrates was in his jail cell in Athens, this may have changed. In the prologue of the Phaedo, which is Plato's chronicle of the final day of Socrates' life, Echecrates asks the eponymous Phaedo if he knows the story of the final days of Socrates and if he could relate it. Phaedo answers that he was actually there in person and the bulk of the dialogue is the fictional "memory" of Phaedo's account of the conversation in the jail cell.

When asked if he would relate the story, for Echechrates says that "sweetly" he would like to hear it, Phaedo answers that he will do his best, and the motif of bittersweet becomes rather prominent. Phaedo felt a mixture of pleasure and pain that final day with Socrates in that he was happy to have been there and to have known him, but deeply sad in that it was in fact the last day on the planet. He relates the conceit of Aesop that pleasure and pain are really one entity and that "a very curious mixture of pleasure and pain was present" while Socrates and his friends were discussing the nature of the Soul, sometimes laughing, sometimes weeping, in short, a very human affair.

When Phaedo begins his re-telling of the story, he describes what Socrates was doing. Apparently, during the final month of his life, while waiting in his jail cell and after the daily visits were over, Socrates' daimon had spoken quite distinctly to him, yet in a manner even more distinct in its aberration from the norm, than in its message. For the first time, his daimon had told him to do something, rather than the accustomed message of dissuading him from doing something. His daimon had told him to "make music."

For seventy years, Socrates had not composed anything, yet upon his imminent death, his inner voice, his daimon, or his hotline to the divinity, asked him to compose hymns to Apollo, the God who figures so prominently in Socrates' life-long quest to "Know Thyself."

Socrates obliges, and since he does not know how to compose his own, he choses to set some of the words and fables of Aesop to music as his paean to the God. For all his life, he listened to this voice tell him not to act, until Time was truly of the essence. The final directive, his soul's will and testament, was to compose hymns of praise to God.

He obeyed, and in his final act, he showed gratitude to this God and he composed. He made music. He acted. He was grateful.