Still life with Plato

Plato 

There’s a difference between debate and dialectic. Debate means you are trying to win. Dialectic means you are using disagreement to discover what is true. I am not interested in debate. I am only interested in dialectic, which does mean I listen to you, and you listen to me.

That's Professor Bret Weinstein speaking to students. It didn't work. They weren't interested in listening to him.

We don’t care what terms you want to speak on. This is not about you. We are not speaking on terms—on terms of white privilege. This is not a discussion. You have lost that one.

They want him fired or even physically assaulted.

One of the more intriguing philosophical puzzles is why nobody has been able to write philosophical dialogues as well as Plato did. The Greeks didn't single-handedly create western civilization but they did raise it to a height that has inspired many people to try to equal or surpass them ever since. As intimidating as the Greeks can be, the task has not proven impossible. Some, albeit a very small number, people have been able to write poetry as good as ancient Greek poetry. Likewise with sculpture and drama. The staggering exception is philosophical dialogues. It is now roughly 2364 years since Plato's death and no one has written a philosophical dialogue that comes close to equalling his.

And Plato was prolific. Not every single dialogue was a masterpiece but he produced at least as many great masterpieces as Shakespeare, Michelangelo or Caravaggio did.

Oddly enough, part of the reason for this may be that his own culture didn't value his written dialogues as much as we do. They admired them but they valued actual dialogue more.

Still lives

Here's a still life selected more or less at random from the Wikipedia page on the subject.

Imagine you lived in a culture where groups of people came together with various elements typically found in a still life—the host brought a vase of flowers, one guest a jug of wine, others bowls of fruit, yet another a musical instrument and perhaps another a dead animal. The host begins the process by placing the flowers on the table. Then the guests each advance in turn and placed their offering. The process is long and drawn out with everyone walking around and looking at the arrangement from different angles and discussing the individual and collective achievement.

Now imagine that some resulting still lives (still lifes?) are so compelling that people record them by sketching, painting or photographing them. Initially, this is done to help remember the moment or perhaps as an aid to teaching people how to do the activity. Over time, however, people begin to notice that the representations themselves are often compelling. Next, it gets meta. We can easily imagine a sort of activity developing where people gather and look at slides of still lives and discuss them. Perhaps they even start producing videos of the process of creating a still life. Eventually, the art of table arrangement is lost or is devalued while still life paintings are regarded as high art.

I don't think that is actually what happened. Yet, the impetus for a long time the painting a still life was an appreciation for the beauty of arrangements of objects. A garden is a sort of still life. A good artist teaches us how to see things.

Plato seems to have written, at least initially, out of admiration for Socrates. Socrates "wins" to use Professor Weinstein's terminology, a significant number of his encounters. He doesn't win them all however and some of his victories are odd ones, drinking poison Hemlock being the most striking of his odd victories. Sometimes Socrates loses or other times, nobody wins—a few of the dialogues are decidedly unresolved.

There is a long-standing theory that the dialogues are really advertisements for Plato's Academy. Roughly forty years ago, when I was an undergraduate, one of my professors outlined this for us. He said that the dialogues were intentionally vague with esoteric truths hidden or hinted at within to entice students to come to the Academy and be taught these things directly. I find that unlikely. My guess is that the dialogues were first meant to give readers a notion of what it was like to be part of a discussion with the great Socrates himself and later to give a sense of what it would be like to attend the Academy. The promise was not answers but dialogue. Just as some people believed, and some still do believe, in table arrangement as an end in itself, Plato and his students believed that the activity was valuable even if the results were not, Plato really believed in dialogue as dialectic.

Thrasymachus

A good argument could be made that the novel is a possible rival to Plato. People come together representing different views and we see how that works out. Philosophers would probably object that no novel, not even a novel of ideas, goes into sufficient technical detail to count as philosophy. On the other hand, very little philosophy is worth reading as art and Plato is.

A while ago I was at a talk called Forgotten Philosophies by William Sweet. Professor Sweet argued that the history of philosophy, as it currently is taught, leaves certain voices out. I think that is a good point but worry that Professor Sweet's real goal is not encouraging the inclusion of many voices so much as promoting scholastic philosophy in particular. What made the talk fascinating for me was that Thrasymachus made an appearance during the question period.

Thrasymachus (not his real name) advanced the postmodern argument that it's all about power. That the people who get included in classes on the history of philosophy are the ones chosen by people with power and that was all there was to be said about it. Professor Sweet explained why he didn't think that was the case. Before another person could ask a question, Thrasymachus repeated his original argument in different words spoken more loudly. Again, Professor Sweet attempted to answer. We don't know if his second attempt was going to be any different or better than the first because Thasymachus cut him off and repeated his original argument even louder still. He spoke as someone who was certain he was right and who couldn't see why Sweet stubbornly refused to concede the point. Sweet looked not afraid but a little intimidated at this aggression, and who wouldn't. The discussion ended when the MC interceded.

What Plato saw, and modern philosophy has tended to forget, is that ideas are connected to character. Anyone who believed what Thrasymachus believes is likely to reflect it in his character. He might be a buffoon. He might also be a defeatist. He might fluctuate between the two depending on whether he thinks he has the upper hand in terms of strength.

We haven't completely lost that sense but we tend to be very binary about it. We demonize Thrasymachus. Plato knew better. Those students who confronted Professor Weinstein are evil demons. They are what all of us would be if we weren't properly educated. We shouldn't even get outraged at the contemporary academic world for the sort of nonsense has long been a fact of university life. Ideally, the students who did this should be expelled and the professors who encourage and support this sort of extremism should be fired. That seems unlikely to happen. All that we have left to us is to rediscover dialectic for ourselves, to conduct ourselves accordingly.

"filosofia della proclamazione dell'essere, il canto in onore dell'esistente"

There was just as much analysis of Joseph Ratzinger's choice on Benedict as there was about Jorge Mario Bergoglio's choice of Francis. The popular press, however, took little notice of the possible reasons for "Benedict" as it was too busy vilifying Ratzinger. (As always, the most serious press bias is not in reporting incorrectly but in what they choose to ignore.)

There is an interesting tension in the choice of the name.

The most obvious possibility for the inspiration of the name is Saint Benedict whose Benedictine rule is believed by many, including me, to have played a major role in the creation of the new European civilization out of the remnants of late antiquity. Pope Benedict XVI's speculation that God was perhaps going to prune the church so that it could grow aligns with this. He drew on a motto found at the frequently destroyed Benedictine Abbey at Monte Cassino, "Succisa Virescit", which means, roughly, "cut down, she grows back".

Politically, we could interpret that as advice for how those in the church should respond to a larger culture that attacks them. We might, as the Benedict option popularized by Rod Dreher would have us do, form separate communities within the greater civilization. These wouldn't be completely cut off, indeed it would be impossible that they could be. Rather, the point would be that they would be little communities where certain core values were embodied such that they could sprout forth and grow when the larger civilization around them calms down.

A less obvious connection to make with the name Benedict is with Pope Benedict XV. At first glance, we might be tempted to think this comparison would only reinforce the first. Benedict XVI's papacy coincided with the First World War and we might think this just another instance of church institutions preserving culture while the culture outside committed suicide. But Benedict XVI did not recommend any withdrawal from the larger culture. Instead he emphasized the need to focus on basics by remaining neutral in political struggles, promoting peace and, when war breaks out as it inevitably must, the ease of suffering.

I wonder if there isn't, behind Benedict XV and Benedict XVI, a subtle shift in attitudes towards Thomism. Beginning with Pope Leo XIII, there was a tendency to emphasize the second part of the second part of the Summa Theologiae. That section of the text focuses on the virtue of justice and is the source of the Church's social teaching. Leo XIII did much to promote the revival of Thomism for this purpose. However, Thomism was redirected towards epistemology so as to provide a counterfoil to modernism under the Papacy of Pius X. Benedict XVI, without directly opposing his predecessor Pius X, emphasized the concern for justice that had inspired Leo XIII.

And Benedict XVI? I think he may have intended to de-emphasize some of the work of his predecessor John Paul II, now Saint John Paul II, without directly contradicting him. He was very close to John Paul and loved him dearly but, I suspect, was also aware of certain shortcomings. He sought to de-emphasize certain aspects of John Paul's legacy without directly contradicting the man he revered.

If I am right, we can see subtle corrections of John Paul II is some of Benedict XVI's acts. Deus caritas est, then is a redirection away from the theology of the body. I think that, like John Paul II, Benedict saw Humanae Vitae as a "catechetical disaster" but also recognized that it would be a pastoral disaster to rescind it. The theology of the body was John Paul's attempt to salvage what could be salvaged and then refocus attention in a more useful direction. If I am right, and base my arguments only on intuition at this point, Benedict XVI revisits the issue in Deus caritas est. The redirection here is not in what is said but in what isn't said. Benedict makes his arguments about eros without talking of any theology of the body as a subtle way of letting us know that he doesn't think such a move is necessary or helpful.

I also think that something similar happens with Caritas in Veritate. Again, John Paul II and Benedict were left cleaning up the missteps of Paul VI. This time the offending encyclical is Populorum progressio. It also is a catechetical failure. John Paul II sought to redirect matters by rethinking and attempting to improve our understanding of development in his encyclical Solicitudo rei socialis. Benedict XVI, while sympathetic,  believed that any discussion of development or progress will necessarily force to the Church support specific political initiatives to her possible detriment. Again, the correction of his predecessor is not in what he chooses to say in Caritas in Veritate but in what he chooses not to say. The more abstract arguments we see in Benedict's encyclical are a deliberate drawing back from what he does not wish us to conclude.

Underneath all this may be a claim about what Thomism should and should not be. John Paul II emphasized the philosophy of Thomas as a philosophy of being, "whose transcendental value paves the most direct way to rise to the knowledge of subsisting Being and Pure Act, namely to God". The heading for this post is the Italian of what he goes on to say, "we can even call this philosophy the philosophy of the proclamation of being, a chant in praise of what exists". Fergus Kerr, whom I draw heavily on here, notes that the phrase is even more beautiful in Italian.

Beautiful it is but I think Benedict XVI thought it was just wrong to think that Thomas's philosophy of being was sustainable. To emphasize being, which is to say the ontology of Thomas, was to make a mistake parallel to that Pius X made in emphasizing his epistemology. Benedict XVI thought that 20th century philosophers, principally Heidegger, had issued a challenge that the ahistorical notions of being that we find in Thomas simply could not answer. He thought that focusing on Thomas as a philosopher of being was a foolish and naive project pursued by an otherwise brilliant pope. I think that is right.

The privilege that Ben Carson and I share

Carson is getting a lot of abuse, I think unfairly,  for saying this [NYT link]:

“I think poverty to a large extent is also a state of mind,” he said, according to a transcript of the interview that was released on Wednesday. “You take somebody that has the right mind-set, you can take everything from them and put them on the street, and I guarantee in a little while they’ll be right back up there.” 

He added that helping people may not better their lives. 

“You take somebody with the wrong mind-set, you can give them everything in the world — they’ll work their way right back down to the bottom,” Mr. Carson said.

He expressed himself poorly. The expression "state of mind" suggests that poverty is just in people's minds. But the larger context makes it clear that isn't what he meant so, while we might wish he'd picked his words more carefully, those criticizing him are being unfair.

What Carson is actually talking about is a kind of privilege. We might think, for example, that a child born to upper-middle class people with university education is more privileged than someone born to poor, uneducated people who make their living in ways that are sometimes illegal. On average, it would be good bet to say that the former child is more likely to succeed than the latter. But you couldn't say it with certainty. The first set of parents might exploit the cushion their financial and social security to live dissolute lives with a lot of recreational drug use and emotional instability. They could further hamper their child's chances by teaching her that life is unfair and that there is no connection between hard work and discipline on the one hand and success in life on the latter. The child of the second set of parents might decide to break the pattern of her family and live a life of discipline and hard work and succeed. In fact, she did for the profile I give above is my maternal grandmother.

By any objective definition my grandmother was a victim but she refused to see herself that way. And she taught my mother likewise and she then taught me. Ben Carson's mother was like that too.

“If everybody had a mother like mine, nobody would be in poverty,” Mr. Carson said. “She was a person who absolutely would not accept the status of victim.”

I have mixed feelings bout my mother but there is no denying that she refused to let me think of myself as a victim and that has been a huge advantage for me in my life. That is a kind of privilege.

"Late capitalism"

I remember noticing some of my lefty friends and family members using the expression starting a couple of years ago. Now, The Atlantic and the New Yorker are using it.

Here is an attempt to explain the term.

Rather, it was Marxist thinkers that came up with it to describe the industrialized economies they saw around them. A German economist named Werner Sombart seems to have been the first to use it around the turn of the 20th century, with a Marxist theorist and activist named Ernest Mandel popularizing it a half-century later. For Mandel, “late capitalism” denoted the economic period that started with the end of World War II and ended in the early 1970s, a time that saw the rise of multinational corporations, mass communication, and international finance. Roberts said that the term’s current usage departs somewhat from its original meaning. “It’s not this sense that things are getting so bad that the revolution is going to come,” he told me, “but rather that we see the ligaments of the international system that socialists will be able to seize and use.”

There is a lot of projection in that. Socialists are the ones who want there to be an international system. But this isn't any kind of socialism, it's boring old Marxism once again. We can see this in the assumption that capitalism suffers from internal contradictions that will cause it to become increasingly unstable such that socialists will be able to seize the day and foment revolution.

It has to be foment revolution rather than lead a revolution. In Marxist theory the socialists can never lead or cause revolution; they believe the revolution will come from the oppressed members of the working class suddenly seeing they have common interests and uniting to seize control. The most socialists can do is instigate but, they think, that's okay because they believe the working class is a powder keg ready to go off.

And yet it never seems to go off. Which leads us to this:

“Late capitalism” took on a darker connotation in the works of the 20th-century critical theorists, who borrowed from and critiqued and built on Marx and the Marxists. Members of the Frankfurt School, reeling from the horrors of World War II, saw in it excessive social control on the part of big government and big business. Theodor Adorno argued that “late capitalism” might lead not to socialism, but away from it, by blunting the proletariat’s potential for revolution. “The economic process continues to perpetuate domination over human beings,” he said in a speech on late capitalism in 1968. (If only he could have seen the Jenner-Pepsi ad.)

The question to ask here is whether "control" and "influence" are the same thing. Big business has certainly had a lot of influence on popular culture. If you read that as the same thing as control, then everything Adorno has to say follows.

If you take big slab of raw salmon and walk up to a black bear, that salmon will give you considerable influence on the bear. It won't give you much control, and this to the point that your death is a likely outcome of such an action. A skilled animal trainer working with a trained bear would likely have more luck. And yet, skilled animal trainers are killed from time to time.

Notice, however, the polar nature of the Marxist response. Sometimes their sympathies are with the bear, which is to say the working class, and other times they can barely conceal their contempt for the gullibility of the little people who are endlessly fooled by a culture propagated by big business.

And wasn't the Jenner-Pepsi ad supposed to be a failure?

Feudalism didn't collapse under its own contradictions. It was replaced by more efficient political and economic practices. It took centuries for that transition to take place. There are third-world countries that still run on patronage-based command and control systems, which is what feudalism is when you strip it of it's pomp and circumstance, today. It is an extremely resilient system, something that shouldn't surprise is given that it lasted centuries. Capitalism, likewise, is extremely resilient. Until someone comes up with a more efficient system, there is little danger of it tumbling. As of today, no one has.

Meanwhile, our socialist friends keep on repeating the same old clichés.

To tell the truth

You know that game where a mommy smiles at her baby and the baby, after much struggle, smiles back? That sort of activity is the foundation of all human learning. Our brain's basic function is imitative/predictive. We learn to imitate patterns.

Head and shoulders, knees and toes, knees and toes, knees and toes.
Head and shoulders, knees and toes, knees and toes, knees and toes.
Eyes, ears, mouth and nose.

Mommy sings the words and makes the hand motions. Baby watches and, after an intensity of effort that would intimidate any adult, learns to make the right hand motions along with mommy. Later, the baby learns to sing the words along with mommy. The song includes patterns and variations. We might say, it includes patterns within a pattern. Eventually, the baby internalizes the patterns to the point that they get really good at being able to pick up new ones quickly. Every new song is sort of like the old ones only with variations. The song above, for example, uses the same tune as "London Bridge is Falling Down" (and many other children's songs) with different words.

The same goes for what we call the "meanings" of the word. At the very beginning, the child needs to know to move her hands the same way mommy does when mommy sings the song. Eventually, she will learn to move her hands at the sound of the words. Mommy plays a new game where she says, "baby knees" and her daughter touches her knees, "baby eyes" and she points at her eyes and so on. Learning this is a long process with much correction. The child isn't learning concepts. What the child is doing is imitating patterns and then learning how to predict patterns so she can act as is expected of her.

When we think about lying, we tend to imagine someone saying something she knows isn't true. And that description matches some lies. But it rapidly gets more complicated than that. Suppose Theresa borrowed her sister's ring without asking and then loses it. Her sister later wants to wear the ring asks Theresa if she knows where it is. Theresa says she doesn't know and that is, in a certain sense, the truth, for Theresa has no clue where it is. And yet Theresa is lying. Why do we feel so confident saying this?

Consider another example. When Elizabeth Warren claimed to be descended from indigenous peoples  it seems to me that she believed what she was saying. People inside her family had been telling her this since childhood. And yet, it is fair to call Warren a liar. Why do I say this? Because different standards of truth apply in different situations. You believe what your mother told you and you can repeat to others. Best, however, to hedge your bets; to not say, "I am part Cherokee "but rather say, "The family lore is that we're part Cherokee and it may be true, I hope it is, but I've never verified this."

What we call "truth telling" is a matter of the brains predictive function. My answer to your questions is based on my assurance that certain patterns will hold. If you ask me if I have an appendix, I will say I do have an appendix. I've never checked. If I had to justify my claim, I might say that I know of no operations, that there are no visible scars and that I've never heard of anyone being born without an appendix. It's not impossible, however, that I might not have one. There just isn't any reason to check.

I have, however, often heard of people who were told things about their ethnic heritage that turned out not to be true. There is every reason to check and not checking before filling out a form claiming minority status is lying.

Lying, and this is my main point, is very closely related to the notion of "what can you get away with". That makes us uncomfortable. We want lying to be more like following a rule. We want it to be something you can easily check.

When a man asks his wife if she loves him, she says, "yes," without even thinking about it. She may feel very much in love with him at the time but, more likely, she feels nothing at all. She's been married to the man for years now. She says, "yes," because that is the responsible answer. If she said "no" there would be serious and hurtful consequences. Assuming she's not an irresponsible jerk, saying "no" would be another way of saying, "I don't want to be married to you anymore." Either way, her answer is based on the predictive function of her brain. Her answer is based on what she senses the consequences of that answer will be.

When Elizabeth Warren grew up, she heard family lore about Cherokee and Delaware heritage. Repeating these stories inside the family had no negative consequences. No one called her a liar. So her brain got used to thinking this was safe pattern of behaviour. My guess is that Warren was probably surprised, even gobsmacked, when she was first accused of lying. She probably felt very strongly that she had not intended to deceive. But how would she know she wasn't lying to herself about this?

Bonaventure would say telling the truth requires us to meet two conditions:

1. You have to believe what you are saying is true.
2. What you are saying actually has to be true.

We tend to find that sort of assessment harsh because it's easy to imagine cases where people honestly believe things that aren't true. I'll come back to that in a moment, but first consider the consequences of shifting all our focus to the first. Catherine honestly believes that she loves and wants to marry John. When she decides to marry him, that decision is based entirely upon her sense of her own feelings. She's certain she isn't lying when she says, "all the days of my life." Five years later, she leaves him.

How could she have avoided that lie? Looking "deeper into herself" wasn't going to help.

It is true that there are many cases where we honestly believe things that aren't true. It's also true that some lies are a simple matter of sincerity. Learning to be honest, it seems to me, is more a matter of focusing on the second condition—making sure what we say is actually true—rather than questioning our own sincerity. Which is not to say that we don't all tell bold-faced lies from time to time. Of course we do but our problem in those cases isn't figuring out whether we're telling the truth or not. The question then becomes whether the lie is justified and I think, controversially, that some lies are justified. Again, though, attempting to justify deliberately misleading someone by examining my own sense of sincerity is of no help at all.

The fact that we won't be able to prove absolutely that what we want to say is true is a feature not a bug. It reminds us that truth telling is a predictive activity. The question isn't, "Do I believe this to be true?" The question is, "How certain can I be that my claims will hold up?"

When the only cure for narrative is more narrative

"I read Claire Dederer’s latest memoir, Love and Trouble"

The expression "latest memoir" ought to evoke the same feelings as "my most recent divorce" or "not last since my last criminal conviction".  These are movements from unfortunate to carelessness.

That said, such memoirs at least gave a reviewer an excuse to talk about herself.

To hedge the accolade slightly, I suspect some portion of the pleasure was narcissistic on my part: I kept recognizing myself in these pages, especially in their evocations of middle-aged befuddlements, and of the surprisingly long half-life of adolescent inchoateness.

Notice, first, the tactic: by announcing she is being narcissistic, Laura Kipnis plans on having her cake and eating it too. That's a clever trick and it's one we all fall victim to so let's not beat her up for what is a near-universal human trait. At the same time, let's take her at face value and ignore the half-meant self-deprecation. Read literally, Kipnis tells us that she's not handling middle age well and that something she here calls "adolescent inchoateness" contributing to this failure. What does that mean?

May I validate your feelings?

A few years ago now I volunteered to visit people who are sick and shut in. In order to be able to do it I had to take (and pay for) a course. I did it without enthusiasm but did it seriously. The course taught us to validate people's feelings. No one in the course told us why this was required. We all meet people every day and manage to get along pretty well so why is it necessary to validate the feelings of people who are shut in?

When I made my first visit I discovered hat the answer to the question is that people who are very sick are often bitter about their experience. They can't do many of the things they used to and no one visits them. They respond to this with anger and sense of entitlement. They put up psychological barriers making it difficult to approach them and this makes their very real problems even worse. They make it impossible for you to reach them. Not every seriously ill person does this but enough do that if you were to sign up to do what I did it would be a virtual certainty that you'd encounter someone like that. People who respond to life's problems with patience, hope and love are a joy to visit so their friends and family tend to visit them. The people who need visits from volunteers aren't like that. Thus the course.

I tolerated the lectures and role-playing activities. As skeptical as I tried to be, though, I could see that this was a technique that would work in some cases. That turned out to be an understatement. It worked incredibly well. I found myself unconsciously slipping into validation mode any time I had to deal with a difficult person. The only time it doesn't "work" is when you're dealing with a difficult person who is in a position equal to your own. I mean, it works in the sense that it calms them down and reassures them but you can't go anywhere after that.

Let me explain what I mean by that. If you're sitting with someone who is bitter and angry about life because they're sick and they feel like no one cares you can diffuse a lot of their anger by saying that  you fully understand that they are angry. When they calm down you can ask them to talk about their life. Ninety percent of the time, simply doing that will lead them to find something good and meaningful about their lives and that will improve their outlook on life. In a very small number of cases you will have to help this process along with with a few gently leading questions. In a tiny number on instances this won't work and you'll have to go to the head of the program and they will assign a qualified therapist to see this person.

The technique "works" because the person in the bed needs human contact. At some level they are trying to earn your company. The bitterness and entitlement and counter-productive in the way that many human responses are counter-productive. When someone like me validates their feelings I give them away to get around this barrier and most people, not surprisingly, jump at that second chance. Most of us would do exactly the same thing in their position. And we'd do it because we'd be in a position of weakness. If this person visiting us doesn't come back we'll be stuck in this damn bed all alone again. Validating feelings is all about power.

And that started to trouble me.