And would you feel equally undecided, Socrates, about things of which the mention may provoke a smile?—I mean such things as hair, mud, dirt, or anything else which is vile and paltry; would you suppose that each of these has an idea distinct from the actual objects with which we come into contact, or not?
Certainly not, said Socrates; visible things like these are such as they appear to us, and I am afraid that there would be an absurdity in assuming any idea of them, although I sometimes get disturbed, and begin to think that there is nothing without an idea; but then again, when I have taken up this position, I run away, because I am afraid that I may fall into a bottomless pit of nonsense, and perish; and so I return to the ideas of which I was just now speaking, and occupy myself with them.
Yes, Socrates, said Parmenides; that is because you are still young; the time will come, if I am not mistaken, when philosophy will have a firmer grasp of you, and then you will not despise even the meanest things; at your age, you are too much disposed to regard the opinions of men.
I agree with Parmenides, and we might read this as Plato looking back on his younger self, when he wanted to restrict the forms to ethics and aesthetics.
That makes sense. The eros of philosophy itself is something other than, but perhaps related to, the eros of flesh toward flesh.
No, except for some great passages that you’ve shared now and then. If you are inclined, I’d be happy to see some more of your favorites. Or you can refer me to the best texts.
That seems like a reasonable approach. One way to interpret Kant is that intuitions “impose” themselves on us through conceptual schemes. How do we extend or modify conceptual schemes ? Through “poetry” or poesis, through metaphors that disclose the reality in a new way (and in that sense co-construct it with intution/sensation.)
The chora could be read as this “ocean of intuition/sensation” that “shakes” up our conceptual schemes which are also the articulation of the world into objects. Sort of like this:
Your approach reminds me of Derrida’s to some degree.
Of course, one should not try to reduce ancient thought to a modern point of view. But, on the other hand, ancient thought should not be treated as a completed monolith either.
Here I see Plato attempting to refine his system, to correct or remove certain inaccuracies within it. It looks like a beautiful attempt, but I do not think it is sufficiently completed within the framework of his own system.
It seems rather like a proposal for further development — either for his followers to work out, or for Plato himself to return to later. Had Plato regarded this scheme as fully resolved, it would probably have become canonical.
This is a fun topic for speculation. If we believe ( and not all scholars do) that there was a genuine unwritten doctrine, then Plato shared it with others at the Academy. He may have felt that none of them understood him.
Continuing the speculation, Plato could have devised his dialogues to generate the thinking in others that led him to his fundamental insight. Instead of trying to say it “directly,” he builds a funhouse, a hall of mirrors. His insight is “implied” for those with ears to hear.
I’m of course situated or biased, but I find ( my interpretation) of the unwritten doctrine to be complete and this completeness is possible because the insight is radically and radiantly simple.
Harman interpreted (creatively misread) Heidegger in a similar way. I can be accused of doing to Plato what Harman did to Heidegger, fastening on some moment of the work as the key and basis and center of all the rest. Harman writes this in Tool-Being.
As of this writing (January 2001), the Klostermann Gesamtausgabe runs to 18 ,649 published pages. Of these pages, the vast majority prove utterly predictable to anyone familiar with five or six key Heideggerian texts. Indeed, one searches the recent history of philosophy in vain for a more single-minded, repetitive thinker; if Heidegger had lived in a more taciturn age, it is easy to imagine his life’s work confined to a single papyrus manuscript.
In the case of Plato, we have only a few fragments that would indeed fit on a single papyrus manuscript. With so few fragments, the space of possible interpretations is huge. To me it makes sense to explore the most powerful interpretations/projections that one can manage. For Plato, if he matters to us, speaks to our personal situated experience. So he “must” be a “modern” Plato inasmuch as we the living reactivate his signs.
I still tend to think that thought exists through its embodiment in history. For this reason, antiquity, which is so distant from us, should be considered above all in terms of how it actually lived and how it influenced others.
Even if there was some lost doctrine or unwritten text, it is extremely difficult to reconstruct its context and the way it might have functioned or influenced others. We read Plato through a gaze already mediated — and to some extent distorted — by all the history that has followed.
Plato, however, was actual precisely in his own epoch and within his own milieu.
I agree with you. But for me this means that our Plato, the Plato we talk about, is really part of us now. So “Plato” is a sign we use in our own actual existences. Put cynically, discussion of Plato is a polite pretext for imposing one’s own naming on reality.
As Plato used Socrates and Kojeve used Hegel, “I” use Plato. Some feel guilty about this, and I’m not trying to celebrate it but only acknowledge it. The investigation of the past is critique of the present and the construction of the future.
Perhaps I simply do not possess the necessary method here. Not everything in Plato’s philosophy seems indisputable to me, and for that reason I cannot try to complete his philosophy for him.
Perhaps this analogy does not fully apply to Plato, but I can give the example of biblical apocrypha. The Gospel of Thomas, even if it were authentic in some sense, was not incorporated into the actual historical development of Christianity. And to speculate about how history would have developed if it had been accepted seems, to me, rather meaningless.
Or, we might read it as what the mature Socrates says in the Republic and when he is about to die in the Phaedo, that is, unfounded hypotheses. Suitable for those who would be led by a philosopher-king and those fearful of death.
I wouldn’t say that Plato’s work is indisputable either. Just to be clear. I’m saying that we create Plato in an important sense. He is only as fascinating as what we managed to project on him from our own experience. The “meaning” of Plato, for me, is only what I can fit in my own soul. So reading Plato is thinking with Plato is projecting possible meanings on his text. Plato’s work is a mere catalyst for a self-world relation.
So completing Plato’s philosophy might be for me merely completing my own philosophy. As Bloom writes, strong poets can’t help but misread one another. If you review this thread, I took some heat for the audacity of my approach, precisely because it was so impious and creative. Others felt, correctly, that my own philosophical creativity was paramount for me. “I come not to praise Plato but to bury him ( and yet to thereby resurrect him, reinvent him).”
To me this is to be expected. If we ourselves are radical ontologists, which is to say rivals of strong poets like Plato who proceed and threaten to constrain us. The concrete dialogue of we who are alive now is primary, and the “mighty dead” get their relevance through that primary fact of us each personally giving a damn about ** being ** philosophy.
I think you are missing that historical speculation is a visionary poetic act. For some, it may involve a kind of idolatry. The “actual historical person” may be important as the bringer of the great truth. For me it’s not. Speculating about Plato is tacitly speculation about the devices of the philosopher for dealing with misunderstanding while also preserving his “seed” until the rain arrives, until the ideal community can recieve it.
I do not disagree with you here. I think that a truly strong reading is precisely the attempt to develop one’s own Plato or one’s own Heidegger through an encounter with the text. A text is often a ladder to heaven, which must eventually be thrown away. Very often, the most important passages for a later reader may turn out to be passages that the author himself considered secondary. For example, one of the most valuable moments in Plato for me is the idea of philosophy as a kind of dying, but where he tries to translate this into a logically rigorous form, it seems to me somewhat weaker.
The same applies to the world of Forms. I understand it as the manifestation of a deeply personal mode of thinking, which from within feels like recollection. Such passages possess a deep inner truth and poetic force. The rationalization itself can appear weaker. On the other hand, if Plato had expressed his insight as it was, without the ancient way of expressing thought, perhaps it would not have survived.
In the case of the chora, it is roughly the same. This is a very deep and fruitful insight of Plato’s: there must be some way to think the relation between the world of Forms and the world of things. For me, the very posing of the question already makes the thought powerful and, in a certain sense, complete. The existence of a detailed explanation is secondary to me. As I understand it, there were many later attempts to unfold this thought: for example, in Plotinus through emanation, among Christian mystics, and in many others.
Very nice to be on the same page. And of course we are grateful to the ladders that get us to high vantage points.
I also find that idea to be very important. It’s hard to ignore how it reappears in Feuerbach and Heidegger, to name just two. It’s a motif in a musical conversation — an infinite concept jazz — that spans centuries. Yet we summon the shades, via creative and yet constrained projection, of those otherwise long lost.
I’m also skeptical in general of “logically rigorous form.” Vision and metaphor are primary. Logic lives in the harmony of what we do and say. Reminds me of the discussion in Plato of the soul as a harmony.
Right. He synthesized Socrates, Pythogoras, Heraclitus, Parmenides, Protagoras, and so on. He gave us a polyphony. I don’t love all of his music equally. You or I or anyone can include the most potent fragments in a fresh creative act.
Right. And Derrida generously projects on \chi the following:
This interminable theory of exegeses seems to reproduce what, following the discourse of Timaeus, would happen, not with Plato’s text, but with khõra itself/herself, if one could at all speak thus about this X (x or khi) which must not have any proper determination.
We might understand “proper” as final or authoritative. My own preference is to understand \chi as what always “overflows” and yet inspires conceptualization. If I use words like “feeling” or “sensation,” then I impose a limiting conceptuality on what I’ve just intended as the surplus of every category. We might joke about a negative (anti-)theology of paradoxical-by-definition-ineffable chora or secret mother.
In my view, logical form is not neutral. It refers back to a concrete metaphysics.
A provocative thought: in some sense, logic can be regarded as an artistic medium, legitimized by a particular tradition among other possible media. Just as a dancer can express thought through the body, an actor through facial expression, a musician through the structure of sound, a playwright through plot, and a painter through color and form.
If we approach the matter with maximum formal rigor, no philosophy is fully logical to the end. It reaches us rather as a resonance or an echo. In philosophy, what matters most is not the completed thought, but the very fact of thinking itself.
For me, the primary value of the Greeks is that they managed to transmit to us an almost childlike, naive confidence that it is possible to reach the very foundation of the world using thought alone.
I would like to clarify one point. From my reasoning, it may seem that there is a motive of logical relativism here, or a privileging of personal interpretation. This is, of course, not the case. Not every interpretation is equally strong.
On the other hand, I also do not have a final way to separate a strong interpretation from a weak one, except perhaps for one criterion, which does not claim to be final: unlike many others, a philosopher creates resonance more through the destruction or displacement of his own ego than through its assertion.
Your Derrida quotation is very powerful. It seems to me that Plato’s strength here lies precisely in the openness of the question. Perhaps it was a strong move on his part not to close the matter with further systematic explanations, even if such explanations existed.
Yes. Exactly. The supposed neutrality is, for some, an ideal. I quoted this from Goodman elsewhere, but it fits in here too.
The eye comes always ancient to its work, obsessed by its own past and by old and new insinuations of the ear, nose, tongue, fingers, heart, and brain. It functions not as an instrument self-powered and alone, but as a dutiful member of a complex and capricious organism. Not only how but what it sees is regulated by need and prejudice." It selects, rejects, organizes, discriminates, associates, classifies, analyzes, constructs. It does not so much mirror as take and make; and what it takes and makes it sees not bare, as items without attributes, but as things, as food, as people, as enemies, as stars, as weapons. Nothing is seen nakedly or naked.
…
The myths of the innocent eye and of the absolute given are unholy accomplices. Both derive from and foster the idea of knowing as a processing of raw material received from the senses, and of this raw material as being discoverable either through purification rites or by methodical disinterpretation.
I think language is intensely concrete. This is one reason I love Bakhtin.
Any concrete utterance is a link in the chain of speech communication of a particular sphere. The very boundaries of the utterance are determined by a change of speech subjects. Utterances are not indifferent to one another, and are not self-sufficient; they are aware of and mutually reflect one another. These mutual reflections determine their character. Each utterance is filled with echoes and reverberations of other utterances to which it is related by the communality of the sphere of speech communication. Every utterance must be regarded primarily as a response to preceding utterances of the given sphere (we understand the word ‘response’ here in the broadest sense). Each utterance refutes, affirms, supplements, and relies on the others, presupposes them to be known, and somehow takes them into account. After all, as regards a given question, in a given matter, and so forth, the utterance occupies a particular definite position in a given sphere of communication. It is impossible to determine its position without correlating it with other positions. Therefore, each utterance is filled with various kinds of responsive reactions to other utterances of the given sphere of speech communication. These reactions take various forms: others’ utterances can be introduced directly into the context of the utterance, or one may introduce only individual words or sentences, which then act as representatives of the whole utterance. Both whole utterances and individual words can retain their alien expression, but they can also be re-accentuated (ironically, indignantly, reverently, and so forth). Others’ utter- ances can be repeated with varying degrees of reinterpretation. They can be referred to as though the interlocutor were already well aware of them; they can be silently presupposed; or one’s responsive reaction to them can be reflected only in the expression of one’s own speech - in the selection of lan- guage means and intonations that are determined not by the topic of one’s own speech but by the other’s utterances concerning the same topic. Here is an important and typical case: very frequently the expression of our utterance is determined not only - and sometimes not so much - by the referentially semantic content of this utterance, but also by others’ utterances on the same topic to which we are responding or with which we are polemicizing. They also determine our emphasis on certain elements, repetition, our selection of harsher (or, conversely, milder) expressions, a contentious (or, conversely, conciliatory) tone, and so forth. The expression of an utterance can never be fully understood or explained if its thematic content is all that is taken into account. The expression of an utterance always responds to a greater or lesser degree, that is, it expresses the speaker’s attitude toward others’ utterances and not just his attitude toward the object of his utterance.
I agree. Instead of “meaning” we need perhaps the wider notion of “significance,” which includes the “total radiance” of the sign for a particular perceiver of that sign. The sign is an event in the world for the senses. Of course the poet understands this well, and chooses sounds carefully. The “total music” is the gift.
Right. It is a comportment, a way of being. “Ways not works.”
Right. Or at least that is a strong interpretation. Of course I am here trying to “create” Plato as a far more “open” thinker. We can likewise, if we want, project on Parmenides. As Heidegger put it, the question of the meaning of being can be the most concrete of all questions. But for most “being” is an empty concept, a “vapor.” That is how they hear it. They unconsciously comport themselves to words as “concepts” with “content” rather than fingers that point, etc.
I’d call myself a relativist, in some sense, while agreeing with you that personally we rate some interpretations as much stronger than others. I don’t believe in an interpretation without an interpreter, so there is an ineradicable perspectivity in existence — from this perspective over here anyway.
I might frame this in terms of a “deep ego” overpowering the “petty ego.” This “deep” ego is more “universal” in its intention. Just my current take, and I can only hint at it with signs. But I mentioned before the desire to share the “poem” with others. The right others with ears to hear. I still lean toward understanding human existence as desirous of high community. The lone wolf is just willing to wait it out, to not settle for what doesn’t satisfy. Pearls before swine, etc.
Right. And this is “visionary speculation.” We can project a sublime sophistication on Plato. The historical person is something like a screen for such projections. Which is funny, because we might think of \chi as a screen for projections or the “space” in which things come and go. I am tempted to link \chi and the concreteness of the question of the meaning of being. “Behind” our concepts, or under them, imperfectly strained, there is the lava of quality that is ineffable and ultra-concretely “present.”
Even if as fire, it nonetheless appears; it appears, even if never as itself.
It seems to me that you are pointing to a certain paradox or tension here. Yes, self-displacement can itself become a pose, but I am not trying to build a metaphysics on this point. It is rather a simple observation that genuine thinking carries within itself a certain discomfort. In some sense, it is something almost unnatural, something that leads one away from ordinary or normative vitality.
One can notice that many great thinkers, who were later declared to be the voice of their age or the soul of a people, were often solitary figures during their own lives. They were either unnoticed, or stood in opposition to the system. This is almost a commonplace.
Perhaps this could be explained within another metaphysical system, one in which neither the ego nor society plays the central role.
Just to be clear, I didn’t think you were. I’m just personally fascinated by the will to create and its relation to the will to share what is created, which we might call the will to express. To press out. I only have direct access, you might say, to my own soul. I sometimes want to do the opposite and have no face and leave no trace. What is this ambivalence ?
I return to the theme as something central for me. Schopenhauer wrote that the artist/philosopher is like an insect that wants to lay its eggs so that it can die in peace. Mach expressed a similar spiritual/ethical vision in The Analysis of Sensations.
This is one way to understand philosophy as learning how to die. We more and more participate in a “poetry” or “music” that feels transpersonal. There’s a sense of “also being the others,” including those not yet born and those long dead.
This explains the metaphor of anamnesis. I “remember” who I am, having temporarily forgotten as I crossed the river Lethe to be reborn. To me this is “only metaphorical” but existence itself, in my view, is metaphorical. The world is metaphorical or analogical in its significance. Joyce’s wild Finnegans Wake is an endlessly spinning wheel, a metaphor for the world itself. The book is so difficult that I won’t pretend to have begun to master it. But just the idea of the book and the method inspires me. It is a teeming tower of monomyth, of endless repetition that is also novelty.
So it is approximate or analogical repetition. As if the “remembering” is bent by noise or chaos, so that the world is endlessly novel but tantalizingly structured enough for us to reach for a “truth” that outlasts us, that others can find in themselves, yet never as quite the same truth.
Perhaps you mean the “toxicity” of thinking ? I’d connect this especially to psycho-analysis. To try to live psycho-analysis is let’s say not for everyone. Instead one learns to live with it in order to survive it.
Of course we can talk about Freud, but the crucial stuff is there, with so much other stuff, in Nietzsche. In my insane 20s, he was my favorite philosopher. These days I see him very differently, of course. But stormy Nietzsche was a toxic delight back then, connected with unspeakable nauseas but also with cosmic harmonies.
I don’t know if this is what you were aiming at. But it’s one way I could try to meet you in what you are saying above.
That is right: philosophy can essentially be reduced to an attempt to struggle against death. Only not from vitality, not from life-processes, like streams of salmon swimming upstream to spawn, unconsciously driven to give up their bodies for the reproduction of offspring, but from death itself, from non-being, gaining a more significant immortality — in the attempt to rewrite the very foundations of the world, performing a kind of God-defying act.
In contemporary discourse this will sound toxic; nevertheless, I believe that philosophy is, in many ways, a male affair, because a woman can literally leave offspring behind — for her, offspring are a literal continuation of her body. A man is biologically deprived of this possibility and is therefore more inclined toward the expansion of spirit.
Not exactly. Rather, I mean a simpler thing: growing up is always painful. It is hard to realize that not all your desires and plans will be fulfilled; that you are not the center of the world; that a human being is fundamentally alone and mortal. And other unpleasant discoveries of this kind, which lead one away from an infantile, that is, animal and vital, mode of existence.