This is a beautiful example and metaphor, but I would risk suggesting that the idea of philosophy as thinking from death, or thinking from recollection, is inexhaustible, and this is only one way of explaining it. Perhaps this is one of those questions whose answer one can only approach, but never reach. Like the question of Being.
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This reminds me of the work of Norman O. Brown, in particular his book Loves Body, which is something like Freud meets Marx meets Christian mysticism, but with a strong emphasis on the carnal ( the living-dying ) and the eternal ( or undeath-unlife ). Arguably directly related to being versus becoming. I’m moved by that last sentence in particular. Yes indeed. A God-defying act. What/who exactly is “God” here ? The nature of things ? The “old text” that stands in the way of the new ? Very rich phrase. George Steiner speaks ( quoting someone ) of “the harsh desire to endure.” Of course Bloom thinks strong poets resent death more than just about everyone. I don’t claim to fully understand your exact take on this, but it’s a very deep issue, which I find quite fascinating.
Yes indeed ! One of my “core” “beliefs” or “feelings” about the world is its “infinity” in the sense of having a terrifying-wonderful surplus of faces to show us. Hence my emphasis of the future as a pregnant darkness that in some sense is “more real” than the present. Or we might say that the darkness of the future “lights up” the present with promise and fringe. The present is always also partially absent. To be shown one face of the world is to not be shown all the others. The world does not fit in any single moment. It’s like trying to squeeze a dragon into a mason jar. A risky instantaneous poem that I will ambivalently let stand.
OK, I hear you. Yes, I can relate to that. Basically the “acceptance” of the dark truths of life in general. Freud is great on this stuff. We have to get over our “infantile longing.”
This definitely echoes Schopenhauer. I can at least report, that while I know many artists who are women, I haven’t personally met a woman — in real life — with a similarly intense passion for the “abrasive conceptuality” of philosophy. Anecdotal, controversial even, but merely a report.
I do not mean any particularly deep metaphysics here. I am speaking rather about the fact that philosophical passion is often driven by a self-confident audacity bordering on madness, as if a single individual could rewrite the very foundations of the world.
The struggle against God, or against the gods, is more of an external perspective on this. For example, we remember the legal justification for the execution of Socrates.
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I would like to clarify that, of course, I do not consider women less talented or less capable of thought. That is not what I mean.
I am speaking only about the possibility that the relation to death, or to non-being, may take a different form in women. Not necessarily a weaker or less philosophical form, but perhaps a different existential configuration.
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Ah, OK. Yes, that makes sense. We see versions of that in Nietzsche (the wild stuff he wrote about himself in some moods) and the not-so-fun intervention of Heidegger into politics.
Just for context for our continuing conversation, I came to see a certain kind of philosophy, which you might “psycho-analytic” as necessarily marginal. This is my integration of pessimism and what you might call my own glimpse of “Moloch.” Some would accuse me of fatalism when it comes to The Wicked Way of The World.
So for me Harold Bloom is a crucial thinker, because he obsesses over the anxiety of poetic influence. Joyce discusses the impossible desire to be one’s own father, which is to be radically original, basically self-created like God. This might be understood as the limit point of a directional drive. So for me it’s natural to read “philosophical passion” as “contiminated” or “fertilized” by a partial component of self assertion. Sartre writes some great passages on this stuff. How does knowledge exist for us ? If I “create” a new powerful thought, it is “mine” and yet beyond me and not mine to the degree that it has a solid independent existence. The insect is and is not the egg it lays. Sartre writes “All children are the mirror of death.” Feuerbach writes that death is the final act of communication. When we say what we “must” say, our death is the punctuation mark. We live by racing ecstatically toward this death — which is also rebirth, eternal life ?
Above I stress “partial” component because I tend to think that a universal component must be ascendent for the work to function as philosophy in the high sense. So there’s a tension between the idiosyncratic, what I inject into the tradition, and hard archetypal core. This is one way I might explain the curious affinities-through-opposition of Plato, Nietzsche, Heidegger, and others. We are still obsessed – “rightly” — with time and being and identity and difference and eros and death and truth and poetry itself as the agent of novelty.
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When we write about other philosophers, we are often writing more about ourselves and our own experience, projecting it onto others.
I think Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle did not think of themselves as great fathers of civilization. They were simply human beings, with their own bodies, desires, passions, and everyday problems. I also do not think that everyone around them saw them as great figures. I suspect that they too were tormented by doubts: whether what they were doing was truly important, even if in public they were fighters and bravely defended their ideas.
I also have Deleuze’s ontology of desiring-machines somewhere in the background here. In this metaphor, philosophy is always a rupture in the scheme. If the desiring-machine is a metaphor for life, then rupture — the exit from the scheme — is a kind of death.
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More than plausible. Especially the part of them not being viewed then as anything special. O the mystique of fame. I see it as a moment of growth to overcome an idolatry toward the famous. Emerson ( himself easily idolized, against his own warning) is a great poet of this liberation in the essay “Self Reliance.”
Socrates is a mystery. His story suggests that he was internally compelled, almost the prisoner of his urge. And yet surely this torment was sometimes ecstasy.
I think Plato was more balanced, Plato the scribe. There is patience in writing, a tiger in the weeds. You don’t accost people on the street. You lay down symbols. You have to seduce your reader.
Writing, in the long run, allows for a highly complex, almost infinitely suggestive “unstatement.” Finnegans Wake for instance. It “might be” visionary prophecy. It “might be” a dirty joke. Both, neither, a belch of magma from the chora. It is an image of the world itself perhaps, indicating the world’s hyper-saturated ambiguity, a honey-gore gallery of too many faces to hope to see. But we hope perhaps to see enough to guess the essence.
I like that. I haven’t studied Deleuze seriously yet, though I have read much of Difference and Repetition. I like pieces of it quite a bit.
Gotta turn in over here, but I very much appreciate the conversation !
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True philosophical thinking is always a wager. It requires an actual belief that the philosopher’s way of thinking can become a universal order.
And this is already a kind of madness, a rupture with everyday life. It demands a certain ruthlessness toward oneself — mentally, existentially, and even materially — since philosophy rarely brings material success.
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I tend to agree in that the sign is “modified” with a significance for the philosopher that can be the radiance of that sign for others. The philosopher feels that it should be the radiance of that sign for others. At least the right others.
Nietzsche thought that conquerors were artists, imposing their own cultural forms on the subjugated. I can only agree, which is not to say that I approve of this or that subjugation. Life itself is an aesthetic-ethical “imposition” on the world. The philosopher is typically understood to impose this force through the invention of chains of signs that affect the radiance of signs for others. By “radiance” I mean what others call “meaning,” but I’m trying to emphasize that the radiance of signs happens to us. For instance, red and blue lights flashing in my rearview scares me a little. Are the cops pulling me over ? That sign is not “experienced” as “safely just in my head as a little chunk of icon stuff.”
After reading Wilde’s The Portrait of Dorian Gray, I imagined a story where some demon haunts a man. The demon cannot mess with the man’s physical reality. The demon only talks to the man. The demon imposes signs on the man. The demon destroys the man with signs. Perhaps these signs are just the signs that make the man doubt his value or worth. Perhaps the demon arouses the suspicions of the man. Iago is more embodied version of this “demon.”
I agree. I have myself, for the useless love of philosophy, ignored more profitable ways of being. Or I just procrastinate on what pays the bills to follow the moment of inspiration. But this is only to mention a relatively post-traumatic stretch of life that comes after more dangerous intensities are resolved. At least in my own case. For me there was a definite crystallization of my comportment to the world. Since then, I just modify my approach as an “artist.” I, the artist, am relatively stable, while the art continues to transform.
Attributed to Plato
For this reason anyone who is seriously studying high matters will be the last to write about them and thus expose his thought to the envy and criticism of men. What I have said comes, in short, to this: whenever we see a book, whether the laws of a legislator or a composition [συγγρα´μματα] on any other subject, we can be sure that if the author is really serious, this book does not contain his best thoughts; they are stored away with the fairest of his possessions. And if he has committed these serious thoughts to writing, it is because men, not gods, have taken his wits away. To anyone who has followed this discourse and digression it will be clear that if Dionysius or anyone else—whether more or less able than he—has written concerning the first and highest principles of nature, he has not properly heard or understood anything of what he has written about; otherwise he would have respected these principles as I do, and would not have dared to give them this discordant and unseemly publicity. Nor can he have written them down for the sake of remembrance [υ‛πομνημα´των]; for there is no danger of their being forgotten if the soul has once grasped them, since they are contained in the briefest of formulas. (trans. Glenn Morrow)
Interesting. Avoiding envy and criticism. Like pearls before swine ? This goes against the dominant attitude today, right ?
But also the unwritten doctrine is very simple. No need to write it down. If you get it, you got it.
Harman’s version of Hegel is also very simple.
From Gerson’s book:
With the above context, we may return to the implications of the description of how the Demiurge brings intelligibility to the precosmic chaos. The principal direct implication is that the intelligibility that our present cosmos possesses is entirely owing to the ‘shapes and numbers’ that the Demiurge has imposed. Therefore, the reality of the present sensible world includes more than what is intelligible to us. This begins at the elemental level of earth, air, fire, and water, and continues for all things constructed out of these elements. The nonintelligible aspect of reality includes the receptacle (υποδοχη´) and sensible qualities. The former, which is described as having the characteristics of both extension and unqualified matter, is only cognizable by a sort of bastard reasoning (λογισμω˛˜ νοθω ´ ˛ ).90 The latter are (in part) the basis for the beliefs that we have of the sensible world.91 The reason we are able to have such cognition as belief at all about sensibles is that these are images of the intelligibles imposed by the Demiurge; only these intelligibles are the objects of intellection (νοησις ´ ). Presumably, it is possible to have beliefs about sensibles as such, for example, that fire is hot or that water is wet. But if by ‘hot’ or ‘wet’ we mean to refer to the phenomenological aspect of the experience of fire or water, we are not referring to anything that is, strictly speaking, intelligible.
From Copleston:
Aristotle distinctly says that, for Plato, “the Forms are the cause of the essence of all other things, and the One is the cause of the essence of the Forms.” Now, in the Republic, Plato speaks of the ascent of the mind to the first principle of the whole, and asserts that the Idea of the Good is inferred to be “the universal author of all things beautiful and right, parent of light and of the lord of light in this world and the source of truth and reason in the other.” Hence it would seem only reasonable to conclude that the One, the Good and the essential Beauty are the same for Plato, and that the intelligible world of Forms owes its being in some way to the One. The word “emanation” (so dear to the Neo‑Platonists) is nowhere used, and it is difficult to form any precise notion how Plato derived the Forms from the One; but it is clear enough that the One is the unifying Principle. Moreover, the One itself, though immanent in the Forms, is also transcendent, in that it cannot be simply equated with the single Forms. Plato tells us that “the good is not essence, but far exceeds essence in dignity and power,” while on the other hand it is “not only the source of intelligibility in all objects of knowledge, but also of their being and essence,” so that he who turns his eye towards the Good, turns it towards "that place where is the full perfection of being. The implication is that the Idea of the Good may rightly be said to transcend being, since it is above all visible and intelligible objects, while on the other hand, as the Supremely Real, the true Absolute, it is the Principle of being and essence in all things.
Proposed reading:
“The one” is “the good” as the principle of the articulation of the world. This “one” is the “form of forms” or an “ur-form” in the sense that it points to forms as unities. What all forms have in common is their unifying or characterizing function.
“The one” is “supremely real” as the principle of every enduring identifiable entity. It is also “the good” as this articulation of the world into enduring entities allows for knowledge.
A form or idea is type that has no being apart from its tokens. The tokens are only tokens of the type through their unity.
We cannot separate the concept of token from the concept of type. Their relationship is more like “up versus down” or “left versus right.”
The type is present as the recognized or characterized token. The type is also absent as the tokens that are not now given.
We can read this in terms of both “being and nothingness” and “being and time,” which say the same thing differently.
The entity ( which is the type or the form ) is only present as one of its moments (tokens) by not being present as any of its other moments (tokens.)
If the call the tokens “moments,” we emphasize “being and time.” But “being and nothingness” says the same thing. The being — the entity — is more absent than present. The manifestation of one characterized moment is the non-manifestation of all the others.
In this sense, the being or entity “hides behind itself.”
If we switch from the metaphor “moment” to the metaphor “aspect,” then we can say that each aspect of an entity occludes all of the other aspects of that entity. The entity “shows itself” one aspect at a time — one moment at a time.
But how do these moments manage to differ ? They differ in their “quality.” This is easy to see if we consider the aspects of a visual-spatial object. As we walk around the chair, its “purely optical” aspects differ continuously. But each aspect is “characterized” or “taken to be” the chair itself. At least until the phenomenologist thematizes the aspect rather than the chair. To thematize is to grasp as a being, which then has its own moments.
We have then the principle of the unity of the object and the principle of “quality” that allows for its moments to differ.
Nelson Goodman’s “characters” are an excellent illustration of this. A million people will a million pencils can inscribe the letter A in a million ways that differ in terms of their quality. We can ignore for now their position in time and space and consider the subtle differences in drawn shapes, which all “have the character” of “being an inscription of the letter A.”
In mathematical terms, the form is an equivalence class. But we don’t want the container metaphor here. Each “instance” is “characterized” in order to be an instance.
As Whitehead saw, fundamental ontology is difficult because we are trying to point at what is always present. It’s not like an elephant that enters the room and then leaves the room. This “fundamental ontology” applies to all objects. Plato is describing the object-ness of objects.
Fundamental ontology, as fundamental and extremely general, is elusively simple.
The temptation is to complicate the picture and worry about “mind” and “matter.” So “ideas” or “forms” are perhaps “internal concepts.” Or otherworldly objects with “their own substance.” But Plato’s ontology is “prior” to the categories that it tries to understand as such.
The “most basic situation” which is “constantly present” as the possibility of intelligible presence is the articulated qualitative continuum.
This is far from the only way to say it. I take the risk of trying to point at something that others may not find. But if others do also “see” it, it might be fun to experiment with words that “capture it” in terms of being effective pointings.
The Good is there compared to the sun, the light of which makes the objects of nature visible to all and so is, in a sense, the source of their worth and value and beauty. This comparison is, of course, but a comparison, and as such should not be pressed: we are not to suppose that the Good exists as an object among objects, as the sun exists as an object among other objects.
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On the other hand, as Plato clearly asserts that the Good gives being to the objects of knowledge and so is, as it were, the unifying and all‑comprehensive Principle of the essential order, while itself excelling even essential being in dignity and power, it is impossible to conclude that the Good is a mere concept or even that it is a non‑existent end, a teleological principle, as yet unreal, towards which all things are working: it is not only an epistemological principle, but also — in some, as yet, ill‑defined sense — an ontological principle, a principle of being. It is, therefore, real in itself and subsistent.
We might understand it as “the reality of the real” to the degree that the speakable or knowable is understood as the real.
As I read it, this is prior to “mind” and “matter.” For what is pointed at is articulation itself, which is more general and constant than any passing ontological articulation. Fundamental ontology aims at the possibility or essence of ontology. The essence of ontology is being as a unity of what otherwise differs in quality.
The One is thus Plato’s ultimate Principle and the source of the world of Forms, and Plato, as we have seen, thinks that the One transcends human predicates. This implies that the of Neo‑Platonist and Christian philosophers is a legitimate approach to the One, but it should not be immediately concluded that the approach to the One is an “ecstatic” approach, as in Plotinus. In the Republic it is definitely asserted that the approach is dialectical, and that a man attains the vision of the Good by "pure intelligence."
Ontologically speaking, the sensible particular can become the object of judgment and knowledge only in so far as it is really subsumed under one of the Ideas, “partaking” in the specific Form: in so far as it is a class-instance, it is real and can be known. The sensible particular as such, however, considered precisely in its particularity, is indefinable and unknowable, and is not truly “real.” To this conviction Plato clung, and it is obviously an Eleatic legacy. The sense-world is therefore, not wholly illusion, but it contains an element of unreality.
We might read this “element of unreality” as the “ineffable quality” that allows moments of an entity to differ. If we thematize the moment, it is no longer the living moment of the original entity. It has become an entity itself, with its own character.
The important point to notice is that for Plato the sense-particulars as such are the unlimited and the undetermined: they are limited and determined only in so far as they are, as it were, brought within the ἄτομον εἶδος. This means that the sense-particulars in so far as they are not brought within the ἄτομον εἶδος and cannot be brought within it, are not true objects at all: they are not fully real. In pursuing the διαίρεσις as far as the ἄτομον εἶδος Plato was, in his own eyes, comprehending all Reality. This enables him to use the words: "But the form of the infinite must not be brought near to the many until one has observed its full number, the number between the one and the infinite; when this has been learnt, each several individual thing may be forgotten and dismissed into the infinite.
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In other words, the division must be continued until particulars in their intelligible reality are comprehended in the ἄτομον εἶδος: when this has been done, the remainder, i.e. the sense-particulars, may be dismissed into the sphere of what is fleeting and only semi-real, that which cannot truly be said to be.
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In the Timaeus the Demiurge is pictured as conferring geometrical shapes upon the primary qualities within the Receptacle of Space, and so introducing order into disorder, taking as his model in building up the world the intelligible realm of Forms. Plato’s account of “creation” is probably not meant to be an account of creation in time or ex nihilo rather is it an analysis, by which the articulate structure of the material world, the work of a rational cause, is distinguished from the “primeval” chaos, without its being necessarily implied that the chaos was ever actual. The chaos is probably primeval only in the logical, and not in the temporal or historic sense. But if this is so, then the non‑intelligible part of the material world is simply assumed: it exists “alongside of” the intelligible world. The Greeks, it would seem, never really envisaged the possibility of creation out of nothing (ex nihilo sui et subiecti). Just as the logical process of p190 διαίρεσις stops at the ἄτομον εἶδος and Plato in the Philebus dismisses the merely particular εἰς τὸ ἄπειρον, so in the physical analysis of the Timaeus the merely particular, the non‑intelligible element (that which, logically considered, cannot be comprehended under the ἄτομον εἶδος) is dismissed into the sphere of that which is “in discordant and unordered motion,” the factor that the Demiurge “took over”.
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Therefore, just as, from the viewpoint of the Platonic logic, the sense-particulars as such cannot be deduced, cannot be rendered fully intelligible (did not Hegel declare that Herr Krug’s pen could not be deduced?), so, in the Platonic physics, the chaotic element, that into which order is “introduced” by Reason, is not explained: doubtless Plato thought that it was inexplicable. It can night be deduced nor has it been created out of nothing. It is simply there (a fact of experience, and that is all that we can say about it.) The Χωρισμός accordingly remains, for, however “unreal” the chaotic may be, it is not not‑being tout simple: it is a factor in the world, a factor that Plato leaves unexplained.
Later we get:
It is evident that the Platonic Theory of Forms constitutes an enormous advance on pre‑Socratic Philosophy. He broke away from the de facto materialism of the pre‑Socratics, asserting the existence of immaterial and invisible Being, which is not but a shadow of this world but is real in a far deeper sense than the material world is real. While agreeing with Heraclitus, that sensible things are in a state of flux, of becoming, so that they can never really be said to be, he saw that this is but one side of the picture: there is also true Being, a stable and abiding Reality, which can be known, which is indeed the supreme object of knowledge. On the other hand, Plato did not fall into the position of Parmenides, who by equating the universe with a static One, was forced to deny all change and becoming. For Plato the One is transcendent, so that becoming is not denied but is fully admitted in the “created” world. Moreover, Reality itself is not without Mind and life and soul, so that there is spiritual movement in the Real. Again, even the transcendent One is not without the Many, just as the objects of this world are not entirely without unity, for they participate in or imitate the Forms and so partake in order to some extent. They are not fully real but they are not mere Not‑being; they have a share in being, though true Being is not Material. Mind and its effect, order, are present in the world: Mind or Reason permeates, as it were, this world and is not a mere Deus ex machina, like the Nous of Anaxagoras.
This “Mind” can be read as the articulation of the world that makes it speakable. Indeed Sausurre’s sound-images are themselves forms.
I am still thinking “chora” in Timaeus could be knowledge attained from our perception in the world. Knowledge could be thought of receptacle, and space for nursing regeneration of the world and its objects.
The ancient Kabbala is defined as knowledge received by humans from God.
I could not link “chora” with any other than knowledge, although there have been various different suggestions for what it could be by other posters and thinkers.
I could not imagine nursing regeneration as anything physical in nature, and for the same reason receptacle as well. They couldn’t have been something material space or objects from my own reasoning on it.
But it seems to resonate OK to say, the mental space where all is happening i.e. receiving and nursing what we have seen, into other form of ideas, and regenerating into poems, ideas, stories and creativities via language and signs “Partaking Of The Intelligible”.
Nursing could be interpretated our own reasoning, intuiting and understanding what we perceived from the world. All this idea could be a result of the “bastard reasoning”, if so, so be it.
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Could it have something to do with being able to hear the music in our head with no music being played in reality, when we are thinking and imagining about certain music bands, and their familiar songs?
Or being able to hear the voice of the favourite actors or actresses when recalling the movies we have watched many times in the past, because we like them?
But I am not sure if we can hear anything in our head when seeing a beautiful mountain or river with spectacular scenery. Hence sound-image seems to have something to do with recollection of the past experience.
Plato gives no reason to believe that “the good”, and “the one” are in any sense the same, or even equivalent. I don’t think that saying he equated these two presents a good interpretation. The Neo-Platonists, culminating with Plotinus focused on “the One”, but they have very little to show that Plato actually associated “the one” with “the good”. Aristotle on the other hand investigated the division between these two in his “Metaphysics”. He dismissed the importance that “some Platonists” attribute to “the one” and characterizes it as a mathematical form which requires a mathematician’s mind for actual existence. Then Aristotle focused on “the good” which was characterized as self-subsistent.
This is from your quoted Copleston reference, right after the part you quoted. A couple things to note: first, Plato refused to discuss “the One”, second, that it was Plotinus who identified the Good as the One. Then, it is the author’s opinion that this is correct. So from this point onward the author speaks as if the one and the good are the same for Plato, even though he recognizes that Plato refused to write about “the one”.
In the Timaeus, Plato says that "It is hard to find the maker and father of the universe, and having found him, it is it is impossible to speak of him to all."**25** That the position occupied by the Demiurge in the Timaeus suggests that these words apply to him, is true; but we must remember (a) that the Demiurge is probably a symbol for the operation of Reason in the universe, and (b) that Plato explicitly said that there were subjects on which he refused to write,**26** one of these subjects being without doubt his full doctrine of the One. The Demiurge belongs to the "likely account."**27** In his second letter, Plato says that it is a mistake to suppose that any of the predicates we are acquainted with apply to the "king of the universe,"**28** and in his sixth letter he asks his friends to swear an oath of loyalty "in the name of the God who is captain of all things present and to come, and of the Father of that captain and cause."**29** Newsman if the “Captain” is the Demiurge, the “Father” cannot be the Demiurge too, but must be the One; and I think that Plotinus was right in identifying the Father with the One or Good of the Republic.
The issue being that “the one” was a Pythagorean principle. Plato and Aristotle worked together to refute Pythagoreanism. However, Pythagoreanism was a strong cult at the time, and it managed to persist. It persisted through Neo-Platonism who’s followers insisted that Plato actually supported Pythagoreanism with unwritten support etc..
Thank you for your feedback.
I tend to agree with those who identify the good and the one. While I find it plausible to project this back on Plato as his authorial intention, I find it more important to do philosophy here and now —to be a philosopher myself — and to find the strongest interpretation of the text.
Plato becomes interesting through these strong interpretations.
Those with rival interpretations should share them. What do you make of the good and the one ?