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Stephen J. Marotta

A Brief History of the Totality of Western Thought

Part 3: Thales to Aristotle

Outline again; what we have covered links to previous classes; what we will cover today is in bold.

  • Why study history of philosophy, what is history of philosophy

  • Drama before Thought and the mythopoetic

  • Part 3: The (pre-)Socratic revolution (dialectic search for the arche)--THE CRISIS EMERGES with the new types who want to have it all out in a go!

    • Thales

    • Anaximander

    • Anaximenes

    • Pythagoras

    • Xenophanes

    • Heraclitus

    • Parmenides

    • Zeno

    • Anaxagoras

    • Empedocles

    • Atomists like Leucippus and Democritus

    • Sophists like Protagoras and Gorgias

    • Socrates

    • Plato

    • Aristotle

  • Part 4: The Catholic Roman Expansion (The not-so-Dark Ages)--Still all footnotes to Plato, on the philosophical side-- but a strange preservation of the mythopoetic.

  • ​Part 5: The Cartesian Revolution -- Problem is Rationalism v. Empiricism (whence comes all our knowledge?)

  • ​Part 6: The Kantian Revolution -- Dissolving the "rationalism v. empiricism" old problem, now interpret this one as objective or subjective phenomena

  • ​Part 7: Nietzsche as judge throughout (rewind time) -- Dissolving pessimism v. optimism of nihilism... Resurrection of the mythopoetic or total reduction to materialism?​

Part 3

A Brief History of the Totality of Western Thought

Part 3 of 8: Thales through Aristotle

Now, with Homer, we have left taken the first half-step into conscious construction of the stories which shaped our civilizations for tens of thousands of years... the author started to consider not just what the muses impressed upon him as the images to depict, but thoughtful consideration about the effects of the stories and the design of the stories.

 

With that emerged a new set of thinkers. The philosophers. These arrogant fellows thought that they could JUST have dialogue about what was right and true and get to the profound realities of life without having to wait 1000 years to see if their story remained in tact and the societies built around it were thriving.

 

This is the first revolution of which we spoke in the beginning.

  • The world was ticking along just fine, except not so much

  • Socrates starts a new game

  • Descartes revolutionizes that game

  • Kant dissolves the emergent problems handed us by Cartesians and gives us a new dimension to the game

  • Nietzsche goes back to Socrates and stands him on his head. We are left trying to synthesize the entirety of Western Philosophy with the massive underpinnings from which it emerged.

 

It wasn't just Socrates, obviously, but he was a major figure head who can easily be thought of as the "mythological hero" of the invention of this new game. The reason I wrote (pre-) in parentheses before "Socratic" was that we are going to consider the work of this revolution, the birth of philosophy as the work of Socrates and the ones who came just before him who helped start this new game.

A Brief History of the Totality of Western Thought

Part 3 of 8: Thales through Aristotle

Historical Context

 

Modern day Turkey. Asia minor. Ionia refers to the coast of Asia minor (Turkey). Most of our Greek period this area was under Greek control, they were Greek city-states; but most of the time they were under Persian rule.

 

Peloponnesus (the peninsula under Greece.)

 

Aegean sea between Asia Minor and Greece.

 

The Hellespont. Leads into the propontis which leads into the black sea.

 

Sicily, the Northeastern part controlled by Greece; Carthage controlled the other parts.

 

Italy was seriously settled by Greeks, and so was the coast of Spain.

 

Major heroes from the Iliad come from areas.

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They seek AretE through TimE.

 

(Seems to still apply, that others’ judgements of one determine level of honor, even in academia.)

 

There’s a lack of consistency in the explanations for things.

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There’s this seeking of honor through spoils. There‘s a fickleness of the way they viewed the world. It’s character, that’s what it is.

 

Then, we look forward to Thales, to see how these problems FIRST receive a rigorous assessment of these issues. They are going to give us a consistent worldview.

 

This Homeric world was the world in which the Greeks lived.

 

Alcibiades's worldview is Homeric as well.

A Brief History of the Totality of Western Thought

Part 3 of 8: Thales through Aristotle

Why the Greeks?

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Many theories have been developed.

 

Why did the Greeks invent philosophy (possible answers, partial answers, competing theories, pieces to a puzzle?):

  • They were in the middle of the world interacting with many AND they have a mountainous country where they were pushed to the sea to trade.

  • The Greeks perpetuated this idea: that they visited Egypt or China or whatever.

  • The Orient had no system of thought to give. There was no rigorous system of rules for debate from the Orient to steal in the first place.

  • The Greeks had a sophisticated monetary system and far-reaching trade and exploration with precise navigational systems.

  • The Greeks did receive astonishing astronomical technology from Babylonia and also extraordinarily precise geometrical techniques. (The Egyptians needed really good geometry because every year the Nile floods and you have to go back and figure out whose land was whose.)

  • The Greeks were also very open-minded. And they had extremely pluralistic religious practices.

    • Perhaps our ancestors before the Greeks were WRONG to take so seriously their mythological stories and codified ethics; if they had just been a bit more open, instead of executing blasphemers, who knows what riches they could have accomplished before the Greeks got it started.

    • Or, alternative perspective: Maybe all this argument and confusion is the result of the very destruction of the great civilization which previously existed and a sign of the inevitable destruction (judgements from the gods) of having been so open about accepting what people believe

    • OR: is it both at the same time, is there a NEW kind of strength emergent through this destruction, but few civilizations find it because it is too terrifying for most to allow the initial destructive work to begin?

  • The Greeks had LOTS of leisure time.

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Early development of this new game, as it starts to take shape, shows that it looks very different from all that came before it:

What did the pre-Socratics achieve that no one before them ever achieved:

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  • They invented the very notions of science and philosophy.

  • They were the first to see the world as ordered and intelligible in itself without recourse to divine will or supernatural happenings.

  • They were naturalists; and they were materialists. They sought purely material explanations, no gods and no chaos (no: ‘shit just happening’).

  • They sought explanations that were: 1) internal, no gods doing things, something in the thing itself defines why x will happen; 2) systematic, rules for governing the thinking you will do; 3) economical, explanations that could explain as much as possible with as few principles as possible (as many diverse phenomena with as few principles as they could; take an explanation and see to how many things this principle can be applied).

Unsurprisingly, the Greeks invented most of our basic scientific concepts and notions.

​

  • Cosmos: a Greek word.

    • Cosmos originally means: “TO ORDER” or “TO ARRANGE” so this is implying a BEAUTIFUL ORDERING as well…. So we get COSMETICS from this; you are beautifully ordering your face with that. Interesting.

  • We get physics (Physis)

    • (which is the Greek word for “nature”) as well. It comes from the verb “to grow”.

  • TechnE: the arts, the techniques. (in contrast to the Physis, what is artificial). Phusis can be used to refer to everything, the whole of nature; BUT it can also be used to talk about a THING’s NATURE or a thing’s ESSENCE.

  • ArchE: is Greek for beginnings, origins:

    • But it comes to mean: “first principle, or rule” it comes to mean “law” or rule or principle.

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Hiking Trail

An inquiry into the Physis leads to a search for the arche, which will give you how it has a beautiful structure. Does the cosmos have a beginning? That is a question asking for the ArchE. What is the quintessence (The 5th essence that is the true nature of fire water earth and air?--the ONE THING) that all things really are? This is asking about the ArchE.

 

Logos: word, thought design study, conversation, logic. This comes from a Greek verb, ‘Legein’ which means “to say”. This is a pattern in English, which is common in Greek. A lot of our nouns derive from verbs.

 

Now would be a good time to stop and talk about how words mean something different when we travel into this realm from our previous one.

A Brief History of the Totality of Western Thought

Part 3 of 8: Thales through Aristotle

Logos, Truth, Knowledge... these all mean different things to the philosopher than they do to the artist which came before and made possible the existence of philosophy.

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This comes to mean: “to say” means “to give an account” which comes to mean “to give a reason” and what is “logic” it is the pattern of argumentation, it gives us the rules for distinguishing between good reasons and bad reasons, which comes to be about THE REASON reason itself. But a logo is a pattern, and the logos gives me a pattern as well.

​

These are the words invented by the Greeks to understand the natural world. The Greeks recognized: ARGUMENTATION as the way of processing the EXTRACTED (from art) or discovered or soon-to-be-invented PROPOSITIONAL statements.

This is a major difference between the Greeks and the others which came before them; the Chinese, the Hindus, and Egyptians or others: They have complicated systems of morality, but they don’t argue for why you should accept them, they are handed over to you.

 

They are not necessarily the givers of GOOD reasons, but they are distinguished by the fact that that is what they are doing, they are giving reasons for things.

 

This does not mean that they also invented logic, these pre-Socratics; it isn’t until Aristotle invents logic that we get a theory of principles of thought.

The general concerns of the pre-Socratic thought:

  • The problem of persistence through change.

    • Whenever something changes, something remains

    • My coffee changes from hot to cold, what changes? My coffee changes.

      • Whenever things change something doesn’t just go out of existence and something new pop into existence

    • What is it that remains when things change

    • The greeks understood change from opposite to opposite

      • The hot becomes cold, the wet becomes dry; the dry becomes wet.

    • Ultimately, they have four opposites, four basic elements: earth air fire and water with four basic properties wet hot dry and cold which are basic combinations of two of those basic elements. And the things always change from their opposites.

      • Air + water = wet; water plus earth equals cold; fire and earth is dry; and air and fire is hot.

    • So they want to come up with an account of what explains change, what changes and what remains the same

    • Answering this question gives us an idea of what the ArchE is; because if there is one thing that never changes, that would be the Arche.

      • There are lots of chairs in here, what is it that they all have in common that makes them count as chairs; what is the one over the many?

      • Answering that question would give us thee ArchE, the thing that persists through the changes.

    • What is the LAW or the principle by which things can change, that would give us the ultimate law.

    • What is the essence or the archetype of things; what is it that makes a thing be the sort of thing it is… these are ALL different senses of the ArchE.

 

Now that we have done MORE THAN ENOUGH to defend the artistic and the poetic and the mythological (because in today's day these things are much slandered, in my opinion, and wrongly so).

 

Let us leave that world behind and get into the newly invented game of the philosophers. A game which DOES NOT TAKE thousands of years to settle questions, but which is more dangerous and powerful. the ideas CAN be dealt with by individual minds; but they aren't grounded in as much as the mythological ideas are. BUT they are things we can deal with ALL AT ONCE instead of waiting around to see how the story works out.

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The Pre-Socratics

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The first three: Thales, Anaximander, and Anaximenes: Aristotle gives these guys a fair amount of philosophical credit, so we will give them a good bit of that.

​

* Thales

 

The Greeks had a list of 7 sages in the ancient world; all these lists disagree with one another, but Thales is the only one on ALL the lists. (this may largely have been due to his ability to accurately have predicted an eclipse.)

 

We have no surviving texts from Thales; so it’s all speculative; and our main source is Aristotle himself.

 

He lived in Miletus; and the claim is that he was the first to suggest that there is a universal explanation for the cosmos that we could come to know, that human beings could come to understand. The religious might hold that there is such an explanation, but he thought we could come to know it propositionally, instead of experientially.

 

He held that:

  • Nothing is random, there is a source

  • That the source is ONE, unitary

  • And that we could come to comprehend this source.

 

I want to focus on three doctrines that we can reasonably ascribe to Thales.

Motion derives from “souls” ("psuche")

“From what has been related about him, it seems that Thales, too, supposed that the soul was something that produces motion, if indeed he said that the magnet has soul, because it moves iron.” -- quote Aristotle, will find link reference soon.

P: If anything has the power of movement, then it has a psuche

P: Magnets and amber have the power of movement

C: Magnets and amber have a psuche

Psyche = Psuche

Originally it was the last breath that leaves the dying

It is the presence of the living principle

For the Latin it’s the animae, the ability to move.

 

Notice that these are arguments... they are not stories about the great magnet that is the first mover of impartation into dirt-shaped into man to give it "soul"... these are arguments. Only things which are like us, with agency, have the ability to initiate motion. It is the soul which makes us unique. Magnets must have souls because they too can induce movement.

 

He is taking his proposition and applying it consistently to other things he observes and making a coherent and non-contradictory set of propositions which he believes are TRUE of the world.

 

He submits these ideas tot he considerations of others and debates them in the forum which is the location for analyzing and shaping these ideas.

 

Aristotle disagreed with Thales on this first of his three points we will discover here.

  • Aristotle says: MOTION requires an underlying cause of willing

  • Aristotle said it can’t have a soul because it doesn’t have sensory capacity

 

But Thales could argue that it DOES have a rudimentary form of sensory perception

  • The thermostat CAN TELL the temperature of the room; the magnet senses the presence of Iron

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We can start with something which appears to be batshit crazy, and find out that it might actually BE RIGHT!

The main thought is this: It requires us to engage with this material philosophically!--With argument and rules of thinking and searches for evidence.

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His second idea we will mention is: Everything has a soul

 

The third one we will look at more closely:

The Arche is water

The origin and organizing principle is WATER

The arche has to be that from which everything else comes; so it can’t be a compound.

If it’s a compound it can’t be a first principle.

Thales is going to have a problem here.

We know things by their opposites.

 

Aristotle speculates about “why water, Thales” is that it nourishes and is essential to life. But, how do you get fire from water? Water is also what sperm is like, so life has a watery origin. WATER can exist in all three states! So, you can get air and you can get earth from water!

 

So, here’s a paradox: on the one hand, the earth is evidently in mid-air, and also evidently stable.

All unsupported things fall

If the earth is unsupported, then it must fall

Earth is stable (it isn’t falling)

Therefore: the Earth is supported

 

I am extending my principles to universal and different things.

 

There are no gods here, we are using the SAME naturalistic rules for describing everything.

 

Perhaps you may think that this is not that good a start for philosophy; but the new WAYS of thinking are pretty dramatically different from what came before, they are emerging gradually, but fairly rapidly. AND, do not think it is so easy to dismiss with Thales's ideas as you might wish. Panpsychism is a popular and growing view in the philosophy of mind today.

 

We will come to understand the world-view of Thales better by looking at the development of thought taken up by one of his students. We will also see the development of THINKING and logic rules in his work; as well as a greater abstraction than "all is water" in the thinking of this student:

* Anaximander

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A book is attributed to him: “Peri Phusis” “On Nature”

 

These guys were all polymaths; this one was said to have drawn the first map of the known world (the first cartographer).

 

The first known appeal to a principle which has played an enormously important role in western thought: The PSR. Principle of Sufficient Reason. So we can see from the start that rules of thinking and how to think are being developed by the philosophers from the start.

 

PSR: For everything that happens, there is always a reason that is sufficient to account for it.

 

This might not have been in the primitive man’s mind a principle which would have been accepted; BUT for us it is so ingrained in us it’s difficult to overemphasize how much.

 

Some, like Anaximander declare that the earth stays at rest because of equality, for it is no more fitting … the idea is that it is in equilibrium.

  1. Earth is at center of Kosmos

  2. For all (each, any) spoke (A) there is a qualitatively identical spoke (B).

  3. Any reason to fall along (A) is a reason to fall along (B)

  4. No sufficient reason to explain earth’s falling along (A) rather than (B)

  5. PSR

  6. Therefore: Earth remains stable; i.e., it doesn’t fall

 

He is applying an abstract principle to explain a natural phenomenon. He never formulates the PSR, but he is clearly appealing to it.

 

Thales has an abstract principle: Water explains everything; but THIS is another layer of abstraction beyond that.

 

How do you get fire out of water? Anaximander may have asked this question. Also: how do we explain the perpetual generation of new things?

 

Thales isn’t distinguishing the question: Is this table water? From Is what that from which this table generates.

 

Anaximander says: “The Arche is the Apeiron which means the UNLIMITED or UNBOUNDED. Peiron is the stone you use to mark the boundary of your property; so A-peiron is that which has no limit.” Don’t think of it as “infinite” because we bring in too many modern notions when we do that.

  • He COULD believe that the Arche is SPATIALLY unbounded

  • He COULD mean that it is TEMPORALLY unbounded

  • And he COULD mean that it is qualitatively unbounded

 

Which was it?

 

The Arche has to be spatially unbounded or else we are going to run out of generative stuff.

 

This is assuming there is no beginning in time or end in time. Also: couldn’t we just recycle stuff over time? Things aren’t just coming to be, they are also always falling apart why not make the new stuff out of the old.

 

To have a beginning it has to have a cause; but this is the thing which is the cause of everything else. Whatever is the Arche is by definition the thing which has no beginning.

 

Qualitatively unbounded means that it CAN’T HAVE any of the basic properties (hot wet dry or cold) some scholars have suggested he meant the quintessence.

 

The Arche is the thing these early philosophers were after. unlike the dramatists and mythologists who came before them, they did not want a plurality of answers to their questions but a ONENESS is what they sought.

 

The Arche: the indefinite is the first principle of that thing. Cannot be water nor any of the other things which are called elements.

  • We need a constant source of stuff since things are always coming into being, so we need something spatially indefinite.

  • It can’t have a beginning in time because then it wouldn’t be the beginning. So it has to be temporally indefinite.

  • And now we get back to talking about the qualitatively indeterminate: NOT one of the other elements.

  • Qualitatively indeterminate means HAS NO PROPERTIES (if that’s how we want to understand him)

    • It’s not clear that that is intelligible. If lacking any properties, then it is nothing.

    • Maybe we should understand it this way: it’s a mixture of the elements. I think this is wrong, however. When we get to the philosopher’s god of medieval period we will see that simple is a divine quality; and reasonably applicable to the “whole of the universe”

  • The things that are perish into the things out of which they come to be, according to necessity, for they pay penalty and retribution to each other for their injustice in accordance with the ordering of time..

 

Now let us look at the younger of the two students of Thales:

* Anaximenes

 

Often taken to be a regressive thinker. He “falls back” from the heights of Anaximander’s contributions.

 

There may be a better way to understand it all.

 

Anaximenes says that the arche is air.

 

But: he gives us a process. And he says that it is UNLIMITED or INDEFINITE air. It has the QUALITY of air, but it is indefinite spatially and temporally; but NOT indefinite qualitatively.

 

The qualitative indeterminacy gives a big problem for Anaximander. He suggests that the earth rests on a surface of air. Note he is using air to explain as much as possible.

 

He has this idea that there are PROCESSES of rarefication and condensation.

 

We have this process, not a metaphorical one like with Anaximander and his poetical language; we have a materialistic process.

 

Here are the points from these three:

  • They are MATERIALISTS

    • They are seeking to explain the natural world in purely materialistic terms

    • This isn’t god or chance or randomness driving things, even if it’s poetical

    • If there’s one thing that describes science, it’s that you have to have NATURALISTIC explanations for things. And these guys are in agreement with that.

  • They try to SYSTEMATICALLY apply their theories as BROADLY as possible from the least or fewest principles or elements.

  • They are doing this all through ARGUMENT

    • So they are ALSO the inventors of PHILOSOPHY as well.

 

Now we move on to a bit more fragmentation than before... a new camp emerges to make war on this first group and all their talk with new talk of their own. Here come the iconoclasts, baby!

* Pythagoras

 

Fled to Italy from his Greek home; set up his own colony there. Flourishing and spreading through the area; his cultural founding. His identity is obscured in myth and legend.

 

His DISCIPLES for hundreds of years wrote a lot! And EVERYTHING a Pythagorean wrote was ascribed to Pythagoras.

 

He founded a CULT, a religious society; which lasted hundreds of years. Obscure rules and initiation rights, fairly rigorously enforced vows of silence. (so we don’t know much about the rules and initiation rights.)

 

One philosophical view we get from Pythagoras which we can reliably ascribe to Pythagoras himself and which was enormously influential particularly on Plato. Metempsychosis = reincarnation.

 

He has a personal identity here; sameness of person is to be identified with continuity of consciousness. In the eastern tradition, which is older than pythagoras, there’s little in the way of ARGUMENT for that belief, it is largely just accepted as dogma. So, the interesting question is to see if his view is merely religious dogma, or if it has a rational philosophical grounding, and if it has any interesting philosophical implications.

 

It implies personal survival, and I am to be identified with MY SOUL.

 

He recognizes a friend’s voice in the cry of a dog. There is continuity of consciousness in his view. He REMEMBERED being a succession of people going all the way back to Troy (700 years earlier) and EXPERIENTIAL memory, memory of what these people actually experienced. I remember going to the fair, but I don’t remember experientially what happened to me when I was there 40 years ago. BUT I don’t remember the experience.

 

Pythagoras remembers being KILLED by Menelaus at Troy at noon on April 1st 1084 b.c. Euphorbus was killed by Menelaus at Troy at noon on April 1st 1084 b.c. Pythagoras is identical to Euphorbus.

 

“Pythagoras believed in metempsychosis and thought that eating meat was an abominable thing, saying that the souls of all animals enter different animals after death. He himself used to say that he remembered being in Trojan times, Euphorbus, Pantus; son who was killed by Menelaus. They say that once … he knew about the inscription on the inside of the shield and they took it down and there it was…”

 

We saw that the earlier first philosophers were looking for the ONE THING which was what the universe and all was... First proposition was it was all: WATER... then came an abstraction, that all was THE UNLIMITED... then a regression into an argument that the ONE which was all was AIR.

 

Pythagoras is going to hit us with another abstraction:

 

He claims that the Arche is NUMBER, that everything is NUMBER, that the universe is ruled by and ordered by NUMBER.

 

He discovered the relationship of musical chord structure of octave to ratios.

 

There are some beliefs of the Pythagorean cult which we do know; and I will tell you a story from memory now, and hope that it is not too faulty:

 

The Pythagoreans had the "God of 1" and the "God of 2" and so on. Masculine, feminine, conjugation to give birth to knew numbers... ALL of these gods were INTEGERS.

 

A fundamental belief of their religion was that ALL ASPECTS OF THE UNIVERSE can be understood as FRACTIONS of these integers... they held the belief that The Universe was RATIONAL (describable as ratios of integers which are things we can get our heads around, this is the origination of the meaning we have today of "rational".)

 

But, famously, Pythagoras was also the mathematician who gave us the formula which says that the area made up of a square with side lengths equal to the two shortest sides of a right triangle will equal the area made up of a square of the hypotenuse of that triangle. Famously: a squared plus b squared equals c squared. if a and b are the lengths of the legs of a right triangle, a triangle with a 90 degree angle between a and b, and c is the length of the hypotenuse, the side opposite the 90 degree angle.

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The problem is obvious yet?

One day, Pythagoras was on a ship with some of his disciples. and a sailor on the ship with a piece of chalk in his hand came up to him and asked the following question:

  • Sailor: Pythagoras, Mr. Smarty-pants: tell me the length of the line I will draw in relation to the other two lines I define before.

  • Pythagoras: Sure. Easy.

  • Sailor: Well, you see these square tiles on the ship's floor. Let us define the side of one of these tiles as 1. So the square is a unit square. We could measure all other things in terms of this singular length. A tower might be 1,000 ship tile sides tall. a flee might be 1/20th of a ship's tile, etc.

  • Pythagoras: I'm with you so far. No problem.

  • Sailor: Good! then if this side is 1, and this side is 1, what is the length of this diagonal that I draw now across the square?

  • Pythagoras: That is easy. I am Pythagoras. 1 squared is 1, and 1 squared is 1, so the square we could make out of the hypotenuse of this newly drawn triangle must have an area of 2, which is the sum of the other two squares.

  • Sailor: So, the physical length of the physical line which is drawn in front of you now is...?

  • Pythagoras: The square root of 2, obviously. It is the number that when multiplied by itself gives us a square of area 2, which is the sum of the areas of the squares made by the shorter sides... all this is in my book of mathematics, if you want to go through the initiation processes of joining our group, you know.

  • Sailor: BUT, Pythagoras, the square root of 2 is an IRRATIONAL number... it cannot be written as the ratio or fraction of two integers. And yet, you yourself agree that there is a physical thing in the Universe right in front of you and I which exists and which exists in relation to this other thing (the side of the square) in a relationship of the sqrt(2) to 1! but one of your central doctrines is that ALL WHICH IS in the universe is the product of the interactions of the divine integers, so no such thing can exist... yet here it is, you said so yourself!

At this point, the story goes, the Pythagoreans responded by throwing the sailor overboard so that he would die. Dispassionate pursuit of knowledge is a harder thing to obtain than it is to appear to have obtained (and it may not even be desirable, for that matter).

* Xenophanes

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The one god, the God of one; sees all hears all and thinks all.

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All of him sees, all of him hears, all of him thinks, his thinking shakes all the world.

* Heraclitus

 

Wrote that in short pieces of prose. Often purposefully paradoxical; a book was attributed to him, and lots of contemporary scholarship has been about reconstructing that book by putting it in order. His influence on Plato and others is HUGELY important. Plato can be said to be a Heraclitan.

 

Heraclitus was the first to emphasize the distinction between appearance and reality; between belief and knowledge; between the way things are and the way they appear to be.

 

There are three important claims which can be weaved together to form a coherent worldview:

  • The doctrine of the LOGOS

  • View of the Unity of Opposites

  • View that everything is in FLUX

 

Nature loves to hide itself.

 

Some people claim that Xenophanes was the teacher of Heraclitus. That might be where some of his modism comes from. The professor who taught the class in which I took these notes is skeptical of this connection.

 

Let’s look at some passages of Heraclitus:

  • “This LOGOS holds always, but humans prove always incapable of understanding it. All things come into being according to this logos, but human beings fail to notice what they do when awake even as they fail to remember what they do when asleep.

  • Although the logos is common, most people live as if they have their own private understanding.

  • No one recognizes that what is wise is set apart for all.

  • He thinks of the logos as the commonly available ACCOUNTING of the way the universe really is,

  • AND he believes its available through the judicious use of sense experience; meaning, NATURE LOVES TO HIDE so you have to have a systematic way of accounting for the plethora of experiences and judging between them; you need the LANGUAGE in order to comprehend what your senses are really telling you!

  • "all that can be seen heard and experienced, these are what I prefer"

  • Nature loves to hide

    • Put the last two together, and you have the need for a judicial accounting of your appearances of the world through your sense experience using LANGUAGE to rule over it all in order to COME TO the logos, the accounting of what the universe really is.

 

Doing so, reveals, as he says, in 22; listening not to me, but to the account, it is wise to agree that ALL THINGS ARE ONE. things taken together are whole and not whole, out of all things there comes a unity and out of a unity all things.

 

How can that which is at variance with itself is attuned to itself, like a bow and a lyre.

 

What is opposed brings together. Opposites are ONE.

 

What we take to be opposites, are things which are underlined with a UNITY. Think of the Milesians, and their world of opposition.

 

The opposition is an illusion, according to Heraclitus; what we take to be opposition is really unity. The underlying unity is literally the STATE OF BEING OPPOSED.

 

War is the father of all and the king of all.

 

He is the one that says: “one cannot step into the same river twice.”

 

He had a disciple maned Cratylus, by saying he improved upon his teacher by saying that one cannot even step into the same river ONCE.

* Parmenides

​

Everything that exists is necessary, so anything that doesn’t exist can’t exist. But there’s no textual evidence that he actually thought this, but it would rectify his views in a consistent way.

  1. Premise: If X can be thought or referred to then X can exist, it is possible for X to exist.

  2. Premise: If X does not exist then X cannot exist.

  3. Intermediate Conclusion: If X can be thought or referred to, then X (must) exist.

  4. Premise: If X is an object of inquiry, then X can be thought or referred to.

  5. Intermediate Conclusion: Therefore, (by 4) if X does not exist then X is not an object of inquiry (cannot be thought or referred to).

  6. Conclusion: X is that which is (exists).

 

Another argument: contemporary: “We cannot think say know and think nothing, but what is not is nothing; so we cannot think know what is not.”

 

Subarguments: That it is ungenerated and indestructible:

  1. If X is generated or destroyed then X is-not at sometime.

  2. To think that at some time X does not exist is, then a true thought.

  3. By 5 above we cannot refer to that which does not exist.

  4. Therefore, X cannot be generated or destroyed (ie., it is eternal).

  5. That it is one and homogeneous:

  6. In order to distinguish between two things (X and Y) we must be able to point to some property that X has but that Y lacks.

  7. Hence, if there exists more than one thing (X and Y) then X must have some property that Y does not have.

  8. Hence If X has property F, Y must have property not-F (e.g. if being brown is X’s distinguishing property then if X is brown then Y must be not-brown).

  9. But by 5, above, we cannot think or refer to what does not exist; viz, Y’s not-brownness.

  10. Therefore, there can be only one thing.

 

To show that it is homogeneous, take X and Y to be parts of a thing rather than separate things.

3) That it is motionless and changeless:

  1. All change takes the form of being F at time t and not-F at time t’

  2. For X to change, it must be F at t and not-F at t’

  3. But by 5 we cannot think or refer to X’s being not-F

  4. Therefore, X cannot change, is immutable.

 

To show that it is motionless requires noticing that motion is just a subspecies of change in general; viz. Change of place.

 

Therefore, of the three possible routes of inquiry,

  1. That it is

  2. That it is-not

  3. That it is and is not.

 

2 is rejected as inconceivable, and 3 is rejected as being contradictory; which leaves us with 1 as the only possible mode.

 

Using reason alone he has demonstrated the fundamental being of all things.

 

A purely a priori argument. Meaning an argument that requires NO EXPERIENCE in the world, an argument that you could agree to even if you were just a brain in a vat and there was no world to which you had ever any of the slightest interaction.

 

And we know all of what is, that it is, that it can never not be, and that it can never change.

 

So, what are we to say about this world? It is all illusion, deception. The apparent change is just that, apparent.

 

Parmenides. He messes this all up. This means that what the Milesians were trying to do is undoable. They were trying to explain the nature of the world of their experiences like natural physicists.

 

Milesians and Heraclitus were trying to account for change in the world and for a changing world. Parmenides denies the possibility of discovering any change at all. He’s drawing the limits of reason, of rationality, of what can be known. They turn out to be extraordinarily narrow.

 

Part II of Parmenides poem, which we only have very small parts of, goes on and talks about the opinions of the mortals.

 

The sophists take him seriously enough and examine only culture and deny truth.

 

Eleatic pluralists reject SOME of what he says but while adopting the most fundamental principles. These are the atomists, Leucippus and others. These accept change but deny the coming into existence or going out of existence just like Parmenides does. Sophists lead us into Socrates.

* Zeno

 

The most FUN of Parmenides's students. He simply took him seriously and adopted what he said as true, and argued it in the forum. One of the first and best TROLLS in the history of humanity.

 

Want to expose others as hypocrites through serious engagement, or pretended serious engagement with them? This is the roll of the troll, and Zeno was one of the best.

 

There is no such thing as change. Tortoise and hare race (Achilles).

 

Infinite divisibility was utilized in each of these examples of his.

 

These are enormously clever, difficult to know what has gone wrong.

 

The conclusion: Motion is an illusion.

 

The archer shows an infinite divisibility of time, not space. You have to cross the halfway point to reach your target, and that takes some time. And to move on from there it has to cross the halfway point again, and that takes time again… We can then show that the arrow will never actually leave the bow.

 

We know that Achilles catches targets. But Zeno says, that is not really knowledge at all, it is illusion.

 

One response: Turn your back on cosmology altogether; OR you could deny one of Zeno’s premises (Parmenides's premises) and make a consistent cosmology out of what’s left;

 

The second path leads to the atomists, the first leads to the sophists.

 

So we can see the FIRST revolution in thought we discussed earlier has already come. A way of thinking is developed, pursued, leads to an impossible passing point. The absurdity of the project is taken to an extreme by a figure; then new minds reinvent how the game is played so that it can continue.

 

Before we move on, I want to talk more about Zeno's paradoxes. One of my favorite ones is a paradox that can be drawn out, so that you can see it, and it requires very little explanation.

 

Here is a paradox not in our conceptions of time and space, like the earlier one, but in our ideas of GEOMETRY.

 

Draw a circle.

 

Draw the largest equilateral triangle you can inside that circle.

 

You have drawn a shape similar to all other shapes that follow those first two instructions... there is only one way to draw it, and the proportions between the parts of these shapes will be the same no matter who draws it.

 

Images not to scale, just to give idea:

Zeno.jpg

OK, now: ask yourself this question: of all the chords one could draw, all the line fragments which start and end with a point on the edge of that first circle... what proportion of those chords will be LONGER than the side of the largest inscribed equilateral triangle inside the circle, and in relation to what proportion which will be SHORTER than the sides of that triangle?

 

Three ways to solve it:

 

First:

 

Inscribe another circle inside the triangle... all the chords of the larger circle whose midpoints fall within the area of the shorter circle will be longer than the sides of the triangle, and all the chords whose midpoint is outside that smaller circle will be shorter than the sides of the triangle.

Zeno1st.jpg

Second way to solve it:

 

Make the base of your inscribed triangle horizontal, and draw another triangle upside-down to the first inside the same circle with the same size. Now, draw all of your chords of the big circle parallel to the horizon. Any of the chords which are drawn BELOW the base of the triangle or ABOVE the upside-down triangle will be SHORTER than the sides of the triangle, and any drawn between the two triangular bases will be longer.

Zeno2nd.jpg

A third way to solve the problem, geometrically:

 

draw all of your potential chords of the larger circle as having one endpoint, the point that is any vertex of the inscribed triangle. Any chord which exists INSIDE the angle of the equilateral triangle will be LONGER than the side of the triangle, and any chord which is drawn in the degrees OUTSIDE of that angle of the triangle will be SHORTER than the side of the triangle.

Zeno3rd.jpg

There is a problem, however. The area of the smaller circle in the first solution is 1/4 the area of the larger circle.

 

The area between the horizontal bases is 1/2 the area of the whole circle

 

And because an equilateral triangle has equiangularity, and they have to add up to 360 degrees, the inside angle of the vertex accounts for 1/3 (60 degrees) of the possible angles a chord could be drawn from that point (180 degrees).

 

So, we have a pictorial mathematical demonstration in geometry that the world is either contradictory, our logic and math is absurd and only has the illusion of being reliable, or something is off here.

 

I mean, 1/3 is not just an answer, one third means NOT 3/3 and NOT 1/2 and NOT 1/4 and NOT anything that is not exactly equal to 1/3. But we have proofs of 1/3 AND 1/2 AND 1/4 as the answers to the question! but 1/2 means NOT 1/4... so the answer is demonstrably BOTH 1/4 AND not 1/4.

 

Fun stuff, man. I'll leave it to the commenters to tell us where Zeno went wrong... I like just leaving it there.

Let's do some more Zeno

​

Context:

 

Thales started a game where WE COULD UNDERSTAND THE ULTIMATE NATURE OF THE UNIVERSE THROUGH PROPOSITIONAL SPEACH.

 

Zeno is here to hold our feet to the fire. He says: Sure, let's use the concepts in our mind and come to conclusions about reality... but you might not like the conclusions that we find!

 

Zeno: There is no change. Change is an illusion. All is static.

 

What?

 

Zeno: Seriously, you think you see a fox catch a turtle, but that is an illusion; we know that there can never be a situation of a world where a fox is distant from a turtle and then a later state of the world where the fox has caught the turtle, because that would be change and we KNOW that there can be no change.

 

What we should do here is look at EVERY STEP of Zeno's argument, and see if we can disagree with any part of it. It is not enough for us to just jettison the problem and reassure ourselves that the inventors of the infinitesimal and calculus have mathematical models to explain and analyze these "changes"... nor is it good enough for us to say: reductio ad absurdum... we cannot respond to Zeno by saying: Look, dude; I'm going to go have conversations with these more reasonable philosophers, because I don't know where you have made a mistake, but I am sure you have made one because your conclusions are absurd... If we dismiss with him this way we will have MISSED the serious lessons we can get... He is being CONSISTENT in his use of ideas that we are going to rely on when talking with other philosophers, what good is all our philosophical thought if the concepts upon which it is based are as easily demonstrated to be absurd as Zeno purports they are!?

 

Can Achilles beat a tortoise in a race if the tortoise is given a head start?

 

Zeno says, 'no way' not even if the head start is just 3 feet or less.

 

Proof:

  • In order for Achilles to pass the tortoise, he first has to catch up to him, Yes?

    • Do you disagree with this? If so, how?

  • In order for Achilles to catch up with the tortoise, he first has to cover the distance which is between himself and the tortoise when he starts, yes?

    • Do you disagree with this? If so, how?

  • In order to cover the distance between the tortoise and Achilles when he starts to try to pass him, this will take some amount of time, Yes?

    • Do you disagree with this? If so, how?

  • In the amount of time used up by Achilles to cross the distance between himself and the tortoise which existed when he first set out to race him, the tortoise is able to move a small distance forward, Yes?

    • Do you disagree with this? If so, how?

  • But now there is a new distance between Achilles and the tortoise, Yes? And that new distance, whatever it is, is subject to the analysis of all we have said leading up to this point, right? Won't Achilles FIRST have to cover that new distance before he can catch up to the tortoise? and won't that take some amount of time? And in that time won't the tortoise be able to move a little further? Won't that "little further" always be a distance for which this entire argument applies?

 

Zeno has a host of these kinds of arguments, and they are not as easily dispensed with as one might wish them to be.

Outline of the rest

 

We have seen the initial bold project of Thales come to a head with the absurdities demonstrated by Zeno (and his teacher, Parmenides)

 

We thought our thinking was better suited to understanding the world, but our thinking itself has some issues; not just what we think but the tools of cognition we are using to start with.

 

How do we deal with this and get the game started up again? A few different camps emerged.

  • The Eleatic purists (Anaxagoras and Empedocles)

  • The Atomists (Leucippus and Democritus)

  • Then we will see the absurdity start to rise again, with the Sophists (Protagoras and Gorgias)

  • The next revolutionary who gives us a new game to play which becomes the basis of ALL Western Philosophy after this emerges. Socrates, and we are off to the races.

* Anaxagoras and Empedocles (The Eleatic Purists)

 

They accept that nothing can be generated or destroyed, that nothing can come from nothing. They are convinced by the argument that what is cannot come to be from what is not. So AT LEAST SOME things must be changeless and immutable (but not all things)... how can the static ONE the Parmenadean ONE can give rise to this apparent world of many changes, what could account for this.

 

From the text:

  • frag. 13: no thing comes to be, nor does it parish. But mixed together and separating apart is all there is.

  • Everything is in everything.

    • 4: all things are not, but all things are equal

    • 6: all things have a portion of everything

    • 8: for how can hair come to be from what is not hair, or flesh from what is not flesh

    • 9: in everything there is a portion of everything; accept mind, but mind is in some things too.

  • Nous, mind, is something which keeps the rest in balance, and is mixed in no thing but is alone and by itself; and this is a kind of dualism.

What picture may be emerging from what we have covered so far?

​

Eleatic Purism might be one way of trying to deal with the absurdities pointed out by Parmenides and Zeno... but utter rejection might be another impulse. If you want to see how powerful the absurdities were, this is not utter rejection of Parmenides or Zeno, it is utter rejection of the Thalesian Project to begin with... what is all this talk of the ONE and the WHOLE and the ORIGIN and the ARCHE and the "unbounded"... let us run in the other direction, and find a materialistic world of always difference and war on every level even to the indivisible tiniest bit of stuff instead of the unified whole of consistent singularity.

 

A brief digression on the pattern we are seeing here already developing:

 

If you thought that the ancient atomists were just clever thinkers who figured out some surprising ideas later verified by scientific method about a thousand years later... they emerged out of a context of conversation which drove them. There is BIAS and PERSONALITY... cognitive inclination in a chosen way of dealing with the problem if ideas falling apart or being insufficient.

 

One group is inclined to pure idealism... they trust the ideas even if those ideas cause them to conclude such obviously ANTI-empirical statements as "Achilles may be the fastest runner, but he cannot pass a tortoise"...

 

The other side is inclined to abolish the influence of ideas which are so faulty, and they OBJECTIFY the world, they let the material world constantly beat up their bad ideas and only accept notions which are not really thinkable in the long run but which always conform to measured observation.

 

These two camps, psychologically, mean almost everything to the history of Western Philosophy, in my opinion. And we see this principle emerging in the conflicts in the conversation before we even get to Socrates.

 

We will find everywhere, that each individual thinker falls into one of these two camps which I am defining by psychological, personality, characteristic inclinations**.** It is an attitude thing, not a propositional affirmation thing. We will keep this lens with us throughout the rest of our examinations of Western Thought, just like we had the lens of exponentially increasing questionability we talked about in the first lecture of this series.

 

We can also now justify why the first 2 parts of this 8 part series were dealing with PREPHILOSOPHICAL thoughts. This will be clear shortly, if it is not already.

Spinoza, we will see, says that there are two complete languages which can be used to describe the entirety of experience and all that is. Each language is completely consistent within itself. (He posits that there are actually perhaps infinite dimensions of analysis which could do this, but that man has access to only these two; god may have other languages with their own vocabularies he can use, maybe even the angels, but we only have two.

 

Fichte says that there are the thinkers inclined to the objectivization of the world, and there are idealists. These are the two camps, the two ways of thinking. But he identifies it, correctly in my view, as a psychological inclination, and not really a manifestation of being convinced by argument.

 

Fichte says that it has to do with how the individual thinker gets their identity. The thinker in one camp gets his identity from his internal meditations of experience in the world, something like that. The thinker in the other camp gets his identity from their separated understanding of the objects around them and how they are manipulated, not about them, about their ability to manipulate the physical world and comprehend what it will do given...

The unsophisticated psychological profile of each of these two camps:

  • The girl sitting on a pink bed in a pink bedroom scribbling her feelings into a diary with a unicorn on the front

  • The businessman who owns a hanger with 300 sports cars in it and who employs a team of people to care for those cars

    • Ask the first how her life is going, you will get talk about her feelings and thoughts and her experiences in life and with others. Even when she talks about things which happened to her these are always expressed in terms of experience that are always intimately personal in every detail

    • Ask the second how his life is going and he will immediately start talking about the physical specs of his latest vehicular purchase, how rapidly it gets up to speed given certain physical conditions, what kind engine it has, etc.

      • Follow up with the first by saying: But how is your search for a job going, or did you write your paper, do your homework, have you put any thought into starting that model you got for Christmas... this person will be annoyed, or they will talk about these things in exactly the same terms they used for the earlier talk, about how they felt getting the present (building it is not of interest to them, and they can't understand why you would think it should be).

      • Follow up with the first by saying: But how is your life going? They will be annoyed: I JUST TOLD YOU! (he did tell us, by telling us about the things and the things which define the things in his life).

You get the idea. Now let us look at the sophisticated, subtle member of each camp to flush out our psychological profile of the two types:

  • Socrates... you value the infinite as better than the finite? The mind has the qualities of the unlimited and eternal; the body has the disgusting qualities of temporality and decay? You are SO UNCONCERNED with the material that you can adhere to your ideas which tell you that you should take your punishment and drink a cup of hemlock as if it were a cup of water, to drink it thirstily? For you the realm of the ideas, the forms, the purified divine thoughts are where you get your identity?

  • John Locke... You believe that knowledge is hard to come by, our minds and our thoughts are not really suited for the task of finding knowledge... but yet you allow that it is just good enough that we can make some progress with some rules so long as we don't spend too much energy in the workings of our minds as the sources of that knowledge... the mind is a troublesome thing which needs RULES and restrictions on it, those have to come from the REAL SOURCE of knowledge, the EMPIRICAL WORLD... let's fasten all sorts of chains around this mental beast all which are grounded in measurements and tests. TO HELL WITH METAPHYSICS you say, the physical is where all real knowledge truly lies, that metaphysics, there is the way to mental masturbation only!

 

Later versions?:

  • Shakespeare: here's a depiction of some experiences for your imagination to consider

  • Francis Bacon: (not fair that I put him here, honestly, but he stands in for the embodiment of the invention of modern science anyway): here's a rule, put your name on your paper so if you are full of crap we don't read you next time... that should help the process of peer review for us to weed out the pseudo from the true scientific

 

French?:

  • Pascale

  • Descartes (not fair to put him in here either, as we shall see, he belongs to a completely different and superior class of thinker, in my opinion; BUT most of his work in his day was scientific and mathematical, and he only wrote one short philosophical text (though the content of that text, as we shall see, means that it is a SIN to put him in this category--again, he stands for the emergence of the empiricists who were one camp of interpreters of his work who came after him)

 

Political?

  • Nietzsche (no revolutionary thinker should be in either of these camps, because the sum total of their life and work is attempting the impossible SYNTHESIS of the two languages, which is what Hegel said would be the end of history; but my view of N is as of little girl scribbling in diary as opposed to Jay Leno polishing his latest automobile purchase.)

  • Marx

 

Later:

  • C.S. Lewis and GK Chesterton

  • Darwin and Aldous Huxley

 

OK. Modern day versions?:

  • John Lennox

    • Less sophisticated: William Lane Craig

  • Richard Dawkins

    • Less sophisticated: his massive congregation of followers

We will return to this lens throughout the course of our review of Western Philosophy... There will be plenty of passages in the writings of the thinkers who come ahead which will clearly place them in one of these two camps, and we will likewise get a better picture of what these two camps really are through our examination of those texts and what they manifest about the types of people who inhabit them.

 

For now, these previous examples should give a good enough idea to start our work.

A summary of what we have seen emerge so far:

​

Now, back to the justification of the mythological discussion prior to our walk through history of philosophy.

 

We took a great deal of time to outline that the SUBJECTIVE language of EXPERIENCE with PERSONAL FORCES which are not in the world, but which constitute what the world is. This is the kind of approach of the mythopoetic we discussed earlier.

 

Now I can reveal that Thales, to me, is the purest philosopher. He started out with the proper goal in mind. He wanted PROPOSITIONAL (which is what makes him a philosopher) understanding of the same intimate experience of the world. He tried to do this boldly, naively, heroically, majestically, quixotically, childishly... wonderfully.

 

I have a confession to make: The "revolutions" in thought can be thought of as something different now that we have this new lens.

 

The revolutionaries are the ones coming closest to a synthesis as is possible between the subjective experiential approach to understanding the world and ourselves in it with the propositional objectivist descriptive "outside" language of attempting to do the same thing.

 

They do dissolve the problems which always come to a head in the form of troll-like or devastatingly consistent "john-the-Baptist" types who come before them and push the limits of the impossibility of such a synthesis... then these heroes emerge and change the game for everyone, and, for just a moment, it is as if these two opposites have become one flesh... then the differences begin to emerge again in the thinkers who come after these great heroes and find alternative ways of interpreting the consequences of their new frameworks and revelations... the two camps which emerge always have the qualities of manifesting the same old camps that were separated from the beginning and which were, briefly merged in the works of that last revolutionary.

 

If this is not clear, we will have plenty of time to flush it out by using this lens on the rest of the history of Western Thought.

Democritus2.jpg

* The Atomists: Leucippus and Democritus

​

Now, more on the atomists:

  • They reject the idea that there is only one thing, just like the last two; and they reject the argument against motion and change.

  • They accept the idea that nothing can come from nothing; and that is the most fundamental Parmenidean stricture.

  • They reject the nonexistence of nothing. They think that nothing exists. Atoms exist and the void exists for them.

  • These were hard-core materialists and hardcore determinists.

  • No Anaxagorean mind here.

  • Hard-core reductionists; everything is reducible to the interactions of atoms; and anything else is merely convention.

 

2: “No thing happens at random, but all things as a result of reason and by necessity.”

4: the full and the empty are the elements; the former what is and the other what is not; what is is full and solid, what is not is empty void and rare. The void is no less than body is. These are the material causes of existing things, the differences are the cause of all the rest, they say: shape, position, and arrangement. That’s all that can change, according to them.

6: Democritus believes the nature of the eternal things is small substances infinite in number, and infinite in amount. Nothing and the unlimited. The substances are so small that they escape our senses, they have all kinds of form and shapes and differ in size; these substances are against one another in position and move around and bump into one another, but they don’t come together to make any new thing.

7: Leucippus did not follow Parmenides; while Zeno and he made the universe one and unlimited and unchangeable; Leucippus posited many things and they come together and change and all that.

16: how we get from shape to “qualitative properties” “he makes the sweet that which is round and good sized, the sharp-tasting are angular and not rounded; pungent is round and angular and not smooth, whatever, all the properties due to the shape qualities. Reductionism, reducing the qualitative world in purely geometrical terms.

21: By convention sweet, by convention bitter, by convention hot, by convention cold; but in reality “atoms in the void”.

 

OK, let's just stop with the last two for a minute, because these ideas might be far more sophisticated than they seem at first simply because the language we use now to talk about these ideas is so developed and therefore different than the straightforward talk of these first to posit such ideas.

 

Take the second, is it different from this: Daniel Dennett

 

You know that the SHAPE of benzine rings of carbon have something to do with the distinguishability of why things smell the way they do?: Aromatics

  • They have to give up the idea that these things are in principle insensible if they are going to have a consistent materialistic worldview…

 

I think this is the same for our modern physical materialism today; ultimately the posited entities are themselves insensible???

 

The empiricist side of things always has a Humean crisis eventually, that is what their commitment to abolishing the subjective brings them to... though they get to explore the chaotic material substrate of reality quite a bit more each time before this crisis overwhelms and they have to call for a new kind of revolution to start their problematic work up all over again.

 

The phenomenologism of post-Nietzschean thought today can be understood as the acceptance of the inevitability of the incompleteness of a view that is solely based in physical reality. But we mustn't skip too far ahead while still giving context.

 

Let us look at the precursors of Socrates who will start a new game which lasts right up to Nietzsche.

* Sophists like Protagoras and Gorgias

 

Another way of dealing with the Parmenidean crisis for Thales's project is to just reject the project and play a power game instead.

 

The Sophists went back to the Homeric value system, they think that this philosopher's game is really just a new way of fighting and wrestling. Maybe a way for ugly or weak people to still dominate under the old rubric of power and greatness is what makes one virtuous in the eyes of the Greek?

 

This was Nietzsche's view of Socrates, actually, but we will talk about that in due time.

 

Socrates gets dumped on by a couple of really great thinkers.

​

Aristophanes wrote a South-park style play with fart jokes and sex jokes and sophisticated philosophical arguments where one of the main characters was Socrates, (Socrates famously went to a performance of this play in his time, and stood up next to the actor playing him (wearing a mask) and everyone laughed about how similar they looked---Socrates was a famously UGLY man, which we will discuss later) and he makes Socrates the head of the SOPHITST school, the people he always swore he hated and was against. A school where Socrates teaches anyone who will pay how to make the "bad argument" the winner over the "good argument". (Socrates famously would not take pay for any of his conversations or lessons, and consistently argued that he was being sincere and genuine and that even if he wasn't he should be, and held himself and all others to a standard that the sophists explicitly rejected... but maybe this was a part of his show? (says N--He also said that "Socrates slept with a copy of Aristophanes under his pillow.)).

 

Enough of that.

 

Back to the sophists themselves

 

Sophists were “wise men” (from the Greek, obviously; "Sophomore" means "wise fool" because you have been through your first year, so you know a lot more and think you know much more than you do)

 

Why Plato hates them:

  • Relativists, cultural and moral relativists; and their claim to have some kind of knowledge.

  • Central to the sophists the relationship between convention and reality; appearance and truth.

    • Convention = nomos

    • Nature = phusis

 

They arose as travelling teachers, teachers of the art of rhetoric and persuasion.

 

A bit of historical context?:

 

They played a role in democratic societies because they were the new teachers for the democratic societies.

 

It used to be if you were an aristocrat, your parents could afford a tutor for you, or buy a slave to tutor you, or send you to a private school: if you were lower class, you might not get educated at all. BUT in democracy, expand citizenship, military pressure behind this. How do you get your poor to fight for you? You give them a voice in society, that’s a good way. Then they are fighting for their own.

 

Perhaps expansion of the military gives us democracy in Greece?

 

A word about stories:

There are famous stories, one of the things I like about being in this conversation about philosophy is that it is like being in a club. I keep remembering stories about various thinkers which one hears when one is in this club... you can't even really look these stories up, they are just like the gossip of the philosophy conversation. Philosophy is the preservation of one of the best conversations our species has ever had. Studying it is not like studying biology, where you can come to know a lot about objects external to yourself. The stories we get to tell about Zeno bursting into the forum holding a plucked chicken by the neck screaming: "Behold, Aristotle's Man!" (Aristotle had previously defined man as the "featherless biped... he had to revise this definition, which was so brief and startling when first offered that it probably garnered a lot of respect for him, at least until the next day when ol' troll boy shows up with his terrified screeching plucked monstrosity of a bird!) or how about Diogenes telling Alexander the Great to get the hell out of his way (We will have more expanded versions of stories about Diogenes later, there are a LOT of them and they are great). What about the gossip and rumor that Socrates was sentenced to death for "corrupting the youth" and the interpretations that this meant: "he was having sex with too many of the young 20 somethings and the other Greeks were pissed because he was so ugly and yet he could talk them into bed (I don't agree with this interpretation, I use the story as an example of the kind of thing one hears among other students when one joins a philosophy department.)

 

Here's a story from the sophists:

You probably have heard this one. The Court Paradox

 

The idea is this, and it may have been a real historical trial.

 

A Sophist teaches a student how to win any argument, gives him a law education, with the understanding that the student will be guaranteed to WIN his very first case. The teacher is so confident in this that he agrees that the student doesn't have to pay him for his education UNTIL he wins his first case.

 

The student graduates, and decides never to practice law, takes no cases, and never argues anything in court.

 

Eventually, the teacher is pissed, so he sues the former student in court.

 

The former student argues: If I win this case, then I don't have to pay. If I lose the case, then I don't have to pay.

 

Kind of a joke which illustrates the "deal with the devil" that these conscious hypocrites bring upon themselves by availing themselves of the cheap tricks and denying that anyone could really take the conversation game seriously because it is all just a power game.

 

Reminds me of the story of the trial where an inquisitor was on the stand testifying about so-and-so being a witch, and he looked into it and had the proof.

  • The lawyer asking him questions asked: "You would break the law to capture the devil, wouldn't you?"

  • The Inquisitor: I would tear down every law in England if I could capture Him!

  • The lawyer giving examination: Yes, and when you had done that and the Devil turned 'round to meet you, what would you do then? Where would you appeal for help, all the laws of England having been torn down?

 

It is this kind of a deal the Sophists are making, it seems to me: Let us forget taking this game seriously, we can win arguments with cheap tricks and bad-faith maneuvers, and we are so cleaver no one can stop us... immediate short-term gain, and all we lose in payment for this advantage are our souls.

 

Anyway, enough of that we have set the stage for the most serious inventor of the game to emerge.

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