The Bequest of the Question

image © Marie-Lan Nguyen
Wikimedia Commons
This post is part of a series on
Plato's Republic. It is intended to
continue the line of
thinking summarized here.

So when we come to Plato asking about the nature of dialectic, how we can learn it, and what it is for, we are trying to learn from him how to think truthfully about a certain set of questions, and what worth those questions have. And by thinking truthfully we mean thinking in freedom from some initial way of taking things which takes the truly one as many and the truly many as one. We want Plato to teach us what this initial way of thinking is, in what its untruthfulness consists, and how this untruth can be overcome.

We have learned from the refutation of Cephalus that, when it comes to the matter of benefit at least, the untruth of the initial position consists in a kind of obviousness, and that thinking truthfully about benefit requires first thinking of it as something obscure and questionable. But very little in Platonic dialogs does not ultimately involve itself in the question of benefit. Certainly anything with a claim to worth has to be understood in the light of benefit. And we now know that this "light" is more like a shadow.

Does Cephalus sense a creeping horror in this cast of obscurity spreading over his view of things, and does he flee back to the sacrifices for fear of facing the uncertainty of his own way of life? This seems to be the standard reading of the character of Cephalus (Rosen, Bloom, and Annas all see him roughly this way), but if he really found Socrates so appalling, would it not give him pause, rather than provoke his laughter, to think of his son as "heir of the argument?" He so prides himself on having benefited his sons through a moderate guardianship of his wealth, that it is hard to imagine him suddenly wanting that inheritance to include a destruction of the very peace which that wealth is supposed to provide.

Since this interpretation (which I first learned from Rainscape's unpublished paper on the subject) contradicts the usual line on Cephalus, we need to analyze the action more closely, to see that:

1. Cephalus genuinely wants to benefit his sons, and cares more for their future happiness more than any self-indulgence.
2. Cephalus's understanding of the benefit of money logically determines his sense of this bequest.
3. As a reminder: the truth of the definition of justice concerns Cephalus in terms of the benefit of money.

In view of these three facts about the character of Cephalus, it will become obvious that it would be incoherent for Cephalus to depart out of some pusillanimous fear of the truth or narrow-minded conventionalism, and we will have to look for some other reason more in keeping with his character.

continued

The Obscurity of Benefit as the Proper Context for the Question of Wealth

image © Marie-Lan Nguyen
Wikimedia Commons
This post is part of a series on
Plato's Republic. It can stand
alone, but is intended to
continue the line of
thinking summarized here.

Last week, I said that in order to see the substance of Socrates's argument in opposition to Cephalus (and so to see the difference from the contentious sophists and debaters from whom Socrates is to be distinguished), we would have to ask how Cephalus's unstated opinions about justice obstruct his view of the benefit of wealth. We should expect that it would be easier for Cephalus not to see benefit itself than to make a miscalculation about money.

In fact, if we follow up on Socrates's refutation as it is developed in the ensuing conversation with Cephalus's son, Polemarchus (not to mention Thrasymachus, we do find that benefit, especially with regard to the possibility of being mistaken about it, is a crucial turning point in the question about justice. According to Polemarchus, the hard cases of justice in which it supersedes the determinations of legal property are governed by the principle that "friends owe it to their friends to do good for them, never harm," and that justice "gives benefits to friends and does harm to enemies." So you would not give a deposited weapon back to an enraged friend because you know it would not benefit him but harm him to have it.

I just can't think about the
idea of the good when you
look at me that way.

But what is benefit? And who is a friend? Depending on the answers to these questions, justice could be marvelous and powerful or completely superfluous. We already want to benefit our friends; that's contained in our considering them friends. But justice must add something to the natural state of affairs, or everyone will be just except for a few fantastically twisted souls. (As Seth Benardete points out in Socrates's Second Sailing, this superfluousness of the just intention is what moves Socrates to construe Polemarchus's justice as an art — a method of application of the intention which we all in fact already have.) So the problem becomes one of identifying what it is that justice could know about friendship and benefit that we don't know just by wanting to benefit our friends.

Socrates's refutation of Cephalus does not turn explicitly on the question of benefit, but it does make clear that Cephalus cannot have seen the benefit of money, precisely in its relation to the idea of benefit, if he thinks that it facilitates justice by way of paying what is owed. For it equally facilitates injustice, if paying what is owed is sometimes unjust.

Thus the obstruction in Cephalus's view of the benefit of wealth is his own presumption of knowledge. He does not see benefit because he does not look for it in a place of darkness — in the field of his ignorance. Socratic wisdom is famously knowledge of ignorance. Here we see that this knowledge is a positive power, that orients the knower in the direction of what he would learn. To get the benefit of Cephalus's report, Socrates needs to place it in the light of something obscure. Benefit itself needs to be seen as something that somehow hides itself.

continued

Economy of Tradition

From Daniel Kroeker, in the comments:

The economy may be fixed, but until there is something behind the decisions that fix it which touches every citizen with a new self-actualizing power and liberty, we will remain a people unworthy of our tradition...What it's really going to take is some generation or other having the humility and prescience to say, "We must give our children something we have lacked--an education which may save our democracy."

What it takes to be worthy of our tradition is to give our children something the tradition did not supply us with. A generation receives the tradition worthily only if it augments the tradition in passing it on. The virtue of the strong anti-traditional current in the American tradition is this requirement that its inheritors not rest with what they have received.

What has to be added to the American tradition? First of all, Daniel says, "humility and prescience." Then, by the light of these virtues, we must discover "an education which may save our democracy." I don't know whether it would be prescient to study the ancient Greeks: does our future lie in their past? But at least it would require some humility to learn from them while we cherish our own tradition, which has come so far since the fifth and fourth centuries BC.

Plato's Republic may teach us the lesson we need to learn, provided we are not reading it to "meet the demands of [our own] souls" (see rimwell's cautionary remark). I'm learning that the issue in the Republic is what good we can do the next generation (an aspect of the text you don't see when you're reading it in college as part of "GeneratioNext" yourself). The question of the nature of justice arises directly from a consideration of whether diligent stewardship of money supplies this good. Cephalus believes he has done right by his sons by leaving them a little more than he inherited, but if money does not facilitate justice, as Cephalus says it does, one may wonder whether he has augmented the right inheritance. Yet, perhaps Cephalus can redeem his stewardship by passing on an argument: if Polemarchus inherits the question of justice, this may be due not to some kind of intellectual cowardice in his father, but rather (as rainscape has argued in a paper on this subject) a humble, prescient relinquishment of his spiritual possession.

What do you owe to past love? When love first strikes, it demands everything from you – and being unable to resist but not having everything to give you promise it the future. But then through its series of unaccountable disappointments, love withdraws. Then what happens to the promise?

Perhaps in embarrassment you disavow it: you never promised, you never were the one who promised; you begin again.

At sufficient distance from or after too many repetitions of these negotiations, the resulting fragmentation of your life's story becomes a problem. But the only way to recover the whole is to take up the promise. And how can you keep a promise to a dead god?

You might think of Aristotle as a very systematic philosopher. His treatises are for the most part each devoted to one of a range of themes which are still regarded as though they were departments of philosophy: ethics, philosophy of nature, logic, metaphysics, to name the big ones. So you might expect that he would present in each of these treatises a set of doctrines, along with some arguments for them. You might think that it would be pretty easy to separate the doctrines from the arguments and walk away with the "Aristotelian system" in your back pocket. Or you might not, dear reader, I don't know you that well. But I have always tended to expect this systematic structure in Aristotle, and I am even now surprised whenever I find in Aristotle's writings show more sketches toward a way of thinking than finished representations.

Well, that was supposed to be a preface to some remarks about the first pages of the Nicomachean Ethics, but that's all I can do today. I owe you.

Blumenberg's theory of tradition

The question of the legitimacy of the secularization thesis (no not that secularization thesis, the other one)hinges in part on the interpretation of spiritual ownership, a concept which has been much discussed in the short life of this blog. What Blumenberg calls the "background metaphor" of the idea that progress (and a raft of related modern tropes) are not legimitate productions of modernity but taken and twisted from Christian theology is the notion of ideas as spiritual property. How one takes "property" here will determine in what respects it makes sense to speak of modernity acquiring the property of its historical predecessor.

The "anachronism" of the secularization thesis , according to Blumenberg, lies in the difference between the criteria of legitimate ownership respectively maintained by the Christian and modern epochs. From the perspective of Christian theology, "legitimate ownership arises through acquisition from the hand that has disposition over the object." The modern epoch, on the other hand, "produced the axiom that the legitimate ownership of ideas can be derived only from their authentic production." These concepts of ownership as applied to spiritual ownership determine the possibilities of tradition.

use enjoys myself

What does it mean to have something? I'm suddenly getting that overwhelming feeling that comes from having loudly announced to a room that I have something significant to say. But neither of the "haves" in the previous sentence will do for the present purpose, although they too will have to be explained. I also say that I have a laptop. I think I mean that I count on being able to use it. Why should I make such a point of distinguishing using it from enjoying it? To answer that I'll have to say what "use" means.

That's all I've got today. You were expecting, what, a dissertation?

Preview of a thought I am still hoarding

In speaking of tradition in terms of the meaning of the word "tradition," that is, in terms of turning something over (to someone), it is tempting to say that this is a metaphor with a limited application to the sorts of things to which we would like to apply it. Intellectual, liturgical, and cultural traditions seem to be exempt from the inescapable fact which makes the turning over of physical property difficult and involves it in contentions so fervid that complex legal structures of contract law and enforcement are required to keep them from tearing human society apart: that the one who turns over property no longer has it. Yves Congar in The Meaning of Tradition, writes:

Usually, when it is a question of handing over a material object, the donor loses possession of it and can no longer enjoy it. But this is no longer true when it is a question of spiritual riches--when a teacher transmits a doctrine he commits it into the keeping of another, to be enjoyed by him, without losing any of it himself.

Spiritual riches, we like to think, are free from competition. But is it always or even preeminently true of traditions that the possession of what is turned over is beyond contention? I believe that Congar maintains this position only by mistaking the meaning of competition for goods, and therefore of what it means to possess them or turn them over. Is it in order to enjoy some good that I strive to possess it when someone else has it and cling to it when I have it?

Tune in tomorrow (by which I do mean Wednesday, January 20, 2010, and not in any other iteration of the eternal return but in continuity with this very day!), when I shall try to say something of what I myself think about the meaning of possession, competition, and turning over (and therefore of the "meaning of tradition").