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Since this interpretation (which I first learned from Rainscape's unpublished paper on the subject) contradicts the usual line on Cephalus, we need to analyze the action more closely, to see that: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

A Step Back: "What is Dialectic?"

You work for hours trying to disentangle two strands from a messy, knotted pile of string, only to discover that they are actually one and the same string.

You aim a telescope at a bright point of light in the night sky, and the closer view splits the star in two.

In reading an astronomy textbook, you learn that the morning star and the evening star are the same star.

All these experiences share a common pattern and all of them are images—not examples but images—of dialectic. Something that was somehow one is now somehow two, or vice versa. In each case, the second position is more truthful, and you won't return to the first position except through forgetfulness.

Dialectic does concern itself with the truth, with regard to questions of unity and multiplicity. But it is not about "looking closer" or "straightening things out" or "expanding your perspective," although each of these expressions can be (and often are) used to indicate the practice of dialectic in a vague way. It does not concern matters which present themselves at particular locations within a spatial field of vision in the first place. Rather, it aims at truth in universal matters, such as being, knowledge, justice, and the soul.

• (NB: Experienced dialecticians will tell you that this opposition between the particular and universal is not as tidy as it sounds, which means that the present indication of the nature of dialectic is only a starting point, but don't worry about that now—you'll have the occasion to savor that twist later.)

The earliest natural scientists established the pattern of discerning unity and multiplicity as the basic structure of scientific thinking. On the one hand, the science of anatomy sorted the seeming unity of the body into a multiplicity of systems that function together, and astronomy broke the mythically simple sky into a field for the complex motions of individual bodies. On the other hand, early philosophers like Thales, Anaximander, and Anaximenes thought that the seeming multiplicity of kinds of things in the world could be completely reduced to a uniform component (although they disagreed about what this component would be: water, air, or perhaps something less palpable). Parmenides later expressed the spirit of these early scientific thinkers as a choice: the decision to order one's thinking according to being, which is one and whole, rather than seeming, which presents what is really one as many and fragmented.

But this transition from seeming multiplicity to real unity is only one possible model of dialectic, and it is not obviously the right way to approach being, justice, and such. Perhaps the transition which makes our thinking more truthful is not from seeming to being, but rather from the partial to the whole, or from the relative to the absolute, or from the temporal to the eternal, or somehow a mixture of these, or something else entirely. To ask after the nature of dialectic is just to ask what it means to consider the "big questions" more truthfully, and to be precise about this is the first task of philosophy.

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

What's in it for Socrates?

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.

What kind of conversation are Cephalus and Socrates sharing at the beginning of Plato's Republic? Are they intently pursuing an abstract point of intellectual interest to both? Or just shooting the shit on a very high level?

The conversation features an oath (329a1), two references to poets (329b-c, 331a), and several fine distinctions (329b, 329e, 330b, and of course 331b-c) — all signs that something fairly serious is happening. On the other hand, the conversation strays rapidly from one theme to another: old age; wealth; inheritance and money-making; the afterlife; and finally justice. People who are taking a theme seriously do not usually so easily abandon it.

Also, Socrates and Cephalus clearly do not play equal parts in the conversation. Socrates poses questions and Cephalus answers. The questions leading up to the refutation are basically of a personal nature: they ask about Cephalus's experience of old age, the basis of his ease, the source of his wealth, and his experience of the usefulness of that wealth. This pattern more nearly resembles an interview than either a casual conversation or a joint investigation of a theme.

The common presumption about Socratic interviews is that they are aimed at a demonstration of the interlocutor's ignorance on a theme he thinks he knows about, and that he poses as a learner only out of irony. However, Cephalus never presents himself as an authority on justice, and the interview with him centers at first around themes with which we can presume Cephalus is intimately familiar: wealth and extreme old age, two things of which Socrates has no experience.

So it is best to assume that, at least in the present case, Socrates genuinely thinks he can learn something from his interlocutor, especially as he reports his own motivations as though this were the case, not only in his speeches to Cephalus but also in the narration accompanying it. ("I admired him for saying that," Socrates says in the narration, "and I wanted him to tell me more, so I urged him on" (329d-e).) Later, he indicates that he thinks Cephalus among all the wealthy is especially likely to see the truth about money because he does not love it too much (330b-c).

The final question before the refutation, then, seems to indicate precisely what Socrates thinks he might be able to learn from Cephalus: what money is good for. Whatever else we may say about him, we must admit that he occupies a unique position for seeing the answer to this question, because he neither lacks experience of wealth nor suffers the distortion which besets most of those who do have such experience. Even if he does not have knowledge (in the sense of being able to give an account) of the answer, at the very least his report will be useful, even indispensable, for those who wish to give thought to this question, and whatever he says will have to be remembered even if it is somehow refuted.

Now if what is to be gained from Cephalus's speech at 330d-331b is a reliable perspective on the usefulness of wealth, then anything which might skew this perspective or throw it out of frame has to be dealt with before Socrates can learn from it. It may be Socrates's greatest virtue is that he can see clearly when someone who would gladly teach is unable to do so without the assistance of his student. If the way in which the youths in the Republic treat Socrates is due to his example, we may say that he has even taught this art to the younger generation.

The question, then, is what obstructions does Socrates see in Cephalus's presentation, and how does this warrant the sudden shift of emphasis from wealth to justice?

continued

Natality and Fate of Tradition

The manifestation of the temporality of tradition, and therefore of the temporality of being in a community, depends on achieving the sense of a founding in terms of a developed consciousness. This means that the provenance of tradition cannot be given in propositional form, whether this proposition should be an unquestioned authoritative mandate or a hypothesis for future verification. However, there is in this fact a substantial piece of information about the sense of a founding—namely, that it is such as to reveal itself not abstractly but only through historical time, not construed as the mere passing of the seconds, minutes, etc. which regulate the motions of physical bodies, but as the medium of a dialectical development of historical perspective. Insofar as tradition involves a responsibility to a founding (as opposed to the thoughtless aping of a fetishized set of protocols, which can be the foundation of no community), it must relate thoughtfully to this founding: it has to know the founding. This knowledge of the founding in its true temporal meaning turns out, as we have seen, to require a development of temporality itself. Formally speaking, this requirement is the temporality of tradition.

To sum up the last week's series of posts in pursuit of the nature of tradition, I have arrived at the following impasse:

1. The dichotomy between the internal and external views of the temporal character of tradition has to be abandoned, because as a religious being searching for piety, I cannot be satisfied with an interpretation which situates me as an outside observer of tradition.

2. The dichotomy cannot be abandoned, because it seems to involve forfeiting the position from which the most can be seen, rolling back consciousness to a point before it discovered the externally historical presentation of tradition; in other words, it seems to involve a willful denial of what the tradition of the philosophy of history has come to know and has passed on to me as my inheritance from it.

I am not sure that I should regard these demands as being equal in force, but I do so regard them. In an attempt to reconcile them, therefore, I am looking for a way to hold on to the synoptic view afforded by the external interpretation while removing the one-sidedness of an "external" position. For this reason it will not content me to retreat to the internal position any more than to abandon myself to the external. For, as I have been saying all along, the very notion of an internal point of view, as one side of a fundamental division, is a function of the external view which lays this division down in the first place--so that the intention to retreat (known as "traditionalism") fails from the outset by capitulating to the very thing it is trying to flee.