Polytropy

This is about dialectic in Plato’s Republic and today. There’s a lot here, and in another post I may investigate why that is; meanwhile, I note words of Serge Lang (1927–2005) in the Foreward of Algebra (third edition, 1993):

Unfortunately, a book must be projected in a totally ordered way on the page axis, but that’s not the way mathematics “is”, so readers have to make choices how to reset certain topics in parallel for themselves, rather than in succession.

From socialism to liberalism and perhaps back

The word “dialectic” has the air of a technical term. It intimidated me in the eighth grade, when I chose communism as my topic for a paper in political geography, and I found myself consulting a big book on dialectical materialism. My main source ended up being the Communist Manifesto, which says nothing of dialectic as such.

The Manifesto may take up dialectic implicitly, as by saying in the beginning (with my bullets),

• Freeman and slave,
• patrician and plebeian,
• lord and serf,
• guild-master and journeyman, in a word,
• oppressor and oppressed,

stood in constant opposition to one another, carried on an uninterrupted, now hidden, now open fight, a fight that each time ended, either in a revolutionary reconstitution of society at large, or in the common ruin of the contending classes.

Perhaps one would refer to the ongoing fight between oppressor and oppressed as dialectical. However, dialogue being conversation, I take dialectic to be the art of conversing; fighting is something else.

A notion of dialectic is laid out by R. G. Collingwood (1889–1943), starting with a thesis as follows (with my bullets and bolding).

… socialism, in the Marxian form … carries along with it too much dead weight in the shape of relics from the age in which it was born.

• From the age of enlightened despotism it inherited the idea of a wise ruler …
• From the utopianism of the eighteenth century … it inherited its dualism between
  • a period of revolution and crisis, and
  • a period when all conflict shall be at an end …
• From the romanticism of Hegel it inherited the idea of war – not war in general, but class-war – as a glorious consummation of political activity …

That’s from the chapter called “Modern Politics” in Collingwood’s Essays in Political Philosophy (1989), edited by David Boucher. The chapter is only a selection from “Man Goes Mad,” labelled by Collingwood as a “Rough MS. begun 30 Aug. 36.” He continues with an antithesis.

All these ideas are obsolete: they have been exploded once for all by that very liberalism against which they are now used as weapons.

• Enlightened despotism as a political ideal has yielded to the conception of a people as governing itself by a dialectic of political opinion.
• The dualism between a time of troubles and a millennium lying beyond it has yielded to the conception of conflict as a necessary element in all life and (as yet) not destroying its peace.
• The conception of war as at once glorious in itself and necessary to the achievement of human ends has yielded to the conception of war as distinct from conflict in general, as something anti-political and, so far as it is merely war, merely evil.

In all these three ways

• socialism, in spite of its affiliation to Hegel’s dialectic, shows itself radically un-dialectical, and
• it is liberalism that has proved the true heir of the dialectical method.

Dialectic then is basically conversation.

The practice of conversation may be intimidating – even therefore harmful, by the account of psychologist Lisa Feldman Barrett (born 1963) in “When Is Speech Violence?” (New York Times, July 14, 2017):

Words can have a powerful effect on your nervous system. Certain types of adversity, even those involving no physical contact, can make you sick, alter your brain – even kill neurons – and shorten your life.

As Collingwood distinguished war from other kinds of conflict, so Barrett makes a distinction, going on to assert,

The scientific findings I described above provide empirical guidance for which kinds of controversial speech should and shouldn’t be acceptable on campus and in civil society. In short, the answer depends on whether the speech is abusive or merely offensive.

According to Barrett, Milo Yiannopoulos (born 1984) is abusive, while Charles Murray (born 1943) is merely offensive; so the former should be banned from campus, and the latter not.

Something is missing here, and I think Socrates says it in Book X of the Republic (609e–10a, Bloom translation). Instead of the example of food here, think of words:

“Reflect, Glaucon,” I said, “that we don’t suppose a body should be destroyed by the badness of foods, whatever it may be – whether it is their oldness, rottenness, or anything else. But if the badness of the foods themselves introduces the badness of body into the body, we shall say that due to them it was destroyed by its own vice, which is disease. But we shall never admit that the body, which is one thing, is corrupted by the badness of food, which is another thing, if the alien evil does not introduce the evil that is naturally connected with the body.”

Be it food or speech, what comes into us will not harm us, unless we are capable of being harmed. Indeed, Barrett says,

“Sticks and stones can break my bones, but words will never hurt me.”

But scientifically speaking, it’s not that simple.

Philosophically speaking, it’s not that simple. Words will never hurt me, unless I am somebody who lacks immunity to their virulence. University should help supply this immunity; however, there are anti-vaxxers trying to prevent this.

I learned of Barrett’s essay from “Why Young Americans Are Rejecting the Social Contract” (Areo, March 22, 2023). According to Julian Adorney, who, by his own account, “graduated from CU Boulder in 2014 with a degree in English and Advertising” and is “also an economist and a libertarian,”

From infancy to college years, then, young people are being trained to avoid trying to resolve conflicts on their own. The net effect is that relatively few young Americans have the skills to do so.

There is suspicion of verbal conflict today; there was suspicion in ancient Athens. In Republic Book VI (487a–c), Adeimantus points out that those who are inexperienced in “the game of question and answer” are led to a position where they

are finally shut in and cannot make a move … yet the truth is not affected by that outcome.

IMDb confirms my memory of an expression of this thought in John Sayles’s 1983 film Lianna:

Just because you can argue better doesn’t mean that you’re right.

Overview

Strictly speaking, the Republic is a monologue, like the Apology. Socrates recounts a conversation of the previous day, mainly with Plato’s brothers Glaucon and Adeimantus. Like my previous two posts,

• “Why the Polity” (on the question of why Plato wrote the Republic in the first place) and
• “Drone” (on the lust of the tyrant, which is “exactly like a great, winged drone”),

the present post began as notes I took while engaged in a conversation about the Republic. Now I want to review how dialectic itself comes up as a topic in the Republic. Still to come are the posts

• “More On Dialectic” and
• “Even More On Dialectic.”

Meanwhile, this post draws on four passages, of which we have already seen the latter two:

1. In Book I, Glaucon interrupts the discussion with Thrasymachus to ask Socrates what he means by a penalty for not ruling. The penalty is to suffer being ruled by a worse person. Socrates goes on to describe two possible ways of persuading Thrasymachus that living justly is profitable:

   1. The disputants can set speech against speech, so that judges will have to decide which one makes the better points. I think this is what we call debate.
   2. The alternative is to try to come to agreement with one another.

2. In Book V, to encourage Socrates to continue speaking, Glaucon says he and the other listeners will give him no trouble. However, Socrates wants trouble, in the form of listeners who will correct what he says; he does not want tolerance to be shown to wrong ideas.

3. In Book VI, where Adeimantus has an issue with “the game of question and answer” as above, he continues (in Shorey’s translation):

   one might say that he is unable in words to contend against you at each question, but that when it comes to facts he sees that of those who turn to philosophy … the majority become cranks, not to say rascals, and those accounted the finest spirits among them are still rendered useless to society …

4. In Book X, Socrates argues that the soul is immortal, because nothing can be killed, except by its own badness or defect. For example, as above, a pathogen doesn’t make us sick, but our body’s response does. Our understanding of this makes medicine possible, because we can cause our body to have a better response.

I see these ideas reflected in the work of Collingwood, as follows.

1. To try to come to agreement is to engage in dialectic, by the account in “Man Goes Mad”:

   The one essential of liberalism is the dialectical solution of all political problems: that is, their solution through the statement of opposing views and their free discussion until, beneath this opposition, their supporters have discovered some common ground on which to act.

2. The passage from “Man Goes Mad” continues:

   The outward characteristic of all liberalism is the fact that it permits the free expression of opinion, no matter what the opinion may be, on all political questions. This attitude is not toleration; it is not the acquiescence in an evil whose suppression would be a greater evil; it is not a mere permission but an active fostering of free speech as the basis of all healthy political life.

   By that account, liberalism is perhaps more than toleration. However, sometimes toleration is an evil, by Collingwood’s account in “Fascism and Nazism” (Philosophy vol. 15, issue 58, April 1940, page 175; reprinted in Essays in Political Philosophy):

   Fascism as a system of political principles is a function, not of Italian Christianity, but of the pre-Christian paganism which has survived under the toleration and protection of Italian Christianity; and this is what has made possible an understanding between Fascism and the Vatican. The “punch” of Fascism is derived from the pagan emotions which the Vatican has always tolerated. It surrenders nothing, therefore, in tolerating Fascism.

   Protestantism from the first has persecuted these pagan survivals and has refused to incorporate them in its own conception of Christianity.

3. In An Autobiography (1939; page 21), Collingwood finds some philosophers (among his Oxford colleagues) to be as useless as Adeimantus did:

   Prichard, developing his extraordinary gift for destructive criticism, by degrees destroyed not only the “idealism” he at first set out to destroy but the “realism” in whose interest he set out to destroy it, and described a path converging visibly, as years went by, with the zero-line of complete scepticism. In Joseph’s case this scepticism was masked by a progressive tendency to accept Plato’s doctrines as substantially true. But the scepticism was nevertheless there; or so it seemed to his pupils, one of whom once said to me, “if the Archangel Gabriel told you what Mr. Joseph really thought about something, and you served it up to him in an essay, I’m perfectly sure he would prove to you that it was wrong”.

4. In the passage from The Idea of History (originally intended for “The Principles of History”) that I looked at in a 2014 post called “Freedom,” if you are afraid to cross the mountains, because of the devils up there, it is your own fear that is holding you back.

At the end of Book I of the Republic, Socrates says the kind of thing he is famous for (354b–c):

ὥστε μοι νυνὶ γέγονεν ἐκ τοῦ διαλόγου μηδὲν εἰδέναι.

so that now as a result of the discussion I know nothing.

He knows nothing, because he has been like a glutton at a feast, taking a bite from every dish brought forth, without settling down to enjoy a particular one.

I too am taking bites from various dishes, now one by Sarah Haider (born 1991), founder of Ex-Muslims of North America. Haider would seem to corroborate her contemporary, Julian Adorney, quoted above. I transcribe the following from from a clip in a tweet by Australian broadcaster Josh Szeps; I take it Haider said this in conversation with Szeps (my bolding, as usual):

I would agree that the 1980s were bad when it came to marginalized groups. But I would also add that some of the other assumptions were simply liberal assumptions: that in order to get past our ugliness we need to have conversation, we need to be open with each other, we need to respect each other’s individual rights; that we thought we would discover the truth through, you know, academic freedom; that this is the path towards a more tolerant society. That assumption has been, I think, fully overturned. You know, anybody younger than thirty doesn’t assume this at all, that the marketplace of ideas is kind of a, not just a cliché, which it was in my time, now it’s like an indicator of a status of a hateful person really.

Words and gender

In the words of Socrates about how he knows nothing, we see that the masculine noun ὁ διάλογος does occur in Book I of the Republic; however, the book apparently makes no use of either of the terms

• ἡ διάλεκτος, conversation;
• ἡ διαλεκτική [τέχνη], the art of conversation.

The noun διάλεκτος is “trans,” so to speak, because it has a masculine form, but is construed as feminine. When I last took up Book XVI of the Iliad, I noted that ἵππος could be construed to mean “mare” rather than “stallion”; such a noun might then be called “genderfluid.” As for διάλεκτος, it seems to occur but once in the Republic, in Book V (454a), where the subject is people who

κατ᾽ αὐτὸ τὸ ὄνομα διώκειν τοῦ λεχθέντος τὴν ἐναντίωσιν, ἔριδι, οὐ διαλέκτῳ πρὸς ἀλλήλους χρώμενοι;

pursue contradiction in the mere name of what’s spoken about, using eristic, not dialectic, with one another.

I shall look more at this in “More On Dialectic”; now I just observe that the gender of διάλεκτος here is betrayed by no associated article, adjective, participle, or pronoun. Thus there is no basis here for saying the word even has a gender. However, διάλεκτος does take on a gender in the Symposium (320a), in the form of the feminine article, when Socrates reports being told by Diotima,

θεὸς δὲ ἀνθρώπῳ οὐ μείγνυται, ἀλλὰ διὰ τούτου πᾶσά ἐστιν ἡ ὁμιλία καὶ ἡ διάλεκτος θεοῖς πρὸς ἀνθρώπους, καὶ ἐγρηγορόσι καὶ καθεύδουσι.

God with man does not mingle: but the spiritual is the means of all society and converse of men with gods and of gods with men, whether waking or asleep.

I’m not sure that the existence of “trans” and “genderfluid” nouns like διάλεκτος and ἵππος should temper the categorical assertions of Helen Joyce (born 1968) in Trans (updated edition, 2022; page 3):

In no society – anywhere, ever – have people been oblivious to the sex of those around them, and certainly not in situations involving nakedness or physical contact. And in all societies – everywhere, always – the overwhelming majority of violence, sexual assault and harassment suffered by female people has been perpetrated by male ones. Single-sex spaces exist for these reasons, not to prop up privilege or pander to prejudice. And it is logically impossible to admit people of one sex to spaces intended for the other while keeping them single-sex. All this is so obvious that it is remarkable to have to say it – and until a few years ago, when gender self-identification started to catch on, there would have been no need.

The 2024 Summer Olympics will bring out how different societies may assign a sex differently to somebody with 5α-Reductase 2 deficiency. Meanwhile, I’ll take the existence of διάλεκτος and ἵππος as a symbol of what I suggested in “Parenthood and Sex,” that if any legal distinction between sexes is needed, then while it cannot be determined by “gender self-identification,” neither can biologists be the sole authority. Some kind of dialectical process is needed.

As I said, in Book I of the Republic, the words διάλεκτος and διαλεκτική do not occur, but the concept of dialectic arises, in the sense in which Collingwood uses the term for the principle of liberalism in the passage above.

Not wanting to tolerate error, I shall look at some negative criticism of Collingwood by Maurice Cowling (1926–2005), who was, according to Wikipedia, “a leading conservative exponent of the ‘high politics’ approach to political history.”

Cowling likens Collingwood to Karl Popper (1902–94), whom he also disparages. I myself shall criticize some activists for (what I see as) their misunderstanding of Popper’s “paradox of tolerance.”

The cause of those activists is transgender rights. It would seem to me that the most urgent causes for activism today are:

1. Overconsumption, particularly of fossil fuels.
2. War, such as waged by Russia in Ukraine.
3. Autocratic government, in a number of countries.

I don’t know what I can do about these things in blog posts.

1. I have avoided overconsumption for most of my life. I have been a vegetarian since college, and I have never owned a car. I do not know why people do not show more responsibility than they do for the world they are leaving their children. Possibly my lack of comprehension has to do with why my spouse and I did not beget children.

2. I have devoted two series of blog posts to

   what might be the biggest, most fundamental story of them all – and one, alas, with terrible resonance in this particular moment. It is the siege of Troy: the subject of Homer’s Iliad, the focus of many Greek tragedies and, in many ways, the literary war that has, over millennia, served as a proxy for thinking about other, more recent conflicts.

   Thus Charlotte Higgins in “A house on fire” (Guardian Weekly, 1 April 2022, page 54), a review of “The Burnt City,” a theatrical performance by a company called Punchdrunk.

3. Although Socrates disparages Homer in the Republic, I am not aware that the Iliad has given anybody any bad ideas. The same cannot be said for the Republic itself, though this may not explain where I live, which is described in a quote in the previous post, “Drone,” as a “personalist autocracy.”

Eugenics

I remember reading, when it came out, the memoir of one young person who was not seduced by Plato into autocratic fantasies. However, she herself was reading the Laws, not the Republic:

I am appalled by Plato. That anyone could write a book like the Laws (which denies free thought and places all authority with the state) and still be considered a great philosopher is shocking. He was no more than an ancient Hitler – listen to this:

The best of either sex should be united with the best as often as possible, and the inferior with the inferior; and they are to reap the offspring of one sort of union, but not of the other; for this is the only way of keeping the flock in prime condition.

I am certainly glad I read about the old fool, so if his name ever comes up I shall not have to be quiet out of undeserved awe.

Thus Kendall Hailey (born 1966) in The Day I Became an Autodidact (New York: Delacorte, 1988; p. 100). She has finished high-school a year early, but is still living at home in Hollywood, reading books and trying to write them. After looking through her mother’s old things, she does grant:

… what a wonderful shock it was to find this paper on Plato. I read the assignment and thought, my heavens, I could never do this. I should give up being an autodidact and head for college because I don’t really know anything about Plato.

Then again, Hailey continues,

How nice to know that my mother, despite having studied him in college, didn’t either. On the final page of her paper was written “totally unacceptable.”

I appreciate Hailey’s self-awareness (pp. 11–2):

The young are apt to be arrogant with those older because of an assurance that they have their whole lives in front of them and an idea that they will do things differently. I am this way too.

---

I never think about the real dilemmas of life. Mainly because I don’t have to. I don’t have to earn a living yet.

That was in the summer of 1982, just before Hailey’s junior, but final, year of high-school. She was a top student (page 28): “If you study all year, it is surprising the free time you can find during finals.” She was also good at dialectic (page 29):

I do believe I am the only person in our class who can have a friendly conversation with anyone – from the people who got expelled for taking drugs to the people who got them expelled.

Somebody else, a decade ago, remembered reading Hailey’s book, then managed to interview her. She has gone on writing, but not publishing. The first part of the interview by Jennifer Paull (who is perhaps not the oboist born in 1944) doesn’t seem to link to part two.

Unlike Kendall Hailey, some people are attracted to eugenics, but perhaps they don’t need Plato for this. They can be found writing software, by the recounting of a dialogue that I first saw in an image tweeted in October, 2022:

Real techies don’t worry about forced eugenics. I learned this from a real techie in the cafeteria of a software company.

The project team is having lunch and discussing how long it would take to wipe out a disease inherited recessively on the X chromosome. First come calculations of inheritance probabilities. Given a population of a given size, one of the engineers arrives at a wipe-out date. Immediately another suggests that the date could be moved forward by various manipulations of the inheritance patterns. For example, he says, there could be an education campaign.

The six team members then fall over one another with further suggestions. They start with rewards to discourage carriers from breeding. Immediately they move to fines for those who reproduce the disease. Then they go for what they call “more effective” measures: Jail for breeding. Induced abortion. Forced sterilization.

Now they’re hot. The calculations are flying. Years and years fall from the final doom-date of the disease.

Finally, they get to the ultimate solution. “It’s straightforward,” someone says. “Just kill every carrier.” Everyone responds to this last suggestion with great enthusiasm. One generation and – bang – the disease is gone.

Quietly, I say, “You know, that’s what the Nazis did.”

They all look at me in disgust. It’s the look boys give a girl who has interrupted a burping contest. One says, “This is something my wife would say.”

When he says “wife,” there is no love, warmth, or goodness in it. In this engineer’s mouth, “wife” means wet diapers and dirty dishes. It means someone angry with you for losing track of time and missing dinner. Someone sentimental. In his mind (for the moment), “wife” signifies all programming-party-pooping, illogical things in the universe.

Still, I persist. “It started as just an idea for the Nazis, too, you know.”

The engineer makes a reply that sounds like a retch. “This is how I know you’re not a real techie,” he says.

Thus Ellen Ullman in Life in Code: A Personal History of Technology (New York: MCD / Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2017; pages 9–10). If her colleagues really are as described, they might be helped by serious consideration of Socrates’s proof of the immortality of the soul.

I had to work to recall Ullman’s name. Eventually I found it in an email that I had written to a friend. The name had not occurred in an article I found: “The Secret History of Women in Coding” (New York Times Magazine, February 13, 2019), by Clive Thompson.

Biology and History

Clive Thompson says elsewhere that writing blog posts sharpens his focus. I talked about this in “Biological History.” That post of mine takes up a distinction that Helen Joyce mentions in the Introduction to Trans (page 2):

Feminists used to use the word ‘gender’, and some still do, to denote the societal framing of female people as inferior and subordinate to male ones. Roughly, sex is a biological category, and gender a historical category; sex is why women are oppressed, and gender is how women are oppressed.

I can see how, but I’m not sure why Joyce uses “why” and “how” as she does. I would use them the other way:

• Sex is how – the means whereby – people are assigned different roles in life.
• Gender is the ostensible reason why these different roles are assigned.

Whatever words we use, I think the distinction here is analogous to one, already mentioned, that Socrates makes in Book X of the Republic. Again, the soul’s badness is injustice, but this does not kill the soul, and therefore nothing does; and this is argued by analogy with the body:

if the badness of the foods themselves introduces the badness of body into the body, we shall say that

• due to them it was destroyed
• by its own vice, which is disease.

In the terms that I am proposing,

• bad foods are how the body may be destroyed; but when this does happen,
• the body’s own disease is why.

The bolded passage from the Republic is an illustration used by Herbert Weir Smyth (1857–1937) in Greek Grammar (Harvard, 1956; page 375), ¶ 1685, 2g., “διά with accusative contrasted with ὑπό with genitive”:

φήσομεν αὐτὸ

• δι᾽ ἐκεῖνα
• ὑπὸ τῆς αὑτοῦ κακίας

νόσου οὔσης ἀπολωλέναι.

By Smyth’s account,

• διά with accusative indicates a more remote cause (“due to them”);
• ὑπό with genitive, the immediate cause (“by its own vice”).

As for sex and gender, try replacing them with color and race.

• The first member of each pair is a biological concept;
• the second, historical, not in the sense of being in the past, but as referring to people’s thoughts and beliefs.

Dark skin is

• not why some people have been enslaved,
• but how some people have been distinguished for enslavement.

There have been other ways of distinguishing. No method is used automatically. This is shown by the pattern of English colonization of Ireland:

… after the Norman invasion of Ireland in 1179 … English settlers in Ireland often intermarried with the local people and integrated into Irish society.

The real decline of native Irish institutions came after Britain created English and Scottish Protestant settlements in Ulster in the seventeenth century. Beginning in 1603, the Plantation of Ulster allowed these settlers to take over the lands of Gaelic Catholics.

Unlike previous invaders … these British Protestants regarded the Catholic Irish as racially inferior. The newcomers rarely intermarried with the locals. In 1649, when Oliver Cromwell’s forces arrived in Ireland, the result was a brutal genocidal campaign.

Thus Livia Gershon in “Britain’s Blueprint for Colonialism: Made in Ireland,” (Jstor Daily, January 29, 2022), citing work of Aziz Rahman, Mary Anne Clarke and Sean Byrne in 2017; but I’m pretty sure I learned these ideas in the 1990s from a recorded talk by Bernadette Devlin McAliskey (born 1947). See also Howard Zinn (1922–2010), “Drawing the Color Line,” A People’s History of the United States (Revised and Updated Edition, 1995; page 31):

the presence of another human being is a powerful fact, and the conditions of that presence are crucial in determining whether an initial prejudice, against a mere color, divorced from humankind, is turned into brutality and hatred.

… in spite of special subordination of blacks in the Americas in the seventeenth century, there is evidence that where whites and blacks found themselves with common problems, common work, common enemy in their master, they behaved toward one another as equals …

Black and white worked together, fraternized together. The very fact that laws had to be passed after a while to forbid such relations indicates the strength of that tendency …

There is an enormous difference between a feeling of racial strangeness, perhaps fear, and the mass enslavement of millions of black people that took place in the Americas.

• The transition from one to the other cannot be explained easily by “natural” tendencies.
• It is not hard to understand as the outcome of historical conditions.

For “natural” (after the first of the two bullets that I added), I think we can put “biological.”

The United States, at least, has seen black liberation, women’s liberation, and gay liberation. Trans liberation would seem to follow in this line, but it is not so simple, as Helen Joyce shows in Trans (page 3):

Gender self-identification is often described as this generation’s civil-rights battle. And it is promoted by some of the same organisations that fought for women’s suffrage, desegregation in the American South and gay marriage. But demanding that self-declared gender identity be allowed to override sex is not, as with genuine civil-rights movements, about extending privileges unjustly hoarded by a favoured group to a marginalised one.

Nothing is the same as anything else. Black families and white families can be segregated. Women and men can be segregated everywhere but the family. Perhaps gay people are not so much segregated as ostracized, once they are identified.

As for trans people, by some accounts, identifying them is a mistake made by other people. In an understanding world, James Barry (1789–1865) would be remembered simply as a male surgeon; but then this would mean forgetting that Margaret Anne Bulkley could not have become a surgeon as a woman.

Ours is a world in flux, a “Heraclitean world,” as Collingwood calls it in Chapter XXIV, “The Body Politic, Social and Non-Social,” of The New Leviathan. I quoted the passage at greater length when taking up Chapter XXIX, “External Politics.” The way to deal with a world in flux is, “think dialectically.” Be ready to reconsider what you thought was true.

Indices of dialectic

Turning back to the Republic, I have at hand three translations with indexes, by

• Paul Shorey (1857–1934), in the Loeb Classical Library, selected by me for use in a preceptorial in college, because it had the Greek; the notes are also interesting;
• Francis MacDonald Cornford (1874–1943), assigned in a high-school class called ancient Greek history, although a guest lecturer in college recommended we burn it;
• Allan Bloom (1930–92), who tries to separate translation from interpretation; he also gave the address at my college graduation.

Shorey’s index is to his own notes, rather than Plato’s text. Under “discussion,” Bloom would seem to index all uses in that text of

• the nouns dialogos and dialektos (διάλογος and διάλεκτος “conversation”);
• the verb dialegô (διαλέγω “converse”);
• the adjective dialektikos (διαλεκτικός “skilled in discourse”).

Thinking all uses of these words are connected could be like thinking there is a connection between the studies of

• the cone whereby a pine, fir, or spruce reproduces,
• the cone traced out by a straight line that has
  • one end fixed,
  • the other end moving along a circle.

I do think the origins of mathematical terms are worth knowing. Sorry not to have been taught these origins in high-school, I wrote a paper about some of them called “Abscissas and Ordinates” (Journal of Humanistic Mathematics, Volume 5, Issue 1, January 2015). However, one can do mathematics, and do it well, while being ignorant of how its terminology arose.

As for my three translators’ references to “dialectic” (or related words) in the Republic:

• Cornford starts in Book VI (511b), at the end of the account of the Divided Line, whose fourth section comprises “all that unaided reasoning apprehends by the power of dialectic.”
• Shorey begins in Book VI (487a–c) with the passage already mentioned, where Adeimantus says “the game of question and answer” does not affect the truth; Shorey’s note gives additional citations “for the idea that dialectic constrains rather than persuades.”
• Bloom takes us back to the beginning of Book I (328a), on the road to Athens, when Polemarchus tells Socrates, “we’ll be together with many of the young men and we’ll talk (διαλεξόμεθα).”

Debate or dialogue

None of the translators cites the passage from Book I (348a–b) that I mentioned, where the words of Socrates are as follows, in Bloom’s translation (with my bullets and bolding):

• Now if we should speak at length against him, setting speech against speech, telling how many good things belong to being just, and then he should speak in return, and we again, there’ll be need of counting the good things and measuring how many each of us has in each speech, and then we’ll be in need of some sort of judges who will decide.
• But if we consider just as we did a moment ago, coming to agreement with one another, we’ll ourselves be both judges and pleaders at once.

Shorey has,

• If then we oppose him in a set speech enumerating in turn the advantages of being just and he replies and we rejoin, we shall have to count up and measure the goods listed in the respective speeches and we shall forthwith be in need of judges to decide between us.
• But if, as in the preceding discussion, we come to terms with one another as to what we admit in the inquiry, we shall be ourselves both judges and pleaders.

Here’s the Greek:

• ἂν μὲν τοίνυν, ἦν δ᾽ ἐγώ, ἀντικατατείναντες λέγωμεν αὐτῷ λόγον παρὰ λόγον, ὅσα αὖ ἀγαθὰ ἔχει τὸ δίκαιον εἶναι, καὶ αὖθις οὗτος, καὶ ἄλλον ἡμεῖς, ἀριθμεῖν δεήσει τἀγαθὰ καὶ μετρεῖν ὅσα ἑκάτεροι ἐν ἑκατέρῳ λέγομεν, καὶ ἤδη δικαστῶν τινων τῶν διακρινούντων δεησόμεθα:
• ἂν δὲ ὥσπερ ἄρτι ἀνομολογούμενοι πρὸς ἀλλήλους σκοπῶμεν, ἅμα αὐτοί τε δικασταὶ καὶ ῥήτορες ἐσόμεθα.

In the bolded passage in particular, Bloom would indeed seem to be quite literal:

What Shorey does with the passage is to

• combine finite verb and participial phrase into “if we come to terms with one another”;
• add “as to what we admit in the inquiry,” presumably to clarify what he thinks Socrates’s meaning is.

It seems worthwhile to me to keep the finite verb separate from the participle. The coming to agreement expressed by ἀνομολογούμενοι is not automatic, but needs the work suggested by σκοπῶμεν. Agreement needs to be “considered,” as Bloom has it, or “scoped out,” etymologically.

Let me note a curiosity, if it is not more than that. In the (nominative masculine plural) participle ἀνομολογούμενοι, we are interpreting the first two letters as representing the preposition ἀνά. However, in principle, they can represent the alpha privitive, cognate with English “un-,” so that the whole participle can refer to disagreeing.

As for σκοπέω, in the Liddell–Scott–Jones lexicon,

• the literal meaning is “behold, contemplate (rather of particulars than of universals, of which θεωρέω is more commonly used …)”;
• the metaphorical meaning is “look to or into, consider, examine.”

I think “look to” here has the meaning that I would express with “look after.” The lexicographers illustrate metaphorical looking with, among other examples,

• the very phrase that we are already looking at, ἂν … σκοπῶμεν ἀνομολογούμενοι πρὸς ἀλλήλους;
• what Socrates says to Thrasymachus about skill or art or practice in 342a–b.

The latter passage, about technê, features seven uses of the verb in question, divided among three parts; here is the whole passage, in Bloom’s translation (and my headings on the parts).

1. Does a skill, as such, need looking after by another?

   τί δὲ δή; αὐτὴ ἡ ἰατρική ἐστιν πονηρά, ἢ ἄλλη τις τέχνη
   ἔσθ᾽ ὅτι προσδεῖταί τινος ἀρετῆς,
   ὥσπερ ὀφθαλμοὶ ὄψεως καὶ ὦτα ἀκοῆς
   καὶ διὰ ταῦτα ἐπ᾽ αὐτοῖς δεῖ τινος τέχνης
   τῆς τὸ συμφέρον εἰς αὐτὰ ταῦτα σκεψομένης τε καὶ ἐκποριούσης;
   ἆρα καὶ ἐν αὐτῇ τῇ τέχνῃ ἔνι τις πονηρία,
   καὶ δεῖ ἑκάστῃ τέχνῃ ἄλλης τέχνης
   ἥτις αὐτῇ τὸ συμφέρον σκέψεται,
   καὶ τῇ σκοπουμένῃ ἑτέρας αὖ τοιαύτης,
   καὶ τοῦτ᾽ ἔστιν ἀπέραντον;

   And what about medicine itself, is it or any other art defective,
   and does it need some supplementary virtue?
   Just as eyes need sight and ears hearing
   and for this reason an art is needed
   that will consider and provide what is advantageous for them,
   is it also the case that there is some defect in the art itself
   and does each art have need of another art
   that considers its advantage,
   and does the art that considers it need in its turn another of the same kind,
   and so on endlessly?

2. Does a skill rather look after itself?

   ἢ αὐτὴ αὑτῇ τὸ συμφέρον σκέψεται;

   Or does each consider its own advantage by itself?

3. Does the idea of looking after a skill make no sense, but the whole point of a skill is to look after other things?

   ἢ οὔτε αὑτῆς οὔτε ἄλλης προσδεῖται
   ἐπὶ τὴν αὑτῆς πονηρίαν τὸ συμφέρον σκοπεῖν·
   οὔτε γὰρ πονηρία οὔτε ἁμαρτία οὐδεμία οὐδεμιᾷ τέχνῃ πάρεστιν,
   οὐδὲ προσήκει
   τέχνῃ ἄλλῳ τὸ συμφέρον ζητεῖν
   ἢ ἐκείνῳ οὗ τέχνη ἐστίν,
   αὐτὴ δὲ ἀβλαβὴς καὶ ἀκέραιός ἐστιν ὀρθὴ οὖσα,
   ἕωσπερ ἂν ᾖ ἑκάστη ἀκριβὴς ὅλη ἥπερ ἐστίν;
   καὶ σκόπει ἐκείνῳ τῷ ἀκριβεῖ λόγῳ·
   οὕτως ἢ ἄλλως ἔχει;

   Or does it need neither itself nor another
   to consider what is advantageous for its defect?
   Is it that there is no defect or error present in any art,
   and that it isn’t fitting
   for an art to seek the advantage
   of anything else than that of which it is the art,
   and that it is itself without blemish or taint
   because it is correct so long as it is precisely and wholly what it is?
   And consider this in that precise sense.
   Is it so or otherwise?

Again, in 348a–b, where Bloom has “consider … coming to agreement with one another,” Shorey has simply “come to terms with one another,” followed by an interpolation, “as to what we admit in the inquiry.” Perhaps the interpolation does make the point that I think “consider” does: again, that agreement is not automatic, but must be worked for. This is reflected in the second passage that I quoted earlier from Collingwood’s “Man Goes Mad,” about how liberalism not only tolerates free speech, but fosters it.

Part of that fostering would seem to be recognizing what I took as a name for a 2017 blog post: “Freedom to Listen,” inspired by a talk given at Boğaziçi University by Timothy Garton Ash. We cannot listen to voices that others are drowning out.

“Man Goes Mad” was ultimately published in full in The Philosophy of Enchantment (2005), whose editors (Boucher, Wendy James, and Philip Smallwood) give two sources for further reading on the “Rough MS. begun 30 Aug. 36”:

• There is a detailed, highly critical, and extremely intemperate consideration of this essay by Maurice Cowling in Religion and Public Doctrine in Modern England (… 1980).
• For a more recent and sympathetic account of the essay see James Connelly, Metaphyics, Method and Politics: The Political Philosophy of R.G. Collingwood (… 2003), ch. 7, esp. 285–7.

I have Connelly’s book on paper (it was one of two books I chose from the publisher in return for reading a draft of another book). For what Connelly says about “Man Goes Mad,” one may consult also pages 185–7 in chapter 4. Since I propose that Socrates talks about dialectic in Book I of Republic, albeit without using the term “dialectic,” let me note also that Connelly says (on his page 50) something similar about Collingwood (and it makes sense to me):

Nearly every one of Collingwood’s books employs a different terminology: the fact that there seems to be no point of terminological contact between [An Essay on] Philosophical Method [(1933)] and [An Essay on] Metaphysics [(1940)] should not, therefore, be taken as lending support to the view that they are incompatible.

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Speculum Mentis [(1924)] is largely written in the language and idiom of traditional idealism: thus it discusses the concepts of dialectic, the concrete universal, absolute mind and absolute ethics, philosophy as absolute knowledge, and so on …

An Essay on Philosophical Method makes explicit the method exemplified throughout Speculum Mentis; yet it does not use the term “dialectic” … The two books are without doubt closely related … it is the terminology alone that differs.

In Speculum Mentis, §7 of the “Art” chapter is called “The Dialectic of Art,” but I did not take up dialectic as such when I looked at the chapter in “Map of Art.” The book’s first mention of dialectic is in §5 of “Art”:

People who are acquainted with knowledge at first hand have always known that assertions are only answers to questions.

• So Plato described true knowledge as ‘dialectic’, the interplay of question and answer in the soul’s dialogue with itself;
• so Bacon pointed out once for all that the scientist’s real work was to interrogate nature, to put her, if need be, to the torture as a reluctant witness;
• so Kant mildly remarked that the test of an intelligent man was to know what questions to ask;

and the same truth has lately dawned on the astonished gaze of the pragmatists.

Questioning is the cutting edge of knowledge; assertion is the dead weight behind the edge that gives it driving force.

I did look at that last sentence in “Map of Art,” noting that Pirsig used a similar metaphor in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance; but his metaphor was supposed to account for “romantic knowledge” and “classical knowledge,” not question and answer.

Instead of investigating any further the analogy

I turn to the “extremely intemperate consideration” by Maurice Cowling (1926–2005) of Collingwood’s “Man Goes Mad.” I do this out of the kind of concern that I think Socrates expresses in the passage I mentioned, near the beginning of Book V of the Republic, where Socrates says he does not want tolerance shown to wrong ideas. This is after the supposed discovery in Book IV of

• how justice is to be preferred to injustice, as health is to disease (444e–5a);

• what justice is in the first place (443c–d):

  in truth justice was, as it seems, something of this sort … with respect to what truly concerns [a man] and his own. He doesn’t let each part in him mind other people’s business or the three classes in the soul meddle with each other, but really sets his own house in good order and rules himself.

Thrasymachus joins Polemarchus, Adeimantus, and Glaucon in stopping Socrates from proceeding to examine the forms of injustice; the gang want to hear more about the sharing of women and children in the perfectly just state. Socrates engages with Glaucon (450d):

“… there’s a certain hesitation about getting involved in it, for fear that the argument (ὁ λόγος) might seem to be a prayer, my dear comrade.”

“Don’t hesitate,” he said. “Your audience won’t be hard-hearted, or distrustful, or ill-willed.”

And I said, “Best of men, presumably you’re saying that because you wish to encourage me?”

“I am,” he said.

“Well, you’re doing exactly the opposite,” I said. “If I believed I knew whereof I speak, it would be a fine exhortation …”

Where Bloom has “prayer,” Shorey has “wish-thought”; I looked at the Greek word, euchê (ἡ εὐχή), in an earlier post, “Why the Polity.” As for Bloom’s “hard-hearted, or distrustful, or ill-willed,” Shorey has “inconsiderate nor distrustful nor hostile.” The Greek is ἀγνώμονες οὔτε ἄπιστοι οὔτε δύσνοι. I should like to interpret the middle adjective as “skeptical,” though the LSJ does not offer that translation. In any case, I want to see whatever it is that skepticism directed at Collingwood can come up with.

In Religion and Public Doctrine in Modern England (pages 186–8), Cowling first has a neutral description of Collingwood’s draft essay:

Man Goes Mad was written in August 1936 after Neville Chamberlain had announced that the League of Nations was in disarray and that League-based sanctions against Italy had been the ‘very midsummer of madness’ … Collingwood’s paper … claimed that English statesmen

• were lending themselves to ‘modern war’ with its
  • imprecision of objective and
  • ‘quasi-religious character’, and
• were doing so in a way that would turn
  • ‘parliamentary’ into
  • ‘authoritarian government’

  by removing the essential characteristic of a liberal state, ‘the dialectical solution’ – ‘free discussion’ of all political problems leading to the establishment of ‘common grounds on which to act’.

An ensuing remark seems to discount that Collingwood died in early 1943, The New Leviathan having been published in 1942:

Collingwood

• was depressed by the death of Liberalism and
• tried to provide a philosophical resuscitation.

This was not really proceeded with, unless The New Leviathan is regarded as its completion. There can be no doubt, however, that he

• connected
  • the death of Civilization with
  • the death of Liberalism and
• explained both in terms of the predominance of Realism.

Now the intemperance comes out.

In reading Collingwood’s later political ravings, one is reminded of Popper’s The Open Society and Its Enemies which was written at much the same time as The New Leviathan, and was subject to the same sort of hysteria. Even if realism was mistaken or psychology a misconception, it was absurd to imagine that thought-fashions could destroy civilization so simply, or, assuming that they could, that the way in which Collingwood put the matter showed any better sense than Popper of the relationship between thought and practice.

As far as I can tell, what Cowling calls absurd is simply the conviction that it matters what we think, so that we ought to think well. Collingwood seems to have shared this conviction with Plato. With somebody truly bereft of this conviction, it is impossible to engage in dialectic, or dialogue in the strictest sense. An example of such a person would seem to be the US president of 2017–21, perhaps along with some other business leaders and politicians.

I acknowledged the existence of such people in “Antitheses,” my “attempt at a dialectical understanding of freedom and responsibility, punishment and forgiveness, things like that.” I said, “Formal rules granting freedom of speech are good; but once they are written down, somebody can figure out how to abuse them.” The same is becoming true of the rule that you don’t have to talk to anybody who is not arguing in good faith.

Presumably Maurice Cowling did believe in the value of thinking, or else he would not have written his books; but the conclusion is not automatic.

As for Karl Popper (1902–94), If Cowling thought he was hysterical, what about certain persons using or abusing his ideas today? In “Biological History” I quoted activists in Edinburgh who had written, “We have to be intolerant of intolerance in order to have a tolerant society.” They were explaining why they could not tolerate a screening of the film Adult Human Female. I suspect that the activists were influenced, directly or indirectly, by what Popper says in the work that Cowling mentions and that is quoted in the Wikipedia article, “Paradox of Tolerance”:

If we extend unlimited tolerance even to those who are intolerant, if we are not prepared to defend a tolerant society against the onslaught of the intolerant, then the tolerant will be destroyed, and tolerance with them … We should therefore claim, in the name of tolerance, the right not to tolerate the intolerant. We should claim that any movement preaching intolerance places itself outside the law and we should consider incitement to intolerance and persecution as criminal, in the same way as we should consider incitement to murder, or to kidnapping, or to the revival of the slave trade, as criminal.

That’s from note 4 to Chapter 7, called “The Principle of Leadership,” falling in the part called “Plato’s Political Programme” of Volume I, The Spell of Plato. The note elaborates on the paradox of freedom described in the main text:

The free man, Plato suggests, may exercise his absolute freedom, first by defying the laws and ultimately by defying freedom itself and by clamouring for a tyrant.

The note describes a similar paradox of democracy: “the majority may decide that a tyrant should rule.” Popper’s answer is,

We demand a government that rules according to the principles of equalitarianism and protectionism; that tolerates all who are prepared to reciprocate, i.e. who are tolerant; that is controlled by, and accountable to, the public. And we may add that some form of majority vote, together with institutions for keeping the public well informed, is the best, though not infallible, means of controlling such a government. (No infallible means exist.)

The parenthetical remark at the end explains why the paradoxes arise. A paradox is not a contradiction, but something that needs careful attention. In mathematics, paradoxes such as those named for Russell and Skolem are theorems that are hard to understand.

The young people working violently to prevent the screening of a film such as Adult Human Female: do they even try to understand the paradox of tolerance? The ellipsis in my first quotation of Popper includes the following.

I do not imply, for instance, that we should always suppress the utterance of intolerant philosophies; as long as we can counter them by rational argument and keep them in check by public opinion, suppression would certainly be most unwise. But we should claim the right to suppress them if necessary even by force; for it may easily turn out that they are not prepared to meet us on the level of rational argument, but begin by denouncing all argument; they may forbid their followers to listen to rational argument, because it is deceptive, and teach them to answer arguments by the use of their fists or pistols.

The Edinburgh activists would seem to be forbidding anybody from listening to certain arguments. Helen Joyce has an explanation in Trans (chapter 11, “Behind the Scenes,” page 224):

What same-sex marriage, women’s franchise and the end of segregation all have in common is that they extend the rights of a privileged group to everyone. And when people hear the phrase ‘trans rights’, they assume something similar is being demanded … What campaigners mean by ‘trans rights’ is gender self-identification …

This is not a human right at all. It is a demand that everyone else lose their rights to single-sex spaces, services and activities … When you want new laws, you can focus on lobbying, rather than the painstaking business of building broad-based coalitions. And when those laws will take away other people’s rights, it is not only unnecessary to build public awareness – it is imperative to keep the public in the dark.

A difficulty here is that, as far as I can tell, trans women (transwomen, trans-identified males), or at least certain vocal ones, do see women as composing a privileged group. Nonetheless, they don’t exactly want to abolish the privileges of the group. Instead, they want to join it, when the only basis for its existence is something that you have to be born with. In “Biological History,” I noted how the British aristocracy was another such group. A character in a Maugham story wished he could be a member, and he pretended to be a member; but since he was not actually a member, he lost the ability to think clearly when it mattered.

Perhaps one could say that Captain Forestier in “The Lion’s Skin” became hysterical. If Collingwood and Popper were hysterical, by Maurice Cowling’s account, some activists today are even more so. In the UK, according to the BBC (June 10, 2023),

Puberty blockers will only be prescribed to children attending gender identity services as part of clinical research, NHS England has announced.

Journalist India Willoughby (born 1965, like me) calls this

Pure bigotry from this rotten Gov and their network of lackeys within institutions. Cass Review another stitch-up. Puberty blockers have been used since the 1970s – and non-trans kids will still get them. It’s groundless discrimination.

Barrister Jolyon Maugham (born 1971) says says of the new policy on puberty-blockers,

We will look back on this time as one of great national shame, when we prioritised maintaining conservative gender norms above care for those who need it. And the culture warriors, who lack both professional expertise and lived experience, will be firmly to blame.

As I understand, particularly from Helen Joyce, most children with gender dysphoria will outgrow it and will probably (like one of Joyce’s sons) turn out to be gay. However, some children will not outgrow their dysphoria; instead, they will want to undergo gender-reassignment. This reassignment has better results if performed on people who have not completed puberty, especially male puberty. The drugs called puberty-blockers will do what they are named for. There are now two possible courses of action, each seemingly reasonable, but incompatible with one another.

1. Give puberty-blockers to gender-dysphoric children, with the idea that

   • if they outgrow their dysphoria, they can stop the drugs and resume puberty;
   • if they remain dysphoric, they can better approximate the sex they want to be (or are convinced they are).

2. Alternatively, let all children undergo puberty, because this is what will resolve their dysphoria, if it is going to be resolved.

Thinking of my own experience of growing up, I can propose only puberty as the reason why I got over the picky eating habits of my childhood. I wrote about this in a post on the chapter of Collingwood’s New Leviathan that took up desire. In a post “On Being Given to Know,” I suggested that the fantasy mentioned in the title, which I took to be the fantasy of people like Ray Kurzweil (born 1948), was a desire to have what is effectively a puberty-accelerator. The fantasy is to have the experience of, say, finishing Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, without having to work through each page.

Of the two possible approaches with puberty-blockers, the first one has indeed not worked out, according to Joyce in Trans (chapter 4, “Child, Interrupted,” page 73):

Of the seventy children enrolled in a study between 2000 and 2007, every single one progressed to cross-sex hormones. Almost all had surgery at age eighteen: the removal of any breast tissue that had developed despite the blockers and sometimes phalloplasties … for the females; and castration and vaginoplasty for the males.

… It beggars belief that clinicians somehow learned to predict exactly which children would persist, exactly when they started using puberty blockers. Far more plausible is that puberty blockers, as well as blocking the physical changes that puberty brings, also blocked the developmental process whereby gender dysphoria often resolves.

One may still ask whether “natural” resolution of gender dysphoria is better than medical resolution.

I see dialectical engagement with the documentary Adult Human Female in a review by somebody in the “collective of UK solicitors and barristers” who write the Legal Feminist blog:

Does that original category, for whom the GRA was introduced, still need its protection? Is it proportionate to jettison their protections because members of a much wider group are now seeking to claim those protections? The film does not explore this, no doubt because it is a film made by and about women, but it would be an interesting topic for a post screening discussion.

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[It] is risible to suggest … that the film is so subversive as to be worthy of blocking.

As for the “group of protesters” at Edinburgh University who “managed to block this screening” of Adult Human Female, the “Statement from the anti-terf protest” attributed to them includes the following:

I invite anyone on the opposing side of the debate to provide suitable scientific evidence that legislation or policy prohibiting transgender individuals from accessing the gender-appropriate bathrooms provides a benefit which outweighs these drawbacks.

Unfortunately this person is not really interested in debate, much less dialogue, or else they wouldn’t be trying to prevent the screening of a film.