Polytropy

At the beginning of the first post “On Dialectic,” I raised the question of why I put so much into such posts. I propose now a couple of answers.

1. I want to collect all evidence for what I am investigating – currently dialectic in Plato’s Republic. As Arthur Conan Doyle (1859–1930) has Sherlock Holmes say in A Study in Scarlet (1887; Wordsworth Classics, 2004),

   It is a capital mistake to theorize before you have all the evidence. It biases the judgment.

   And yet in Religion and Philosophy (1916), Collingwood states “the fundamental axiom of all thinking,”

   namely that whatever exists stands in some definite relation to the other things that exist.

   Thus “all the evidence” is everything in the world.

2. I am engaged in such self-defense as a certain Islamic philosopher is, by the account of Strauss in Persecution and the Art of Writing (1952):

   Fārābī avails himself then of the specific immunity of the commentator or of the historian in order to speak his mind concerning grave matters in his “historical” works, rather than in the works in which he speaks in his own name.

I shall not look at any new passages of the Republic, but shall continue with

• the proof in Book X of the immortality of the soul, introduced in the first post;
• the noble art of contradiction from Book V, taken up in “More on Dialectic.”

The present post has the following sections, which I list with sources quoted (other than Plato):

• Poison
  • Jesus in Mark on what goes in and comes out of you;
  • Jonathan Haidt on how the trouble with young people is a belief that words can be violent;
  • John Warner, who understands the trouble differently.
• Logic
  • Collingwood on interconnectedness;
  • Lord Acton, on history, morality, and slavery;
  • Robert E. Lee, in correspondence with Acton;
  • a mathematician’s blog post on how to be antiracist;
  • Arthur Conan Doyle, as Sherlock Holmes.
• Contradicting
  • Tolstoy on how young people talk;
  • Collingwood on logic;
  • Aristotle on what we do generally.
• Neuroscience
  • a Nature article on a neuroscientist and a philosopher who expect a mechanical explanation of consciousness;
  • examples from Xenophon and Demosthenes given by Smyth concerning the grammar of agency;
  • Jesus in Matthew on human worth.
• Writing
  • Strauss on
    • his own preference for philosophy over morality,
    • Farabi as disguising his true beliefs;
  • Bloom on the Republic;
  • Ryle and Bloom on one another;
  • Johann Hari on going without the internet;
  • the Quran on Muslim faith;
  • Maugham on reincarnation.

Poison

When I started, I called dialectic the art of conversing. I reported how it could be harmful, according to a psychologist writing in 2017. Lisa Feldman Barrett distinguished between abusive and merely offensive speech, suggesting the former should be banned; but who would make the distinction?

I brought in a part of the Republic that was not explicitly about dialectic. In proving the immortality of the soul in Book X, Socrates uses the premise stated at 609a (in Bloom’s translation):

the evil naturally connected with each thing and its particular badness destroys it, or if this doesn’t destroy it, surely there is nothing else that could still corrupt it.

Poisonous chemicals and poisonous speech will not destroy you, unless you somehow let it happen. One might see this idea in Mark 7:15:

There is nothing from without a man, that entering into him can defile him: but the things which come out of him, those are they that defile the man.

οὐδέν ἐστιν ἔξωθεν τοῦ ἀνθρώπου εἰσπορευόμενον εἰς αὐτὸν ὃ δύναται κοινῶσαι αὐτόν: ἀλλὰ τὰ ἐκ τοῦ ἀνθρώπου ἐκπορευόμενά ἐστιν τὰ κοινοῦντα τὸν ἄνθρωπον.

Perhaps Jesus is distinguishing between the letter and the spirit of the law; I talked about this in “Antitheses.”

As for Socrates, one might see his idea in a newsletter issue from last winter called “Why the Mental Health of Liberal Girls Sank First and Fastest” (March 9, 2023). Jonathan Haidt explains his title:

In conclusion, I believe that Greg Lukianoff was exactly right in the diagnosis he shared with me in 2014. Many young people had suddenly – around 2013 – embraced three great untruths:

They came to believe that they were fragile and would be harmed by books, speakers, and words, which they learned were forms of violence (Great Untruth #1).

They came to believe that their emotions – especially their anxieties – were reliable guides to reality (Great Untruth #2).

They came to see society as comprised of victims and oppressors – good people and bad people (Great Untruth #3).

Liberals embraced these beliefs more than conservatives. Young liberal women adopted them more than any other group due to their heavier use of social media and their participation in online communities that developed new disempowering ideas. These cognitive distortions then caused them to become more anxious and depressed than other groups.

I don’t know whether they recognize Collingwood’s “relativity of causes,” which I took up in “On Causation.” Identifying a cause of a problem should mean identifying a solution. Haidt proposes a couple of solutions, summarized in section heads:

1. Universities and other schools should stop performing reverse CBT on their students
2. The US Congress should raise the age of “internet adulthood” from 13 to 16 or 18

The first solution seems to recognize that poison alone cannot harm you; the second, that it can be hard not to let poison harm you.

In The Happiness Hypothesis (2006), Jonathan Haidt distinguishes between “character ethics” and “quandary ethics”; I looked at this distinction in the same post on the “Desire” chapter of Collingwood’s New Leviathan where I took up eating; as I mentioned in the first post “On Dialectic,” my own picky eating resolved with puberty, just as, supposedly, gender dysphoria usually resolves, if it is allowed to.

Concerning what’s bothering young people today, John Warner disagreed with Haidt in “Teen Mental Health Distress Didn’t Start with the Phones” (March 12, 2023):

I also saw significant evidence of student mental health distress that is rooted in years earlier than 2012. After years of seeing this with my own eyes, in 2012 … I wrote about the high incidence of students crying in my office …

These students were not experiencing distress because a switch had been thrown on social media in 2012 as Haidt contends. They were operating under years of stress and had reached a breaking point.

Now we are back to dialectic, because Warner does allow its possibility:

I recognize that I have more work to do to engage with Jonathan Haidt’s full theory of the case when it comes to the mental health of young people, and in the end, I think we will find significant agreement in terms of the necessary remedies to help those young people thrive in today’s world.

Logic

I am trying to connect things in recent and ancient texts. Any two things are connected, by what Collingwood calls “the fundamental axiom of all thinking”; this is in Religion and Philosophy (1916; pages 196–7; bolding mine):

“Cheap and easy” are almost permanent epithets for the type of theory called monism, which explains reality as issuing from a single principle … But monism properly understood is only another word for the fundamental axiom of all thinking, namely that whatever exists stands in some definite relation to the other things that exist. And the essence of dualism or pluralism is that it catalogues the things that exist without sufficiently determining these interrelations.

I shall be looking at mind-body dualism later; it is another place where Socrates’s proof of the immortality of the soul may be useful. Meanwhile, in my gathering of evidence, I might be accused of resembling Sherlock Holmes, who was ridiculed first by another fictional detective, then by Collingwood in The Idea of History (1993/1946; pages 280–1). First Collingwood gives a version of the principle above:

everything in the world is potential evidence for any subject whatever.

How then can the researcher get anything done? Research does get done, and Collingwood explains it as follows.

… every time the historian asks a question, he asks it because he thinks he can answer it: that is to say, he has already in his mind a preliminary and tentative idea of the evidence he will be able to use …

It was a correct understanding of this truth that underlay Lord Acton’s great precept, ‘Study problems, not periods.’

As I understand the argument of “Historical Evidence” – originally meant to be the first chapter, called “Evidence,” of “The Principles of History,” and printed as such in a posthumous work, The Principles of History and other writings in philosophy of history (1999) – every science, or at least every ordinary science, infers its results from what Collingwood now calls “grounds,” though I would identify these with the hypotheses taken up last time. The passage from hypothesis to conclusion is by means of a logic.

1. The logic of mathematics (“exact science”) is deductive and thus compulsive.
2. The logic of a natural science such as meteorology or chemistry is inductive and thus merely permissive; reason for taking its permission comes from elsewhere, namely Christian theology.
3. The logic of history has no name. It has been thought merely permissive, but is properly compulsive.

In “What It Takes,” I looked at

• Alexandre Kojève’s article, “The Christian Origin of Modern Science”;
• what Collingwood has to say on the same theme in An Essay on Metaphysics.

The hypotheses or grounds of history are called evidence. You may think that this evidence consists of other people’s words, so that to do history is to

• gather up a lot of those words,
• pick out the ones you like,
• paraphrase them.

Perhaps George Grote derived his History of Greece from Herodotus and Thucydides this way: Collingwood invites us to see how far this is true, but I have not done it.

It is better to think of evidence as consisting of your own words, or rather your own understanding, concerning something in front of you. What is in front of you could indeed be somebody else’s words; it could also be a potsherd or a landscape.

From work of others, I pick out a lot of words to include in my posts. Having them on the screen of computer with internet access may lead me to do more.

I have returned to Collingwood’s account of evidence a number of times since first buying a copy of The Idea of History in the early aughts in a leftist Ankara bookshop called İlhanilhan. The founder had named the shop in memory of his brother, İlhan Erdost, killed in prison after the military coup of 1980. I have probably spent more time reading Collingwood’s words on evidence as they appear in The Principles of History …, which I must have ordered when I somehow learned of its existence. I set down Collingwood’s words now with the sense that they are relevant to my current project.

I mentioned the logics of exact, natural, and historical sciences; but there are also philosophical sciences, and I suppose their logic would have to be “through-logic” or “dia-logic,” that is, dialectic. Moreover, the logics of the ordinary sciences are used for proving conclusions, not discovering them in the first place; that this discovery itself is dialectical is how I read a remark of Collingwood at the beginning of “Evidence”:

The knowledge in virtue of which a man is an historian is a knowledge of what the evidence at his disposal proves about certain events. If he or somebody else could have the very same knowledge of the very same events by way of memory, or second sight, or some Wellsian machine for looking backwards through time, this would not be historical knowledge; and the proof would be that he could not produce, either to himself or to any other critic of his claims, the evidence from which he had derived it.

As distinct from revealed knowledge, if there be such a thing, historical knowledge – scientific knowledge in general – is such that you can and do come to agreement with others about it.

I hadn’t thought of all of this when first quoting Collingwood on the interconnectedness of things.

Neither had I learned about Lord Acton; but he turns out to be relevant too.

John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton (1832–1902) was among other things an historian; more than that, he understood what it took to be an historian, at least in Collingwood’s judgment. Acton said, “study problems in preference to periods,” in his “Inaugural Lecture on the Study of History,” addressed to “Fellow Students” at Cambridge University in 1895. Acton could not be one of those students at the usual age, because he was Catholic. He recited a list of precepts that he said were too well known to dwell on (the bullets are mine):

I shall never again enjoy the opportunity of speaking my thoughts to such an audience as this, and on so privileged an occasion a lecturer may well be tempted to bethink himself whether he knows of any neglected truth, any cardinal proposition, that might serve as his selected epigraph, as a last signal, perhaps even as a target. I am not thinking of those shining precepts which are the registered property of every school; that is to say –

• Learn as much by writing as by reading;
• be not content with the best book;
• seek sidelights from the others;
• have no favourites;
• keep men and things apart;
• guard against the prestige of great names;
• see that your judgments are your own, and
• do not shrink from disagreement;
• no trusting without testing;
• be more severe to ideas than to actions;
• do not overlook the strength of the bad cause or the weakness of the good;
• never be surprised by the crumbling of an idol or the disclosure of a skeleton;
• judge talent at its best and character at its worst;
• suspect power more than vice, and
• study problems in preference to periods; for instance: the derivation of Luther, the scientific influence of Bacon, the predecessors of Adam Smith, the medieval masters of Rousseau, the consistency of Burke, the identity of the first Whig.

Most of this, I suppose, is undisputed, and calls for no enlargement.

Collingwood is not the only person to abbreviate Acton’s words to “study problems, not periods,” or to take them as more significant than what Acton goes on to say:

But the weight of opinion is against me when I exhort I exhort you never to debase the moral currency or to lower the standard of rectitude, but to try others by the final maxim that governs your own lives, and to suffer no man and no cause to escape the undying penalty which history has the power to inflict on wrong.

As far as I can tell, Acton condemns those who would excuse the Crusaders for having begun by killing Jews. It sounds as if he might agree with the mathematician who suggested,

try to figure out if any buildings on your campus are named after famous bigots … In my view this is more than just a symbolic act – I can only imagine how unpleasant it would be to live or work in a building named after someone dedicated to enslaving your ancestors.

Perhaps one’s grounds for action should be more than imagined unpleasantness, particularly when it is imagined on behalf of other people, but not in dialogue with them. In any case, if you look up Acton himself on Wikipedia, you can find out that he wrote as follows to Robert E. Lee, just after the American Civil War.

I saw in State Rights the only availing check upon the absolutism of the sovereign will, and secession filled me with hope, not as the destruction but as the redemption of Democracy. The institutions of your Republic have not exercised on the old world the salutary and liberating influence which ought to have belonged to them, by reason of those defects and abuses of principle which the Confederate Constitution was expressly and wisely calculated to remedy … I deemed that you were fighting the battles of our liberty, our progress, and our civilization …

Lee’s reply included the assertion,

Although the South would have preferred any honorable compromise to the fratricidal war which has taken place, she now accepts in good faith its constitutional results, and receives without reserve the amendment which has already been made to the constitution for the extinction of slavery. That is an event that has been long sought, though in a different way, and by none has it been more earnestly desired than by citizens of Virginia.

This raises various questions, such as whether it isn’t, at best, what Helen Joyce called, in words I looked at last time, “describing the wished-for world as if it already existed.” Now I am just going to return to Collingwood, who was saying that, since everything in the world was potential evidence, you could not collect actual evidence unless you had a question it might answer.

… It was a correct understanding of the same truth that led Monsieur Hercule Poirot to pour scorn on the ‘human blood-hound’ who crawls about the floor trying to collect everything, no matter what, which might conceivably turn out to be a clue.

Perhaps Collingwood, or Agatha Christie, had another example in mind, but in “The Boscombe Valley Mystery” (The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, 1892; Penguin Popular Classics, 1994), by crawling around the scene of the crime, Holmes is able to infer that the murderer

Is a tall man, left-handed, limps with the right leg, wears thick-soled shooting-boots and a grey cloak, smokes Indian cigars, uses a cigar-holder, and carries a blunt pen-knife in his pocket.

However, my sense is that this information is not for solving the crime, but for

• giving the chance to solve it to somebody else (Lestrade of Scotland Yard) and
• convincing the criminal and the jury, if need be, that the crime has been solved.

Holmes has trained himself to notice things that others don’t. Only after my own training on a farm could I

• impulsively pick a weed from a lawn;
• recognize an eggplant growing just behind the chain-link fence in front of somebody’s house.

I don’t know how much gardening Collingwood did, but he did archeology, and this helped make him bold to say, in Speculum Mentis (1924),

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’ …

I looked more at that passage in the first post “On Dialectic.” Below I’m going to look at how the “logic of question and answer,” described by Collingwood in An Autobiography (1939), gives a better account than the conventional “propositional logic” of what we do when we are really trying to work something out.

Contradicting

Again, I said in that first post that dialectic was the art of conversing. In one sense, this is an art that Tolstoy gives to Anna Pavlovna, but not to Pierre, in Chapter 2 of War and Peace, here in the Maude translation, revised by Amy Mandelker:

Pierre now committed a reverse act of impoliteness. First he had left a lady before she had finished speaking to him, and now he continued to speak to another who wished to get away. With his head bent, and his big feet spread apart, he began explaining his reasons for thinking the abbé’s plan chimerical.

‘We will talk of it later,’ said Anna Pavlovna with a smile.

And having got rid of this young man who did not know how to behave, she resumed her duties as hostess and continued to listen and watch, ready to help at any point where the conversation might happen to flag. As the foreman of a spinning-mill when he has set the hands to work, goes round and notices, here a spindle that has stopped or there one that creaks or makes more noise than it should, and hastens to check the machine or set it in proper motion, so Anna Pavlovna moved about her drawing-room, approaching now a silent, now a too noisy group, and by a word or slight rearrangement kept the conversational machine in steady, proper and regular motion. But amid these cares her anxiety about Pierre was evident. She kept an anxious watch on him when he approached the group round Mortemart to listen to what was being said there, and again when he passed to another group whose centre was the abbé.

Pierre had been educated abroad, and this reception at Anna Pavlovna’s was the first he had attended in Russia. He knew that all the intellectual lights of Petersburg were gathered there and, like a child in a toy shop, did not know which way to look, afraid of missing any clever conversation that was to be heard. Seeing the self-confident and refined expression on the faces of those present he was always expecting to hear something very profound. At last he came up to Morio. Here the conversation seemed interesting and he stood waiting for an opportunity to express his own views, as young people are fond of doing.

Tolstoy wrote a lot in War and Peace, and apparently he wasn’t sure what he was doing; but I looked at this in “Creativity.”

As for looking for an opportunity to express our own views, not only young people are fond of this. It was a joke in my family that the ear was an organ for detecting a pause in the conversation; and the reason to detect a pause was not to step in like Anna Pavlovna and get other people to keep talking.

If you don’t want to give the floor to somebody else, you have to keep up the flow of your own words. Myself, I want to hear what others have to say; still, I don’t like being contradicted by people who haven’t understood what I’m saying. I used to get contradicted when I talked (or rather wrote) about art on the basis of The Principles of Art (1938). This was the first and, for about ten years, the only work of Collingwood that I had read (except for Herbert Read’s quotation from Speculum Mentis at the beginning of A Concise History of Modern Painting). I am not going to try to talk more here about that particular experience of being contradicted; however, something that somehow comes out of it is the “Art” chapter of the document introduced in “Discrete Logarithms.”

People enjoy applying what Socrates calls “the contradicting art” (in Bloom’s translation) or “the art of contradiction” (in Shorey’s). This is in a passage that I looked at last time: Republic Book V, 454a, where dialectic is distinguished from eristic. The passage begins with Socrates’s report,

ἦ γενναία, ἦν δ᾽ ἐγώ, ὦ Γλαύκων, ἡ δύναμις τῆς ἀντιλογικῆς τέχνης.

Better than Bloom’s translation is Shorey’s, for following the order of Socrates’s noun phrases (given in the Greek with no copula):

“What a grand thing, Glaucon,” said I, “is the power of the art of contradiction!”

Here comes another reason for lengthening a blog post: exploration of a word. “Grand” is not one of the suggested translations of γενναῖος in the lexicon of Liddell and Scott, revised by Jones; we could say “noble” or “high-minded.” Shorey still praises the lexicon for recognizing that the “Eleatic Stranger” uses the adjective ironically in the Sophist (231b):

Then let it be agreed that part of the discriminating art is purification (ἔστω δὴ διακριτικῆς τέχνης καθαρτική), and as part of purification let that which is concerned with the soul be separated off, and as part of this, instruction, and as part of instruction, education; and let us agree that the cross-questioning of empty conceit of wisdom, which has come to light in our present discussion, is nothing else than the true-born art of sophistry (ἡ γένει γενναία σοφιστική).

I am not going to look at the Sophist any more here. I don’t think I’ve read it since college, at least not in its entirety. I’ve read the Theaetetus again, having bought the Loeb edition to do so, and the same volume does contain the Sophist – naturally enough, since its dramatic date is the day after that of the Theaetetus.

I went back to the Thaeatetus again after a logic conference in 2007. I talked about why I did that when I blogged on the “Reason” chapter of Collingwood’s New Leviathan (1942). Briefly, even professional philosophers apply to Plato (and anything else that draws their attention) the noble art of contradiction.

Collingwood refers to this art as propositional logic in An Autobiography. He does not mean what I defined as propositional logic in “Gödel, Grammar, and Mathematics.” That propositional logic is part of formal or symbolic logic, which is what you get when you turn Collingwood’s propositional logic into mathematics.

As Collingwood says (page 34),

According to propositional logic … truth or falsehood, which are what logic is chiefly concerned with, belongs to propositions as such. This doctrine was often expressed by calling the proposition the ‘unit of thought’ …

This is in “Question and Answer,” the chapter of An Autobiography named for a logic that better accounts for what actually happens in pursuits of truth. Such pursuits include “my ordinary work as a philosopher or historian” (page 37). They presumably include also the work of the mathematician or the biologist. Such pursuits are hypothetical, in the sense discussed in the last post, “More on Dialectic.” In “What Mathematics Is,” I said (and tried to explain how) “Mathematics is the science whose findings are proved by deduction.” A deduction shows that some conclusion is a necessary consequence of some hypothesis, not that the conclusion is true in isolation.

In life in general, much of what we do is in pursuit of something, as Aristotle observes at the beginning of the Nicomachean Ethics – which is on my mind, since a Catherine-Project discussion of it has just begun:

The translation is by Roger Crisp (Cambridge University Press, 2000); the lining it up with the Greek original, mine. Aristotle seems well suited to this lining up, especially if the works attributed to him are indeed lecture notes. Maybe elsewhere in his lectures, Aristotle distinguishes the four kinds of doing things that he mentions above; but here the point seems to be that just about everything we do has a point. However, that point is not usually the truth; if we have to give it one name, we can call it the good.

Neuroscience

There are two scientists who seem to be pursuing the truth about consciousness. Although they haven’t found it, they trust one another’s judgment on what it will mean to find it. At any rate,

In 1998, neuroscientist Christof Koch bet philosopher David Chalmers that the mechanism by which the brain’s neurons produce consciousness would be discovered by 2023. Both scientists agreed publicly on 23 June [2023] … that it is an ongoing quest – and declared Chalmers the winner.

I question the hypothesis here. No mechanism produces consciousness, any more than a computer produces the words that you are reading. I produce the words, and you reproduce them (in the sense of reading them), by means of computers. This is how Socrates talked about getting sick, in the passage of Republic Book X (609e) that I have already mentioned and that I took up a couple of times in the first post “On Dialectic”: rotten foods do not make us sick, but our body does, by means of the foods.

By means of the contradicting art, one may point out that my summary of Socrates’s words is contradicted by published translations, which do not actually refer to bad foods as means of getting sick. Having mentioned the foods, and then the body, Socrates says that we shall say,

αὐτὸ δι᾽ ἐκεῖνα ὑπὸ τῆς αὑτοῦ κακίας νόσου οὔσης ἀπολωλέναι.

It through them by the of-itself badness disease being to-be-destroyed. (verbatim)

That due to them it was destroyed by its own vice, which is disease. (Bloom)

That it is destroyed owing to these foods, but by its own vice, which is disease. (Shorey)

The bolded phrase is composed of the preposition διά and the neuter accusative plural of the demonstrative pronoun ἐκεῖνος. The preposition can also be followed by a substantive in the genitive case. According to Smyth (¶ 1685, 2d), the genitive signifies direct agency; the accusative, indirect:

• διά with gen. is used of an agent employed to bring about an intended result;
• διά with accus. is used of a person, thing, or state beyond our control (accidental agency).

Smyth’s examples include the following, from Xenophon’s Cyropedia:

• νόμοι, δι’ ὧν ἐλευθὲριος ὁ βίος παρασκευασθήσεται “laws, by means of which a life of freedom will be provided”;
• διὰ τοὺς νόμους βελτίους γιγνόμενοι “men become better thanks to the laws.”

However, “Sometimes there is little difference between the two cases”; the example is Demosthenes, who in speaking “On the Crown” says,

He was so nervous, and so much worried by the fear that, in spite of his Thracian success, his enterprise would slip from his fingers if you should intervene before the Phocians perished, that he made a new bargain with this vile creature – all by himself this time, not in common with his colleagues – to make that speech and to render that report to you, by which all was lost (δι᾽ ὧν ἅπαντ᾽ ἀπώλετο).

Two paragraphs later:

What then were the speeches he made at that crisis – the speeches that brought everything to ruin (δι᾽ οὓς ἅπαντ᾽ ἀπώλετο)? He told you that you need not be excited because Philip had passed Thermopylae …

None of Smyth’s awesome scholarship tells us what Socrates has to mean. He is arguing for the immortality of the soul, something that Glaucon seems never to have thought of. The gods may be immortal, and apotheosis may be possible; but that each of us is already immortal is a new idea.

Our bodies are not immortal, and this is somehow why our souls are immortal. Pathogens don’t kill the body; diseases do. Indeed, if we leave out the bolded phrase in the quotation of Socrates, what is left can be put in the active form: “We shall say that its own vice, which is disease, kills the body.” Disease may be somehow provoked, as by bad food; but if the body is really going to get sick, it has to allow itself to be provoked.

There are diseases of the soul, and Glaucon names them (609b–c):

all the things that we were just now enumerating,
injustice and licentiousness and cowardice and ignorance.

ἃ νυν δὴ διῇμεν πάντα,
ἀδικία τε καὶ ἀκολασία καὶ δειλία καὶ ἀμαθία.

Glaucon has already shown himself susceptible to arguments by analogy with the body. Back at the end of Book IV (445a–b), he allowed as how nothing would compensate for a corrupt body, much less a corrupt soul. In Book II (Book II, 372c), he interrupted Socrates’s account of primitive village life by saying

You seem to make these men have their feast without relishes.
Ἄνευ ὄψου … ὡς ἔοικας, ποιεῖς τοὺς ἄνδρας ἑστιωμένους.

Socrates’s wish for Glaucon is

• not that he grant the truth of the proposition that the soul is immortal,
• but that he live a better life.

Glaucon may do this by recognizing his own value. Jesus teaches this value to his own followers in the Sermon on the Mount, without reference to immortality, in the latter part of Matthew 6:

24 No man can serve two masters: for either he will hate the one, and love the other; or else he will hold to the one, and despise the other. Ye cannot serve God and mammon.
25 Therefore I say unto you, Take no thought for your life, what ye shall eat, or what ye shall drink; nor yet for your body, what ye shall put on. Is not the life more than meat, and the body than raiment?
26 Behold the fowls of the air: for they sow not, neither do they reap, nor gather into barns; yet your heavenly Father feedeth them. Are ye not much better than they?
27 Which of you by taking thought can add one cubit unto his stature?
28 And why take ye thought for raiment? Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow; they toil not, neither do they spin:
29 And yet I say unto you, That even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these.
30 Wherefore, if God so clothe the grass of the field, which to day is, and to morrow is cast into the oven, shall he not much more clothe you, O ye of little faith?
31 Therefore take no thought, saying, What shall we eat? or, What shall we drink? or, Wherewithal shall we be clothed?
32 (For after all these things do the Gentiles seek:) for your heavenly Father knoweth that ye have need of all these things.
33 But seek ye first the kingdom of God, and his righteousness; and all these things shall be added unto you.
34 Take therefore no thought for the morrow: for the morrow shall take thought for the things of itself. Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof.

The neuroscientist and the philosopher could use the lesson of Socrates, if not Jesus. According to the account by Mariana Lenharo that I was quoting from Nature (Vol 619, 6 July 2023, pages 14–5),

Consciousness is everything that a person experiences – what they taste, hear, feel and more. It is what gives meaning and value to our lives, Chalmers says.

However, despite a vast effort, researchers still don’t understand how our brains produce it. “It started off as a very big philosophical mystery,” Chalmers adds. “But over the years, it’s gradually been transmuting into, if not a ‘scientific’ mystery, at least one that we can get a partial grip on scientifically.”

I propose that consciousness is

• not what the person experiences,
• but the person who experiences – and who engages in the activities that Aristotle mentions at the beginning of the Ethics.

That we can do these things is somehow owing to the brain, as disease may be owing to pathogens; but the brain and the pathogens are not enough. The consciousness and the body respectively have to be “susceptible.” As we cannot understand why a pathogen makes us sick, just by studying the pathogen itself, so we cannot understand why we do what we do, just by studying the body with which we do it.

Writing

As there is an art of conversing, so there is one of writing. Leo Strauss writes about it in a book called Persecution and the Art of Writing, mentioned in the Wikipedia article called “Allegorical interpretations of Plato.” The article on Strauss’s book itself lacked a list of its contents until I added it:

1. “Introduction”
2. “Persecution and the Art of Writing”
3. “The Literary Character of the Guide to the Perplexed”
4. “The Law of Reason in the Kuzari”
5. “How to Study Spinoza’s Theologico-Political Treatise”

I have read the first two chapters, but am not likely to read the others before reading the works that they are about. Strauss explains that his Introduction is based on his article, “Fārābī’s Plato.” Türkiye (formerly Turkey) has a Farabi Exchange Program, for movement of students and faculty between Turkish institutions only; I wonder whether whoever named the program knew the kinds of things that Strauss has to say about the eponym of the program.

In explaining Plato’s philosophy, Farabi omits the immortality of the soul; therefore, according to Strauss, Farabi must not believe in this immortality.

Fārābī … was so much inspired by Plato’s Republic that he presented the whole of philosophy proper within a political framework.

According to Fārābī … philosophy by itself is not only necessary but sufficient for producing happiness …

The praise of philosophy is meant to rule out any claims of cognitive value which may be raised on behalf of religion in general and of revealed religion in particular. For the philosophy on which Fārābī bestows his unqualified praise, is the philosophy of the pagans Plato and Aristotle.

… in his commentary on the Nicomachean Ethics he declares that there is only the happiness of this life, and that all divergent statements are based on “ravings and old women’s tales.”

Fārābī avails himself then of the specific immunity of the commentator or of the historian in order to speak his mind concerning grave matters in his “historical” works, rather than in the works in which he speaks in his own name … His flagrant deviation from the letter of Plato’s teaching, or his refusal to succumb to Plato’s charms, proves sufficiently that he rejected the belief in a happiness different from the happiness of this life, or the belief in another life. His silence about the immortality of the soul in a treatise designed to present the philosophy of Plato “from its beginning to its end” places beyond any reasonable doubt the inference that the statements asserting the immortality of the soul, which occur in some of his other writings, must be regarded accommodations to the accepted views.

The putative immortality of the soul does not exercise me one way or other, but I am interested in Socrates’s argument for it. In saying so, I do not mean to classify myself among what Ryle calls the “much smaller tribe of interpreters whose prime interest is in Plato’s arguments.” This is in “If Plato Only Knew,” a review of three books on Plato, including Bloom’s translation of and commentary on the Republic. For Ryle, Bloom is in

the large tribe of unphilosophical interpreters who have been fascinated by the Platonic dialogue[s] … but have been incompetent to appraise their arguments.

in particular, Bloom’s “Interpretive Essay,” says Ryle, “is not a bit satisfactory.” I agree with Bloom’s reply: “In themselves Ryle’s opinions are beneath consideration.”

I looked at Ryle’s dispute with Bloom in “Badiou, Bloom, Ryle, Shorey.” Now I just observe that, whatever his level of competence may be, Bloom does not appraise Socrates’s argument for the immortality of the soul. He may not accept it, but he doesn’t explain why, in his commentary on the closing section (608c–21d) of the Republic (bullets mine):

Socrates thus returns to the conventional way of praising justice which Adeimantus has criticized …

The first step of the praise is to extend the range of consideration beyond this life to eternity … So Socrates undertakes to convince Glaucon that the soul is immortal. This discussion can hardly rank as a proof … This discussion then serves two purposes:

• to cause the unphilosophic man to be concerned about justice for fear of what will happen to him in another world, and
• to turn philosophic men to the study of the soul.

The discussion does not only turn some of us to the study of the soul; it contributes to that study – at least it could, if taken seriously by researchers such as Chalmers and Koch.

The Myth of Er does not begin till 614b, but in his commentary on 595a–608b, Bloom remarks,

The myth of Er is only a tale, just as is Odysseus’ descent to Hades; there is small likelihood that Socrates believed in the survival of the individual soul.

Does Bloom mean to suggest that Socrates’s belief is something that one could bet on, as Koch and Chalmers bet on the discovery of “the mechanism by which the brain’s neurons produce consciousness”?

What can “survival of the individual soul” even mean? The phrase might describe what Johann Hari was seeking when he

went online and booked myself a little room by the beach in Provincetown, at the tip of Cape Cod. I announced triumphantly to everyone – I am going to be there for three months, with no smartphone, and no computer that can get online.

That is from an excerpt of Hari’s book Stolen Focus: Why You Can’t Pay Attention published in the Guardian as “Your attention didn’t collapse. It was stolen.” After a period of isolation, Hari gets jealous of all of the other people he sees on their mobiles:

For so long, I had received the thin, insistent signals of the web every few hours throughout the day, the trickle of likes and comments that say: I see you. You matter. Now they were gone. Simone de Beauvoir said that when she became an atheist, it felt like the world had fallen silent. Losing the web felt like that.

Believing in immortality may be a way of thinking we matter to others. Strauss seems to think the belief or its absence was important in Farabi’s milieu; however, immortality is not really part of the ayah of the Quran (namely 2:285) that Wikipedia, at least, cites as a source for five tenets of Islamic faith:

1. God.
2. Angels.
3. Revelation.
4. Prophets.
5. Judgment Day.

Perhaps Judgment Day is meaningless without an ensuing eternal life. At any rate, here is Muhammad Asad’s translation of the last three ayat of the second surah (Al Baqara, “The Cow”) from The Message of the Qur’ān:

284. Unto God belongs all that is in the heavens and all that is on earth. And whether you bring into the open what is in your minds or conceal it, God will call you to account for it; and then He will forgive whom He wills, and will chastise whom He wills: for God has the power to will anything.

285. The Apostle, and the believers with him, believe in what has been bestowed upon him from on high by his Sustainer: they all believe in God, and His angels, and His revelations, and His apostles; and they say:

     We have heard, and we pay heed. Grant us Thy forgiveness, O our Sustainer, for with Thee is all journeys’ end!

286.  

     God does not burden any human being with more than he is well able to bear: in his favour shall be whatever good he does, and against him whatever evil he does.

     O our Sustainer! Take us not to task if we forget or unwittingly do wrong!

     O our Sustainer! Lay not upon us a burden such as Thou didst lay upon those who lived before us!

     O our Sustainer! Make us not bear burdens which we have no strength to bear!

     And efface Thou our sins, and grant us forgiveness, and bestow Thy mercy upon us! Thou art our Lord Supreme: succour us, then, against people who deny the truth!

In the Myth of Er, one is judged after each life on earth, and there is no bound how many of these lives one may have, for one can always be reincarnated. I confess to not understanding a passionate (albeit fictional) expression of belief in reincarnation in The Razor’s Edge, Chapter Six, section (vi), when Maugham has met Larry by chance (at the Théâtre Français during the intermission in a performance of Racine’s Bérénice), and then spends all night in a café listening to Larry’s story. Part of that story concerns a man in India of whom Larry says,

in a year, when he reached the age of fifty, he was going to resign his profitable position, dispose of his property to his wife and children and go out into the world as a wandering mendicant. But the most surprising part was that his friends, and the maharajah, accepted it as a settled thing and looked upon it not as an extraordinary proceeding but as a very natural one.

One day I said to him: “You, who are so liberal, who know the world, who’ve read so much, science, philosophy, literature – do you in your heart of hearts believe in reincarnation?”

His whole face changed. It became the face of a visionary.

“My dear friend,” he said, “if I didn’t believe in it life would have no meaning for me.”

Because Larry mentions Plato in his discussion of reincarnation with Maugham, I talked about this passage of The Razor’s Edge also in “Plato and Christianity.”

As for Strauss, perhaps we should appreciate his honesty in telling Jacob Klein,

you attach a higher importance to morality, as morality, than I do. Now, let me explain this. That the philosophic life, especially as Plato and Aristotle understood it, is not possible without self-control and a few other virtues almost goes without saying. If a man is habitually drunk, and so on, how can he think? But the question is, if these virtues are understood only as subservient to philosophy and for its sake, then that is no longer a moral understanding of the virtues.

This was in an exchange at St John’s College, Annapolis, January 30, 1970, transcribed in The College, April, 1970. Perhaps Strauss does not understand philosophy as being criteriological in the sense of Collingwood mentioned in “More on Dialectic.”

Back in the Introduction to Persecution and the Art of Writing, Strauss says,

What Fārābī suggests is that by combining the way of Socrates with the way of Thrasymachus, Plato avoided the conflict with the vulgar and thus the fate of Socrates.

I do not know how the simplest interpretation of this can apply to Plato. By the account of Plato in the Euthyphro and Apology, Socrates was put to death for expressing his ideas. Is Plato not then expressing those ideas again? I am used to the idea that Plato attributes his own ideas to Socrates. One may get the impression from the Republic that we all ought to live under a fascist dictatorship. If this is a toned-down version of a more radical teaching, what is that? I can propose only the opposite extreme, expressed by Jesus of Nazareth in the form, “Resist not evil.”

I do like the words of Strauss, from his essay on Plato in History of Political Philosophy (third edition, edited by Strauss and Cropsey), that I took up elsewhere, during a previous discussion of the Republic:

Strictly, there is then no Platonic teaching; at most there is the teaching of the men who are the chief characters in his dialogues. Why Plato proceeded in this manner is not easy to say. Perhaps he was doubtful whether there can be a philosophic teaching proper …

Also during that discussion I took up what Strauss says of Collingwood. As I understand the criticism, Collingwood is too keen to work out what he thinks to understand what Plato (or anybody else) thinks.

Probably then I am with Collingwood. I apply the principle of sola scriptura and am more interested in reading Plato himself than in reading commentary about him. Hearing a commentator who takes questions is something else.