Philosopher of the Week

[Honey]

"You cannot step twice into the same river, for other waters are continually flowing in." 

Reading his thoughts through the lens of the metaphor of the river, I think of the logos as being the river.  The words we use, the times we live in, the direction it takes, the climate of the times, etc. changes constantly, continually, observably.  The river remains the same.  The one is many.  The many is one.  It's the same thing.  It flows.  It's usually beautiful (to me).  Sometimes it's not.  It just is.  It is what it is.  We can use words to describe it, different words even, but it always was.  Until it's not.

[Requia ☣]

I'm still trying to figure out if Heraclitus actually had anything to say, or was nuts/full of shit.

[M.K]

Why does some of this stuff remind me of Taoism and Indian philosophy? I think I saw some "one is all, all is one"-shit going on. This is relevant to my interests; Cain should definitely keep this shit coming.

[LMNO]

This reminds me, that I have a collection of all his fragments at home.

Often, I don't know what the fuck the guy's saying (fragments, remember).

But it seems that he's trying to frame the inexpressable (the infinite?).

One of the drawbacks, to me, is that he doesn't seem to get down with what to do with this.

It seems that it could lead to either nihilism or pragmatism; but either way, it seems to lead away from gnosis, as it is implied as unreachable.

Also, all this talk of fire makes me think of LHX.








Also also I would like to propose that as this thread goes forward, at least one person should act as an advocate for the philosopher in question, to defend all ideas to the board.  That way, we can debate without slagging (too much). 

[Iason Ouabache]

(The rest of my thoughts on Heraclitus)

The obscurity that are present in his Fragments (whether intentional or not) is one of the best things about Heraclitus. He never made things easy for the reader. He assumed that the audience is smart enough to connect the dots and Think for Themselves. If they can't, then fuck 'em.  Yes, this means that information can be lost but think of it as a verbal rorshach test. You learn more about people and their thought patterns while watching them work things out for themselves.

As a quick example, I have pushed the "Black sheep are still sheep" meme at a couple different religious forums and almost every single person got the positive connotation but not the negative connotation. They got the part that Outsiders are still people and should not be shunned. They didn't get the point that rebelling against the Machine means that the Machine still controls you.

[Requia ☣]

Isn't sheep a positive metaphor in religion?  Though I have a feeling it means the same thing.

[Chairman Risus]

(The rest of my thoughts on Heraclitus)

The obscurity that are present in his Fragments (whether intentional or not) is one of the best things about Heraclitus. He never made things easy for the reader. He assumed that the audience is smart enough to connect the dots and Think for Themselves. If they can't, then fuck 'em.  Yes, this means that information can be lost but think of it as a verbal rorshach test. You learn more about people and their thought patterns while watching them work things out for themselves.

As a quick example, I have pushed the "Black sheep are still sheep" meme at a couple different religious forums and almost every single person got the positive connotation but not the negative connotation. They got the part that Outsiders are still people and should not be shunned. They didn't get the point that rebelling against the Machine means that the Machine still controls you.

Had the same problem.

[Cain]

Sorry I've been busy with some other stuff over the last couple of days, so I haven't kept up with this.  I'll post the final piece on Heraclitus in the next post, and then I'll start Plato tomorrow.

I like LMNO's idea.  As much as I'll hate Plato, I'll at least try and explain his reasoning throughout the time we look at him.

Edit: just to add, this isn't going to be entirely chronological.  However, it obviously helps if you know something of the big, well known philosophers before going onto others.  Reading Nietzsche is not as useful unless you know something of Plato, Aristotle and Kant, for example.  Habermas makes little sense unless you understand the problems of the Frankfurt School and Critical Theory.  Etc etc

[Cain]

Heraclitus operates with an untraditional concept of soul.  In Homer, the soul is of no importance during life; it leaves the body at death, to carry what is left of the person's individuality to a shadowy existence in Hades. For Heraclitus, it is clear that during life the soul is the carrier of personal identity and character, and the organising centre of intelligence and action. It is what the person really is; the theory of soul is the theory of human nature.

Not surprisingly, the soul is identified as the underlying unity in a complex unity-in-opposites structure. So it should manifest itself in processes: presumably one of living, and a contrary one of dying.  There should be physical constituents as phases of these processes, corresponding to earth, water, and so on. There should also be subprocesses, corresponding to the two physical dimensions, hot-cold and wet-dry. The evidence confirms some of this:

Dry light-beam is soul at its wisest and best.
It is death to souls to become moist.

The dry-wet dimension accounts for intelligence and its opposite: a drunk man's lack of knowledge and awareness is due to the fact that "his soul is moist". The ability to act effectively is also connected with dryness in this remark; and "soul... at its best (ariste)" also suggests a soul in action (when ariste is taken with its traditional associations of active male excellence). As for the hot-cold dimension in relation to souls, the very word psyche suggests something not hot (it is naturally etymologised from the verb psychein, "cool," "breathe"); and a "dry light-beam" is presumably clearest when neither hot nor cold. To confirm this, heat is associated with
a bad quality:

Arrogance needs to be quenched more than wildfire.

Dying is the natural process opposed to living. The word thanatos (death), most often refers, not to the state of being dead but to the process or event of dying. For this reason Heraclitus can identify it with "becoming moist." For a soul this must mean increasingly poor
functioning both in mind and action. But there can be no permanent state of death; to be dead can be but a momentary phase at an extreme point of the cycle.

It is the same that is present as living and dead, as waking and sleeping, as young and old; for these by change of state become those, and those by change of state become these.

This alternate "living" and "dying" of souls can only partly correspond to living and dying in the usual sense. (The secondary cycle of waking and sleeping, with dreams, introduces further complications.)  For Heraclitus, the natural decline in mind and body after the prime of life will already count as dying. By contrast, a violent death in one's prime will not count as dying at all. The soul, though separated from
the body, will be in its best state. Some evidence suggests, cryptically, that death in battle, in particular, was rewarded by a place of honour for the soul outside the body, perhaps as a star.  In all cases, the mere corpse of a human being (the body without the soul) is valueless:

Corpses are more fit to be thrown away than dung.

If souls by nature live and die, in the new senses, alternately, then they may be described both as "mortal/' being always subject to dying, and "immortal/' being always able to return to life. This gives Heraclitus a new, piquant case of unity-in-opposites:

Immortals are mortals, mortals are immortals, living the others' death, dying the others' life.

This is a first suggestion (cf. section 6) that the difference between the gods and humanity, traditionally almost unbridgeable, is for
Heraclitus inessential. Souls are of their own nature both mortal and immortal. Whether they exist in manifest shape as human beings,
or as something like traditional gods, may well be a matter of chance and of their momentary position in the cycle of living and dying. (Heraclitus' remarks on traditional Greek religion are, as might be expected, cryptically ambivalent.) Other degraded forms of being, like the traditional Hades, may also occur for souls in a bad state. The cryptic statement that "souls have the sense of smell in Hades" may indicate some kind of minimal sensory existence.

If the soul in its best state is intelligent and rational, why do most people fail even to try to understand things? Are their souls not in the best possible state, or do they fail to use their capacities? An element of choice, at least, comes into the way the soul behaves in
this life.

The best choose one thing instead of all else: the ever-flowing renown of mortals; but the many are glutted like cattle.
It is character [ethos] that is a person's daimon.

The word ethos has etymologically the suggestion of "habit," and descriptively picks out what is characteristic. It must not be equated with physis (nature or essence). The thought that a person's habits and character form one another reciprocally is found in archaic Greece (Theognis 31-36). This makes superfluous the popular fatalistic belief, that the quality of one's life was determined by one's allotted individual daimon. Rather, the divine aspect of each person is manifested in and as character.

Since individual choices, in an Aristotelian way, both proceed from and determine the character and state of the soul, an explanation can
be given for the general failure of human intelligence. Human character [ethos] does not have understanding, but divine character
does (B78).

A man is called "infant" [nepios: literally, "wordless"] by a daimon, just as a child is by a man.

Here again we need not read in an unbridgeable gulf between human and divine natures. It is a matter of character not of nature; and
the child-man analogy implies that a man can "grow up" to become a daimon. That human nature is perfectly capable of achieving real
understanding is shown, not only by Heraclitus' claims on behalf of his own thinking, but also by explicit statement:

All share the capacity to understand.
All human beings share in the capacity to know themselves and to be of sound mind.

Why, then, are human beings so prone to form bad habits in thinking and living, and to make bad choices? There are no direct indications
of Heraclitus' answer, but the struggle between good and bad in any individual must presumably be connected with, and isomorphic
to, its cosmic counterpart.

The intelligent soul will want to understand everything: including itself. Heraclitus tells us: "I looked for myself". This suggests introspection, in which the mind has privileged and direct access to itself. Whatever Heraclitus' preferred method of looking for himself, he is aware of the paradoxical and elusive nature of the quest.

The bounds of soul you would not find by going about, though you travelled over every road; so deep a logos does it have.
To the soul belongs a logos that increases itself.

The "bounds" are spatial only within the metaphor of "travelling."  They are logical limits, that "mark off" the nature of the soul from that of other things. Correspondingly, the logos of the soul is the true, rational account of the soul, but it can also be understood as the account given by the soul. This points up the paradox that the soul is here talking about itself. The regresses of reflexivity now intrude.  The soul must talk about itself and therefore about its own talk about itself, and so on. The story of the soul is an unlimitedly self-increasing one.

[Cain]

Ultimate Questions:


Unity-in-opposites, as displayed in cosmos and soul, exemplifies another higher-level opposition: that between conflict and law.  If opposites such as hot and cold are forces, genuinely opposed, there must be real conflict between them:

Heraclitus rebukes the poet [Homer] who said: "Would that strife might perish from among gods and men!"; for there would be no fitted structure (harmonia) if there were no high-pitched and low-pitched, nor would there be animals without the opposites male and female (Aristotle, Eudemian ethics VII.i 1235a 25-29).

War is father of all, king of all: some it shows as gods, some as human,- some it makes slaves and some free.
(Heraclitus)

But if the processes are to be intelligible, they must also be lawlike  Heraclitus not only emphasises both opposed aspects, but he also
proclaims that they constitute a unity.

Sun will not overstep measures: otherwise, the Furies [Erinyes], helpers of justice, will find him out.
(Heraclitus)

But one must know that war is the same for all [xynon], and that justice is strife, and that all things happen according to strife and necessity.
(Heraclitus)

How, then, can the cosmic process constitute both strife and justice at one and the same time? The Heraclitean solution is perhaps
preserved in an unusually enigmatic remark:

Everlasting [Aion] is a child at play, playing draughts:30 to a child belongs the kingdom.

The child is a boy playing a board game for two players; no opponent is mentioned, so the assumption must be that the boy is playing both sides. This can still be a free and genuine conflict, in which skill is exercised and sharpened. It is lawlike in procedure: the rules (which are freely accepted by the players, not imposed from outside) define the game and are impartial as between the sides. It is lawlike
in outcome since, if each side plays equally well, it will win equally often in the long run - though the outcome of any one game will not be predictable. In the short-term there are (as gamblers know) alternating runs of luck on one side and the other. True to his habits of thought, Heraclitus seeks to show, by a model drawn from everyday experience, that strife and justice can coexist, interdependently,
without becoming denatured.

Here, if anywhere, we seem to glimpse where Heraclitus located the meaning of life for the individual: in participation in the inner
and the cosmic struggle.



Unity-in-opposites is a unified conception that overcomes the apparently unbridgeable oppositions of monism and pluralism. It is therefore an example of itself. Heraclitus seems to be aware of this curious state of affairs:

Comprehendings: wholes and not wholes; in unison, not in unison,- and from all things one and from one all things.

This remark uses the usual unity-in-opposites pattern in talking about "comprehendings" (syllapsies), with the usual process-product ambiguity: the products or the processes both of "taking together" and "understanding." These must be cases of unity-in-opposites, which considered abstractly exemplify the very same pattern.  This reading suggests why unity-in-opposites is fundamental and central. First, it is a phenomenon so all-embracing that it even embraces itself. Next, it is necessarily the pattern that structures thought and language, because it is the pattern of understanding. Any sentence has many different words with syntactic functions "moving different ways," but a single meaning making it a unity. The logos, whatever it is, is something that is expressible only in language and intelligible only because it is so expressible. The structure of language and thought is necessarily also the structure of reality: this is the conclusion to which Heraclitus seems to be pointing.



Conclusions:


Heraclitus' claim to the continued interest of philosophers is that he is a pioneer of philosophical and scientific thoughts and of logical devices. And behind what he actually expresses, there seem to lie certain ideas that determine his thinking. Among these are:

that reality must be something that can be lived and understood from the inside; and that the structure of language is the structure of thought, and therefore of the reality that thought describes. Whether Heraclitus himself could or would have formulated these ideas in such terms, is quite uncertain. What the tone and the mastery of his fragmentary work does put beyond doubt, is that he was already, in Ryle's phrase, a self-moving philosopher.


Source:  The Cambridge Companion to Early Greek Philosophy, 2006 (available in pdf format on request)

[LMNO]

The part about the body being a shell, while the soul holds some special status reminds me of some of the Christian Gnostics, especially the Gospel of Judas.

As far as I can tell, Judaism seemed to be more concerned with the earthly body, and doing Works while on earth.  The New Testament, on the other hand, seems concerned with the Soul and with Heaven.

Heraclitus as an influence on early Xtians?

[Cain]

I know some early Church fathers took the time to try and debunk his theories (which is incidentally some of the only sources for his writings), so its possible.

Also remember strife = Eris in Greek.

[Cain]

Plato

Plato (428/427 BC[a] – 348/347 BC), was a Classical Greek philosopher, who, together with his mentor, Socrates, and his student, Aristotle, helped to lay the foundations of Western philosophy.  Plato was also a mathematician, writer of philosophical dialogues, and founder of the Academy in Athens, the first institution of higher learning in the western world. Plato was originally a student of Socrates, and was as much influenced by his thinking as by what he saw as his teacher's unjust death.

Plato's sophistication as a writer can be witnessed by reading his Socratic dialogues. Some of the dialogues, letters, and other works that are ascribed to him are considered spurious.  Although there is little question that Plato lectured at the Academy that he founded, the pedagogical function of his dialogues, if any, is not known with certainty. The dialogues have since Plato's time been used to teach a range of subjects, mostly including philosophy, logic, rhetoric, mathematics, and other subjects about which he wrote.


It should be noted Plato was born and grew during the most violent phase of the Peloponnesian War, as part of a noble family in Athens.  Two of his Uncles were part of the Thirty Tyrants, the dictatorial ruling council who were elevated to power due to and after the Spartan victory over Athens.  They massively restricted the franchise of the vote, who had access to trial by jury and who held the right to bear arms.  They also engaged in purges and summary executions of the populist parties.  Plato was invited by his uncles to join, but before he could decide, Thrasybulus, a famous Athenian general who was a leader of the exiles, led an army of foreigners, commoners and Athenians who had fled fearing for their lives, and overthrew the oligarches, restoring the democracy.



In several dialogues, Socrates floats the idea that Knowledge is a matter of recollection, and not of learning, observation, or study.  He maintains this view somewhat at his own expense, because in many dialogues, Socrates complains of his forgetfulness. Socrates is often found arguing that knowledge is not empirical, and that it comes from divine insight. He is quite consistent in believing in the immortality of the soul, and several dialogues end with long speeches imagining the afterlife. More than one dialogue contrasts knowledge and opinion, perception and reality, nature and custom, and body and soul. The only contrast to this is his Parmenides.

Several dialogues tackle questions about art: Socrates says that poetry is inspired by the muses, and is not rational. He speaks approvingly of this, and other forms of divine madness (drunkenness, eroticism, and dreaming) in the Phaedrus (265a–c), and yet in the Republic wants to outlaw Homer's great poetry, and laughter as well. In Ion, Socrates gives no hint of the disapproval of Homer that he expresses in the Republic. The dialogue Ion suggests that Homer's Iliad functioned in the ancient Greek world as the bible does today in the modern Christian world: as divinely inspired literature that can provide moral guidance, if only it can be properly interpreted.

On politics and art, religion and science, justice and medicine, virtue and vice, crime and punishment, pleasure and pain, rhetoric and rhapsody, human nature and sexuality, love and wisdom, Socrates and his company of disputants had something to say.


"Platonism" is a term coined by scholars to refer to the intellectual consequences of denying, as Socrates often does, the reality of the material world. In several dialogues, most notably the Republic, Socrates inverts the common man's intuition about what is knowable and what is real. While most people take the objects of their senses to be real if anything is, Socrates is contemptuous of people who think that something has to be graspable in the hands to be real. In the Theaetetus, he says such people are "eu a-mousoi", an expression that means literally, "happily without the muses" (Theaetetus 156a). In other words, such people live without the divine inspiration that gives him, and people like him, access to higher insights about reality.

Socrates's idea that reality is unavailable to those who use their senses is what puts him at odds with the common man, and with common sense. Socrates says that he who sees with his eyes is blind, and this idea is most famously captured in his allegory of the cave, and more explicitly in his description of the divided line. The allegory of the cave (begins Republic 7.514a) is a paradoxical analogy wherein Socrates argues that the invisible world is the most intelligible ("noeton") and that the visible world ("(h)oraton") is the least knowable, and the most obscure. (This is exactly the opposite of what Socrates says to Euthyphro in the soothsayer's namesake dialogue. There, Socrates tells Euthyphro that people can agree on matters of logic and science, and are divided on moral matters, which are not so easily verifiable.)

Socrates says in the Republic that people who take the sun-lit world of the senses to be good and real are living pitifully in a den of evil and ignorance. Socrates admits that few climb out of the den, or cave of ignorance, and those who do, not only have a terrible struggle to attain the heights, but when they go back down for a visit or to help other people up, they find themselves objects of scorn and ridicule.

According to Socrates, physical objects and physical events are "shadows" of their ideal or perfect forms, and exist only to the extent that they instantiate the perfect versions of themselves. Just as shadows are temporary, inconsequential epiphenomena produced by physical objects, physical objects are themselves fleeting phenomena caused by more substantial causes, the ideals of which they are mere instances. For example, Socrates thinks that perfect justice exists (although it is not clear where) and his own trial would be a cheap copy of it.

The allegory of the cave (often said by scholars to represent Plato's own epistemology and metaphysics) is intimately connected to his political ideology (often said to also be Plato's own), that only people who have climbed out of the cave and cast their eyes on a vision of goodness are fit to rule. Socrates claims that the enlightened men of society must be forced from their divine contemplations and compelled to run the city according to their lofty insights. Thus is born the idea of the "philosopher-king", the wise person who accepts the power thrust upon him by the people who are wise enough to choose a good master. This is the main thesis of Socrates in the Republic, that the most wisdom the masses can muster is the wise choice of a ruler.


Many have interpreted Plato as stating that knowledge is justified true belief, an influential view which informed future developments in modern analytic epistemology. This interpretation is based on a reading of the Theaetetus wherein Plato argues that belief is to be distinguished from knowledge on account of justification. Many years later, Edmund Gettier famously demonstrated the problems of the justified true belief account of knowledge. This interpretation, however, imports modern analytic and empiricist categories onto Plato himself and is better read on its own terms than as Plato's view.

Really, in the Sophist, Statesman, Republic, and the Parmenides Plato himself associates knowledge with the apprehension of unchanging Forms and their relationships to one another (which he calls "expertise" in Dialectic). More explicitly, Plato himself argues in the Timaeus that knowledge is always proportionate to the realm from which it is gained. In other words, if one derives their account of something experientially, because the world of sense is in flux, the views therein attained will be mere opinions. And opinions are characterized by a lack of necessity and stability. On the other hand, if one derives their account of something by way of the non-sensible forms, because these forms are unchanging, so too is the account derived from them. It is only in this sense that Plato uses the term "knowledge."


Plato's philosophical views had many societal implications, especially on the idea of an ideal state or government. There is some discrepancy between his early and later views. Some of the most famous doctrines are contained in the Republic during his middle period, as well as in the Laws and the Statesman. However, because Plato wrote dialogues, it is assumed that Socrates is often speaking for Plato. This assumption may not be true in all cases.

Plato, through the words of Socrates, asserts that societies have a tripartite class structure corresponding to the appetite/spirit/reason structure of the individual soul. The appetite/spirit/reason stand for different parts of the body. The body parts symbolize the castes of society.[30]

• Productive Which represents the abdomen.(Workers) — the labourers, carpenters, plumbers, masons, merchants, farmers, ranchers, etc. These correspond to the "appetite" part of the soul.
  Protective Which represents the chest.(Warriors or Guardians) — those who are adventurous, strong and brave; in the armed forces.  These correspond to the "spirit" part of the soul.
  Governing Which represents the head. (Rulers or Philosopher Kings) — those who are intelligent, rational, self-controlled, in love with wisdom, well suited to make decisions for the community. These correspond to the "reason" part of the soul and are very few.

According to this model, the principles of Athenian democracy (as it existed in his day) are rejected as only a few are fit to rule. Instead of rhetoric and persuasion, Plato says reason and wisdom should govern. As Plato puts it:

"Until philosophers rule as kings or those who are now called kings and leading men genuinely and adequately philosophise, that is, until political power and philosophy entirely coincide, while the many natures who at present pursue either one exclusively are forcibly prevented from doing so, cities will have no rest from evils,... nor, I think, will the human race." (Republic 473c-d)

Plato describes these "philosopher kings" as "those who love the sight of truth" (Republic 475c) and supports the idea with the analogy of a captain and his ship or a doctor and his medicine. Sailing and health are not things that everyone is qualified to practice by nature. A large part of the Republic then addresses how the educational system should be set up to produce these philosopher kings.

Wherein it concerns states and rulers, Plato has made interesting arguments. For instance he asks which is better - a bad democracy or a country reigned by a tyrant. He argues that it is better to be ruled by a bad tyrant (since then there is only one person committing bad deeds) than be a bad democracy (since here all the people are now responsible for such actions.)

According to Plato, a state which is made up of different kinds of souls, will overall decline from an aristocracy (rule by the best) to a timocracy (rule by the honorable), then to an oligarchy (rule by the few), then to a democracy (rule by the people), and finally to tyranny (rule by one person, rule by a tyrant).

[LMNO]

First off, it's interesting to note the contradictions Plato has in some of his writings.  As having only a cursury understanding of Plato, that wasn't readily obvious to me.

It's also interesting to note the acceptence of divine madness (which some of us would attribute to Eris) in some of his writing.


What struck me most however, is the possibility that the entire "Ideals/Cave" business might have been far more meta-metaphorical than is usually understood.  Sure, Plato can be blamed for taking an abstract and trying to push it into the realm of the actual, but what if he was trying to say something different?

What if he was trying to say that the worls of the senses, the world of the barstool, is only made up of sensation?  Most people have focused on his parable of the shadows on the cave wall, but how many have talked about the fire* illuminating the cave?

What if Plato was trying to say that beyond the gross physical movement of the world is a deeper experience?  Because beyond the friction and muscle spasms of sex, there is love; beyond the grunting territorial shit-throwing, there is honor and loyalty; beyond the mechanics of structure and movement, there is art.

So, the philosopher kings are those that seey beyond the material world, into motivations, desires, illumination.  They are the ones that don't take things at face value, as "what they are".  They try to see behind the action to see the motivations behind the action.


Of course, it can also be argued that much of what we know today about how perception works backs up at least the first half of the Cave analogy; much of what we see really are just shadows.  However, there aren't any "ideal" forms.  Just our own brains, flickering and jumping, turning rocks into monsters.




*Heraclitus again?

[Cain]

I like the interpretation, however I am fairly sure Plato did not intend it to be read that way, precisely because the usual interpretation supports his Platonic Forms theory - the Really Real forms of Reality, which were inferred but inaccessible.  And we can see the negative effects of this around us to this day - his apparent hatred of reality is apparent within Christianity, Islam and most Utopian projects.  In a very real sense, he considered Forms as the only real things, that almost possess humans to make them act in certain ways, according to their nature.  It also denies plurality and diversity, a very dangerous mix.