Two books arrived yesterday from Amazon, both from friends, one was the kind, generous, wry, wicked (not to say brilliant) Eileen Pollack's collection of short stories and novellas In the Mouth and the other Jim Mackey's Jesus of Nazareth which I have mentioned in an earlier post, and which I have started reading first because I need to be in a different space to read Eileen.
Although I sometimes feel that I am being clubbed over the head by the constant beat of Jim's sentences (he really does have a clunking fist), they are, taken all in all, powerful sentences which achieve lift-off quickly and you feel the urgency of his message, which is quite simply about the clash within our lives and our own minds and on this lean earth between (the impulse to) coercive power and the power of love, and the remoteness and proximity of the new heaven and new earth that would be constituted by a reign of love. It forces me to re-evaluate the idea of the eucharistic meal. Taking part in such a meal is properly to be understood as an earnest of a mutual commitment, as a visible sign that we are in this together and for the long haul. That is a powerful image, but at the same time, I can hardly imagine the conditions under which this would be a genuine expression of a genuine commitment. But it could hardly be at the communion table. It would have to be a shared meal, as among those on the same journey or pilgrimage. Goodness, where is this taking me? But it also makes sense in the context of the sangha, and the Order meetings which start with a shared meal ... nad it is certainly too long since I have participated.
Wednesday 30 April 2008
Sunday 27 April 2008
Secular humanism ...
I have committed myself to writing something about religion and secular humanism for the autumn, well really I want to find a space between them, if that makes sense. Partly because I have an unclear conception of both of them. My instincts are towards secular humanism in a way, but annoyingly I have left my borrowed copy of Richard Norman's short introduction in the bedroom in Orkney. I have a lot of time for his work. But I think my problem with the proposition set out on Amazon, 'that it is ultimately through the human capacity for art, literature and imagination that humanism is a powerful alternative to religious belief', is that I am completely uncertain about the status of one of the terms of the opposition, viz 'religious belief', and doubtful at least about the other. To put it another way, is Norman trading on a particular conception of religious belief? Well 'trading' is too cheap a word here, but there is something from which he wishes strenuously to dissociate himself, and, if it is spelt out in a certain way, then I would be on his side of the barricades, though presumably that metaphor of civil strife is not quite right. In any event, we should have to ask whether that conception is the only one available, and whether we should conflate 'the religious' with 'religious belief' at all.I think the crux for me is going to be a conception of the moral life that is at once fully engaged with 'our human capacity for art, literature and the imagination' but which also forces us towards a 'non-religious' notion of 'spirituality' or 'transcendence'. Philosophers have been here before, of course (John Cottingham, John Haldane, Anthony O'Hear) . The question really turns on our answer to the question, what constitutes the human? and on whether we have to find something within what we think of as 'religious' to augment what we think is entailed by the 'secular'. Unfortunately many people think that so-called 'non-realists' about religion are simply secular humanists in disguise, but then they need to tell us what they have in mind when they talk about secular humanism. The real issue is about the nature and the conditions of the moral life that are taken to be involved: by either side.
Still, I have a few months yet. Beacons only have significance when they can shine brightly in heavy seas, where there are strong currents and hidden skerries. We need them, we can see them, only when we are already in danger. For some reason I connect this thought with the concept of spirituality. One thing about writing a blog is that you tend not to look back over older posts, or at least I don't, and so you don't see the pattern that is emerging, if there is one at all ... And so, beacons, danger, the need to find something else, something that rescues us from a condition by which we feel endangered (and you do not head towards the beacon, but keep at a distance), though what is endangered, and what needs to be let go of? The metaphor of 'spirit', 'breath', 'wind' ... indicates a contrast, life rather than death, something heard, news from elsewhere, beyond the bunker, where both of these are metaphors for felt conditions of oppression and release. 'Spirituality' is a term that derives from these metaphors, and so belongs to, in the sense of having its origins in, a particular religious tradition, but the conflicting human possibilities it refers to has wider application and can be understood outside the terms of that tradition. Thus the concept of Buddhist spirituality' makes perfect sense, even though the juxtaposition yields a mixed metaphor ...
Thursday 24 April 2008
Talking of Pilate in the Mersey Tunnel
A lift home from an esteemed colleague (EC), talking about sympathetic representations of the High Priest and his Council. These were good men doing what they could in the most difficult circumstances. I suppose they were decent men in the way that many politicians are decent men, but find themselves voting to attack Iraq (and I do not present myself as at any moral distance from decent men in whose shoes I have not had to stand). The BBC production of The Passion over Easter made me feel that Jesus of Nazareth really was in the circumstances an utterly dangerous embarrassment ... and please come back after Passover ... otherwise the Romans will come down on all of us with vicious reprisals ... I've also been reading James P Mackey's Christianity and Creation ... and so the point is, what? that even the best of men can descend to this, as EC says, that this is what they will do in these circumstances, the alternative vision is impossible, almost, perhaps, morally impossible, it belongs to the future (the presence of Christ is a visitation from there, he is an image, almost a mirage), which is hardly a way of absolving ourselves, but a condition of the possibility of our thinking that there is something from which we need to be absolved and these best of men are an image of us not of 'the Jews'. It belongs to 'the future' ('new earth, new heaven', not to be realised here), but is the standard by which we measure what we do, which is unavoidable as a response to force majeure. So Jesus of Nazareth is an image of what we are incapable of, of what cannot be incarnated, but whose incarnation we desire, though with all the cautious prevarication of our double-mindedness. In a way, the presence of Jesus, or the fact that it is he who is sacrificed, is hardly relevant, except that he is the image of the other possibility ('my kingdom is not of this world', from which, however, we are unable to detach ourselves, though we make a beginning just when we posit something beyond it), his presence presents and poignantly points the contrast. As I said in an earlier post, he hardly registers, can hardly register, with Pilate. Mackey does the detail of the Feuerbachian thesis in a way, in our myths we see the lineaments of our deepest impulses seeking expression in the form of the story in which we read ourselves, in which we see our conflicted and divided selves only because we see, we glimpse, what conflicts with what: that is the revelation - and can it really be that in some deep part of ourselves we would not return evil for evil, just as we would not wish evil to be returned, to use JM's favourite biblical phrase? Anyway I have just ordered his Jesus of Nazareth. Sometimes one needs to state something so that one can with time see what might be wrong with it, what its limitations are. That is the business of dialectic, we need a premiss ... or we cannot start our game. Creation stories also tell us about our own humanity, whatever they might reveal about gods, and the latter doesn't interest me much at all, though I found all that intriguing in JM's book. Here is a link to the opening of a review of it, though you need an Athens log-in to see the whole piece.
Tuesday 22 April 2008
A waking dream
Gordon Brown always took the largest cup. Even now he is seizing MINE. He cannot have it, we wrestle with it and it spills. Yes, but what does it say about ME?
A way of thinking of Art as the expression of emotion: we should distinguish between representing, evoking and expressing ... The tragedy evokes feelings of pity and terror; the character, Macbeth, say, expresses emotion, resignation and weariness; and the actor represents that expression ... my students always conflate these distinctions, taking an instruction to write about expression as one to write about evocation. Sad music? sometimes evocative, sometimes also expressive of sadness in its pace and rhythm. A composer can write to order because they know how to represent a mood or feeling. But they can also express and explore feeling, and the point for us is not that it is theirs but that it expresses this, as in, say, Kindertotenlieder.
A way of thinking of Art as the expression of emotion: we should distinguish between representing, evoking and expressing ... The tragedy evokes feelings of pity and terror; the character, Macbeth, say, expresses emotion, resignation and weariness; and the actor represents that expression ... my students always conflate these distinctions, taking an instruction to write about expression as one to write about evocation. Sad music? sometimes evocative, sometimes also expressive of sadness in its pace and rhythm. A composer can write to order because they know how to represent a mood or feeling. But they can also express and explore feeling, and the point for us is not that it is theirs but that it expresses this, as in, say, Kindertotenlieder.
Monday 21 April 2008
What do philosophers teach?
This is the draft of a paper I have been working on about what it is to teach philosophy. It may be a bit long for a blog ...
Wisdom and Virtue: or what do philosophers teach?
1
Beneath the surface of these fragmented reflections on teaching philosophy are images of scenes from the last thirty five years, scenes of my success and failure, courage and cowardice, as a teacher of philosophy. There is more than one kind of success and one kind of failure in teaching, but my occasional perplexity about teaching intertwines with a more chronic one about what it is to do philosophy at all, or, since even that phrase carries a certain self-distancing within it, about what it is to be a philosopher, and whether and to what extent I have been either a philosopher or a teacher of philosophy.
What follows is impressionistic and as much about my own intellectual ambivalence and uncertainty as about the state of the discipline. In any event I am sure that other philosophers have had a sense of emptiness when they have talked about what most matters to them, but without apparent reaction; or a sense of hollowness when they have given the audience what it wants but not yet what it ought to have; or, and marvellously, a sense of fulfilment when students are utterly absorbed and engaged—and all this quite independently of the petty domestic achievement of proper preparation, the power point presentation, the e-learning and other initiatives commended with one (anxious) voice by our Teaching and Learning Committees as ‘good practice’ or, and even better, as ‘innovative’ in ‘delivering’ a module—though ‘delivering’ is a more significant metaphor than first appears ...
2
It seems to me that two related and half-submerged dichotomies have infected philosophy and the way we teach it—the first of these is between intellect and feeling, the second, to put it pointedly and controversially in these scientistic times, is between philosophy and poetry. Now contemporary philosophers almost never talk of the ‘love of wisdom’ and if it is raised by their students as the true vocation, perhaps, of the philosopher they are likely to say, though, alas, without irony, that such a notion belongs to the distant history of the discipline and has little to do with our contemporary agenda. And yet, perhaps the embarrassment has something to do with the dichotomies.
We have a dichotomy, an a priori intellectual distortion that determines in advance the direction of conscious reflection, when two elements that belong together within an integrated whole, are forced apart and treated independently and out of all connection with each other. Overcoming the dichotomy is a matter of restoring the connections, though practice, and this is crucial and almost the main theme of this paper, may well lag behind the theoretical achievement. Thus, although it is now widely acknowledged that we have sometimes fatally split thought from feeling, this recognition is precisely not yet embodied in our practice, and this seems to me to be a failure of wisdom.
But my claim that there is a dichotomy between philosophy and poetry may seem more surprising, and even tendentious, so it may be helpful to call in aid here two rather different figures, John Stuart Mill and Ludwig Wittgenstein. But before I do so it is worth repeating that if there is indeed a genuine dichotomy to be overcome it should issue in a change in how we approach the teaching of philosophy, since our practice as philosophers, which I take to be continuous with our practice as teachers, is a function of our conception of the discipline: if literary art or poetry should be (re-)integrated into that conception then it must make a difference to how we teach—though this may not be to the liking of all teachers or all students: because it will make on us a different set of demands (and the academy institutionalises a set of aptitudes). This dissonance between theory and practice, though, is itself, again, an image of the distinction between knowledge and wisdom.
The young John Stuart Mill wrote in a letter to Thomas Carlyle that
… one thing not useless to do would be to … make those who are not poets understand that poetry is higher than logic, and that the union of the two is philosophy.
In his Notebooks Wittgenstein wrote:
Philosophie dϋrfte man eigentlich nur dichten.[1]
These remarks are striking, and if they put pressure on our conception of philosophy they also must put pressure on our conception of poetry. It must be more than ‘the merely decorative word’, as Pound said. So it is not ‘what oft was thought’, as Pope puts it—indeed must not be what oft was thought, but rather what we are by its means only now able to bring to thought at all—in the spirit of Shelley’s ’marking the before unapprehended relations of things’—which poetry does just because it is, as he says, ‘vitally metaphorical’, where, in the same way, what is metaphorical is to be understood, not as an ornamental way of expressing what we already know or understand, but as the unexpected means to the startling disclosure of what we did not until then realise or understand.
But I said that the two dichotomies are related (and one can hardly articulate this without the absurdity becoming evident): philosophy is alleged to appeal to the intellect and poetry to feeling. One might recall here and against that thought Wordsworth’s notion of ‘feeling intellect’, and there is no such dualism in Kant:
Poetry … expands the mind by giving freedom to the imagination and by offering, from among the boundless multiplicity of possible forms accordant with a given concept, to whose bounds it is restricted, that one which couples with the presentation of the concept a wealth of thought (Gedankenfülle) to which no verbal expression is completely adequate, and by thus rising aesthetically to ideas
This highly perceptive remark of Kant’s hints at how the metaphorical content of an image works upon the imagination in a vivid present of experience, but such content also and crucially discloses itself and the realities it opens up slowly and over time, attracting a compelled attention before it is understood, where the compulsion is the unconscious recognition of significance.
3
Teachers of philosophy take themselves, on the whole, to have a responsibility to train the intellect and are all too likely to consider the feelings of their students, as indeed their own, to be a private matter that is no one else’s business—a ‘defensive’ attitude which shows we know ourselves ‘vulnerable’ where feeling is concerned: indeed our resentment when our ideas are ‘attacked’ shows that unconsciously at least we all know very well that thought, feeling and our sense of identity are vitally related, and it shows that this ‘embattled’ and anxious self is in danger and that this is the real source of the martial imagery so much deplored in philosophy.
Many students of philosophy also seem to subscribe to this never quite explicit doctrine, that their feelings are not part of the contract, even though one knows very well that their feelings are involved in the very business of philosophy, in the unsettling experience of the elenchus and the emotional shock and disarray of aporia, in which the sense both of the world and one’s identity within it seem threatened and undermined.
But it is worth noting, by contrast, and as a possible future aid, that no such contract appears to be in place in Departments of Drama, where teachers almost routinely appeal to the emotional intelligence of their students, who implicitly consent to their emotional lives and resources being addressed and challenged. Part of their training is in the authentic representation of feeling in articulated thought, in speech, conduct and demeanour and this means that they must draw on, and are encouraged and goaded into drawing on, their own life-experience, their own perplexities, and must learn to rely on observation, imagination, memory and self-knowledge—and, also, of course, on each other.[2]
4
Philosophers are famously reluctant to define philosophy—beyond saying, for instance, that it is an activity rather than a subject to be studied, that it is not a body of knowledge but a method and spirit of inquiry that depends upon conversation and dialogue, though this latter aspect becomes increasingly unavailable as student numbers rise and the basic conditions for the possibility of genuine conversation and dialogue—personal acquaintance—recede. The teacher of philosophy will tend to dismiss requests for definition and just get on and do philosophy—with the students in tow as it were—in the expectation that they will get the point and start to do on their own account what their teachers exemplify.
Although this approach is pedagogically sound as far as it goes, nevertheless what one does, how one teaches philosophy, is a function of one’s conception of the discipline, and that conception will certainly reflect the necessary tasks of one’s time, which become as it were the ‘normal science’ of philosophy—and may, in a time of specialism and narrow focus, exemplify nothing else. The resident danger of this approach, then, lies in taking these tasks to be the thing itself—and in regarding the history of philosophy exclusively in the light of advances in the treatment of particular favoured problems, without further attention to what else might be found outside the narrow focus determined by these prior interests. And yet this amounts to an almost catastrophic failure to learn how to read—to learn just to read without this being a kind of search for proof texts as it were.
A philosophically well educated student in the mainstream Analytic tradition will answer more or less to the Aims and Objectives that have attached themselves to Programmes of Study, they will have good dialectical skills, will have an engaged acquaintance with the state of the discipline within their own tradition and a good grasp of the historical developments that led to that state. They will, however, share with many of their teachers an almost invincible ignorance of the other traditions whose progress helps to determine the larger and more fragmented state of the discipline in the wider world. In particular, to use an egregious example, they will be unaware of how a European philosophical dialogue which still seemed entirely possible, not to say normal, in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries had become unavailable in the twentieth. So they will disdain (and quite rightly in some cases) styles of thinking and philosophical idioms with which in truth they are ill-equipped to engage—styles and idioms that have grown out of close attention precisely to what is ‘vitally metaphorical’. But they will know a good argument when they see it, and a bad one, though perhaps if they favour an argument the premises may be granted too easily without the patient sifting of distinctions that is prior to argument, and they are likely to see the history and contemporary condition of philosophy in terms of a set of ‘positions’ which can be defended or refuted thus and so.
It would be mad to deny that philosophy deals in positions and problems and arguments—but it is not mad to complain that we come to them too quickly, without reflecting on the conditions of inquiry that eventually give rise to them. The virtue of negative capability that sustains a person through the unpleasant experience of disorientation and loss of bearings is not on the curriculum; the ‘not knowing one’s way about’ that Wittgenstein said was the form of a philosophical problem, is hardly referred to. And so our students seek impatiently and indignantly for release into the clearly defined terrain of positions, problems and arguments … which will allow them to finish an assignment before the deadline or pass an exam: in this environment the creative condition of philosophical confusion and tension before release is not permitted—or will at least be penalised for lateness on the grounds that otherwise it is unfair on those whose time-management is allegedly more efficient.
What troubles me about this kind of otherwise admirable philosophical education is that it can leave one’s life and sense of identity intact, as in ‘untouched’ and unaffected. In some cases philosophers simply shore up by minute and ingenious argument their prior sense of world and identity. There is no inwardness in it, no loss of the sense through elenchus and aporia of self and world, but rather a self image built up around a carapace of expertise and competence, no gestation or bringing forth—and therefore no wisdom and what Socrates says to Agathon seems little to do with the case:
It would be very nice, Agathon, if wisdom were like water, and flowed by contact out of a person who has more into one who has less, just as water can be made to flow through a thread of wool out of the fuller of two cups into the emptier. (Symposium 175d)[3]
Now we have to make compromises in the face of difficult political and social realities, we have to negotiate with an inimical instrumentalism in our institutions of higher education which suffer systemic anxiety in the face of the need to deliver and so defend like out-voted cabinet ministers policies not within their control or of their making, and of course it is possible to identify the knowledge and skills that are developed in a philosophy degree, transferable skills that render students (highly) employable, and if the ethos demands that we factor employability into our module specifications, then no doubt that can be done. But the compromise can also be corrupting since it encourages us to emphasise in our teaching what is most teachable and to wave vaguely and perhaps ironically in the direction of what is more hardly won in philosophy.
Nevertheless, if we talk of ‘compromise’ in the face of political imperatives, it is well to remind ourselves of the standards and principles which we have had to compromise, and from which we have therefore fallen: philosophers desire to be wise, philosophy is a disguised form of eros, better therefore thought of as a passion—at least according to the priestess, Diotima, who makes an interesting claim about the term eros:
…”the truth is that we isolate a particular kind of eros and appropriate for it the name of eros, which really belongs to a wider whole, while we employ a different name for the other kinds of eros.” (205b)
Eros, in other words, has been arbitrarily assigned to just one form of desire, viz sexual desire, even though it has other forms whose conceptual connection with one another is concealed by language: one of these forms is philosophy. As the translator Robin Waterfield points out (p 85) eros and philosophy become increasingly identified in the dialogue and become so in the figure of Socrates himself as the Erastes who is born of Poverty and Contrivance.
But Diotima immediately makes a similar point about poiesis after the young Socrates is made to ask a conveniently artless question:
“Can you give me another example of such a usage?” … “Yes, here it is. By its original meaning poetry means simply creation, and creation, as you know, can take very various forms. Any action which is the cause of a thing emerging from non-existence to existence might be called poetry, and all the processes in all the crafts are kinds of poetry, and all those who engage in them poets … but yet they are not called poets, but have other names, and out of the whole field of poetry or creation one part, which deals with music and metre, is isolated and called by the name of the whole. This part alone is called poetry, and those whose province is this part of poetry are called poets”.
Although Diotima is clear enough that she wants to include philosophy as a form of eros and although the comments about poiesis are immediately juxtaposed to that discussion, the connection between philosophy and poetry is not so obvious. But if we recall that the philosopher is one who desires to be wise, then the connection is mediated for us by what she goes on to say about the ‘best’ kind of poetry:
there are some whose creative instinct is of the soul, and who long to beget spiritually, not physically, the progeny which it is the nature of the soul to create and bring to birth. If you ask what that progeny is, it is wisdom and virtue in general; of this all poets and such craftsmen as have found out some new thing may be said to be begetters. (209a)
Thus Diotima identifies the poets as among those who generate wisdom and virtue. The point is emphasised a little later when she mentions Homer and Hesiod:
Take Homer, for example, and Hesiod, and the other good poets; who would not envy them the children that they left behind them, children whose qualities have won immortal fame and glory for their parents? (209c)
But this is not just the poets in the sense of those who write in metre and verse: poiesis is to be understood in terms of human creativity more generally (‘Any action which is the cause of a thing emerging from non-existence to existence might be called poetry’) though Diotima’s particular interest is in those ‘poets’ who are the cause of bringing into existence ‘wisdom and virtue’ and that is to be understood in terms of the metaphors of begetting and bringing forth, metaphors which are deeply entrenched within our thinking about creativity.
5
Now one way to connect the idea that philosophers are those who desire wisdom with the idea that philosophy is, like poetry, a form of creativity, is through the further thought offered by Diotima that the ‘best’ poets are creative in their begetting and bringing forth precisely of wisdom and virtue—and this is just what those who desire wisdom, the philosophers, also wish to do. Philosophy and poetry converge in being creative of wisdom and virtue, in bringing wisdom and virtue forth, and in begetting it.
Here it would be reasonable to object that philosophers and poets may at least sometimes have a common end, but that is all: poetry and philosophy are different kinds of activity. Indeed it is interesting to note that one translator of the Symposium, Robin Waterfield, refers in his Preface to what he calls ‘the balance’ in the dialogue ‘between philosophy and literary art’.
But to talk in this way assumes that we know the nature of the quantities that rest upon the scales, that we know where and what the philosophy is and how it is to be distinguished from the ‘literary art’. The objection depends upon the dichotomy I mentioned at the beginning, and one move towards its overcoming is to deny that it is philosophy and poetry that have a common end, and to assert, by contrast, that certain activities that have become associated with what we now call ‘philosophy’ and other activities that we now tend to associate with ‘poetry’ are unified by a philosophical telos.
If I might make a suggestion inspired by Diotima’s comments on eros and poiesis, what we now tend to think of as ‘philosophy’ refers only to a subset of the activities that can properly be called ‘philosophical’. What has allegedly happened to the terms eros and poiesis, in other words, has happened in a damaging way to philosophy. Just as eros and poiesis have both been appropriated for just one form of eros and poiesis whose connection with other forms is thus concealed by the surface appearance of language so ’philosophy’ has come to be appropriated as a term that applies to just one part of philosophy which is then distinguished from other activities that really belong to it. So, very crudely, we tend to think of philosophy as a matter of analysis and argument, as part of dialectic, and explicitly distinguish it as a discipline from other forms of reflection.
I should prefer to talk rather of a convergence of methods and tropes, a range of forms of reflection, all of which are philosophical—story-telling, allegory, theatre, metaphor, dialectic, analysis, in combination and mutual dependence, and what makes them ‘philosophical’, to come to the point at last, is their tendency to emancipate us from error and ignorance or delusion and to lead us towards self-knowledge and wisdom. So, for instance the elenchus is not ‘the philosophy’ but only one of its activities, a particular procedure which has a role within the whole philosophical enterprise, viz to undermine attachment to such beliefs and attitudes as conceal from us what can be shown only by other means—in a way that depends upon the imagination. All the aspects in combination have the function of investigating and revealing realities that were previously concealed from view because we stand in our own light. At the beginning such realities may be only dimly discerned, and we proceed feelingly by means of images and metaphors that attract our attention before we are able to draw out their meaning. But this slow process precisely invokes the metaphor of gestation that precedes the bringing forth. In other words the term ‘philosophical’ names a function or telos rather than a subset of the methods by which this telos or function might be achieved. It seems obvious to me that this enterprise is a moral endeavour which depends upon a moral response and envisages a philosophical community composed of teachers and their pupils, though who the teachers are and who the pupils will not always coincide with their social role. But who would dare to be a teacher if these are the terms?
6
The image or, to recall Kant, the aesthetic idea, of the Cave exercises its power of attraction, and the power it exerts over us is a sign that it shows us something we have not yet fully realised. I think of the moment when the released prisoner looks back and sees for the first time the mechanisms which had determined the form of his whole previous experience, a form of experience within which his comrades remain imprisoned. Even this moment of looking back and observing the absorption of the others in the shadows is an image of ‘wisdom’. It is an image of seeing the narrowness of a previous vision and perspective, and represents a form of self-knowledge and freedom constituted by the revelation of possibilities previously hidden, including the possibility of movement from the one condition to the other, both in the sense that others can follow and that one can fall back and lose perspective again.
The ‘wisdom’ lies in the revelatory seeing things as they really are as opposed to how they had seemed to be, though perhaps it is better to say that the extent of someone’s wisdom lies in the applications of that phrase, in the many contexts in which one has to learn the hard way that such distinctions obtain, and that if one knew ... one would behave differently. So there is a further, ‘virtue’ aspect to wisdom: being able to comport oneself and order one’s desires in the light of that knowledge of how things really are. This is the real force of the Platonic connection between knowledge and virtue—one only ‘really’ knows when one is able to act in the light of one’s knowledge: it is then that one knows in one’s body or in one’s heart, it is a criterion of a degree of knowledge determined by how much of the person acknowledges it. The Cave is also an image of the necessity for Kierkegaardian indirection: you cannot simply announce to the prisoners that that is their condition, unless you want to get yourself killed (though the murderous response envisaged in the narrative indicates that what the prisoners represent is not engulfment in their perspective, but bad faith).[4]
7
In her account of eros Diotima says that there is something that the gods and the ignorant have in common: they do not desire wisdom. The gods do not desire it because they are already wise and you cannot desire to have what you do not lack—and the ignorant precisely do not know that they lack it:
The tiresome thing about ignorance is precisely this, that a man who possesses neither beauty nor goodness nor intelligence is perfectly well satisfied with himself, and no one who does not believe that he lacks a thing desires what he does not believe he lacks.
In fact Diotima’s description is ambiguous, at least in the translation. It may be true that an ignorant person ‘does not believe’ that they lack wisdom, but this is consistent with their having no beliefs in the matter at all, and in this they are to be distinguished from the deluded who believe positively that they do not lack wisdom. The purely ignorant will be entirely unaware that there is anything that they lack.
So it is one thing to lack something and another to know that you lack it. It is this latter condition which is described in Diotima’s answer to Socrates’ next question, what kind of person can be said to love or desire wisdom?—it is ‘those who fall between wisdom and ignorance’. They are not entirely ignorant because they know that they lack wisdom, and they know this because the lack is something that they feel because they are aware of the dissonance between what they now know and the state of their passions and desires
But what is it to feel the lack of wisdom? This condition is personified precisely in the figure of Eros, that weather-beaten, shoeless, homeless person who exemplifies the felt lack at the heart of desire, most crucially at the heart of the desire to be wise, and it includes Eros because
wisdom is one of the most beautiful things, and Love is love of beauty, so it follows that Love must be a lover of wisdom and consequently in a state half-way between wisdom and ignorance.
But really we need a better objective correlative to render intelligible this unkempt and passionate condition of ‘homelessness’—and ‘wisdom is one of the most beautiful things’ sounds too pious and effete, at least in translation, and does not give us what we need if we are to capture the ordeal of the erastes. It does not, for instance, give us any clear idea of the nature of the spur that impels the philosopher forward in a state of felt lack. We also have to acknowledge that the conclusion is dubious. A lover or erastes of (any kind of) beauty could only ‘love wisdom’ if they were in a position to perceive it as ‘one of the most beautiful things’ and even then we can admire something beautiful with desiring it. There is a general comment to be made here on Plato’s account of eros and beauty. Beauty is something that we admire and we can admire a person or a beautiful object without conceiving a desire for them or suffering that sense of lack which belongs to desire. Indeed the whole Kantian aesthetic rather depends on this point.
But there is a further objection. Surely one needs to know what wisdom is if one is to desire it. But there is more than one reason for rejecting this objection. If we make a distinction between knowledge and wisdom we need to specify a difference. As I have already implied, the difference lies in the fact that wisdom is a condition in which one not only knows how things really are as opposed to how they had seemed to be, but in which one can also comport oneself and order ones desires in the light of that knowledge. Indeed it might be said that the intermediate state between ignorance and wisdom is precisely that of knowledge in advance of the re-ordering of desire. One way of lacking wisdom and feeling and thus suffering its lack is just in this experience of dissonance between what one knows and how one feels and acts. One can have the knowledge without the capacity to act so, in that sense, one knows what wisdom is and suffers its absence. More mundanely, and to talk perhaps more specifically of phronesis, our ordinary human follies and stupidities are precisely failures to learn from experience, defined by our inability to act in the light of knowledge of the causal chains that characterise the human condition, and the wisdom consists not just in knowing but also in the power to act in the light of that knowledge.
8
In any event, Diotima crucially represents the philosopher as a lover, an erastes. But at this point we surely need to get more personal. If one really wants to represent Socrates, the figure of the philosopher, as to that extent an erastes one surely needs an eromenos, a corresponding ‘beloved’. Wisdom and Beauty have indeed both been personified in the traditions as a goddess. Even so, although Diotima might resist this because she does want to talk about an eros directed towards ideas and institutions, as well as towards ‘beauty itself’, there is some point in staying with the idea that the eromenos of the one who desires wisdom, is a person. There are two related possibilities here: it can be someone who is ‘beautiful’ in their wisdom or in their capacity for wisdom. Thus someone who is further along the path of wisdom would see the attractiveness of someone who is capable of the same wisdom, and someone at an earlier stage will be attracted to those who are wiser. This latter distinction also allows us to see the reciprocity of desire between erastes and eromenos as well as the switching of roles from one to the other. However, to bring a little primness in to this wonderful locus of self-deception (which is surely anyway one of the notions over against which wisdom is defined)—if we recall Diotima’s comment that eros has been assigned exclusively to sexual desire when really it applies to other forms of desire as well, then the relationship we are talking about is not a sexual one even though it appears to use erotic language. However, one has to recall Nietzsche’s good-humoured remarks in Twilight of the Idols:
Plato … says with an innocence for which one must be Greek and not ‘Christian’, that there would be no Platonic philosophy at all if Athens had not possessed such beautiful youths; it was the sight of them which first plunged the philosopher’s soul into an erotic whirl and allowed it no rest until it had implanted the seed of all high things into so beautiful a soil. Another singular saint!—one doesn’t believe one’s ears, even supposing one believes Plato. One sees at least that philosophising was different in Athens, above all public …Philosophy in the manner of Plato should rather be defined as an erotic contest …What finally emerged from this philosophical eroticism of Plato? A new artistic form of the Greek agon, dialectics. §23 p 80-81 Twilight)
… Or at least the form of the relationship we are talking about is not a sexual one. But the central comedy of the Symposium turns on Alcibiades’s sexual and philosophical faux pas in seeking to offer sexual favours in exchange for wisdom. The dialogue almost centres on this comedy. The point about the figures of Alcibiades and Socrates is the admiration of the former and the attractiveness or moral beauty of the latter. Alcibiades is also a figure of the philosopher, but a figure who shows the parlousness of that precarious condition poised between ignorance and wisdom. If Socrates is, for all that, also a figure of one who desires wisdom he is also the figure of one who is attractive just because he exemplifies it, who embodies what is desired. He can be both of these things just because one person can be wiser than another and there is such a thing as increase in wisdom. The reciprocity of erastes and eromenos must work something like this: even the Silenus figure of Socrates who is physically ugly can be an eromenos to one who desires wisdom but just to the extent that the latter does indeed desire wisdom they themselves are attractive to one who is already wise because they exemplify some degree of moral beauty. To make sense of any of this one needs to accept that these various states of eros are precisely embodied and have a characteristic presence.
However, what we are shown is the failure of Alcibiades to comprehend what he is attracted towards and that failure is also embodied and has a characteristic and palpable presence that makes him unattractive to one who thus discerns his condition and whose desires are in any case differently ordered and at a higher stage of the Ascent. There is a further aspect of the comedy which has a Wittgensteinian flavour. If we think abstractly of the attractiveness of wisdom—as opposed to the attractiveness of what we see embodied in one who is wise—then one may be led into the error of thinking of wisdom as a possession, even a commodity with an exchange value. But this is just the mistake that Alcibiades makes in proposing his exchange. Diotima pointedly remarks that the aim of eros is not ‘possession’ of the beautiful but ‘procreation in the beautiful’:
The object of love, Socrates, is not, as you think, beauty”. “What is it then?” “Its object is to procreate and bring forth in beauty”.
The talk here is of begetting and bringing forth, though what is obviously missing from the metaphorics is the equally important conception and gestation. However, it brings us to a point where philosophy as eros coincides with philosophy as poiesis. What the philosopher seeks to do is to bring forth as well as to procreate and the capacity for both depends upon a prior conception and gestation. What the one who desires wisdom does is to bring forth in themselves as well as beget in others. But if what is brought forth is wisdom and virtue then we can also say that what is brought to articulate expression is insight and the realisation of how things really are as opposed to how they had only seemed to be—which is the common revelatory function of what we call philosophy and what we call poetry. It is one reason at least why it might be true that philosophy should really only be written as poetry. It is a bringing forth into being of truths which were formerly hidden.
[1] Philosophy should really only be written as poetry
[2] A Joint Degree in Philosophy and Drama, in which a dedicated, jointly taught module dealt with just these issues, would provide an illuminating experimental forum.
[3] A friend remarked that this is a nice image of ‘knowledge transfer’ and thus precisely not an image of philosophy
[4] See my ‘In the Beginning was the Deed: Philosophers, Reality and the World’ in Practical Philosophy 8 2 2007
Wisdom and Virtue: or what do philosophers teach?
1
Beneath the surface of these fragmented reflections on teaching philosophy are images of scenes from the last thirty five years, scenes of my success and failure, courage and cowardice, as a teacher of philosophy. There is more than one kind of success and one kind of failure in teaching, but my occasional perplexity about teaching intertwines with a more chronic one about what it is to do philosophy at all, or, since even that phrase carries a certain self-distancing within it, about what it is to be a philosopher, and whether and to what extent I have been either a philosopher or a teacher of philosophy.
What follows is impressionistic and as much about my own intellectual ambivalence and uncertainty as about the state of the discipline. In any event I am sure that other philosophers have had a sense of emptiness when they have talked about what most matters to them, but without apparent reaction; or a sense of hollowness when they have given the audience what it wants but not yet what it ought to have; or, and marvellously, a sense of fulfilment when students are utterly absorbed and engaged—and all this quite independently of the petty domestic achievement of proper preparation, the power point presentation, the e-learning and other initiatives commended with one (anxious) voice by our Teaching and Learning Committees as ‘good practice’ or, and even better, as ‘innovative’ in ‘delivering’ a module—though ‘delivering’ is a more significant metaphor than first appears ...
2
It seems to me that two related and half-submerged dichotomies have infected philosophy and the way we teach it—the first of these is between intellect and feeling, the second, to put it pointedly and controversially in these scientistic times, is between philosophy and poetry. Now contemporary philosophers almost never talk of the ‘love of wisdom’ and if it is raised by their students as the true vocation, perhaps, of the philosopher they are likely to say, though, alas, without irony, that such a notion belongs to the distant history of the discipline and has little to do with our contemporary agenda. And yet, perhaps the embarrassment has something to do with the dichotomies.
We have a dichotomy, an a priori intellectual distortion that determines in advance the direction of conscious reflection, when two elements that belong together within an integrated whole, are forced apart and treated independently and out of all connection with each other. Overcoming the dichotomy is a matter of restoring the connections, though practice, and this is crucial and almost the main theme of this paper, may well lag behind the theoretical achievement. Thus, although it is now widely acknowledged that we have sometimes fatally split thought from feeling, this recognition is precisely not yet embodied in our practice, and this seems to me to be a failure of wisdom.
But my claim that there is a dichotomy between philosophy and poetry may seem more surprising, and even tendentious, so it may be helpful to call in aid here two rather different figures, John Stuart Mill and Ludwig Wittgenstein. But before I do so it is worth repeating that if there is indeed a genuine dichotomy to be overcome it should issue in a change in how we approach the teaching of philosophy, since our practice as philosophers, which I take to be continuous with our practice as teachers, is a function of our conception of the discipline: if literary art or poetry should be (re-)integrated into that conception then it must make a difference to how we teach—though this may not be to the liking of all teachers or all students: because it will make on us a different set of demands (and the academy institutionalises a set of aptitudes). This dissonance between theory and practice, though, is itself, again, an image of the distinction between knowledge and wisdom.
The young John Stuart Mill wrote in a letter to Thomas Carlyle that
… one thing not useless to do would be to … make those who are not poets understand that poetry is higher than logic, and that the union of the two is philosophy.
In his Notebooks Wittgenstein wrote:
Philosophie dϋrfte man eigentlich nur dichten.[1]
These remarks are striking, and if they put pressure on our conception of philosophy they also must put pressure on our conception of poetry. It must be more than ‘the merely decorative word’, as Pound said. So it is not ‘what oft was thought’, as Pope puts it—indeed must not be what oft was thought, but rather what we are by its means only now able to bring to thought at all—in the spirit of Shelley’s ’marking the before unapprehended relations of things’—which poetry does just because it is, as he says, ‘vitally metaphorical’, where, in the same way, what is metaphorical is to be understood, not as an ornamental way of expressing what we already know or understand, but as the unexpected means to the startling disclosure of what we did not until then realise or understand.
But I said that the two dichotomies are related (and one can hardly articulate this without the absurdity becoming evident): philosophy is alleged to appeal to the intellect and poetry to feeling. One might recall here and against that thought Wordsworth’s notion of ‘feeling intellect’, and there is no such dualism in Kant:
Poetry … expands the mind by giving freedom to the imagination and by offering, from among the boundless multiplicity of possible forms accordant with a given concept, to whose bounds it is restricted, that one which couples with the presentation of the concept a wealth of thought (Gedankenfülle) to which no verbal expression is completely adequate, and by thus rising aesthetically to ideas
This highly perceptive remark of Kant’s hints at how the metaphorical content of an image works upon the imagination in a vivid present of experience, but such content also and crucially discloses itself and the realities it opens up slowly and over time, attracting a compelled attention before it is understood, where the compulsion is the unconscious recognition of significance.
3
Teachers of philosophy take themselves, on the whole, to have a responsibility to train the intellect and are all too likely to consider the feelings of their students, as indeed their own, to be a private matter that is no one else’s business—a ‘defensive’ attitude which shows we know ourselves ‘vulnerable’ where feeling is concerned: indeed our resentment when our ideas are ‘attacked’ shows that unconsciously at least we all know very well that thought, feeling and our sense of identity are vitally related, and it shows that this ‘embattled’ and anxious self is in danger and that this is the real source of the martial imagery so much deplored in philosophy.
Many students of philosophy also seem to subscribe to this never quite explicit doctrine, that their feelings are not part of the contract, even though one knows very well that their feelings are involved in the very business of philosophy, in the unsettling experience of the elenchus and the emotional shock and disarray of aporia, in which the sense both of the world and one’s identity within it seem threatened and undermined.
But it is worth noting, by contrast, and as a possible future aid, that no such contract appears to be in place in Departments of Drama, where teachers almost routinely appeal to the emotional intelligence of their students, who implicitly consent to their emotional lives and resources being addressed and challenged. Part of their training is in the authentic representation of feeling in articulated thought, in speech, conduct and demeanour and this means that they must draw on, and are encouraged and goaded into drawing on, their own life-experience, their own perplexities, and must learn to rely on observation, imagination, memory and self-knowledge—and, also, of course, on each other.[2]
4
Philosophers are famously reluctant to define philosophy—beyond saying, for instance, that it is an activity rather than a subject to be studied, that it is not a body of knowledge but a method and spirit of inquiry that depends upon conversation and dialogue, though this latter aspect becomes increasingly unavailable as student numbers rise and the basic conditions for the possibility of genuine conversation and dialogue—personal acquaintance—recede. The teacher of philosophy will tend to dismiss requests for definition and just get on and do philosophy—with the students in tow as it were—in the expectation that they will get the point and start to do on their own account what their teachers exemplify.
Although this approach is pedagogically sound as far as it goes, nevertheless what one does, how one teaches philosophy, is a function of one’s conception of the discipline, and that conception will certainly reflect the necessary tasks of one’s time, which become as it were the ‘normal science’ of philosophy—and may, in a time of specialism and narrow focus, exemplify nothing else. The resident danger of this approach, then, lies in taking these tasks to be the thing itself—and in regarding the history of philosophy exclusively in the light of advances in the treatment of particular favoured problems, without further attention to what else might be found outside the narrow focus determined by these prior interests. And yet this amounts to an almost catastrophic failure to learn how to read—to learn just to read without this being a kind of search for proof texts as it were.
A philosophically well educated student in the mainstream Analytic tradition will answer more or less to the Aims and Objectives that have attached themselves to Programmes of Study, they will have good dialectical skills, will have an engaged acquaintance with the state of the discipline within their own tradition and a good grasp of the historical developments that led to that state. They will, however, share with many of their teachers an almost invincible ignorance of the other traditions whose progress helps to determine the larger and more fragmented state of the discipline in the wider world. In particular, to use an egregious example, they will be unaware of how a European philosophical dialogue which still seemed entirely possible, not to say normal, in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries had become unavailable in the twentieth. So they will disdain (and quite rightly in some cases) styles of thinking and philosophical idioms with which in truth they are ill-equipped to engage—styles and idioms that have grown out of close attention precisely to what is ‘vitally metaphorical’. But they will know a good argument when they see it, and a bad one, though perhaps if they favour an argument the premises may be granted too easily without the patient sifting of distinctions that is prior to argument, and they are likely to see the history and contemporary condition of philosophy in terms of a set of ‘positions’ which can be defended or refuted thus and so.
It would be mad to deny that philosophy deals in positions and problems and arguments—but it is not mad to complain that we come to them too quickly, without reflecting on the conditions of inquiry that eventually give rise to them. The virtue of negative capability that sustains a person through the unpleasant experience of disorientation and loss of bearings is not on the curriculum; the ‘not knowing one’s way about’ that Wittgenstein said was the form of a philosophical problem, is hardly referred to. And so our students seek impatiently and indignantly for release into the clearly defined terrain of positions, problems and arguments … which will allow them to finish an assignment before the deadline or pass an exam: in this environment the creative condition of philosophical confusion and tension before release is not permitted—or will at least be penalised for lateness on the grounds that otherwise it is unfair on those whose time-management is allegedly more efficient.
What troubles me about this kind of otherwise admirable philosophical education is that it can leave one’s life and sense of identity intact, as in ‘untouched’ and unaffected. In some cases philosophers simply shore up by minute and ingenious argument their prior sense of world and identity. There is no inwardness in it, no loss of the sense through elenchus and aporia of self and world, but rather a self image built up around a carapace of expertise and competence, no gestation or bringing forth—and therefore no wisdom and what Socrates says to Agathon seems little to do with the case:
It would be very nice, Agathon, if wisdom were like water, and flowed by contact out of a person who has more into one who has less, just as water can be made to flow through a thread of wool out of the fuller of two cups into the emptier. (Symposium 175d)[3]
Now we have to make compromises in the face of difficult political and social realities, we have to negotiate with an inimical instrumentalism in our institutions of higher education which suffer systemic anxiety in the face of the need to deliver and so defend like out-voted cabinet ministers policies not within their control or of their making, and of course it is possible to identify the knowledge and skills that are developed in a philosophy degree, transferable skills that render students (highly) employable, and if the ethos demands that we factor employability into our module specifications, then no doubt that can be done. But the compromise can also be corrupting since it encourages us to emphasise in our teaching what is most teachable and to wave vaguely and perhaps ironically in the direction of what is more hardly won in philosophy.
Nevertheless, if we talk of ‘compromise’ in the face of political imperatives, it is well to remind ourselves of the standards and principles which we have had to compromise, and from which we have therefore fallen: philosophers desire to be wise, philosophy is a disguised form of eros, better therefore thought of as a passion—at least according to the priestess, Diotima, who makes an interesting claim about the term eros:
…”the truth is that we isolate a particular kind of eros and appropriate for it the name of eros, which really belongs to a wider whole, while we employ a different name for the other kinds of eros.” (205b)
Eros, in other words, has been arbitrarily assigned to just one form of desire, viz sexual desire, even though it has other forms whose conceptual connection with one another is concealed by language: one of these forms is philosophy. As the translator Robin Waterfield points out (p 85) eros and philosophy become increasingly identified in the dialogue and become so in the figure of Socrates himself as the Erastes who is born of Poverty and Contrivance.
But Diotima immediately makes a similar point about poiesis after the young Socrates is made to ask a conveniently artless question:
“Can you give me another example of such a usage?” … “Yes, here it is. By its original meaning poetry means simply creation, and creation, as you know, can take very various forms. Any action which is the cause of a thing emerging from non-existence to existence might be called poetry, and all the processes in all the crafts are kinds of poetry, and all those who engage in them poets … but yet they are not called poets, but have other names, and out of the whole field of poetry or creation one part, which deals with music and metre, is isolated and called by the name of the whole. This part alone is called poetry, and those whose province is this part of poetry are called poets”.
Although Diotima is clear enough that she wants to include philosophy as a form of eros and although the comments about poiesis are immediately juxtaposed to that discussion, the connection between philosophy and poetry is not so obvious. But if we recall that the philosopher is one who desires to be wise, then the connection is mediated for us by what she goes on to say about the ‘best’ kind of poetry:
there are some whose creative instinct is of the soul, and who long to beget spiritually, not physically, the progeny which it is the nature of the soul to create and bring to birth. If you ask what that progeny is, it is wisdom and virtue in general; of this all poets and such craftsmen as have found out some new thing may be said to be begetters. (209a)
Thus Diotima identifies the poets as among those who generate wisdom and virtue. The point is emphasised a little later when she mentions Homer and Hesiod:
Take Homer, for example, and Hesiod, and the other good poets; who would not envy them the children that they left behind them, children whose qualities have won immortal fame and glory for their parents? (209c)
But this is not just the poets in the sense of those who write in metre and verse: poiesis is to be understood in terms of human creativity more generally (‘Any action which is the cause of a thing emerging from non-existence to existence might be called poetry’) though Diotima’s particular interest is in those ‘poets’ who are the cause of bringing into existence ‘wisdom and virtue’ and that is to be understood in terms of the metaphors of begetting and bringing forth, metaphors which are deeply entrenched within our thinking about creativity.
5
Now one way to connect the idea that philosophers are those who desire wisdom with the idea that philosophy is, like poetry, a form of creativity, is through the further thought offered by Diotima that the ‘best’ poets are creative in their begetting and bringing forth precisely of wisdom and virtue—and this is just what those who desire wisdom, the philosophers, also wish to do. Philosophy and poetry converge in being creative of wisdom and virtue, in bringing wisdom and virtue forth, and in begetting it.
Here it would be reasonable to object that philosophers and poets may at least sometimes have a common end, but that is all: poetry and philosophy are different kinds of activity. Indeed it is interesting to note that one translator of the Symposium, Robin Waterfield, refers in his Preface to what he calls ‘the balance’ in the dialogue ‘between philosophy and literary art’.
But to talk in this way assumes that we know the nature of the quantities that rest upon the scales, that we know where and what the philosophy is and how it is to be distinguished from the ‘literary art’. The objection depends upon the dichotomy I mentioned at the beginning, and one move towards its overcoming is to deny that it is philosophy and poetry that have a common end, and to assert, by contrast, that certain activities that have become associated with what we now call ‘philosophy’ and other activities that we now tend to associate with ‘poetry’ are unified by a philosophical telos.
If I might make a suggestion inspired by Diotima’s comments on eros and poiesis, what we now tend to think of as ‘philosophy’ refers only to a subset of the activities that can properly be called ‘philosophical’. What has allegedly happened to the terms eros and poiesis, in other words, has happened in a damaging way to philosophy. Just as eros and poiesis have both been appropriated for just one form of eros and poiesis whose connection with other forms is thus concealed by the surface appearance of language so ’philosophy’ has come to be appropriated as a term that applies to just one part of philosophy which is then distinguished from other activities that really belong to it. So, very crudely, we tend to think of philosophy as a matter of analysis and argument, as part of dialectic, and explicitly distinguish it as a discipline from other forms of reflection.
I should prefer to talk rather of a convergence of methods and tropes, a range of forms of reflection, all of which are philosophical—story-telling, allegory, theatre, metaphor, dialectic, analysis, in combination and mutual dependence, and what makes them ‘philosophical’, to come to the point at last, is their tendency to emancipate us from error and ignorance or delusion and to lead us towards self-knowledge and wisdom. So, for instance the elenchus is not ‘the philosophy’ but only one of its activities, a particular procedure which has a role within the whole philosophical enterprise, viz to undermine attachment to such beliefs and attitudes as conceal from us what can be shown only by other means—in a way that depends upon the imagination. All the aspects in combination have the function of investigating and revealing realities that were previously concealed from view because we stand in our own light. At the beginning such realities may be only dimly discerned, and we proceed feelingly by means of images and metaphors that attract our attention before we are able to draw out their meaning. But this slow process precisely invokes the metaphor of gestation that precedes the bringing forth. In other words the term ‘philosophical’ names a function or telos rather than a subset of the methods by which this telos or function might be achieved. It seems obvious to me that this enterprise is a moral endeavour which depends upon a moral response and envisages a philosophical community composed of teachers and their pupils, though who the teachers are and who the pupils will not always coincide with their social role. But who would dare to be a teacher if these are the terms?
6
The image or, to recall Kant, the aesthetic idea, of the Cave exercises its power of attraction, and the power it exerts over us is a sign that it shows us something we have not yet fully realised. I think of the moment when the released prisoner looks back and sees for the first time the mechanisms which had determined the form of his whole previous experience, a form of experience within which his comrades remain imprisoned. Even this moment of looking back and observing the absorption of the others in the shadows is an image of ‘wisdom’. It is an image of seeing the narrowness of a previous vision and perspective, and represents a form of self-knowledge and freedom constituted by the revelation of possibilities previously hidden, including the possibility of movement from the one condition to the other, both in the sense that others can follow and that one can fall back and lose perspective again.
The ‘wisdom’ lies in the revelatory seeing things as they really are as opposed to how they had seemed to be, though perhaps it is better to say that the extent of someone’s wisdom lies in the applications of that phrase, in the many contexts in which one has to learn the hard way that such distinctions obtain, and that if one knew ... one would behave differently. So there is a further, ‘virtue’ aspect to wisdom: being able to comport oneself and order one’s desires in the light of that knowledge of how things really are. This is the real force of the Platonic connection between knowledge and virtue—one only ‘really’ knows when one is able to act in the light of one’s knowledge: it is then that one knows in one’s body or in one’s heart, it is a criterion of a degree of knowledge determined by how much of the person acknowledges it. The Cave is also an image of the necessity for Kierkegaardian indirection: you cannot simply announce to the prisoners that that is their condition, unless you want to get yourself killed (though the murderous response envisaged in the narrative indicates that what the prisoners represent is not engulfment in their perspective, but bad faith).[4]
7
In her account of eros Diotima says that there is something that the gods and the ignorant have in common: they do not desire wisdom. The gods do not desire it because they are already wise and you cannot desire to have what you do not lack—and the ignorant precisely do not know that they lack it:
The tiresome thing about ignorance is precisely this, that a man who possesses neither beauty nor goodness nor intelligence is perfectly well satisfied with himself, and no one who does not believe that he lacks a thing desires what he does not believe he lacks.
In fact Diotima’s description is ambiguous, at least in the translation. It may be true that an ignorant person ‘does not believe’ that they lack wisdom, but this is consistent with their having no beliefs in the matter at all, and in this they are to be distinguished from the deluded who believe positively that they do not lack wisdom. The purely ignorant will be entirely unaware that there is anything that they lack.
So it is one thing to lack something and another to know that you lack it. It is this latter condition which is described in Diotima’s answer to Socrates’ next question, what kind of person can be said to love or desire wisdom?—it is ‘those who fall between wisdom and ignorance’. They are not entirely ignorant because they know that they lack wisdom, and they know this because the lack is something that they feel because they are aware of the dissonance between what they now know and the state of their passions and desires
But what is it to feel the lack of wisdom? This condition is personified precisely in the figure of Eros, that weather-beaten, shoeless, homeless person who exemplifies the felt lack at the heart of desire, most crucially at the heart of the desire to be wise, and it includes Eros because
wisdom is one of the most beautiful things, and Love is love of beauty, so it follows that Love must be a lover of wisdom and consequently in a state half-way between wisdom and ignorance.
But really we need a better objective correlative to render intelligible this unkempt and passionate condition of ‘homelessness’—and ‘wisdom is one of the most beautiful things’ sounds too pious and effete, at least in translation, and does not give us what we need if we are to capture the ordeal of the erastes. It does not, for instance, give us any clear idea of the nature of the spur that impels the philosopher forward in a state of felt lack. We also have to acknowledge that the conclusion is dubious. A lover or erastes of (any kind of) beauty could only ‘love wisdom’ if they were in a position to perceive it as ‘one of the most beautiful things’ and even then we can admire something beautiful with desiring it. There is a general comment to be made here on Plato’s account of eros and beauty. Beauty is something that we admire and we can admire a person or a beautiful object without conceiving a desire for them or suffering that sense of lack which belongs to desire. Indeed the whole Kantian aesthetic rather depends on this point.
But there is a further objection. Surely one needs to know what wisdom is if one is to desire it. But there is more than one reason for rejecting this objection. If we make a distinction between knowledge and wisdom we need to specify a difference. As I have already implied, the difference lies in the fact that wisdom is a condition in which one not only knows how things really are as opposed to how they had seemed to be, but in which one can also comport oneself and order ones desires in the light of that knowledge. Indeed it might be said that the intermediate state between ignorance and wisdom is precisely that of knowledge in advance of the re-ordering of desire. One way of lacking wisdom and feeling and thus suffering its lack is just in this experience of dissonance between what one knows and how one feels and acts. One can have the knowledge without the capacity to act so, in that sense, one knows what wisdom is and suffers its absence. More mundanely, and to talk perhaps more specifically of phronesis, our ordinary human follies and stupidities are precisely failures to learn from experience, defined by our inability to act in the light of knowledge of the causal chains that characterise the human condition, and the wisdom consists not just in knowing but also in the power to act in the light of that knowledge.
8
In any event, Diotima crucially represents the philosopher as a lover, an erastes. But at this point we surely need to get more personal. If one really wants to represent Socrates, the figure of the philosopher, as to that extent an erastes one surely needs an eromenos, a corresponding ‘beloved’. Wisdom and Beauty have indeed both been personified in the traditions as a goddess. Even so, although Diotima might resist this because she does want to talk about an eros directed towards ideas and institutions, as well as towards ‘beauty itself’, there is some point in staying with the idea that the eromenos of the one who desires wisdom, is a person. There are two related possibilities here: it can be someone who is ‘beautiful’ in their wisdom or in their capacity for wisdom. Thus someone who is further along the path of wisdom would see the attractiveness of someone who is capable of the same wisdom, and someone at an earlier stage will be attracted to those who are wiser. This latter distinction also allows us to see the reciprocity of desire between erastes and eromenos as well as the switching of roles from one to the other. However, to bring a little primness in to this wonderful locus of self-deception (which is surely anyway one of the notions over against which wisdom is defined)—if we recall Diotima’s comment that eros has been assigned exclusively to sexual desire when really it applies to other forms of desire as well, then the relationship we are talking about is not a sexual one even though it appears to use erotic language. However, one has to recall Nietzsche’s good-humoured remarks in Twilight of the Idols:
Plato … says with an innocence for which one must be Greek and not ‘Christian’, that there would be no Platonic philosophy at all if Athens had not possessed such beautiful youths; it was the sight of them which first plunged the philosopher’s soul into an erotic whirl and allowed it no rest until it had implanted the seed of all high things into so beautiful a soil. Another singular saint!—one doesn’t believe one’s ears, even supposing one believes Plato. One sees at least that philosophising was different in Athens, above all public …Philosophy in the manner of Plato should rather be defined as an erotic contest …What finally emerged from this philosophical eroticism of Plato? A new artistic form of the Greek agon, dialectics. §23 p 80-81 Twilight)
… Or at least the form of the relationship we are talking about is not a sexual one. But the central comedy of the Symposium turns on Alcibiades’s sexual and philosophical faux pas in seeking to offer sexual favours in exchange for wisdom. The dialogue almost centres on this comedy. The point about the figures of Alcibiades and Socrates is the admiration of the former and the attractiveness or moral beauty of the latter. Alcibiades is also a figure of the philosopher, but a figure who shows the parlousness of that precarious condition poised between ignorance and wisdom. If Socrates is, for all that, also a figure of one who desires wisdom he is also the figure of one who is attractive just because he exemplifies it, who embodies what is desired. He can be both of these things just because one person can be wiser than another and there is such a thing as increase in wisdom. The reciprocity of erastes and eromenos must work something like this: even the Silenus figure of Socrates who is physically ugly can be an eromenos to one who desires wisdom but just to the extent that the latter does indeed desire wisdom they themselves are attractive to one who is already wise because they exemplify some degree of moral beauty. To make sense of any of this one needs to accept that these various states of eros are precisely embodied and have a characteristic presence.
However, what we are shown is the failure of Alcibiades to comprehend what he is attracted towards and that failure is also embodied and has a characteristic and palpable presence that makes him unattractive to one who thus discerns his condition and whose desires are in any case differently ordered and at a higher stage of the Ascent. There is a further aspect of the comedy which has a Wittgensteinian flavour. If we think abstractly of the attractiveness of wisdom—as opposed to the attractiveness of what we see embodied in one who is wise—then one may be led into the error of thinking of wisdom as a possession, even a commodity with an exchange value. But this is just the mistake that Alcibiades makes in proposing his exchange. Diotima pointedly remarks that the aim of eros is not ‘possession’ of the beautiful but ‘procreation in the beautiful’:
The object of love, Socrates, is not, as you think, beauty”. “What is it then?” “Its object is to procreate and bring forth in beauty”.
The talk here is of begetting and bringing forth, though what is obviously missing from the metaphorics is the equally important conception and gestation. However, it brings us to a point where philosophy as eros coincides with philosophy as poiesis. What the philosopher seeks to do is to bring forth as well as to procreate and the capacity for both depends upon a prior conception and gestation. What the one who desires wisdom does is to bring forth in themselves as well as beget in others. But if what is brought forth is wisdom and virtue then we can also say that what is brought to articulate expression is insight and the realisation of how things really are as opposed to how they had only seemed to be—which is the common revelatory function of what we call philosophy and what we call poetry. It is one reason at least why it might be true that philosophy should really only be written as poetry. It is a bringing forth into being of truths which were formerly hidden.
[1] Philosophy should really only be written as poetry
[2] A Joint Degree in Philosophy and Drama, in which a dedicated, jointly taught module dealt with just these issues, would provide an illuminating experimental forum.
[3] A friend remarked that this is a nice image of ‘knowledge transfer’ and thus precisely not an image of philosophy
[4] See my ‘In the Beginning was the Deed: Philosophers, Reality and the World’ in Practical Philosophy 8 2 2007
Sunday 6 April 2008
walking on the same ground
Returning to Birkenhead after three weeks in Papay, catching up on the ordinary opportunity to read the Observer in hard copy, sitting in a coffee shop ... I found my copy of the writings of Pelagius on the bedroom floor which is to say, where it was when I left, and started to read his Letter to Demetrias, who was fourteen and wanted to dedicate herself to the religious life as a virgin ... it hardly matters what the topic was except that I have this recurring ... well, hardly a problem, but I find that my imagination cannot quite cope with the idea that some ancient Briton can write elegant Latin prose (maybe he couldn't though, maybe he needed a little help from his friend) about the virtues of the religious life with psychological insight and shrewdness. The very idea of a complicated sentence structure with qualifications and sub-clauses and so forth ... there is something ridiculous about what I am trying to say ... unlike Jerome and Augustine, say, who I knew first from their writings. In this case what I know first is that someone was brought up on this soil, perhaps walked across these fields or in this woodland ... and I can't quite connect that with the life of the mind. It's a failure of my background imaginative assumptions, the background picture. By the way, they all say that Augustine was incomparably cleverer than Pelagius ... and yet all my sympathies are with Pelagius: perhaps because I'm rather charmed by the idea of someone being cleverer and wrong in a culture which values cleverness so much. I try to distinguish between being clever and being intelligent, perhaps because I am not that clever myself.
A similar thing with Orkney, with St Boniface Kirk, for instance, a monastic settlement, conceivably led by an Abbot promoted to Melrose in the 1170's (though Eynhallow seems the official candidate for Abbot Laurence) ... but, again, walking these fields, standing on this shore ... Cistercians, after the earlier Columban monks finding their little deserts in the midst of swirling seas: with the same toughness of mind one finds in Pelagius ...
Daniel took Jonardon and me across to the Papey Holm in his inflatable on Thursday afternoon, but not for long since the wind was rising, a powerful, uninhabited place, and a glimpse into the chambered cairn:
A similar thing with Orkney, with St Boniface Kirk, for instance, a monastic settlement, conceivably led by an Abbot promoted to Melrose in the 1170's (though Eynhallow seems the official candidate for Abbot Laurence) ... but, again, walking these fields, standing on this shore ... Cistercians, after the earlier Columban monks finding their little deserts in the midst of swirling seas: with the same toughness of mind one finds in Pelagius ...
Daniel took Jonardon and me across to the Papey Holm in his inflatable on Thursday afternoon, but not for long since the wind was rising, a powerful, uninhabited place, and a glimpse into the chambered cairn:
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