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A few more trees
Nov. 7th, 2007 11:59 pm
Currently at Toronto Pearson: 1. High today: 3. Saw my first snowflakes of the cold season today. Still no killing frost, though; the petunias are still going strong.
Spent this afternoon at the Toronto Reference Library, mostly looking through journals, of which they have a surprising number--not as many as the universities, but some that the universities have discontinued. Happened on a fantastic article by Elijah Millgram called "Who Was Nietzsche's Genealogist?" in Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, which points out some basic contradictions in The Genealogy of Morals, probably the most striking of which is that Nietzsche begins by saying that the English moral philosophers have it all wrong when they locate the origin of morality in favourable judgments about what's beneficial and unfavourable judgments about what's harmful, judgments which have now been forgotten--because, says Nietzsche, how could they be forgotten?--and then tells his own story about the origins of morality which similarly requires the founding judgments to have been forgotten. In other words, he forgets what he has said about forgetting. Another bit: Nietzsche criticizes the English moralists for basing their account of the origin of morality on a speculative fiction, saying that we need to look at the facts and see what really happened, and then bases his own account on his own speculative fiction (which, in its own right, bothered and disappointed me about the Genealogy and/or Beyond Good and Evil when I first read them seriously--how much weight can you put on these speculative fictions and their results? (Somewhat relatedly: Foucault begins his "Nietzsche, Genealogy, History" by saying that "genealogy is gray, meticulous, and patiently documentary"--and arguments continue as to how meticulous and patiently documentary Foucault's own genealogies are, and in what sense they are, as he also said they were, "fictions".)) Millgram thinks Nietzsche does this to show how easily people assimilate contradictory ideas, how they forget one idea when confronted with another. Which is reminiscent of Socrates's and Meno's forgetting all about the "theory of recollection" toward the end of the Meno--and as with the Meno, as with Being and Time, as with so much philosophy, it goes to show how difficult and rare it is to see the forest for the trees.
Started in on the Charmides for the fourth time today, and noticed something I'd missed before: after Critias calls Charmides over and says Socrates has a cure for his headaches and Socrates tells a story about how he got this cure from some Thracian and that it involves eating a leaf and reciting an incantation at the same time, Critias says that Charmides "is considered to excel his comrades ... in that very thing which you say is produced by your charm: temperance, you say it is, do you not?" Socrates agrees, but in fact he had said no such thing.
Also: Critias doesn't say that Charmides is the most temperate person in the world, but that he is considered to be.
It occurred to me today that the reason for announcing at the beginning that Socrates has just come back from years away at war could be (in part) to set it up that this conversation is taking place years after the conversation of the Republic, and that people have been discussing, and distorting, what Socrates had said while he's been away. So, "doing one's own work" has come to Charmides, through Critias, as the definition of temperance, sophrosune, rather than of justice, dikaiosune. (But this gets tricky, because, as I was wondering over on my last reading of the Republic, last month, Socrates doesn't seem to distinguish all that sharply between sophrosune and dikaiosune. He says that sophrosune "is surely a kind of order, the mastery of certain kinds of pleasures and desires", and that it is "an agreement between the naturally worse [i.e., the desiring part] and the naturally better [i.e., the rational part] as to which of the two is to rule both in the city and in each one". You could say that sophrosune is the ability to have dikaiosune, the ability for each part to do its own work. It seems strange to subordinate one virtue to another like this, but then if wisdom is to be the chief of all virtues, then it may not be so strange. Courage is subordinate to temperance is subordinate to justice is subordinate to wisdom ... is subordinate to the good.) When Charmides says to Socrates that maybe he doesn't know what "doing one's own work" means because the guy who came up with the idea didn't know what it meant either, Socrates--who is narrating the dialogue to some unknown listener--says that Charmides glances slyly at Critias, and Critias gets upset, and this confirms his suspicion that Critias was the guy who came up with the idea. But it could be that Critias gets upset because he knows that Socrates was the guy who came up with the idea, although he doesn't know that the idea has been distorted, and thinks that Charmides knows this too (maybe because he did in fact pass the idea on to Charmides, but as Socrates's rather than as his own), and that Charmides is insulting Socrates. Actually, it doesn't matter whether he thinks Charmides knows it's Socrates's idea or not; he might actually be more embarrassed if he plagiarized the idea in giving it to Charmides, and now his plagiarism--which has gotten it wrong, as plagiarists usually do--has come home to roost.
Anyway, Socrates suggests a very odd interpretation of what failing to do one's own work might be, such that one would fail to do one's own work in writing someone else's name or making tools for someone else, before Critias jumps into the discussion and by a convoluted chain of reasoning comes up with the idea that doing one's own work means making good things. The way he does this, it seems as if what he might be doing is trying to reconstruct what Socrates, knowing Socrates in the way that an unphilosophical but intelligent associate might know Socrates, would mean by "doing one's own work". And Socrates eventually tells him that what he's ended up with is pretty good and important, but it ain't sophrosune. (It ain't even dikaiosune anymore, but Critias never knew he was there in the first place.)
So, again: at the end of the dialogue, the lone rational one is forced to rule, as recommended in the Republic, by virtue of reason, but not by reason but by force, because, as suggested in the Republic, most people can't reason straight and mostly shouldn't bother trying. It's better if they stick to their own work.
Spent this afternoon at the Toronto Reference Library, mostly looking through journals, of which they have a surprising number--not as many as the universities, but some that the universities have discontinued. Happened on a fantastic article by Elijah Millgram called "Who Was Nietzsche's Genealogist?" in Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, which points out some basic contradictions in The Genealogy of Morals, probably the most striking of which is that Nietzsche begins by saying that the English moral philosophers have it all wrong when they locate the origin of morality in favourable judgments about what's beneficial and unfavourable judgments about what's harmful, judgments which have now been forgotten--because, says Nietzsche, how could they be forgotten?--and then tells his own story about the origins of morality which similarly requires the founding judgments to have been forgotten. In other words, he forgets what he has said about forgetting. Another bit: Nietzsche criticizes the English moralists for basing their account of the origin of morality on a speculative fiction, saying that we need to look at the facts and see what really happened, and then bases his own account on his own speculative fiction (which, in its own right, bothered and disappointed me about the Genealogy and/or Beyond Good and Evil when I first read them seriously--how much weight can you put on these speculative fictions and their results? (Somewhat relatedly: Foucault begins his "Nietzsche, Genealogy, History" by saying that "genealogy is gray, meticulous, and patiently documentary"--and arguments continue as to how meticulous and patiently documentary Foucault's own genealogies are, and in what sense they are, as he also said they were, "fictions".)) Millgram thinks Nietzsche does this to show how easily people assimilate contradictory ideas, how they forget one idea when confronted with another. Which is reminiscent of Socrates's and Meno's forgetting all about the "theory of recollection" toward the end of the Meno--and as with the Meno, as with Being and Time, as with so much philosophy, it goes to show how difficult and rare it is to see the forest for the trees.
Started in on the Charmides for the fourth time today, and noticed something I'd missed before: after Critias calls Charmides over and says Socrates has a cure for his headaches and Socrates tells a story about how he got this cure from some Thracian and that it involves eating a leaf and reciting an incantation at the same time, Critias says that Charmides "is considered to excel his comrades ... in that very thing which you say is produced by your charm: temperance, you say it is, do you not?" Socrates agrees, but in fact he had said no such thing.
Also: Critias doesn't say that Charmides is the most temperate person in the world, but that he is considered to be.
It occurred to me today that the reason for announcing at the beginning that Socrates has just come back from years away at war could be (in part) to set it up that this conversation is taking place years after the conversation of the Republic, and that people have been discussing, and distorting, what Socrates had said while he's been away. So, "doing one's own work" has come to Charmides, through Critias, as the definition of temperance, sophrosune, rather than of justice, dikaiosune. (But this gets tricky, because, as I was wondering over on my last reading of the Republic, last month, Socrates doesn't seem to distinguish all that sharply between sophrosune and dikaiosune. He says that sophrosune "is surely a kind of order, the mastery of certain kinds of pleasures and desires", and that it is "an agreement between the naturally worse [i.e., the desiring part] and the naturally better [i.e., the rational part] as to which of the two is to rule both in the city and in each one". You could say that sophrosune is the ability to have dikaiosune, the ability for each part to do its own work. It seems strange to subordinate one virtue to another like this, but then if wisdom is to be the chief of all virtues, then it may not be so strange. Courage is subordinate to temperance is subordinate to justice is subordinate to wisdom ... is subordinate to the good.) When Charmides says to Socrates that maybe he doesn't know what "doing one's own work" means because the guy who came up with the idea didn't know what it meant either, Socrates--who is narrating the dialogue to some unknown listener--says that Charmides glances slyly at Critias, and Critias gets upset, and this confirms his suspicion that Critias was the guy who came up with the idea. But it could be that Critias gets upset because he knows that Socrates was the guy who came up with the idea, although he doesn't know that the idea has been distorted, and thinks that Charmides knows this too (maybe because he did in fact pass the idea on to Charmides, but as Socrates's rather than as his own), and that Charmides is insulting Socrates. Actually, it doesn't matter whether he thinks Charmides knows it's Socrates's idea or not; he might actually be more embarrassed if he plagiarized the idea in giving it to Charmides, and now his plagiarism--which has gotten it wrong, as plagiarists usually do--has come home to roost.
Anyway, Socrates suggests a very odd interpretation of what failing to do one's own work might be, such that one would fail to do one's own work in writing someone else's name or making tools for someone else, before Critias jumps into the discussion and by a convoluted chain of reasoning comes up with the idea that doing one's own work means making good things. The way he does this, it seems as if what he might be doing is trying to reconstruct what Socrates, knowing Socrates in the way that an unphilosophical but intelligent associate might know Socrates, would mean by "doing one's own work". And Socrates eventually tells him that what he's ended up with is pretty good and important, but it ain't sophrosune. (It ain't even dikaiosune anymore, but Critias never knew he was there in the first place.)
So, again: at the end of the dialogue, the lone rational one is forced to rule, as recommended in the Republic, by virtue of reason, but not by reason but by force, because, as suggested in the Republic, most people can't reason straight and mostly shouldn't bother trying. It's better if they stick to their own work.
