![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Good for nothing
Jul. 21st, 2010 12:34 am
Currently at Toronto Pearson: 24, which you'll notice is higher than 21. High today: 28. What's in full bloom now: Queen Anne's Lace.
One of those rare badly blown forecasts for today--the little low pressure system that was supposed to slide over top of us and keep down the daytime heating ran to the south instead, so we were in the sun all day long. So: it was much warmer than it was supposed to be today because we were deeper in a cold air mass than we were supposed to be. And that, as Randy St. Clair says on the Weather Network, is how the weather works! (He also says THUN-derstorms. I like that.)
While I'm here, let me tell you something else about Plato, just to while away the time. Something kind of astounding struck me the other day: Socrates's attack against Euthyphro's understanding of piety (which is often the first thing students (e.g., me) look at in Plato, which means it's often the only thing they look at in Plato) is also an attack against the idea of the form of the good as it is traditionally understood (or maybe as it is more or less universally understood; I don't really know who besides me doesn't understand it this way). That understanding is this: the form of the good exists prior to and independent of all particular good things, and is what is responsible for their being good. If there were no form of the good, nothing would be good. Conversely, the form of the good would still exist even if there were no particular good things. One does not find out what the form of the good, the good itself, is by way of good things, because one does not know what things are good unless one knows the form of the good. How, then, does one find out what the form of the good is? By way of "dialectic", but whatever that is is A COMPLETE FREAKING MYSTERY, but maybe you will find out if you spend half your life in Plato's school for philosopher-kings. But since Plato is dead and the Academy is closed, we will never know. ALAS.
Now, Euthyphro's understanding of piety is that the pious is whatever is loved by the gods. Socrates asks, is something pious because it's loved by the gods, or do the gods love it because it's pious? The point is this: how could the arbitrary say-so of the gods (or, for that matter, of God) decide whether something is pious, or more generally virtuous, or more generally good? What's to stop the gods from loving something bad? If the good is just whatever God says is good, then if God had decided that thou shalt kill, and steal, and commit adultery, and bear false witness, then it would be good to kill, and steal, and commit adultery, and bear false witness. How could anyone think that makes sense? (Here's how: by saying "but God wouldn't command those things, because God is love!" without noticing that they've given the game away.) The problem with "divine command theory" (as it is known in Ethics, but I don't think anyone actually has such a theory) is that it makes "the good" prior to and independent of all particular good things--just like the form of the good is traditionally understood to be. If the form of the good cannot be such that murder, theft, betrayal, and so on, are good, then the form of the good cannot be prior to and independent of all particular good things. If Plato is pushing this general idea in the particular case of piety in the Euthyphro, how could he lose sight of it in the the general case of the good in the Republic?
I started re-reading The Unbearable Lightness of Being last night, because we were talking about eternal recurrence in class today, and The Unbearable Lightness of Being starts out with and takes its title from a meditation on eternal recurrence: if everything happens only once, being is unbearably light (as Nietzsche says that eternal recurrence is "the heaviest thought"; it is Zarathustra's "most abysmal thought", which renders him catatonic for a week when he faces it directly). The first character introduced in The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Tomas, Kundera says was born of a single thought: the German saying "einmal ist keinmal", "once is never"--if something happens only once then it might as well never have happened at all. It occurred to me on the way home tonight that if my understanding of Plato is correct, then a unique particular has no form, because the form of a type (as the analytic philosophers would say) is the way-of-appearing common to its tokens. A unique particular woud be, then, from a Platonist point of view (I mean from my heretical-Platonist point of view), literally nothing, no-thing. Fortunately, there is no such thing as a unique particular--as Nietzsche gathers from Heraclitus, not a thing, not an event, in the world is itself a unique particular, because nothing in the world is persistently self-identical. According to Nietzsche's understanding of Platonism, this means that nothing has a form, because forms are unique particulars that determine the being of persistently self-identical things. According to my understanding of Platonism, it means precisely the opposite: there is a tremendous profusion of forms ... a Heraclitean flux of forms!
One of those rare badly blown forecasts for today--the little low pressure system that was supposed to slide over top of us and keep down the daytime heating ran to the south instead, so we were in the sun all day long. So: it was much warmer than it was supposed to be today because we were deeper in a cold air mass than we were supposed to be. And that, as Randy St. Clair says on the Weather Network, is how the weather works! (He also says THUN-derstorms. I like that.)
While I'm here, let me tell you something else about Plato, just to while away the time. Something kind of astounding struck me the other day: Socrates's attack against Euthyphro's understanding of piety (which is often the first thing students (e.g., me) look at in Plato, which means it's often the only thing they look at in Plato) is also an attack against the idea of the form of the good as it is traditionally understood (or maybe as it is more or less universally understood; I don't really know who besides me doesn't understand it this way). That understanding is this: the form of the good exists prior to and independent of all particular good things, and is what is responsible for their being good. If there were no form of the good, nothing would be good. Conversely, the form of the good would still exist even if there were no particular good things. One does not find out what the form of the good, the good itself, is by way of good things, because one does not know what things are good unless one knows the form of the good. How, then, does one find out what the form of the good is? By way of "dialectic", but whatever that is is A COMPLETE FREAKING MYSTERY, but maybe you will find out if you spend half your life in Plato's school for philosopher-kings. But since Plato is dead and the Academy is closed, we will never know. ALAS.
Now, Euthyphro's understanding of piety is that the pious is whatever is loved by the gods. Socrates asks, is something pious because it's loved by the gods, or do the gods love it because it's pious? The point is this: how could the arbitrary say-so of the gods (or, for that matter, of God) decide whether something is pious, or more generally virtuous, or more generally good? What's to stop the gods from loving something bad? If the good is just whatever God says is good, then if God had decided that thou shalt kill, and steal, and commit adultery, and bear false witness, then it would be good to kill, and steal, and commit adultery, and bear false witness. How could anyone think that makes sense? (Here's how: by saying "but God wouldn't command those things, because God is love!" without noticing that they've given the game away.) The problem with "divine command theory" (as it is known in Ethics, but I don't think anyone actually has such a theory) is that it makes "the good" prior to and independent of all particular good things--just like the form of the good is traditionally understood to be. If the form of the good cannot be such that murder, theft, betrayal, and so on, are good, then the form of the good cannot be prior to and independent of all particular good things. If Plato is pushing this general idea in the particular case of piety in the Euthyphro, how could he lose sight of it in the the general case of the good in the Republic?
I started re-reading The Unbearable Lightness of Being last night, because we were talking about eternal recurrence in class today, and The Unbearable Lightness of Being starts out with and takes its title from a meditation on eternal recurrence: if everything happens only once, being is unbearably light (as Nietzsche says that eternal recurrence is "the heaviest thought"; it is Zarathustra's "most abysmal thought", which renders him catatonic for a week when he faces it directly). The first character introduced in The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Tomas, Kundera says was born of a single thought: the German saying "einmal ist keinmal", "once is never"--if something happens only once then it might as well never have happened at all. It occurred to me on the way home tonight that if my understanding of Plato is correct, then a unique particular has no form, because the form of a type (as the analytic philosophers would say) is the way-of-appearing common to its tokens. A unique particular woud be, then, from a Platonist point of view (I mean from my heretical-Platonist point of view), literally nothing, no-thing. Fortunately, there is no such thing as a unique particular--as Nietzsche gathers from Heraclitus, not a thing, not an event, in the world is itself a unique particular, because nothing in the world is persistently self-identical. According to Nietzsche's understanding of Platonism, this means that nothing has a form, because forms are unique particulars that determine the being of persistently self-identical things. According to my understanding of Platonism, it means precisely the opposite: there is a tremendous profusion of forms ... a Heraclitean flux of forms!
