On personality in philosophy, and once more on not liking Aristotle.

One of the things I've always loved about philosophy is how personal it is -- I mean that we all feel as though we knew many of the authors with whom we spend so much time. Some are naturals for perceived intimacy: the eloquent and prolific correspondent Seneca; Plato, arguably the single greatest contributor to literature ever; Augustine who puts his mind on display and practically pleads with you to riffle through the pages. Others offer themselves via a mysterious mix of writing style and idea patterns. There's dry, haughty Aristotle who only talks about aristocratic pastimes and occasionally says something that's not really a joke but you're pretty sure he thought it was; and airy, cocky Hume; Hobbes how self-satisfiedly sour; Spinoza whom you can see packing his straw-frail, ecstatic mysticism into bricks of theorems to build castles in the air ...It does prejudice one, though. Of course, thinking that women and non-Greeks are naturally slavish since congenitally missing the rationally commanding part of the soul -- when you've spent twenty years with Plato, who explicitly argues that slaves learn in just the same way as Socrates, whose republic contains no slaves and a ruling class whose women are on an absolutely equal footing with the men (though he does expect them to be fewer in number), whose Academy (supposedly) admitted female students! -- will tend to leave a bad taste in people's mouths regardless of their prior feelings towards you.

On passion and starvation in middle-period Plato.

Not sure yet what to make of thus, but I noticed today that Plato's two sustained examinations of rhetoric and love -- the Symposium and the Phaedrus, both thought to date from his Middle Period -- both contain myths in which groups of people die out through becoming so absorbed in some other activity that they forget to eat.

In Aristophanes's speech in the Symposium, the people Zeus has split in two, frantically seeking reunion with their other halves, languish in each other's embrace until they die of hunger. Now Zeus has already expressed his commitment to keeping the human race viable, so as to continue receiving the gifts and sacrifices only people lavish upon gods. So he changes the way humans reproduce: earlier, we had "spilled seed in the ground ... like cicadas," but now he has made us reproduce sexually (like the Greek gods themselves); so that our natural yearning to be joined with each other will not stifle but promote the continuation of the species. Fascinating myth, brilliant speech, mysteriously placed in Aristophanes's mouth, often taken to be very romantic (as in the linked clip from "Hedwig and the Angry Inch," which do check out if you're unfamiliar). Comic -- really, farcical -- and mournful at once, silly and profound. Further intriguing for its stubbornness in BOTH tying sex to reproduction AND insisting that procreation is posterior to the main point of love -- and continues so past the origin story, for there were three sexes originally -- man-man, woman-woman, and man-woman -- and only people split from the last of them perpetuate the species without further activity, but their love is not the more valuable for it. (The others are satisfied with the "fullness" or "completeness" (πλησμονή) of reunion.) And premised on the idea that people can en masse become so involved in other things that they forget to eat, indefinitely.

The relevant bit of Phaedrus is shorter and simpler: there once was a group of people who -- existing before the Muses had come into being -- had never heard song. But when the Muses arrived, they were so enraptured that they spent quite all of their time in song, forgetting to eat and drink and "they did not even notice as they died." They were changed to cicadas, who sing all day and do not need to eat or drink; and now they praise the Muses constantly after their own fashion.

In both stories gods transform and preserve human beings, in both stories seeking humans' prayers, sacrifice, and praise. In both stories cicadas appear. In both stories an entire group of people is overcome and then consumed by a shared passion. I'm certain that's important, that they aren't like Narcissus gazing at his reflection until he pales and shrinks and fades into a flower by a lake. In both stories the passion grows in response to major changes in their circumstances: devastating, destabilizing loss and the introduction of art, respectively. Neither is affirmed as such; the first story is in Aristophanes's mouth, the second Socrates tells Phaedrus, as a myth, in a complete digression of less than obvious purpose. I don't know what it means.

On not liking Aristotle (sexual equality edition).

Cleanthes the Stoic wrote a book titled "on the fact that virtue is the same for a man and for a woman." His teacher Zeno, his rival Aristo, his successor Chrysippus, and the later Stoic Epictetus also (with varying enthusiasm) accepted this view. The doctrine is Socratic (see in particular the beginning of the Meno and Xeno's Symposium) and middle-period Platonic (think of the female guardians in the Republic, less numerous but quite equivalent to the males); Plato is also supposed to have accepted two female students in his Academy, of whom one wore women's and the other men's clothes. It is also, naturally, a Cynical doctrine, an important illustration of the ways in which living socially perverts our basic natures. Cynics and Cyrenaics, the schools that identified philosophy most closely with ways of living and teaching most closely with performance and demonstration, both featured prominent women teachers. The unmarried Cynic couple Crates of Thebes and Hipparchia of Maroneia became a model of the highest ideals of love as enabler of life; the Cyrenaic leaders are Aristippus of Cyrene, his daughter Arete, and her son Aristippus, known as "metrodidakter" or "mother-taught." The Epicureans were not especially tempted by virtue-talk but they certainly thought that both sexes would live well according to the same principles, and we know of three (I think) female members of the Epicurean community. (Possibly they thought the same of non-human animals as well, who nevertheless were not capable of pleasures as great as humans can have.) The other schools of ancient philosophy -- various brands of logicians and skeptics, mainly -- were by design unwilling to make claims of such a nature. (The Pythagoreans are a more difficult case.)

But Aristotle thought that women were -- biologically, rationally, psychically, virtue-wise -- defective men. True, this was (and implicitly remains) a common view even among "civilized" people, the ones he engaged with. But he spent twenty years in the Academy surrounded by people who thought otherwise -- including presumably the two women there. The idea must have occurred to him. It must have been treated as a respectable if controversial view in at least those circles. Yet he never seems remotely tempted by the thought. He never mentions it as a view that one would uphold only paradoxically, as he does some of Socrates's other unconventional views (such as that no one willingly does wrong). (I am told, however, that Straussians have taken the proclaimed in principle equality of souls of differently-sexed individuals as a sign that the surface meaning of the book is intended to draw us by its patent absurdity towards another sort of reading.) The issue doesn't seem to bother him.

My point is not that all ancient philosophers were feminists but Aristotle. That's not true. Later in the Republic Plato has nasty things to say about particular kinds of mothers, and in the Timaeus he makes us almost a separate enough species -- occupying a separate space on the ladder of reincarnations, below men and above the rest of the animals. Two of the three female Epicureans we hear of are given only insultingly sexualized nicknames ("Mammarion," which Martha Nussbaum briskly translates as "Tits," can hardly have been the woman's real name). When Cynics and Stoics and Epicureans ask "should I marry?" the question is always "should I, as a man, marry?" Chrysippus discusses the meritoriousness or lack thereof of virtuous behavior whose alternative is not tempting under the rubric of "abstention from ugly old women." They weren't feminists. They had, in general, no special concern for women.

But they were humanists; they believed that the human soul or mind or self was first and foremost human. (Again, perhaps not the Cyrenaics or, in some ways, the Epicureans.) They thought that the ways we lived in society needed to be plumbed very deeply before we could pretend any confidence as to whether and what they showed us about what human beings are.

The same dynamic shows up with regard to poor people: the other schools accepted poor people in principle while making little effort to accommodate many of them. (I know of three notable exceptions: Socrates, born into the middle class, self-ruined through failure to work, and supported by aristocratic friends; Cleanthes, who supported himself by manual labor even while heading the Stoic school -- and was rewarded with the insulting nickname "the Ox"; and Epictetus, a slave not freed until middle age, by which point he was already a notable Stoic lecturer.) And the same with regard to non-Greeks. Pythagoras, like many of the natural philosophers of the sixth and fifth centuries, was an Italian; the Cyrenaics are named for their home in northern Africa; Zeno, as a Cypriot, may have been either Greek or non-Greek, we do not know which (though Diogenes Laertius and Cicero in the Tusculan Disputations preserve some charming ethnic slurs against him as a Phoenician); Socrates and the Cynics explicitly self-identified as citizens of the universe in contradistinction to Greeks, as did most of the Stoics. But Aristotle -- not Plato or Chrysippus the aristocrats, but middle-class, Macedonian (the Macedonians think they are Greeks, but other Greeks do not think they are Greeks. They're the Mormons of the ancient Hellenic world), disenfranchised Athenian resident Aristotle -- thinks that all non-Greeks are natural slaves and that any important kind of virtue is impossible without the leisure that comes with wealth.

I would not object to calling Aristotle the most important philosopher of all time, nor perhaps to calling him the most brilliant. And there is much good in his embrace of convention. But it is not a coincidence that the same man is both the ancient philosopher most dismissive of skepticism and the ancient philosopher most oblivious to alternative possibilities of social ordering. It makes him very hard to read sometimes.

On the forms of akrasia, discussed and under-discussed.

The Greek word "akrasia" is often translated "weakness of will." Literally it is "powerlessness"; the range of common meanings for its adjectival form "akratos" is wide -- unmixed or pure, esp. of wine (cf. "akratizomai: drink neat wine, hence breakfast, because this consisted of bread dipped in wine"; this sense comes from an entirely different verb, "kerannumi," mix, rather than "kratew," have power); uncontrolled or undisciplined; violent (cf. Latin "inpotens," which shares the surprising dual meaning "without strength/violently aggressive"). In an action theory or moral psychology context -- that is, in plainer English, when we are talking about how it is a person makes decisions and acts on them -- usually it means something closer to "not being in control." There is no reference to some special faculty "the will," or to any particular mechanism of control or uncontrol. "Weakness of will" suggests a ditherer or a guilty self-indulger, but akrasia is broader: it covers any case of acting against a decision one has made and continues, in some reasonably strong way, to accept. This is important: problematic akrasia should not just be changing one's mind. The decision is meant to remain firm, yet circumvented. But how can one accept a decision -- think "this is good, this is right, this is what I want," and yet "the good thing that I want I do not do, but the bad, which I do not want -- that is what I do" (as the Tarsian put it)?

The cases most often discussed in the modern literature are of two families. First, the ditherer, as above. This actually doesn't present much of a mystery. In most such cases, the deliberator clearly has just changed her mind -- not necessarily in the words she applies to things, but in how she conceptualizes and evaluates them. For instance she says "I do not want to sin; I want to be good," meanwhile at the first opportunity going against her stated desire and intention, perhaps by worshiping idols or coveting her neighbor's things. -- Notice that, because of its dependence on the decisions and desires of the agent in question -- where "agent" just = "person, considered in the role of someone who acts" -- akrasia is not actually meant to track any objective or external right and wrong. It is solely a matter of an agent's apparent internal consistency. That's why changing your mind isn't akratic -- any more than it is inconsistent for a clock to read "five o'clock" at one time and "five-oh-one" at another. (Puzzles of time are out of our area here.)

The other much-pondered family of cases do present genuine puzzles. These are the instances of "clear-eyed akrasia" so-called: when you the agent really do, as far as you can tell, want x and really have decided on x -- no "I didn't realize"s, no "oh just this once"s -- and yet you pick not-x. Euripides's Medea, deliberating whether to kill her children before the audience's very eyes, is often taken to represent clear-eyed akrasia. People who read her so say that she knows it is wrong but allows herself to be overcome by her anger against their no-good cheating father. (This passage in the play is actually the subject of a fascinating debate between Stoics and Platonists&Aristotelians, on which see Christopher Gill, "Did Chrysippus Understand Medea?".) This is the kind of case in which one seems consciously to go against one's better judgment. People have lots to say about this, and I won't go into any detail. I'll just mention that Aristotle and the Stoics both class this as essentially a branch of the first, unproblematic sort of akrasia, and want to solve its puzzles in the same way. Plato had been troubled by such solutions (also offered by his teacher Socrates), and felt he had to recognize apparent cases of internal conflict as real: to make this possible he divided the soul into three parts, rational, spirited, and appetitive, and assigned each part enough independence to permit for genuine conflicts. Plato literalized the metaphor of the "divided self." (In this he has his modern adherents.) Each part of the soul has its own impulses and aims. The problem with this view is that it becomes difficult to explain what, exactly, makes them add up to one self at all. (When such as Bloom say "two selves," they don't mean it rigorously.) The answer certainly presumes that "add up" is the wrong metaphor there, but what's better, and what can we say beyond metaphors about the larger union of warring selves?

So we do see how clear-eyed akrasia points us towards other issues in moral psychology. They are important and interesting and I'm glad people work on them. But I do wish people spent more time on negligent akrasia. That's failing to act upon your decision because you just didn't think of it, you just didn't put the information together in the right way. This can be very simple: you didn't realize that leaving at two wouldn't get you to the zoo on time even though if you'd thought of it, you would have. But that description conceals at least two different cases. First, you planned to leave at two and did so, and only later realized that that was not the correct way to act upon your decision to get to the zoo on time. Second, you planned to leave for the zoo at one-thirty, but didn't notice when one-thirty came around. Third, you made no specific sub-decisions as to how to execute your decision to get to the zoo by two-thirty, and all morning and early afternoon you felt confident of your decision, absolutely meant to get to the zoo -- and yet failed to make the connection between having that aim and making plans (or just forming intentions) that would instrumentally aid or partially constitute fulfillment of your goal.

That last is the most mysterious to me. Perhaps I'll have more to say in a separate post; meanwhile, this is far too long as it is.

On logos and magic in Plato's presentation of Socrates.

Plato's Socrates was not a normal human being. He went barefoot in winter and in battle. He stood motionless for hours, even a day, on end. He gave up his craft -- presumably stone-masonry, his father's craft -- to stand in the market-place or at the baths asking people questions about truth, beauty, goodness. Though hemlock is a miserable death and a long process of loss of functions, he died with dignity and quietness. He associated with strange people: Pythagoreans, priests with odd beliefs, boys, slaves, aspiring tyrants, future tyrants; yet somehow the dully respectable and practical Xenophon became a devoted follower (of the historical Socrates, not Plato's), too. Other pupils and friends of the historical Socrates included the hedonist Aristippus and the devoutly ascetic Antisthenes, and perhaps Aristophanes, whose brutal mockery in "The Clouds" Plato's Socrates claims in "Apology" set the stage for his later condemnation, yet who is given the most beautiful speech of the "Symposium." He moved in aristocratic circles -- Plato was descended from Solon and other legends of Athens, Alcibiades, Nicias, Laches, and later Xenophon were important generals, the famous sophists he conversed with and their wealthy hosts hardly made it a practice to invite members of the laboring classes to their speeches and soirées -- which does not sound so strange until we reflect and realize that we can't think of a single other classical Athenian who demonstrated even that degree of social mobility. Later came others like him -- court poets and philosophers, and a very few -- really I can only think of Cleanthes (the second head of the Stoic school, 4-3c BCE) at the moment -- who succeeded as figures of culture and learning without patronage or private wealth; and Cleanthes gardened for a living even when he was a prominent philosopher, and is condescended to for his manners and appearance and intelligence (!) in our ancient sources. (He was nicknamed "the Ox.") -- The Stoics and Epicureans actively embraced outsiders of various sorts, it is true. Epicurus's school received the only female pupils we know of in any school but the Academy, which supposedly took on two female pupils under Plato's rule (Axiothea and something with an "L") one of whom was reputed to dress in male garb while the other wore women's clothing. The Stoa was founded by a foreigner of dubious pedigree -- for, as Cicero points out repeatedly in his Tusculan Disputations (isn't it?), Zeno was from Cyprus, and therefore not necessarily of Greek descent -- and headed next by Cleanthes, though from Chrysippus to Marcus Aurelius most of its spokesmen are high-hats. The important late exception is Epictetus, who began his philosophical studies as a slave and later was freed, in middle age I think. But that was at Rome, and the Roman Empire offered dramatically better chances for social improvement than Athens ever had at its peak. There, the classes simply did not mingle. Yet Socrates did.

Certain words that characterize the oddness of Socrates recur throughout Plato: atopia, or being out of place, bizarre, absurd; eironia, "irony," which really meant "dissembling" (Socrates is rarely simply sarcastic), or preparing a face to meet the faces that you meet; epo[i]de -- incantation (lit. "sung over")-- and other words of magic spells and charms. Reversal too is a constant theme. In the "Apology," Socrates proposes as the alternative to the death penalty that he be given a state pension. In "Euthyphro," he stops a moment on the way to his trial for impiety to point out that well-regarded priests know less of piety than he. In "Protagoras" he engineers such thorough confusion that by the end he and Protagoras have switched their positions on all the issues they were considering. In "Gorgias" he acknowledges that by Athenian standards he is politically powerless and a poor speaker, then redefines politics and rhetoric so that he is the only person in Athens with any grasp of either. Further he cites the Pythagorean (and perhaps Heraclitean -- cf. "immortal mortals, mortal immortals") teaching that "who knows whether we the living are really dead, while the dead have life?" In "Phaedo" he asks his friends to offer a thanksgiving offering to Aesclepius the healer god after his death. And more, and more and more, climaxing, surely, in Alcibiades's drunken rant in "Symposium" about how ugly old Socrates refuses to play the part of lover but instead others woo him as if he were a beautiful young boy. His is the last speech. The dialogue ends with Socrates -- alone sober after the night's revelries -- trying to persuade the tragedian Agathon and the comic playwright Aristophanes that the true poet should be able to compose both tragedies and comedies, at dawn, while they struggle not to join the rest of the company in sleep. The echo of Socrates's night with Alcibiades, when too Socrates seemed simply not to see the physical temptations to which everyone else succumbed, and to which Alcibiades frantically endeavored to rouse him, is unmistakable. Alcibiades thinks that Socrates must have bewitched him to make him act the fool so, while remaining himself teasingly unaffected.

Charmides and Phaedrus (?) too accuse Socrates of witchcraft, and Meno compares his effect to the sting of a puffer-fish. Thrasymachus in "Republic" i and Callicles in "Gorgias" have nastier words for it: they feel not enthralled but bullied. In one important way Plato clearly sides with them against the charmed. For they recognize that Socrates has only his words for a net and a spell, and that he traps them and catches them with just words. They are not special, magical words unique to Socrates. On the contrary, he draws them out of every interlocutor, from famous sophists like Protagoras and Hippias to teenagers like Charmides and Theaetetus to Meno's innumerate slave. The words are theirs, not Socrates's. Famously he calls himself a midwife in "Theaetetus," because he can only help others nurture and deliver the babies conceived (if we accept "Symposium"'s account) in encounters with the Forms. "Symposium" suggests that we fall in love because we are already pregnant and wish "to give birth in beauty" -- that is, to express the goodness and truth and beauty we feel certain we have within us -- and for that we need others' help. Socrates helps through talking with us, through asking questions and worrying our replies until the weak spots show. His magic is speech and reasoned argument (both central meanings of the Greek "logos"), not a mumbled spell or sacrificed bird or buried curse-tablet. His wizardry and his bullying aggression are partial views of his midwifery.

Socrates was strange. He moved in social circles beyond his class, he sought out beautiful boys and then ignored their bodies, he humbled great speakers and arguers with simple questions, he sometimes felt no effects from cold and alcohol, he refused to take money for what he considered to be the most valuable service of all, his aid in the care of souls. Other contemporaries tried to explain him as magical. (The pseudo-Platonic "Theages" suggests the astonishing claims made for him when one of its characters claims to become wiser and better through mere physical proximity to Socrates.) Xenophon mostly ignores such claims, fearing perhaps that they come too close to the critiques that led to his trial and death. Plato, on the other hand, as is his wont, does something more ambitious and more audacious. He acknowledges the magic of Socrates, but offers a revisionist account on which it is nothing more than logos -- something we all have -- and on which any special talent or might of Socrates's lay in midwifery -- a profession of poor women (including Socrates's mother, he says in "Theaetetus") that no one powerful would dream of pursuing. It's true, Plato tells us, that Socrates is different, bizarre, dissembling, magical. In a culminating reversal, those very qualities only show the more clearly what is universally human in him.

On the beauty of Plato's Gorgias.

I have been kidnapped by a sadistic genius. He knows that what I like best is to read. He is licking his lips to look at my sadly overflowing bookshelves.

"Classicist," he begins, finally -- "classicist, you have misunderstood me deeply. You take me for a sadistic psychopath, but in truth I am kind and generous. You'll have Stockholm Syndrome by the time I let you go." I raise my eyebrows. "Here -- " and he releases my hands and lets me spit out my gag. "I am a nice man," he reiterates. "I didn't have to do that."

"But I'm still tied to a chair that is nailed to the floor."

"I never promised you a rose garden. In any event" -- he gives the room one more sweeping glance -- "I am going to do you a favor."

"Thank you."

"I may let you go some time, or I may not. You won't know until I do -- or don't. But in the interim, I'll leave one book within your reach. Any book, whether you have it here already or not. -- No cheating, now: you can't have a compilation, no full Bible or the complete works of Shakespeare: if you want Jeremiah, you can have Jeremiah, if you want Beatrice and Benedick pick them, but you can't have Jeremiah and Genesis, or Beatrice, Benedick, and Hamlet. -- By the way, when my assistant gets here, he's bringing my recently perfected selective amnesia device, and he's going to remove the memory of every other book besides your choice from your nervous system. So." He fixes his gaze on me. "What can I do for you?"

********************

In this circumstance it is hard for me, at this juncture in my life, to imagine picking anything other than Plato's Gorgias. (If I had to pick the edition I'd say E.R. Dodds's Greek text with commentary.)

It breaks my heart to pick; it breaks my heart to imagine a life without the rest. It is cruel of him even to make me think of it. Nevertheless I can say with confidence that I would pick the Gorgias.

I have been writing about courage lately, its awkwardness as a virtue and ways philosophers have found to revise it, to reenvision it as a virtue central to our moral lives. Ultimately I suggest that a late Stoic conception of courage as a sub-species of greatness of soul, "the virtue that puts us above those things that happen to good and bad people alike," can help us out of the problems raised. From this perspective, writing about the problems for courage in Aristotle is easy (though getting my adviser to accept that I've made any good points against Aristotle is a different matter, hard-won and cherished), but writing about the problems for courage in Plato is hard, because the Laches, Protagoras, and Gorgias -- not the Republic, which is again easy to criticize from a Stoic perspective -- all embrace something like what the Stoics mean. The Stoics read Plato closely and responded to him carefully (we know that the two most important early Stoics, Zeno and Chrysippus, both wrote book-length responses to Plato's Republic), and in their account of courage they are building on Laches, Protagoras, and most of all Gorgias.

Gorgias is the dialogue in which Socrates is most ironic and most passionate. Tyrants celebrated as the happiest of men are really in the worst condition, if they are truly tyrannical. Cooking and rhetoric belong to a single art, the art of pleasing others, while medicine and philosophy belong to the opposite art, which is oriented towards truth and goodness. No one willingly does wrong. A life of desire satisfaction is less happy than a life without desires. It is better to be wronged than to do wrong. He insists that he does not know for certain what the truth is about that last thesis, but that he has never heard and can no longer imagine anyone arguing against it without ending by looking ridiculous. He is unskilled at the Athenian style of politics, yet turns out to be the only true teacher of politics in Athens.

What does this all have to do with courage? -- Socrates's last and most interesting interlocutor, Callicles, rejects the Socratic theses of the previous paragraph. Justice and temperance, he says, are for the birds; they are imposed by the many weak men upon the few strong, but the course of nature, which we might even call "natural justice," is for the few strong to rule. These strong men -- what qualities suit them to rule? It is their intelligence and their courage. And from Callicles's embrace of courage, Socrates argues him into accepting all of the other theses.

Callicles has embraced a rhetorical and political model of courage, rather than the standard military paradigm. By the end of the dialogue, we have come to understand that this is the right model, only Callicles has erred as to what constitutes a true rhetoric and a true politics. A proper rhetoric ought to subjugate itself to truth -- that is, it ought to become philosophy, or dialectic. So for all the choppy simplicity of his argumentative style, Socrates turns out to be a better rhetorician than Gorgias of Leontini, one of the most famous and highly-paid speakers of the era.

A similar paradox awaits in courage's other special arena. Socrates is inept at Athenian politics, yet by wise standards he is a true politician; and both of these features put his life in danger. The ending of the Gorgias is haunted by Socrates's eventual conviction and execution on charges of impiety (399 BCE). We know, when he says that he would rather die for acting justly than live having acted unjustly, that he means it. Why should he live humiliated and in bad condition? And why should he fear to die, when he has no special reason to believe that death is an evil? Either it is nothing, as he suggests seems likely in the Apology, or he will be happy in the afterlife if he has lived justly in this life, a thesis he elaborates mythically here and in Republic and Phaedrus (and cf. the Laws' claims at the very end of the Crito).

Socrates is not afraid to die because he is not persuaded that life is a very great good or that death is a very great evil. Something that he can find in himself or make for himself -- justice, wisdom, temperance, courage; virtue, goodness, happiness -- is more important even than life. This is the radical self-sufficiency of Socratic courage, and it is one of his most important bequests to his Stoic heirs.

The language of the Gorgias is beautiful, its structure a fortification to argument and to beauty alike, its thought important and profound, its characters vivid and engaged. To Plato, writing it must have seemed to discharge a sacred obligation.

On what I do.

I thought it might be time for a post that at least alluded to ancient philosophy, so here is a very brief introduction to What I Do, pitched to the intelligent layman with more patience than experience with philosophy.

I am a graduate student in ancient philosophy, writing primarily at the moment about the ethical system of the Hellenistic (3rd-1st centuries BCE) Stoic school. My dissertation considers some aspects of self-sufficiency in the Stoic understanding of happiness.

The Stoics are extremists on many issues, and fond of paradox; they believe that knowledge is sufficient for virtue and that virtue is sufficient for happiness.

I'll have to interrupt here for a terminology note on "sufficiency." Take the conditional "p-->q," which should be read: "if p, then q," where p represents a proposition such as "Lindsay is older than Sam" and q represents a proposition such as "Sam is younger then Lindsay." In this instance, "p-->q" is all right, since it really is true that if Lindsay is older than Sam, then Sam is younger than Lindsay. Anyway, the terms "necessary" and "sufficient" are defined as follows:

If "p-->q," then: p is sufficient for q: that is, p's being the case is sufficient to ensure that q is the case -- not causally, but logically. And q is necessary for p: that is, if p is to be the case, then q must be the case.

So if virtue is sufficient for happiness, that means that where virtue is present, there too must happiness be. But that's crazy, isn't it? -- Can they really mean to say that a virtuous person being tortured on the rack with no obvious way out is happier -- not just better, but happier -- than a wicked person who is healthy, wealthy, comfortable, and content?

They do! This is where self-sufficiency comes in. An orthodox Stoic would tell you that only your mind -- Epictetus emphasizes especially the faculty of decision -- is within your control, and not anything outside of your mind; further, that nothing that isn't within your control can ultimately affect your happiness. So the virtuous person on the rack has the internal resources to remain happy, while the content wicked one lacks them.

If you haven't spent a lot of time with the Stoics, or maybe if you have too, you probably want to get off the boat here. I know I was repulsed when I first read Epictetus, towards the end of my Introduction to Ancient Philosophy class, as a freshman in college. I was fascinated with the Pyrrhonist Skeptics, fired up to defend Epicurean hedonism and atomism, willing to reread Plato over and over again. Aristotle and the Stoics left me cold.

I'm not exactly sure when or why this changed. Probably my enthusiasm for early Plato, whose theses are defended more steadily by the Stoics than by middle-period Plato, had something to do with it. The Apology* changed my life when I first read it, a very long time ago now. Perhaps I'll post about that some time.

Anyway, that's enough for now.



* Apologies for the fussy, stilted, dating-to-Teddy-Roosevelt-times Jowett translation. If you're at all interested, pick up the excellent Hackett Five Dialogues, translated by G.M.A. Grube, which you can find used for under five bucks but shouldn't run you more than fifteen or so even full price. Thank God for Hackett Publishing Company.