On teaching and on appropriateness.

I am an open, enthusiastic person. I make a lot of jokes without pausing for a laugh (this style seems particularly liable to misunderstanding by the Midwestern-born. I'm not sure why). I have something to say in response to most questions and comments, and generally I take everything to be related to everything else. So it happens, naturally enough, that I am just that way as a teacher. I discipline myself mainly with syllabi and prepared notes. The occasional self-injunction little avails; like Jane Eyre picturing herself as a missionary in India married to St. John Rivers, I can do it for a little while and without noticing revert to being as I am and acting as I act -- and like Jane Eyre I'm sensible enough to accept that, however deeply I may wish to change, and however much I admire those who do things in another way, that way is too foreign to my nature to figure in my long-term plans. Efforts to enshrine it there end, soon, in self-reproachful reversion. Jane Eyre considers the constant effort of will required, and realizes that even if to live so would be finer than to live according to her nature, she could not succeed, certainly not without a stronger force (St. John Rivers would do nicely) heating and beating and hammering her metal always into that other shape. So it goes. Jane Eyre is choosing how to live her own life. But my decision directly affects many more people than myself, and perhaps impacts some of them more than it does me. So it is particularly incumbent upon me to ensure that I do my best not just as I conceive it, but according also to standards that are set by others and not engrained in me, by which I have agreed to work. I do. I put a lot of work into syllabus, I prepare material thoroughly before class and write out notes for at least the most important points I would like to get to, I solicit conversation and try to manage the debate. That last is in fact not a part of -- though not incompatible with -- the usual standards for teaching such a class as I have been teaching. In a class of up to -- oh -- twenty, perhaps thirty students, student participation is very much the norm. In a larger class, like mine, too large for us to all face each other, it is not so common to devote most of the class to discussion. The students determine the shape and ambiance of any class that is not pure lecture or nearly, and the more students, the harder it is for the teacher to give them all voices. I have been lucky enough to teach remarkably good students always, so far, throughout my brief career. This term in particular they were lovely (though I suppose I say the same nearly every term). Under my supervision, the students built a running conversation. It did absolutely require my supervision, and on occasions when I let control out of my hands I erred. But it was their conversation. I was more than just another participant, but I wasn't on high or separate, either. I was trying to create a space where we could say anything (relevant); and then trying to manage the process of figuring out collectively what counted as relevant. Here is where we come to the topic of the title. I am always eager to let students know they should not be embarrassed to speak: that their comment is likely not "stupid," since if they are unsure of something probably several other people are, but also that a stupid comment is nothing to be ashamed of -- only something to be ashamed of repeating over and over without learning from it. To this end I used my nature, and showed by example that you can do something silly at one moment and be clever and helpful the next. So I made up silly examples, and used my students in them.* I brought in occasional props. I cold-called and told them just to say if they hadn't done the reading. Twice or three times I asked them all to close their eyes and raise their hands if they believed this or were persuaded by that. I often took attendance by having them call out their own names, so that they would learn each other's names and perhaps get more used to speaking in front of each other. I made jokes constantly (that is, I articulated at least half of the jokes that I wanted to make). I declared "Experimental Fridays" and changed things from time to time. And I told them stories. I told them stories about myself, sometimes true, sometimes untrue or elaborated, sometimes patently, outrageously false. I performed the just-linked monologue for them one Experimental Friday, and finished to an ovation, lots of questions, lots of "great class!"es, and came home to four additional, e-mailed "great class!"es. I would never, ever have felt comfortable doing that with a class that hadn't already been interested and willing and comfortable. (Of course I told them at the end that Daniel Dennett had really written the story and not me.) I let my guard down. That, in itself, is what I have struggled with. No particular possible inappropriate behavior. That I let my guard down so with them. That I told them things about myself when they asked me, or for the sake of examples. I wanted to open them up to talking about what they cared about, and to a large extent I succeeded. Several students have told me that this was their favorite class, and one said that writing the final paper had been the most intellectually engaging project of their freshman year. But I don't know. Socrates made himself the show and managed to draw people in to philosophy. It can be done. But I am no Socrates. I do not regret this, not knowing it's so because I do other things besides initiate challenging conversations with people I encounter. (For one, I go home to h, while Socrates does not appear to have been an exemplary family man.) But even Socrates sometimes was too much the show. Think of the view, crudely expressed in the pseudo-Platonic Theages and sophisticatedly in any number of Plato's dialogues -- the Apology and Alcibiades's speech in the Symposium -- that Socrates is magic. Plato rationalizes his magic to logos, to reason, to argument, to things in principle accessible to all of us by our humanity. Or think simply of the terrific differences between Xenophon's and Plato's Socrates. Xenophon's Socrates is magic mainly in being so outstandingly in self-control, in his being so temperate, so moderate, so tolerant of hardship. This isn't unrelated to Plato's view -- both present him as exceptionally the master of himself and his circumstances. And Aristotle's casually proposing him at Posterior Analytics 97ab? for an archetype of greatness of soul suggests that mastery and majesty remained dominant impressions of him. This is sort of drawing people in, but sort of only drawing them to oneself. And even if Socrates succeeds, surely there's something amiss. It might possibly be effective to interest people in a discipline by showing that some people engaged therein are interesting; would that justify it? It was never my intention to do that. But I worry that I may have depended too much on my nature in teaching, and to some students made myself a sideshow, when I only meant to be a ticket-taker. * Along the lines of "Now, S believes in witches, and I don't. So when the crops fail and my sheep are stricken down, and S says it must be because of a spell or a curse, I don't consider that an adequate explanation. But why not? How could S convince me? Well, he could bring me records of all the alleged curses laid on by witches and of all the agricultural problems in the neighborhood, and pick out patterns of similarity. Or he could show me a witch casting a spell, and hope I learn from experience what I wouldn't believe based on testimony. He could point to a particular witch who is now casting a particular spell, predict that it will be fulfilled, and point out when it is. Or he could show that the presence of witches helps us explain other phenomena, too. For instance, on my account, the crop failures have resulted from unexpected weather patterns, the sheep illnesses from bad luck, and the concurrent phenomenon of many local young women acting suddenly quite different than usual in similar ways, I attribute to a trip the girls took together that frightened them or some water they drank that was poisoned. S explains them all with witches. His explanation is certainly simpler and more elegant than mine, and it coheres perfectly well with all the facts we've given ... So should I start believing in witches?"

On the subtle delights of teaching.

One of my favorite moments is always the moment when I can shrug and say, "Well, one man's modus ponens is another man's modus tollens and have my students get it.

On the similarity of the mind-body problem and the fact-value gap.

Let c stand for the thesis that human beings should live according to human nature -- that facts about human nature are not idle, but have normative (action-guiding) force.

Many twentieth-century philosophers scoffed at premises along the line of c, and more than enough still do in the twenty-first century: What? How can an "ought" ever follow from an "is?" haven't you heard of the fact/value distinction, and the unbridgeable gap between them? For Pete's sake, haven't you people ever read Hume?

I have little to say to this; it strikes me as superstitiously and gratuitously mystery-making. Many of these same people, if you had asked them:

"How could Descartes have thought both that:

(1) minds and bodies are completely separate entities, of completely different kinds, with completely different natures, incapable of overlapping at any point -- and that
(2) the mind and the body are utterly intermingled, such that mind pervades body?

How could those both be true?"

-- would have replied with a laugh that even smart people used to believe unaccountably foolish things. Obviously, if (1) is true, then mind and body simply can't have anything to do with each other. You couldn't attach a mind to a body any more than you could attach a triangle (not a triangle-shaped piece of paper, but a triangle, the abstract object) to a blackboard eraser. Why can't you do that? Because the blackboard eraser doesn't have a mind to hold the triangle, and the triangle doesn't have a body to touch the eraser. And by the same token, you can't attach a mind to a body, because the body would already have to have a mind to be able to interact with a mind, or the mind would already have to have a body to be able to interact with a body. To believe both (1) and (2) simultaneously is frankly bizarre.

Some of these people have been willing to assert nevertheless both that

(1') facts and values are completely separate entities, of completely separate kinds, with completely different natures, incapable of overlapping at any point; and that
(2') facts and values are utterly intermingled, such that values pervade facts.

Some have accepted (1') and therefore rejected (2'), and more than (2'): rejected the very idea that value could be in anything. All there are are facts; facts are incompatible with values; hence there are no values.

Most people don't want to do that. For obvious reasons: we routinely take facts to have normative implications and values to have factual implications. Here's a reasonable argument from fact to value-judgment:

There is no Santa Claus. Therefore, to represent Santa Claus to a child as the source of his Christmas bounty is to lie. All other things being equal, it's bad to lie. Therefore, all other things being equal, you shouldn't tell children that their presents come from Santa Claus.

Here's a reasonable argument from value-judgment to fact:

This marriage is illegitimate. (For instance, the bride and bridegroom have concealed prior marriages or blood relations.) Therefore, no marriage has taken place.

To give up (2') on the grounds of (1') means rejecting these arguments as monstrously ill-formed. That's quite a sacrifice, and requires large changes to the ways we are used to thinking through problems. Sacrifices just about as large as would be required if we were to give up (2) because of (1). To say that there exist only facts but no values is not less strange than to say that there exist only minds but no bodies, or bodies but no minds.

The obvious solution is to reject (1) and (1'): minds and bodies aren't made out of different stuffs so fundamentally as all that, facts and values aren't made out of different stuffs so fundamentally as all that. Not everyone wants to take that route. But people who take it in regard to (1) and (2) really shouldn't have to take out the smelling salts in the presence of someone who takes it in regard to (1') and (2').

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 image of God.

Κύδιστ’ ἀθανάτων, πολυώνυμε παγκρατὲς αἰεί,
Ζεῦ φύσεως ἀρχηγέ, νόμου μετὰ πάντα κυβερνῶν,
χαῖρε· σὲ γὰρ καὶ πᾶσι θέμις θνητοῖσι προσαυδᾶν.
Ἐκ σοῦ γὰρ γενόμεσθα, θεοῦ μίμημα λαχόντες
μοῦνοι, ὅσα ζώει τε καὶ ἕρπει θνήτ’ ἐπὶ γαῖαν·

Noblest of immortals, many-named, omnipotent,
Zeus, First Cause of nature, helmsman by law --
Greetings. Appropriately I address you though mortal,
For we are born of you; we possess the image of god
Alone who live, and crawl earthbound, and will die.

-- Cleanthes, "Hymn to Zeus" ll. 1-5 (3rd century BCE)


I have been thinking a lot about what Cleanthes -- the second head of the Stoics -- can mean when he says we have the image of God. He doesn't mean what Genesis 1:26-27 means, whatever one makes of it: "And God said, 'Let us make Adam [or: "a man"] in our image, after our likeness ...' And God made Adam in his* image: in the image of God he made him, male and female he made them." The surprising plural (the verb for "said" is singular, as usual with that grammatically plural term for the divine, and Hebrew has no "royal 'we'"); the image and likeness, and then "likeness" dropped in the following parallelism; the juxtaposition of biological sex with the image of God -- they are not the same as Cleanthes' mysteries. Yet the question is the same, and comparison may illuminate. In any event it is impossible to read Cleanthes without hearing the Bible, so we may as well put that to work.

In one way his version should be easier to fathom, for he has more explicit ideas about what God is made out of than does Genesis -- so that it should be easier to understand what an image or likeness or representation (the Greek "mimema" can mean all of those and more) might be. Genesis often speaks as though God had a body, but never -- except here? -- gives any clue as to what such language might refer to. On the other hand, Cleanthes, like all orthodox Stoics, is a pantheist: he believes that "God" and "the universe" do not name or describe distinct entities, he believes that there is no piece of the universe that is not God -- not only not divine, but not God. So the initial clarity gives way immediately to fog. Cleanthes's God does at least have a clear material content, the sort of thing of which a likeness could exist -- but by virtue of the very same thesis, that God is the universe, we lose sight of what it could mean to single out a part of that universe as specially divine.

As Cleanthes was clear where Genesis said nothing, so oppositewise Genesis tells more than Cleanthes about what it means that Adam is made in the image of God. For the ellipsis above covers the omission of a sentence about ruling birds and beasts and land and so on. The plan is clear, if not the execution: God intended Adam to mimic the divine insofar as Adam was intended to rule Eden.

So far we have three options, none of which suits Cleanthes' purposes as stated:

(1) "The image of God" refers to God's physical pattern or shape. Our bodies -- both male and female -- reflect God's body because they resemble it.
(2) "The image of God" refers to God's material composition. As God is made of [body and spirit? spirit only?], so too are we -- and we alone.
(3) "The image of God" refers to God's role in the natural hierarchy. As God rules the universe, we rule our patch of earth.

Genesis endorses (3) and, at least on the face of it, (1). (2) is a part of the way it is often taught among the traditionally religious, in my experience: not that as God is body and spirit so too are we (though perhaps Christians, who do believe that God has been mortal flesh, accept this), but that we have some special divine feature not shared by e.g. table lamps, or cobras. There is also a non-corporeal way of taking the patterns mentioned in (1): as God is merciful, so must we be merciful, as God is just so must we be just, as God feeds the poor and clothes the naked we too must do all we can to leave the world better than we found it. I do not include this as an interpretative option since "image of God" has given way to "imitation of God"; but anyway it is a famous midrashic interpretation. (See Talmud Yerushalmi Peah 15b; Sifre Deuteronomy 11:22; Bavli Sotah 14a; Genesis Rabbah on 23:19; probably more places.)

A fourth option is suggested by the more macabre invocation at Genesis 9:6:

"Who spills a man's blood, by a man shall his blood be spilt, for God created man [or: a man; Adam] in his image."

(4) "The image of God" refers to a special relationship between God and humanity. As we have obligations to God [the passage's context is God reexplaining to Noah how he is to live after he emerges post-diluvian from the Ark], so we have obligations to other human beings, for which God holds us accountable and expects us to hold each other accountable. (This interpretation of Genesis gains some support from its connection with Leviticus 19:2 -- "You shall be holy, as I the Lord your God am holy" -- and Deuteronomy 13:5 -- "After the Lord your God you shall walk.")
****************

With these options on the table, back to Cleanthes. He means a little of each of these, I think, but none of them as stated.

(1) "The image of God" refers not to God's physical pattern or shape but to the shape of a divine life. We participate in God's image insofar as what we require to succeed in life is to resemble God more and more.

(2) "The image of God" refers not to God's material composition (which of course we share, along with everything else in the universe) but to God's nature, which is reason. We are made in God's image insofar as our perfected nature reveals itself too as reason.

(3) "The image of God" refers not to God's role in the hierarchy of nature but to God's unequivocal embrace of nature. We have God's image insofar as we embrace the totality of things, which is God.

(4) "The image of God" refers to a special relationship between God and humanity, of obligation as well as of love -- hence Cleanthes's paternal language. But what this itself can mean, I do not know.

Further things I do not understand in the first lines of Cleanthes' "Hymn to Zeus":

-- the repeated allusion to our mortality -- is it defiant (of death, using divinity as shield)? humble? merely contrasting us with God?
-- "helmsman by law" (or "lawful helmsman") -- what can he mean by law, if not the law of nature that God is meant to embody? and if that, then what does it mean to acknowledge that God rules by law? merely to restate that the law is the true embodiment of everything that's excellent -- it has no kind of fault or flaw -- and God, our lord, embodies the law?
-- "born of you" -- ??????
-- and I still don't understand the meaning of "image of God," or its significance, or the use to which he's putting it here -- though I have my own thoughts on that, for another time.


*Personally I make it my practice to avoid assigning sex or any other attribute, and in particular physical attributes, to the divine; but I cannot misquote a source.

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 applicability of philosophy to "real life" so-called.

I am methodologically a moderate skeptic, an enthusiast by temperament. I do not believe in philosophical conclusions that are sepable from the process by which one has attained them (for if the question can be answered so simply, it's hard to see that we needed philosophy for it, really). I have no qualms about ascribing falsity and many about ascribing truth -- though fewest of the three to ascribing insight. My beloved Stoics had some crazy views -- I don't hesitate much about applying that term, either -- but much understanding.

Epictetus tells us that life is a game precisely in the respect that seems to distinguish the two, namely that in a game the outcome is not very important while adherence to the rules is imperative -- since inconsistent adherence means playing the game ill, or, at some point on the spectrum, ceasing to play the game at all. Now we are used to thinking that life is not like this. We are used to thinking that whether you win or lose within the game of life has quite a bit of importance to us the agents concerned, and should have. Clearly it makes a difference to one whether one's aorta bursts or not, and whether operations on our hearts are successful or not. ("Successful" -- it's built in already there.) Yes, this matters. But Epictetus (following his Stoic forebears) tries to show why it needn't matter in the way we might antecedently have assumed. This involves lots of high philosophy, naturally enough -- axiology (=consideration of what value is and of what is valuable), theology and metaphysics to ground value, logic including epistemology (as they divided it) to keep us from error and guide us towards understanding on the way. It is all very fascinating and largely the subject of my dissertation and not at all suitable for this sort or level of explanation.

Instead let me assume it all, and hint at some consequences.

Epictetus argues that if this is so, then we haven't anything to regret when we act correctly yet fail to attain our objective. This is so because nothing has been lost by our losing it that could determine whether our lives are happy or not -- I think by "happy" he very nearly means "meaningful, in such a way as to be worth living." So: failing to get a job does not eliminate the chance for a meaningful life. Dying destroys us, but not our lives, not the sense we'd learned to make of things. Losing a child, even, cannot mean losing all the worth one might ever have attained to -- though I would imagine it makes most things look very unworthy of the time we give to them.

Is this true? I wouldn't know how to answer that question. Certainly Epictetus relies on false beliefs to get to it, and not incidentally, not separably. Certainly the Stoic view is so radical as to be hard to understand. (What would it mean for a life to disappear yet for its happiness to match a god's?) Certainly such points can be hackneyed to death with the large axe, or is that a carriage, of Hollywood fairy tale treacle. All I can add is that learning to think of the ways in which merely doing something right in itself constitutes succeeding at it, no matter how all occasions do conspire against us, i.e., how external features cooperate with our efforts -- that exercise, that learning, that reflective choice to change perspective -- is not a matter of books, but of how books can change and shape our lives.

On libraries and taste.

The line between decaying splendor (good!) and dreary grandeur (not so good!) is a fine one. I can confidently place the Bod on the former and the Widener on the latter side. Loveliest of all is Sterling, which is as old-fashioned as either but not so campily as the Bod (those portraits of forgotten scholars everywhere) nor so creakily as the Widener (all that marble and gold). I do like modern libraries too (the Seattle Public Library and the Beinecke are two of my favorites, and the Wellesley library's intimidatingly "designed"-looking chairs that turn out to be excellent of their kind remind me of Seattle), and I rather like the British National Library as well) and some comfily elderly ones, including many smaller university or college libraries and my local public libraries where I was raised.

I don't know, it's hard to say what makes one person appreciate this imperfection and another dislike it. (I discussed this a bit in the bad movies post.) My inclination is toward a weak aesthetic Platonism: I believe that many or most of the good things people see in anything are really there and really good. On this sort of account the hard work is not saying what is really good and not good, but prioritizing: since we are not big enough to get all of the good things, and because it is not unusual for appreciation of one good to detract from our capacity to "get" others, whether because of internal tensions or simply because we have not world enough and time. So for example I believe that there really are the good things that others see in songs or books or films that I would normally, casually call "horrible." That doesn't mean I regret my inability to appreciate, oh, reggae music and Nicholas Sparks and Wes Anderson, or professional football either. Nor when picking tastes to acquire would I make an effort to cultivate those in particular. But I have no problem with people filling in the blanks in art differently than I do and I have no problem accepting that what is salient to each of us on each occasion is not of necessity the only feature of that thing that could be important. I love enough clichés myself that I could never claim to occupy some Archimedean outside point. I can't criticize those who find "Brief Encounter" classist and sentimental; so it is; but I should be very sorry to watch it again and find that those features and aspects dominated my perception in place of its delicately intense emotional fidelity. I would be sorry to lose what I have seen in it. Naturally I cannot have the same investment in "The Royal Tenenbaums," and so I am neither sad nor ashamed to declare it trite, strained, arbitrarily sentimental, somewhat sexist, and dull. But I would be sad and ashamed to find myself trying to argue someone else out of her (well, realistically ... more likely his) love of Wes Anderson.

On empathy, in scattered, conversational format.

H&I have been talking Hume of late, and sentimentalism of other stripes. H says he is dubious that empathetic sentiments -- that is, sentiments of identification with another -- are as natural and automatic and unreflective as Hume assumes; I say that babies above say three, or certainly six, months respond palpably to the moods of those around them. H says that Hume is thinking of something stronger -- not merely natural proclivity towards others' stances and status, but positive feeling as if it were happening to you, and belief that it could happen to you. I say I can go along as far as feeling as if it were happening to you, that it is natural to blush for your friend who has got mud all over herself, and to be afraid for your friend who is going to a war zone, and to cry for Baptiste et al. in "Children of Paradise." He agrees but considers the further requirement false and onerous. Aristotle sometimes seems to say such things in the Poetics, I say, and there too it is a bafflingly unnecessary restriction. It is true that the characters must be somewhat like us to evoke our pity (and fear?): I cannot pity a character in a noh drama, whose language and affect and gestures and appearance convey little to me; I know I lose something from the nineteeth century social dramas because I cannot really understand the stakes in the bizarre reputation games they are always playing. It is not true that I have to consider myself very likely to encounter the character's situation, else no one would appreciate Euripides's "Medea" or Sophocles's "Oedipus the King." It is not clear how important the thought that if I were in this situation, I might think it through like them, let alone that I would respond as they do, is. Surely it makes some difference. Surely we empathize more when we identify more closely, and surely we pity more when we empathize more. The issues are of thresholds.

I do always think of what Chesterton's Father Brown says: I understand criminal behavior because I am a criminal, too. It is not a stretch for a human being to imagine herself coming to cause unnecessary harm.

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.