Rules for the Guide

Until the modern era, when freedom of religion became dominant in the West, and atheism became increasingly associated with privilege and the ruling class, philosophers often hid their more subversive teachings in their books, and only patient, thorough study could piece them together. Philosophers did not make this explicit, for a variety of obvious reasons. 

An exception is Maimonides. In his Guide of the Perplexed, he identifies seven causes for contradictions in books:

1. A book compiles remarks from multiple sources, and sources often contradict each other 
2. The author has changed his mind about something in the course of writing the book, and left both statements intact 
3. Not every statement is to be interpreted literally. Metaphors, illustrations, analogies, etc. may appear contradictory but are not interpreted strictly 
4. Of two contradictory statements, one has not been explained properly; when it has, the contradiction disappears 
5. In teaching a student, something difficult to understand is mentioned or used as a premise in explaining something easier to understand. Later, in the appropriate place, that obscure matter is stated exactly, with precision 
6. The contradiction is concealed and manifests only after many premises and arguments expose it. It may escape the attention of the author, and escapes the attention of scholars who write books. 
7. In very difficult subjects, it is necessary to conceal some parts and disclose others. Sometimes this means the discussion proceeds on the basis of a certain premise, whereas in another place sometimes the discussion proceeds on the basis of a different, contradictory premise. In such cases the vulgar must remain unaware of the contradiction, and the author uses some device to conceal it.

Causes 1-2 are found in the biblical commentary Maimonides used and taught - the Mishnah, the Talmud, etc. Causes 3-4 are found in the Old Testament, in what Maimonides refers to as the books of the prophets. He raises the possibility that Cause 7 is found in the Bible, but "this is a matter for investigation" later. Cause 5 is found in the books of "those who know the truth," i.e. the wisest of philosophers. Cause 6 is found "in most of the books of authors and commentators other than those we have mentioned"; that is, not the works of those who know the truth, though sometimes Cause 7 is present there, too. More biblical commentary (Midrash) and Jewish liturgical ritual are given as examples. Cause 7 is found in his book, and by extension (note the clever wording), in the books of the wise philosophers as well. Of the seven causes, three of them reduce to inchoate noise, and two of them are used in Sacred Scripture. Maimonides himself only cares about the fifth and seventh causes. "Know this, grasp its true meaning, and remember it very well so as not to become perplexed by some of its chapters." 

"If you wish to grasp the totality of what this treatise contains, so that nothing of it will escape you, then you must connect its chapters one with another: and when reading a given chapter, your intention must be not only to understand the totality of the subject of  that chapter, but also to grasp each word that occurs in it in the course of the speech, even if that word does not belong to the intention of the chapter. For the diction of this treatise has not been chosen at haphazard, but with great exactness and exceeding precision, and with care to avoid failing any obscure point. And nothing has been mentioned out place, save with a view to explaining some matter in its proper place." 

The philosophers, when communicating their thoughts to others, are very careful to write exactly what and how they want to, and their works are crafted wholes, like a sculpture or a painting, with everything in its intended place. Using this principle of interpretation, and being alert to the fifth and seventh causes of contradiction, is how I will approach these old, so-called esoteric books. 

The Nicomachean Ethics, Prolegomena

I have begun a study of Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics. It will be the first time I have really turned to it since my college years, and maybe since spring of freshman year. My friend D, whom I speak with most of all about things like this, likened studying Aristotle to cutting through a jungle of falsehoods, but said that at least with Aristotle we get arguments, rather than cryptograms which lead to arguments (i.e. Plato). Having suffered through the Philebus (a book which bore the tantalizing subject of the relationship between the good and the pleasant, but which was so difficult I understood nothing), I am strongly inclined to agree. Right where you want clarity, Plato is needlessly, horribly obscure, and the obscurity is entirely artificial; purely a function of his manner of writing. Aristotle's difficulty is the interweaving of true and false arguments and a thoroughly dialectical structure; which means he's an entire level closer to speaking his mind with you than is Plato.

So I'm going through the first book of the Ethics slower and more thoroughly than I've ever gone through a book in my life, and I can't say it's unpleasant. Whether the good is pleasure, honor, or contemplation (or as is more likely, something else Aristotle does not explicitly mention), what happiness is, and what the causes for happiness are - these are difficult and urgent questions for me. And when I take the trouble to read and reread, as Daniel did the Talmud and Freud, some measure of understanding does arise, and the pleasure that accompanies such understanding must be perceived in order to be understood.

The trouble, of course, is the same trouble that accompanies the study of most philosophers, and particularly ancient philosophers: the contradictions, the terrible arguments, the unhelpful rhetoric, and almost total lack of good teaching. It makes discovering the philosopher's genuine teaching and distinguishing it from their opinions exceedingly difficult, to say nothing of the difficulty of deciding if these teachings are actually true.

And Book One is a labyrinth. A labyrinthine jungle. Circular, organic structure, hidden false arguments, open contradictions, subtle contradictions, pandering to the prejudices of his day, and I could go on. Every chapter must be read on its own and then compared with every other chapter in that book. The amount of work required is daunting, even discouraging. For one with little confidence in his own powers, the temptation to give up and rely upon the opinions of others is strong, very strong.

I am resolved not to do that. Granted, D has helped me very much, but I have to do my own work as well. My foray into Book One has revealed some of the main thrusts of the argument: the importance of the good, what the good is, the definition of happiness, how the arguments for happiness contrast with those of the good, and how the three ways of life (pleasure-seeking, honor/power loving, contemplative) stack up against human desire. The ranking of goods and virtues is also critical, so naturally Aristotle does almost none of that.

The most important sections in Book One are probably chapters six and seven. Six is hard, so I basically skipped it as a freshman - I read its pages, but I read them with zero understanding. They will form the crux of a paper I want to have written by Advent on the good and happiness in Book One. They will also be read with the following questions in mind (as will, to a similar extent, mutatis mutandi, all of Book One): What is the good? What is happiness? Are Aristotle's arguments for them sufficient or not? He rejects a universal idea of the good - can the same objection be leveled against the universal idea of happiness? Why is the artistic/poetic life absent in his schema? What is the role of pleasure in happiness and the human good (the question for me right now)? Goods and virtues ought to be explicitly compared and contrasted: are they?  If they are, are they compared satisfactorily? Is Aristotle a mathematician, a rhetorician, a geometer, or a carpenter?

I have a sinking feeling that I will be spilling a lot of digital ink on Book One. But if I want to genuinely understand, it's probably the quickest way. This means yet another commentary. And the trouble with commentaries on esoteric writings of philosophy is that they get exponentially more complicated the further they get. The advantage is that I will be able to see the contours of the work's structure much more easily having gone through work like that, so the largely mediocre writing I'm about to produce won't be entirely without fruit. I will begin with Book One of course, but I will try and follow the dialectical contours of the argument and pause at each major change or development as I see them. I will try to keep my writing simple, direct, and strive to always speak from my own experience. I will place as few barriers as possible in the way of understanding. So in a way, I will be the anti-Plato, the anti-Aristotle.

Let us begin. 

Interlude: The High and Low in Liberal Education

Liberal education is the study of how to flourish as a human being; how man flourishes as man. For me it has primarily become cultivating a desire for what is beautiful, good, and life-affirming. And, I even dare to hope - for what is true. And for educating me in hungering for that desire, of seeking to stretch myself out towards knowledge, I am grateful first of all to Plato and the wise teacher I once had who awoke in me the awareness of my own ignorance. Ever since, I have been guided by those books often considered 'great' by Western Civilization. Homer to Heidegger, as it were.

Part and parcel of that education was the refining of my taste. I used to abhor the very sound of operatic singing. Now it is one of my fondest pleasures. I could not stand languid, leisurely storytelling in film. Now one of my favorite works onscreen is one in which almost nothing happens. Similarly, I used to hate mushrooms and beans. All of which is to say: taste changes.

So far, that says almost nothing. But for awhile, I looked askance at pop music, television, movies, video games, etc - really, anything popular - as being a waste of time at best and intellectually corrupt at worst. If it weren't established in the canon of the greats, I didn't want it.

An early sign of change from this established opinion was reading The Catcher in the Rye, and loathing it. It was reputed to be among the best American novels, and I absolutely despised it. Tastes change, however, and Shinji drove me absolutely wild the first few times I saw Eva too. After thinking about it more I've decided to at least give Salinger another chance.

A stronger sign was discovering that an alleged low form - anime serials - was rising to great art, and what was allegedly great art - McCarthy's Blood Meridian, for example - was really not that great. I don't mean unartfully crafted, because it was very carefully written, but the delight in rubbing readers in despairing violence for its own sake, for no purpose, seemed absolutely suspect. Genesis has the shocking, horrific violence as well, but its understanding of humanity is much, much greater.

Anime was the tipping point. Shinsekai Yori is one of the finest stories ever told, better than most Shakespeare or the vast majority of good novels; easily the equal of Austen or Dostoevsky, and much better than Tolstoy. The education of a leader, a hero, has never been treated finer - at least, I rack my brains trying to think of a better hero than Saki, but I can't. Compassion, courage, and understanding cultivate themselves within her so organically, so naturally, it was like watching the growth of a magnificent cedar. Seldom has a story in any medium - novel, film, television - explain better or show more beautifully what makes for a good leader of a people. Watership Down comes close, and the growth of Jon Snow is a close third, but neither of them remotely equal Saki. Honestly, the closest runner-up comes from another suspect medium, science fiction: Colonel Jack O'Neill of Stargate SG1.

In the same way, Oregairu is better - much better, I'd argue - than Catcher in the Rye. Just to make sure I'll read it again, but I bet my opinion won't change. It's not anime's Catcher in the Rye, it's better at every turn in showing alienation, isolated youth, and the difficulty in reaching out for genuine human connection in a world almost entirely lacking in role models, i.e. authentic teachers. It is more socially astute in showing the ways we lie to ourselves and other people and defensively retreat or look away from the less pleasant parts of our souls. I could go on.

Both of these examples demonstrated an astonishing clarity of insight into humanity and turned my expectations upside down and inside out. Anime is considered juvenile at best, unworthy of serious reflection or consideration. Blood Meridian is alleged to be the exact opposite. But honestly, my time would have been better spent thinking about Oregairu and Shinsekai Yori than spending hours poring over a novel I didn't enjoy at all, one that didn't help me understand myself or humanity any better, and all the while trying to convince myself that I was enjoying it because reputable authorities told me it was more than well worth my time. What a waste.

What is beautiful and illuminating, what reveals the nature of things, can be found outside my expectations. What a stupidly obvious, mundane conclusion. I wish something more eloquent came to mind. The upshot is that I've discovered anime that rivals, if not surpasses, Shakespeare. And honestly? That still might be underselling Shinsekai Yori. 

The Sound and the Fury II

It took me a long time to gain any semblance of meaning behind Faulkner. It's one of the best novels I've read in a long, long time, and undoubtedly the most difficult. Benjy does not experience the world the same way we do, and understanding that proved a challenge.

I was sad for days when I finished the book enough times to understand most of it. I've never met anyone who can rip a family apart the way Faulkner can, and reveal the vice, the cruelty, and the isolation you only find within a family. There's no way out of it, either, no solution; just incest, murder, and suicide. Benjy is no answer; his image as a Christ figure is simply to show that Christianity is impotent (and to emphasize that, Faulkner castrates Benjy); the only people who cling to that primitive faith are old slave-servants (the younger generation, even the black generation, has no interest in Christianity at all). Whatever plagues the family, Christ has nothing to offer. All Benjy can do is cry.

There's more aspects in Sound and Fury than just Jesus and the family, naturally, but to my mind those are the most important. It's a deeply despairing book, a haunting one. Faulkner has now joined Nietzsche and (probably, assuming I ever get around to understanding him) Heidegger as the finest of the antichrists, mostly because (in Nietzsche's case, at least) they can't suffer refutation, only contradiction. At his best, Nietzsche is excoriating a corruption of Christianity - one that uses feigned humility and weakness as weapons, since otherwise the strong can't be overcome. It can't be denied that this form of Christianity has been prevalent, especially in our decadent age. It isn't the Gospel, it's not the Fathers, it's not Christian Tradition, but the roots of Christendom haven't been watered in centuries. Instead, there's been a woodening, hardening, ossifying process, reducing that beautiful tradition to a dead, recorded letter, in which case it is no longer life affirming.

Hence a Christian's response to the brutal challenge of Faulkner and those like him is simply to live beautifully according to the Truth Himself, to rediscover again and again the purifying fire of divine, merciful love, to look again at the very heart of what the Way of Life truly is. Only from that perspective, with that preparation, can a convincing counterargument - and even better, a counter-enfleshment in life and literature - be achieved. 

Interlude.The Sound and the Fury I

Perseverance has never been my strong suit. I generally prefer the (quite damning, actually) adjective 'small-souled' to 'effeminate', because it requires less explanation (the transfer of physical traits to the soul, or perhaps tendencies more blameworthy in one sex than the other? at any rate, it is a powerful aversion to discomfort and an irresistible draw to pleasures, but the latter term could be interpreted to mean such things are characteristic of femininity, and the witness of the Saints -Teresa, Joan, and Therese among a thousand others - not to mention personal experience, belie this).

Further, I am absorbing the Second Vatican Council (i.e. studying the documents carefully and spilling what will become a lot of ink on them), and that will take up a lot of time elsewhere instead of writing here. But they're both on blogs, so at least I'm still writing something here. I begin to wonder if separate blogs were a dumb idea.

Also, Faulkner is hard. Never have I ever read more difficult literature. In terms of intelligibility, Aristotle, Heidegger, and Hegel are his equals. I read the first sentence of The Sound and the Fury at least a dozen times, and the first chapter at least seven times, before I had the barest hint about what the blasted thing meant. PTSD flashbacks of Hegel seminars ensued, where we read a sentence of the Phenomenology and literally asked ourselves, 'What does this mean?"

This is easing, but I will have to read the novel at least three times before I have anything intelligent to say about it. It is easy to lose myself in lighter literature (parts of Kristin Lavransdatter, not to mention all of Father Elijah, Father Elijah in Jerusalem, and Voyage to Alpha Centauri have all been devoured since I 'started' Faulkner!), but it's back to the South now, and even the merest taste of the rewards is enough to keep going. This book is rich. I will not think about time, experience, and how they relate the same way again. Never have I ever been brought into the life of another man as I have Benjy (who, incidentally, is thirty-three and whose story begins during the Easter Triduum. I doubt this is coincidence).

He always snags on the nail. 

Plato, Phaedo

Few dialogues are as deeply disturbing and perplexing as the Phaedo, and though all the dialogues concern themselves with what it is to be human, and what the human life looks like, no dialogue explores the consequences of these questions like the Phaedo. For the Phaedo is about dying, being dead, and the preparation for death; since man is mortal, and if he is to live in the truth, he must confront his mortality. And since philosophy claims to be the best life, she must justify herself in the face of death. Given the fact of our imminent doom, why should we spend our days in philosophy? Does not the fact of death make such speculation, especially on such abstract, abstruse subjects like metaphysics, vain? In the words of the Philosopher-King, "he who increases knowledge increases sorrow. This too is vanity."

Socrates rejects this line of thought, the fears that characterize his young companions' questioning into the soul. For since, reason they, philosophy might not even prolong one's life but might (as the case of Socrates suggests) on the contrary prematurely shorten it, is not a live dog better than a dead lion? But Socrates reassures his friends: the soul is immortal, and after death we shall continue to be what we are now. This knowledge, for which ample proofs are given, reassures his friends and provides Socrates with the courage to face death and show his young friends that he is the "wisest and justest of all men." In the face of a constantly changing, hostile world, the soul persists always, giving the philosopher hope in the most hopeless of circumstances. This has some fairly significant implications: since we are, properly speaking, our soul, we should neglect the passions of the body and care only for the soul; the soul is, in reality, 'imprisoned' by the body, and since knowledge is of spiritual things, the body is of no help in the search for wisdom. The philosopher therefore is a hater of bodily things.

Such a view of the Phaedo is hardly original. This is the standard, conventional interpretation of the Phaedo, and one encounters it everywhere - encyclopedias, articles, and introductory philosophy courses at the university. But - if one rereads the Phaedo with sufficient care, one begins to see the extraordinarily conflicted nature of the dialogue. Socrates claims the philosopher is a hater of bodily things, but he has children in his very old age, presumably enjoying the prior, accompanying pleasures; he spends not a little time rubbing his leg prior to his attack on bodily pleasures; and he idly plays with Phaedo's beautiful hair (as, we learn, he was in the habit of doing). Further, we know from the Symposium that he drank more wine than anyone else, never got drunk, and enjoyed himself more than anyone present. Such actions are not the actions of a man convinced that the body is vain. Socrates is neither a Christian ascetic, sacrificing good things as penance for the kingdom of heaven, nor a Buddhist monk, convinced of the vanity of all desire.

Far more disturbing, however, is the treatment of the soul. To be sure, Socrates lays out four arguments for the immortality of the soul. Unfortunately, all of them fail, containing patent logical errors. A great thinker is apt to err in first principles, but not usually in minor steps of logic; Spinoza's Ethics might not be absolutely true, but few would deny it is internally consistent. But even more grievous; the arguments Socrates advances strip the soul of everything personal, which ignores our primal fear of death and longing to live forever: we want ourselves, what makes us us, to persist, not some abstract Form or Intellect, which has no knowledge of individual things nor memory of our life. In short, we long for what Christ promises; for our perfected person, body and soul, our self, to rise again and have life everlasting. Whether such a thing be possible - that is the leap of faith. That the Christian message has proved so powerful is in part because it addresses man's most primal, urgent longings; precisely the longings Socrates betrays in his Four Arguments (consider the opening of the Second Argument and how it moves from the particular to the universal until nothing of the particular is left).

Though Socrates teaches falsehood for the sake of comforting his companions and inspiring them to seek out philosophy, there is no indication that he himself is convinced by his sophisms - rather, the contrary. It seems therefore that he did not think what these arguments proved had been sufficiently demonstrated, and from this two conclusions might be drawn: one, that Socrates did not think the personal immortality of the soul could be known through reason. Two, that Socrates positively affirmed the personal mortality of the soul. I myself prefer the first option, for it is more in line with his gentle skepticism (he does not say, "I shall not believe it till you prove it to my satisfaction," but "How can that be? Let us investigate it together"), more confident the possibility of future inquiry, and it preserves the fundamental difficulty resulting from the failure of his earlier arguments: why philosophize if you cannot know, but can only hope (and scarcely have a reasonable hope, at that), that the soul is immortal? Is not everything vain again?

Unfortunately, the Phaedo does not provide sure, open answers to these questions. Matters thus look very bleak, a cause for the deepest despair. But some consolation might be present in the Allegory of the Cave and reflecting upon courage. For there is no question that for those who have truly tasted it, the philosophic life is superior to that of all others (the challenge of revelation is for the time being set aside). Once one has seen knowledge, to live in ignorance is intolerable, at least for those few souls who love wisdom, but even men living in ignorance wish to think their ignorance the truth (Cipher's decision to re-enter the Matrix is the clearest modern example of this). And courage is the perseverance in a judgment which reason knows to be true - in this case, that philosophy is the best life. For even if death is the end, philosophy remains the best life, and one should take even more care over one's soul, because it is the most precious of all things. Abandoning this for a life of hedonistic despair and nihilism would be weak and shameful, the willing enslavement to the bodily passions which is so fatal to philosophy (Socrates, remember, was famous for his temperance). Still, this is far less reassuring than it might have been, for Socrates seems to suggest that only courage separates us from despair.

Plato, Minos

Through this introduction to the life of Socrates through the shorter Platonic dialogues, I begin to get the feeling that Plato is guiding us from a love of what we think we know (authoritative opinion) to a love of the truth. Whatever else may be said for Bruell's take, I have to admit it's rather wonderful. The medievals held that the short dialogues are the best gateways into Platonic philosophy (though what that itself is is a matter of some dispute, and I claim provisional ignorance), and the Straussians tend to agree. I at least am finding the order of dialogues he recommends perfect: dialogues 'on' gain, law, and justice (among other things). Most incredible is the way Plato effortlessly illustrates thoughtful popular opinion on these things, and how similar a man in 21st century America might have the same opinions on gain, law, and justice as a 4th century BC Athenian.

Never have I read a dialogue where I was more invested in the outcome than in the Minos. Socrates asks a nameless companion, "What is law, for us?" Socrates immediately presses the issue towards defining law as something not entirely up to us ("a discover of what is), but he is initially unsuccessful. His companion's final definition of the law is as following: Law is the official opinion of the city; that is, political opinion. Opinion, and not knowledge. Here begins my difficulty: this is precisely my definition of law: customarily accepted political opinion. But if it is mere opinion, not knowledge, why ought it to be respected and heeded? Why should the philosopher, who has knowledge, not be above the law? I react with some horror at the implication of my own view, for widespread disrespect for the law would be devastating to the city. Plato, it seems to me, is trying to raise the reader up from such a vulgar view of law, and so I was hoping very much to find a persuasive argument that was not intended to be ironical.

Unfortunately, I did not find it. Socrates links justice and law very closely when he gets his companion to agree that the lawful are just and the lawless unjust. But is this true? That there could be unjust law I have no doubt: laws which defraud the poor and vulnerable, laws which treat political equals unequally, or worse offenses. If the law may be unjust, then are not the unlawful just and the lawful unjust? Yet this returns to disrepecting the law, for if the view that in some cases the unlawful is just is promulgated, one will simply call all laws which moderate one's vulgar desires unjust and himself just when he is unlawful - surely a great disgrace.

Through linking the law with justice, Socrates persuade his companion that "Law is true opinion", and therefore that "Law wishes to be the discovery of what is", like the other arts: medicine, agriculture, gardening, cooking, etc. The companion raises a difficulty: if this is so, why do cities everywhere not use the same laws, as they all use the same medicines, etc? (a similar impasse might be raised against the proposition that certain things are true) And Socrates' response is most unconvincing: professing ignorance that this is indeed the case. And after the companion enlightens him with a description of contrary laws and customs (like Herodotus, a bit), Socrates avoids his clear, eloquent speech and instead moves into being a sophist to produce agreement. His response is quite puzzling. After the companion pleads that he wishes to be convinced (as did I - I longed, positively longed to be convinced), but that "when I consider that we never stop changing the laws, I can't be persuaded", Socrates says, "Perhaps you do not perceive that these things, being moved like droughts pieces, remain the same" - which I don't understand at all.

Further, the argument progresses on the assumption that law is some sort of techne: as the heavy is heavy in Athens and Sparta alike, and the healthy is as well, etc. law will be the same everywhere. He uses four examples: medicine, agriculture, gardening, and cooking. How do these illustrate the nature of law? Medicine seems accurate enough: the causes of health in a man can be approximately codified, and doctors, whether in Athens or Lycaea, will use similar means to induce health. Agriculture is similar, but seldom relies on written "laws" - most often tradition and experience (though I suppose these are similar in practice to the 'laws' of medicine) to produce bountiful crops. But gardening? What is the aim of gardening? And cooking? These seem far more dependent upon private whim and fancy than they do with a written law, intending to be the discovery of what is (also, in the Gorgias, Socrates uses cooking as a negative example to illustrate rhetoric). Perhaps Plato did not intend to undermine Socrates' argument that law is the discovery of what is, or that I'm missing something crucially important, but Socrates did not convince me that the lawful are always just, and that therefore law is the discovery of what is; if Plato did not intend that, he sure came close.

I have seldom been in a position of wishing to be convinced, and yet being unconvinced. It is rather unpleasant. Is law nothing more than authoritative political opinion, whose justice is entirely accidental? Are justice and law completely separate things? I don't want to hold either of those opinions, but till I work something out (perhaps Aquinas' Treatise on Law, which I have completely forgotten, would help), that is unfortunately where I linger: in the shadow of vulgar opinion.

"What else would law be, Socrates, except those things that are lawfully accepted?"

Plato, Hipparchus

I am under no illusions about the depth of these brief notes on the Dialogues. I have read the Hipparchus carefully only a few times. Doubtless indeed I should see more of it if I read it carefully twenty times, but I must move on; and even in this brief introduction I have learned much about the Socratic life and how philosophy constitutes itself in the face of the authoritative public opinion against which it must inevitably conflict.

It helps, truly, to have a good guide. I am reasonably intelligent, but I am young and have read little. Christopher Bruell is very learned, utterly brilliant, and has been reading Plato carefully for at least fifty years. His book, On the Socratic Education is an exquisite thing, written late in life, and ironically entitled "An Introduction", which it most certainly is not. The writing is far denser than it needed to be, with seemingly endless subordinate clauses everywhere you look till you have almost forgotten what the subject was; but this is no criticism, for Mr. Bruell is a smart enough man to write intentionally. The difficult, dense writing employed by him, Leo Strauss, and those like him, is truly a barrier set up against the average reader, but the barrier is there on purpose. Not everyone is meant to embark upon philosophy; not everyone should begin to question their authoritative, traditional opinions. Such men might be made worse by philosophy, like Meno; better for them to remain simple, moral people. Though we today would call sentiment 'elitist', 'snobbish', or 'aristocratic', I believe Strauss and his students thought it was the truth, and inculcated it in themselves and employed it in their writings. But they learned it first from their masters, particularly Plato. But enough of Bruell - I shall turn to what little I have gleaned from the Hipparchus.

The Hipparchus is first in the path of sixteen Bruell lays out, indicating that he intends the Hipparchus to be the introduction to Socrates and his education, if not the introduction to philosophy. In it, Socrates approaches a young man and asks, "What is the love of gain, and who are the lovers of gain?"; or the dialogue begins in the midst of on ongoing conversation. His young companion immediately launches an impassioned, indignant assault upon the lovers of gain as sellers of the worthless, cheaters, frauds, evil men, etc. He neglects to seek out what gain could be. What is it? We think first of increase of wealth or money, but also increase of good things, since gain in the first sense is held to be good. The companion seems ignorant of this double meaning, and Socrates exploits the ambiguity rather mercilessly. Through his questioning, he shows his companion that he believes gain is always good, and thus it is unreasonable to expect anyone, even the decent or just man, from seeking it; even more, that those who love gain what is good; thus, cheaters and frauds turn out to be lovers of the good. This shocking conclusion is rendered unconvincing to the reader (and Plato intended it to be so), since Socrates banishes justice from the dialogue quite early on, locking out his companion's complaint against the lovers of gain, and refusing to acknowledge the opposing view, that gain could be criticized. And by subtly switching the terms of the argument, and proceeding on a false assumptions (when the companion defines the lover of gain in terms of the worthless, Socrates acts as if he meant "worthless for producing gain" - obviously not what his interlocutor intended), he is easily able to reduce the counter-arguments to nonsense, 'proving' his argument true.

The companion thinks of gain as a good, but wishes to restrain the love of gain in the name of decency or justice. He further argues that the lover of gain is "he who thinks it worthwhile to make a gain from that which the decent wouldn't dare to gain from", and what he has in mind is most likely the unjust increase of money through deception, bribery, etc. But in calling them gains, he implicitly recognizes them as good, since he resolutely adheres to the proposition that gain is good. Further, he asserts those who pursue such gains are harmed by them, which means he is forced to argue that the good harms. He is confused about the nature of gain, and Socrates is so willfully obtuse that the nature of gain is never clearly spelled out in the dialogue.

Why does Socrates hold this conversation? Why is he so brutal to his interlocutor? In what way is the Hipparchus meant to be a defense or propaedeutic to philosophy? This is difficult for me to say, probably because I have read insufficiently. But perhaps Socrates sees a danger in the companion's criticism of the lovers of gain, for since he does not recognize the ambiguity inherent in the word, the philosopher might well be included in his condemnation. As to what this different love of gain might be, I am rather unsure; but the interlude on Hipparchus hints that it may have something to do with wisdom.

"This is a memorial of Hipparchus: Do not deceive a friend."

On Reading Plato: Hermeneutical Tools

Collecting organized thoughts on writings as complicated as Plato's dialogues is more difficult than I thought; when I said 'tomorrow', I probably meant 'sometime next week'. And here is next week (or the week after) and instead of a brief essay articulating questions which go right to the heart of the dialogue - so I flatter myself - I thought I should lay down for myself how to approach my most beloved philosopher. So here are some general guidelines for those who are not natural geniuses:

1. Plato was quite possibly wiser than you and wrote on purpose; every word in the dialogue is present with design and purpose. Nothing of importance is left to chance or happenstance. [N.B. this probably applies to all wise men]
2. Read slowly and repeatedly. When dissatisfied at the end of a dialogue (a first reading of the Hipparchus, for instance), start again, for you have only scratched the surface.
3. Become personally committed in seeking out the question at hand. If you do not care about what law is, how can you read the Minos profitably?
4. Where are oddities, contradictions, and sophistries present? Who is responsible for them? How do they come about, and why? 
5. Examine your primal reactions and associations at every turn. When answering a question to yourself, or probing a difficulty, strain your mind to search out alternatives, and ask always, "Why do I think this answer is true or sufficient?" 
6. What are the important terms of the dialogue (e.g. gain, good, etc. in the Hipparchus)? Do their meanings shift as the dialogue progresses? If so, how? Do the interlocutors understand the terms differently? If so, how? 
7. Be honest in your difficulties and courageous in your perseverance.

 Using the above suggestions, I am curing all of my bad reading habits and getting beneath the surface of a text on my own for what is probably the first time in my life. Many of us are not used to reading carefully, and the Dialogues profit us when we bring all our mental faculties to bear as we read. Take notes, if that helps you, or annotate the book (I never do that), even. Anything to slow yourself down and approach the dialogue from a fresh angle. And when you are onto something, indulge your feelings of excitement.

Homer, The Iliad

It is both a pleasure and a shock to return to Greece by means of Homer. From the opening lines celebrating and mourning Achilles' wrath, to the closing lament over the Breaker of Horses, I was fully spellbound. Homer's depiction of heroic virtue is unforgettable, and Achilles, Hector, Diomedes, Agamemnon (specifically not Odysseus) and Aias are the standards against which subsequent heroes shall be judged. There is beauty, courage, grace, and honor amongst them which is alien, yet not unattractive (though I remember how much The Iliad shocked me as a freshman) to a modern. Like my experience with the Waldstein Sonata, I grew to love The Iliad and to revel with the heroes in the pride of their strength.

The problem of honor and glory is what concerns me most in the poem, and how they unfold the magnificent tragedy. Honor and glory seem to be related to one's own and the other; honor is given a man by other men, and it can be easily stripped away, as Agamemnon effortlessly shames Achilles; but once taken, it is unclear whether or not it may be returned, though the offender may wish it so. On the other hand, glory, or fame, κλέος - literally, a report - though it requires the efforts of others and possibly would be unsatisfying without it, does not admit of this weakness, far more dependent on the feats of the individual. Thus the wrath of Achilles is spread about the four winds and all men sing his songs, and none can strip him of his great deeds. In this light Nestor refutes Diomedes, who claims he will lose glory by fleeing Hector. Even more, it seems Achilles might make a transition from honor-loving to glory-seeking midway through the Iliad when Agamemnon's envoy comes upon him singing and delighting his heart with the songs of the great men from the past. Since it is possible to be dishonored by a lesser man (though I hardly dare to assert even this; for, losses of faith notwithstanding, Agamemnon's conduct in battle is irreproachable, and Homer's depiction of the troubled shepherd of the people is among the most moving of passages), what is a hero to do? How to hold honor, based on the words or praises of men (which are but wind, right?) and glory, based on deeds? Do the two come together as one more than I am allowing here?

Since all the heroes fight for honor and glory (Hector is emphatically not an exception, read carefully Andromache's plea and his response and you might be convinced it does not properly address her request), there are no villains, strictly speaking, though I vastly prefer the Achaian heroes, and Diomedes in particular (what a lion!), to anything Ilion has to offer. Further, though frequent mention is made of fate, it seems Zeus is not subject to fate at all, but that fate is merely Zeus' will, for Hera all but says that in book sixteen, and among the first lines of the Iliad is "the will of Zeus was accomplished", and when Zeus bows his head in assent to a thing, nothing may gainsay it. Unrelated and probably trivial, but interesting, is the discovery that Zeus, Poseidon, and Hades are all equals, give or take, though the Furies tend to side with Zeus, for he is the eldest.

There is much to say about the poem, and these scattered reflections hardly do it justice. Buried beneath the beauty, honor, and glory of noble battle is harsh, unromantic bloodshed and a deep sadness about the nature of things. I am not sure how friendship figures in The Iliad, nor to what extent the vivid pictures of death and violence change the beautiful picture of heroic virtue, though I am not inclined to say Homer is attacking that virtue in every line. Plenty of open questions for next time.

"Of the creatures that crawl the earth, man is the most miserable of all."

Plato, Ion

What a pleasure it is to return to inexhaustible literature! This short gem of a dialogue is the beginning of my return to Ancient Greece; on deck now is the Iliad and a modern doorstopper, Tragedy and Hope, recommended to me by David Fabe via Josh Barr.

The Ion appears to be part of a critique of poetry and the poets. Through inquiring if Ion is clever about all poets, not just Homer, Socrates is able to show Ion that the rhapsode's ability is not an art or craft, that it possesses no knowledge, and that in general, the poet does not know what he is talking about. But when one reexamines the argument, specifically with the question how Socrates gets Ion to admit all this, it becomes ever clearer that Socrates uses poorly constructed arguments for his assertions - switching subjects unbeknownst to Ion, ignoring implications, etc. Further, the examples he uses make the question of what τέχνη and ἐπιστήμη are completely unclear, inviting us to consider the possibility that the argument is not intended to be taken seriously, culminating in a twin example of generalship: Ion claims he knows what a general should say to exhort his troops before battle, and this he learned from Homer. Socrates changes the subject again ("So the rhapsode is a general? Seriously?"), mocks him, and ends the discussion, but it is unclear just how a general should learn to exhort his troops, and perhaps Ion's claim is not quite so ridiculous. Through an examination of the general, it seems that far from banishing the poets from the city, they are necessary to form its soul, and provide a vision of the whole for its citizens.

There is more. Homer occupies a special place in Athens; he is an artist who truly formed the soul of man; his depiction of heroic virtue was the standard until Alexander the Great, and his work was about as authoritative to the Greeks as the Bible was to the Medievals. As such, Homer is the commonly received opinion or tradition of the Greeks (Athens' cave, perhaps - what a great cave!), and by focusing solely on him, Ion is the most conventional, unreflective of men. He does not inquire or even seek to inquire whether there might be alternatives to Homer, using him to bolster his own achievements and reputation. Socrates, in investigating the link between art, poetry, and "speaking well or badly" (is this related to knowledge? the word "knowledge" occurs very seldom in the dialogue, hardly an accident), is investigating the very foundation of the city's most dearly held beliefs, what reason there is to hold those beliefs, and whether there might be alternatives: a dangerous business, for it is simple to see such a man as subversive.

I am sure that hardly covers the entire Ion. I have only read it five or ten times, and will probably see more as the count approaches fifty. But it is a good beginning. Reading Plato is like reading nothing else; it is exhilarating, shocking, infuriating, and provoking towards education of the highest sort; a great adventure. This is the first of the Dialogues I have read carefully; one down, thirty four more (plus the Letters) to go.

"As for me, I speak nothing but the truth, as is fitting for a private human being".

Allan Bloom, The Closing of the American Mind

Bloom's book is probably one of those who got provocative reviews in the New York Times, making it a bestseller which no one reads. At almost four hundred pages long, it is quite dense, and Bloom shares the Straussian love of long paragraphs. As such, probably most people who bought it cracked it open, read a few pages, and then consigned it to an indefinite prison sentence on the bookshelf.

Closing is a critique of the soul of the American university student; Bloom writes about choice, love, eros, music, and the history of thought (my favorite section), especially how words like "values", "ideology", and such words come to American popular thought and altered their original meaning; he writes how all these elements culminate in rather nihilist-unawares ways of thinking and being. Closing is often beautifully written (especially when he is discussing the merits of a particular book), and while its arguments were sometimes surprising, more often it voiced sentiments and concerns already at work within me. It fell upon fertile soil, you may believe that. This book and Crisis of European Sciences should be enough to convince anyone of the importance of liberal education, which of course for Mr. Bloom is the answer; the Great Books education. This has earned him hatred from other sectors, who accuse him of only teaching students what to read, not how to think for themselves, but any intelligent person can mock the pseudo-thinker who would be blinded enough to say such a thing.

One of its finest achievements is how Bloom is able to show us (for though I am a zealot for liberal education, I am also a Millennial and a modern, however much I may hate both of these things) ourselves. It is occasionally as frightening as peering into a mirror, for we often do dislike what we find.

"An American student knows only the word 'philosophy', and it does not seem to be any more of a serious life choice than yoga."