Opitimism and Pessimism I identified tonight's topic in ethics as "the war of optimism and pessimism". The assigned reading consists of selections from Plato's Republic, and an essay by Schopenhauer entitled "On the Sufferings of the World." The texts that I assigned offer a mix of optimistic and pessimistic messages, Plato seems optimistic about the possibility for achieving justice, Schopenhauer is much more pessimistic in many ways.

What's even more interesting than each author's position on the pessimism/optimism scale is what they have to say about hope itself. Both text contain important discussions of what it means that one is going to die and how can one be hopeful with that looming ahead. During the first class I made a rough contrast between those ethical theories which begin by examing the notion of a good life and then proceed to develop a theory of how to acquire a good life, the virtues being the qualities necessary to attain such a life, and those that assign values to goods-in-themselves, irregardless of their utility to human ends.

The independent reality of goodness and justice is most famously associated with Plato, Schopenhauer takes it a step further by claiming the postive, independent existence of evil.

If we define the virtues as those things that lead to happiness, then we have a plan and can be somewhat optimistic about how things turn out. If goodness is independent of human thriving, then we the two might not be mutually conducive. Both Plato and Schopenhauer at least entertain the notion that justice and goodness might be antithetical to human happiness and, in so far as we're successful in acquiring those things that people call good, we've probably had to lie, cheat and steal. Justice and goodness may be detrimental to human happiness.

Plato's dialog opens with Socrates renewing his friendship with Cephalus, a older, educated man with moderate tendencies. Cephalus has found himself to be happier as he's gotten older, the passions of youth have faded and he's made it to a comfortable age without failing in his duties, he cites Pindar:

Sweet Hope is his companion, cheering his heart,
the nurse of age; Hope, which, more than anything else,
steers the capricious will of mortal men.
(331a)

In particular, he's happy because he's hopeful for an afterlife since he's lived justly here. By justly he means that he spoken the truth and paid his debts.

Which is were Socrates jumps up, because it seems that Cephalus's definition is not good enough. For the purpose of tonight's discussion, I would like to put off the discussion of what justice actually in favor of considering if justice is achievable.

Plato again engages with a discussion of hope in his story of the ring of Gyges, but instead of considering hope as it operates within a human life, he considers how much hope can one have in human life in general, are we all doomed to be corrupted by whatever power might come our way. Its a very pessimistic picture to claim that justice is something that we is practiced against the will of the practitioner (Socrates suggests exactly this position as a sort of thought expirement at the beginning of book II).

Schopenhauer doesn't so much worry about wether or not justice can be achieved, he knows that it won't. Schopenhauer's pessimistic about the very possibility of achieveing happiness, by which he means an abscense of suffering, or at least a balance of suffering because even the abscense of most easily understood suffering and striving,

mankind would inflict more suffering on itself than it has now to accept at the hands of nature.

This is because "the will to live" can not be satisfied. Removing the limits of this desire leads the will to life to consume itself. As with Plato, freeing people from their constraints will lead them to evil.

Both Plato and Schopenhauer find great value in the lessening, indeed the elimination of desire. They both reject, at least for the sake of argument in the case of Plato, the idea that justice is a necessary component of human happiness or striving.

I have already mentioned the distinction between ethical theories which connected human happiness to the good (either utilitarian or eudainmonistic varities). Now we're faced with something very different, if justice is an objective category, then there is no longer any guarantee that the pursuit of justice will lead to human thriving, happiness or pleasure.

Schopenhauer's final claim is very strange indeed. If we act as if we are all evil spirits who are "living to atone for sin", then we'll recognice "the most necessary thing in life -- the tolerance, patience, regard and love of neighbor -- of which everyone stands in need and which, therefore, every man owes to his fellow". In other words, act as if justice is impossible, and you'll become just.

To summarize, if there is a good-in-itself, it may not correspond to human thriving, or at least not to human thriving as most people understand it. Is this a paradox, or does it mean simply that to know how to achieve the good can make one a failure in the eyes of men. Plato and Schopenhauer would agree on this point.  ¶ #

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  Meno Tonight we'll be talking about the Meno in introduction to philosophy. Rather than get into the deeper elements of the dialog, I'd like to point out a few things that someone reading this text for the first time might find useful. Since we'll be reading Plato in Ethics as well, the following notes will be useful to members of both classes.

1. Plato's works entered the public domain before copyright was formalized, so its easy to find. The Internet Classics Archive | Meno by Plato will be especially useful for anyone who's writing a journal and would like to directly quote or link to parts of the dialog.

2. As I mentioned in class on Monday. This dialog occurs before the overthrow and restoration of Athenian democracy in 404 b.c.e., but was written well afterward, so Plato's intended audience would be expected to be familiar to those events. The eight-month reign of the thirty dictators was an episodie in the Peloponnesian War. The events of this war are summarized on the the wikipedia (an excellent source). Although the Athenians won the war, the dictators came to power as a direct result of the Athenian defeat in Cyprus. We're told that Meno was killed in this expedition. Some of Socrates former students were involved in this oligarchy, and resented over this period was an important motivator for the prosecutors at Socrates eventual trial. (Especially for Anytus, who appears in the Meno as well).

3. Despite everything that I just said, the Meno is not usually presented as Plato's commentary on the political events that present a background to his character's discussion. Plato's dialogs are traditional broken up into three types, usually called Early, Middle and Late Period. Even though the order of composition is disputed, there's a lot to be said for a three part division between the dialogs. The early period dialogs are aporetic, that is, the characters illustrate the Socractic method of inquiry, but don't necessarily come to any conclusions about the questions they've chosen to pursue. The middle period dialogs demonstrate the method, but also present answers to the various questions. The late dialogs tend to be treatises and Plato doesn't seem to play the same sorts of games that he does in the early dialogs. Wether or not we can present a completed set of theories that belonged to a mature Plato is a topic for people far smarter than I.  ¶ #

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  Comic Book Science Since I'm just playing for the moment, and I don't want to say welcome again, I think I'll say something about the use of science in comic books. There's been more written on this topic then it rightly deserves, but so much of it is just terrible. Science in comic books has nothing to do with good and evil, or cold war anxieties, or even with power fantasies. It's all about the suspension of disbelief. So when some wise guy (henceforth WA) complains to a prominent combic book writer (henceforth, SL), the dialog could go as follows.

WA: You know, I don't really understand how spider man can walk on walls.

SL: Well, then could you enlighten us to how a spider can walk on walls.

WA: Well, they're like sticky and stuff.

SL: That's what I thought, and yet spiders manage to walk on walls very well, even though you don't know how they do it. It's scientific stuff that you don't know how they do it.

WA: Gee, I guess your right.

SL: I'm glad we settled that because Spidey's about to fight a guy with a 12 foot tongue and I wouldn't want you getting caught up on trivial matters.   ¶ #

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  Welcome Message #2 See, there's an option to post comments. Right?  ¶ #

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  Welcome Aboard.

As of last night, my Introduction to Philosophy students now know about my pedagogical expirement in blogging. Tonight, Introduction to Ethics will also be in on the secret. I'll be posting more in an hour or so as I get ready for Ethics, for the moment, I want to welcome everyone to the blog and make sure that I've turned comments on properly.  ¶ #

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  Why start intro to philosophy with the Presocratics?

There's an awful lot that needs to be put into a very small amount of time and the presocractics are both difficult and fragmentary. Anyone who goes to really get anything out of a introduction to philosophy course won't have developed the skills necessary to get much out of them.

Since my Greek skills are negligible, I don't have the skills necessary to get much out of them let alone teach them. Sure I've read some secondary sources, such as Heidegger's Early Greek Thinking, but I literally have no way to evaluate the claims that are made in that book. For this reason the following isn't meant to be a scholarly investigation of the presocratic thinkers, this is my thinking about how to begin teaching introduction to philosophy.

There are some accessible translations and commentaries are available. I used The Presocratic Philosophers and the presocratic sections of Copleston's A History of Philosophy were what I used when I was studying for my comprehensive exams.

The difficult and fragmentary nature of the presocratics does have some advantages though. I can't really expect beginning students to read the presocratics and I can't really expect beginning students to have read anything on the first day of class. A fortuitus coincidence. What's more, I do expect them to have read at least a little of Plato's Meno by the second class. Plato can, or at least should, be pretty intimidating.

In reading Plato, its important to be able to identify the argument that motivates each position he considers. The dialog form does not make this very easy. Before the beginner can get around to finding the argument, they first have to find out something about the form. The most obvious thing about the dialogs are all of these characters, these personalities that interact to drive both the story and the argument. Unlike so many philosophers who use a dialog format to make a point, these characters aren't simple stand-ins for abstract positions or concepts (such as theism v. atheism or beauty and justice), they're full blown characters with motivations, desires and individual characteristics. Plato can pull this off because Meno and Anytus and any number of other characters were real people know by Plato and, presumably, used as models for the characters in the dialogs. Plato knew, or at least knew of, these flesh and blood people before he wrote about them.

The novice student of philosophy can easily get stuck on the question of "who is Plato?", before they even get to the questions about "what were Plato's arguments?". Thoughtful students will in particular have this sort of difficulty. In order to address, however briefly, who Plato is, it helps to get some idea of the Greek thinkers who created the intellectual enviroment in which he operated.

There's a third reason for discussing the Presocratics, however briefly. That is that they present an easy way at getting at the philosophical impulse. There is a difference between appearence and reality. Application of reason can reveal the reality of the situation. We can account for the behaviour of the stick and the water together.

Begin with wonder at the bent stick experiment. Place a ruler into water and it appears to bend. The appearence of the stick conflicts with its reality. Yet, the appearence is not random or even misleading. To the modern high school graduate, there's nothing new here. The American college freshman is actually quite adept at looking at a table as a collection of dense points of matter floating in a void and of consider everything as made up of a collection of elements that, in their pure states at least, don't seem to share any properties with the things they make up. Plato writes a person who sees some difficulties in develioping these sorts of theories and tries to construct more nuanced theories about what the appropriate sorts of explanation are possible. Before we can get at that, we need to get at the early impulse to try to make sense out of the world and to take responsibility for how we make sense out of the world.
  ¶ #

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