[New post] THE UNEXCLUDED MIDDLE: SOCRATIC DEATH AND PAIDEIA
Filipe Felizardo posted: " THE UNEXCLUDED MIDDLE: SOCRATIC DEATH AND PAIDEIA Final Assignment for Learning How to Die: Socratic Discipline and the Philosophical Life, a seminar instructed by Daniel Sacilotto, at The New Centre for Research & Practice - July-August 2022 T" Even Prometheus Started Small
Final Assignment for Learning How to Die: Socratic Discipline and the Philosophical Life, a seminar instructed by Daniel Sacilotto, at The New Centre for Research & Practice - July-August 2022
THE UNEXCLUDED MIDDLE: SOCRATIC DEATH AND PAIDEIA
I shouldn't be surprised that Euripides' lines are true when he says:
After his trial, Socrates had one month of purgatory until his execution. To call it so may be an exaggeration, given the Athenian philosopher gave the impression of being already and truly dead. In the Platonic dialogue set during this timeframe2, the titular Crito coaxes Socrates into leaving the city in order to evade his penalty and save his life.
Socrates refuses – for him to do so would be to concede to the possibility that the social contract is irrational. And that is something that not only would be out of character for the philosopher, but also out of form; in the playground of reason, the stakes are high – to leave the city and evade his famously unjust penalty would be to dismiss it as unintelligible. If his penalty was deemed unintelligible, it could neither be considered just nor unjust. To think Socrates was anointing himself as a martyr is tempting, but it would miss the pedagogical point – one of the many we are, to this day, gleaning from this historical primary fact.
I will propose - and expand below - that it was by staying that Socrates managed to leave; that in doing so, he allowed for the unjustness of his trial to be extricated from the false justness of it; that learning how to die, the paideia of philosophy, is the activation of mixture. To all this I may add that to leave the city and evade his trial Socrates would be conceding to the unlimited – and worse, to unlimited power. For this purpose, I will have to suggest that in order to allow for the principle of mixture in Plato's construction of cosmopolitical citizenship, we need to barr entry of the principle of the excluded middle into his organizational logic.
1. Paideia - To learn; to die
I should start by suggesting that we compromise on some working determinations of what it means to learn, and what it means to die, given their critical usage in this essay.
In the context of the history of ancient Greek education, up to the arrival of Socrates, educational and formational activities were generally bound to conformity with an ideal – that of paideia, cultural formation. The genesis of paideia stems from the ideal of areté (via Homer3), the aristocratic and divine social form, followed by the ideal of right (via Hesiod4), and by the ideal of citizenship (via Solon5). The latter two combined in a democratic state formation, followed by the sophists ideal of human nature as individuated in the formation of citizenship6. It was against this last ideal that Socrates comes up. We can see in the Protagoras7 that despite their best intentions, the sophists had turned paideia into a mere labor of education – of amassing facts and juggling them along with rhetorical grace for personal gain in the political arena. It is in the Protagoras that we are confronted with the fact that despite marvellous and expensive education, nonetheless there are still young politicians who are unwise, cowardly, impious, and unjust. What does education accomplish, if it breeds contradiction between its purported ideals and their being carried out? Without theoretical – reflexive – support, how can practice be harmonized with any ideal? It seems that education is not learning, nor is learning being educated. In true Socratic fashion, to learn is to strive for an ideal of the human that comes into being in the pursuit of wisdom, the grasping of knowledge. That is, an ideal of the human which, like Socrates, never deems oneself consummate, never deems oneself finally wise, nor totally all-knowing.
As to what it is to die, we obviously refer to the ascetic ideals defended in the Phaedo8 – that to attain wisdom and acquire knowledge one's soul must ascend the Divided Line9 by dismissing bodily senses and by following the adage of avoiding gastronomical and sensual excess. Only so – disembodied, unbound of any fetish – can reason operate its tasks and grasp truth and the forms. As such, these activities are a world apart from the lexicon of life and nature's flux. It may also be fruitful to compare this with the Zen Buddhist notion of the Great Death10: as opposed to the small death, that of the body and its animation, the Great Death of the Zazen monk should occur during their life – and by undergoing their Great Death, they open themselves to being nothing. It is here that the comparison must stop short, for a Socratic student does indeed open oneself to being nothing, but only in order to construct being. While the Zen monk who dies the Great Death embraces an affirmation of nothing and thus recoils into nature, the Socratic pupil who dies the Great Death will embrace nothing in its identity with being, through the pedagogy of mixture. Such dialectic entails a transformation of nature into rational artifice, and this is where we part ways with Zen. We will see down below how is the activity of mixture put into practice and so, how learning is a coming-into-being. For now, I hope I can able to say that to die is thus not the small death, but should be understood as the coming into being of the ideal of the human, as well as a refusal of the sophists' concept of human nature as such. At this point, it seems there is only a thin membrane separating learning from dying – that one almost necessarily entails the other. As a preliminary remark, it might be worth noting that in this coming-into-being Plato still retains – to good use – his early Heraclitean influence through his teacher Cratylus.
2.0 The polis as an unexcluded middle
I can try to guess that Socrates was being true to form by saying that he refused Crito's entreaties to leave Athens in order to see what he could learn by staying. He was no stranger to being stopped in his tracks when perplexed, and investing all his being into inquiry and examination. We are told, at the end of the Apology11, that in hell, aided by the god of reason, Socrates will examine deeds, the dead, and the gods. When reading so one can also wonder if the suggestion is that under an unexamined unjust rule such as one that condemns a just man to his death, we are already in hell – and that the only way out is by transforming hell into an ideal republic, through examination and subsequent revision of the laws that organize it. I'm suggesting that Socrates put pedagogy into practice by allowing us to examine the conditions of his acting out in accordance with virtue and with the social contract. In other words, that it is through him – through his not leaving Athens – that we learn. That by staying, he learned, diachronically, through us. Which is to say that in a way, he also left and met us along the way.
Socrates lived during the heyday of the sophists – an elite of educators who saw the city-state as the educator, strongly focused on immediate effects on politics, not so much of a scientific bent12. Political areté was to be attained by spiritual formation13, and, beyond focus on the formal and the material, the moral field was one of their main interests in the State – which, if unharnessed, could bring about a true mess of untruths14. Such an organization is not strange to our contemporary democracies. The sophistic education was strictly of a practical aim, not theorical or scientific; their politics was the practice of a blend of aesthetics and morals, to the exclusion of theory and science, buttressed in an ever more crystalized notion of human nature. One was educated not by example, but by unquestioning mimesis – so, with no examination as to the why of it. Without a why, the how and the what become very flimsy. In that ethics is a science of morals, and thus, subject to logics, we can say that the sophists' politics, by vice of being uninformed by science and theory, were at a loss with regard to logic and to ethics. A practice without theory will suffer from the same. Under these constraints, the sophistic political practice was in fact, impractical.
Its should be clear that an idea of the state as an educator, on such grounds, easily maps onto an idea of the State as a repetitor of blind power. Historical consequences of sophistry's infection of the State would supposedly be beyond the scope of my essay, but we must halt briefly to note that the unjust condemnation to death of a philosopher and pedagogue by a State institution is a direct consequence of it. Socrates saw that education as repetition brings no difference. If the state is forming its citizens without any inquiry into what is that which it forms, without knowing what to form, it is merely activating unlimited power, which is concurrent with unlimited disorganization. Unlimited disorganization is the end of the State, and the emptiness that cradles tyranny.15
Socrates proposed us a via media. On the one hand, the sophists still heralded the State as dispositional, in that it allowed for the formation of individuals who then disposed of unexamined power. On the other, the tyrants saw the State as an instrument of disposition of their unexamined and thus unlimited power. Socratic discipline brought forth a synoptic ideal of paideia and the State to its full-bloomed possibility: paideia as the State is the collection of co-learners, rationally and ethically bound by enkráteia, autarky, and friendship. Only through this can then the State be paideia. Such a possibility is also an unexcluded middle, but one from which citizens can realize themselves in the State, and the state can realize itself in them. In other words: the rational realization of citizens is bound to come into being as the rational realization of the state, in the pursuit of the Good.
2. The realizers of the polis:Enkráteia, Autarky, and friendship
Here we have to make a pause and look at enkráteia, autarky, and friendship, in order to validate the rational and ethical realization defended a moment ago.
2.1.1 Enkráteia
The sophists flourished in an epoch when the Greek State had been expanded from its aristocratic origins into a democratic State of right – as such, beyond the rule of theophanical law. A State of right brings forth the socialization of justice, in which the conduct of the individual citizen is subject to normativity, and it is by abiding to such norms that the citizens will be protected by the State. Enkráteia16, self-dominion, is the normative principle by which the individual projects themself in the polis in order for the polis to project itself – its objectives, concerns, and welfare - into them. As such, we see a political ideal being mixed with an ideal of individuation, and with it comes the dissolution of law into the possibility of its examination. Enkráteia is not mere submission, but, I'll dare say by paraphrasing Ray Brassier, it is a principle, an ideal, for the domination of domination.17
Historically, it is not yet a principle of freedom, but we can see it is a principle of equality, which allows for a modicum of freedom – the individual freedom of examination, inward and outward. Harking back to our determination of death, we can see that enkráteia entails an emancipation from the unruly animal nature of the human, establishing its inequality with any given, with any flux. Enkráteia is a normative suspension from instinct and nature – not in complete detachment, but as its self-reflexive realizing process.
2.1.2 Autarky
Enkráteia opens the way for a suspension from the social. Again, we must insist that a suspension is not a complete detachment, but for lack of a better image, a dialectical bungee-jump. Such a suspension from the social can be termed as autarky – the absence of necessity.18
If the ideal of the human starts at the overcoming of nature, it activates the possibility of overcoming necessity. The self-regulated (as auto-nómos) individual is unbound from necessity, and is able – moreover, it thus should – construct/learn in itself the rules for its behaviour in conformity with social norms, as much as to construct/learn the rules which allow them to evaluate and transform the social norms if their contingent examination deems it fruitful. Far from gratuitous voluntarism, autarky transforms enkráteia into the rational task of overcoming domination – of realizing emancipation. As such, Socratic discipline already risks serious affront to unlimited power: only the gods were without necessity. Socrates' god, reason, is indeed a corruptor of the youth, if by that paideia means to provide the infant mind with the tools for, more than stealing fire from the gods, realizing fire without their help. It is a virtuous corruption of hypostasy, and a transformation of divine morality and aristocratic law into interpersonal ethics. If divine law is corrupted by human autarkic logics and the social metalogic, then all humans can become gods. If all humans are gods, then there are no gods – only the Socratic god, the meta-rule of reason, which can even rule over itself.
2.1.3 Friendship
Mutually reinforced with enkrateia, autarky is a Socratic injunction for finding reason within oneself. Of course, one can only do so if undeerstood by oneself to be reflected in others. We see that in turn, autarchy must be mutually reinforced with Socratic friendship19. It is not difficult to notice a superficial pattern in the whole of Plato's dialogues, especially in the Socratic ones: unlike many of his interlocutors, Socrates never loses his temper. It may be too strained, but I'd like to suggest that the friendly dialogue is the platform for both Socrates inductive and deductive reasoning20; furthermore, that it is his friendliness which also bears the torch of the dialectic – in that the unencumbrance of passions allows for clarity and sincerity in discourse, which are virtuous tools for progressively obtaining interpersonal wisdom and knowledge. It is never by force of authority that Socrates can guide one peer from a belief into knowledge of a Form, but by collaborative guidance across healthy perplexity.
Opposed, then, to merely taught facts through unexamined and unjust authority, Socratic pedagogy constitutes itself in the friendliness of the equality of souls – which includes the mutual recognition of the right to examine any judgment. No one is teaching anyone from above, but everyone is learning with one another. Formally, Plato exemplifies this in a majority of dialogues in which Socrates rarely pontificates on any matter without justification, and in which there is no transparent conclusion to inquiry. As a literary form, many times does the Socratic dialogue through Plato deliberately leave matters open for further consideration by the reader. It's definitely not "let that sink in", and much more about "eager to know what you think about this".
2.2 Diachronic Realization
It is now that I want to get into "staying was leaving". I can jump ahead merely for effect and say that not leaving Athens was Socrates' act of enkráteia, autarky, and friendship – not out of epiphanic martyrdom, but out of virtue and in search for truth. This essay is hopefully further proof that the Socratic realizers are precisely what allows us to learn diachronically. Disincarnate, Socrates – or Socratic paideia – did manage to leave Athens and is in dialogue with his future, precisely because he elected to stay. Such jumping across the hoops of history is of course in great part due to the material predicates of literature, but my point is that what truly allows for it is the pedagogical practice of the fact. Had Socrates not done so, there would be no great story to tell, nothing new to know, nothing virtuous to learn or understand – which is logically comical, given that what he did was not doing something, leaving. It was and is dialectically engaging, which goes beyond mere jest, and turns the perplexing into something knowable.
By staying, Socrates allowed us to co-learn with him that undergoing injustice was to stand the affront, stay and examine the conditions which necessitated the occasion. That is, quite prometheically, to allow for necessity to be dissolved into contingency, into an inquiry into counterfactuality – what if the city ruled itself in order to obviate unjust trials? By staying, Socrates allowed us to find the unjustness of his trial in the alleged justness of it – both in the justness of his action, and in the critical and pedagogical leverage he gained for pointing the unjustness of his leaving the city. Had he flown – another counterfactual – the status of the truth of the trial having been unjust would have been kept undecidable. In this way, we have learned doubly more. It is through these modal flights of fancy that I hope I can be allowed to say again that by staying, Socrates did also leave – and that this is what is constitutive of paideia.
With that in mind, I'd like to keep at this balancing act for a while longer, and pursue the ambiguity of this image into how such a construction maps onto the notion of 'turning around' brought forth in Republic, which will hopefully lead us into mixture and the unexcluded middle.
3.To turn around
My remarks on 'turning around' will be brief, but hopefully a facilitating step in the way from Plato's early dialogues on the death of Socrates into one of his later works, the Philebus. It seems true poetic justice that, in this way too, time, or better, history, is eversed. It is so, by accompanying Socrates from when he 'starts' reasoning upon his nearing death, into a disincarnate actualization of thought. In that sense, he is very much alive after the fact.
In order to be able to judge that this notion of 'leaving by staying' maps onto 'turning around', I have to say that as much as leaving Athens would have been eluding the unjustness of the verdict, 'turning around' is not a mere tourism of the senses; it is the deliverance of the soul to the understanding. The Republic puts it quite transparently: "Education isn't what some people declare it to be, namely, putting knowledge into souls that lack it"21, and "the instrument with which each learns is like an eye that cannot be turned around from darkness to light without turning the whole body. This instrument cannot be turned around from that which is coming into being22 without turning the whole soul until it is able to study that which is and the brightest thing that is, namely, the one we call the good."23 Followed by: "Then education is the craft concerned with doing this very thing, this turning around, and with how the soul can most easily and effectively be made to do it."24
I call this a pedagogy of death, in that to die in this context is a Great Death, during one's incarnate life; the dissolution of imagination, dogma and mere belief, into the possibility of self-examination propitiated by enkráteia, autarky, and friendship. To turn around with one's whole soul entails the same that 'leaving by staying' does: acting out the ideals of cosmopolitical, communicative reason. Concurrently, to leave-by-staying was to turn around one's soul to the synopsis of interpersonal, diachronic reason.
3.1 Synopsic view of the Divided Line
'Turning around' allows for a panoramic view of the Divided Line. Following that diagram for the playground where the form of the Good operates in aiding the soul to attain wisdom and acquire knowledge, we can say that these are virtually distributed along the Divided Line, virtually awaiting their realization. For the sake of clarity, let us remind ourselves that the Line is Divided into lowly Imagination (eikasia), then Belief (pistis), followed by the higher Thought (dianoia) and Understanding (noesis). The line is straight, but I'd suggest a tweak to this image. Each time one pronounces a judgment, one is electing to halt progress along the Divided Line, and, without cutting into it, bend it orthogonally – more or less like indenting a step for a stairway. I'll stretch the imagination and even suggest that by doing so, much like constructing real numbers by cutting their line, one also stretches the point of the Divided Line where the new step was indented. Thus, the line is somehow elasticated, allowing us take stock of where we are with a finer granularity – a just retribution for our judgment, which reflects it, and allows us to, in this provisional halting state, to look around and take stock of what, if any, wisdom and knowledge we have gleaned.
In this moment, we have our whole soul turned to the possibility of knowledge. We may only learn what we do not yet know, of course. We may also understand we are still in the realm of belief. The bungee-jumping act I mentioned earlier also happens here: we are pinching the line and looking around, to see how far we are from either the imagination or the understanding. This vertiginous dialectic of the Divided Line is, then, a sort of death - to open oneself to revision by our peers and allow our soul to be transformed by the panorama of the results, in order to keep on being able to transform it as well.
This laying down of judgments (in the sense of locutions which can be formalized as having ethical, epistemological, and ontological purchase) is what I understand as theory put into practice. Only this sort of pedagogy of death can allow all citizen-learners to study and transform the organization of the polis. This is the friction of learning – the growing pains of the soul, which we must all sooth with friendship.
4. Mixture
Now, I must make good on my suggestion and try to show how I think that 'turning around', having been mapped to 'leaving-by-staying', can be mapped onto the Platonic concept of mixture. We can see how that my essay was preparing this sort of raccord, by looking right at the start of the Philebus.
Socrates tells us that in order to inquire into the puzzles of the One and the Many, the entry point into them is "by making the point that it is through discourse that the same thing flits around, becoming one and many in all sorts of way, in whatever it may be that is said at any time, both long ago and now. And this will never come to an end, nor has it just begun, but it seems to me that this is an 'immortal and ageless' condition that comes to us with discourse."25
We have to thank translator Dorothea Frede for pointing out the polemic use of 'immortal and ageless', an epithet of the gods. We have already seen that in Socratic pedagogy, the gods are also subject to a semantic death and rebirth. For him, the sun is not vain Apollo; its light becomes a mere metaphor for the form of the good. As such, the immortal is already mixed with the mortal, and the ageless seems to have aged into a previous state of the contemporary. In this sense, the Philebus is pointing out that such a condition of mixture is contingent upon rational discourse, in connection with, for example, the dialogues in which Socrates hints that the virtues of bravery, piety, justice, and wisdom, are in the Philebus subsumed under what is the Platonic virtue of virtues, the Good.
In the Philebus, Plato shows Socrates explaining his critical pedagogy, after we have already lost count to how many young and old he playfully tripped up - if only in order to catch them before they fell. Socrates recounts that "whomever among the young first gets a taste of [the puzzle of the one and the many] is as pleased as if he had found a treasure of wisdom. He is quite beside himself with pleasure and revels in moving every statemnt, now turning it to one side and rolling it all up into one, then again unrolling it and dividing it up."26 This is a friendly jab at many a sophist-educated interlocutor that tries to end up an argument with vague relativization or coarse summation. Many times we have read Socrates coaxing them into explication of some one concept which goes to demonstrate that it cannot subsume indefinitely many things. Irked, Protarchus of the Philebus asks us what tool is it that allows one to not trip like this. It is pleasurably telling that Socrates teases him by saying that "everything in any field of art that has eveer been discovered has come to light because of this" tool.27
This Promethean tool, which seems to have taken a principal role in making everything come to light, that is, come into being, and so, allowing for it to be known, is none other than mixture. Socrates continues, saying that "the structure of things" consists in that "whatever is said to be consists of one and many, having in its nature limit and unlimitedness."28 In a quite constructive and intuitionistic manner, Socrates claims that "we must not grant the form of the unlimited to the plurality before we know the exact number of every plurality that lies between the unlimited and the one29. Only then is it permitted to release each kind of unity into the unlimited and let it go."30 Again, such a notion would not be strange to L.E.J. Brouwer's constructive philosophy of mathematics, who would've wanted David Hilbert's formalism to not go "straight from the one to the unlimited and omit the intermediates."31 Such a difference between dialectical and eristic discourse seems to be the practical, political difference between non-axiomatized and axiomatized logics. It may seem we are straying from the path by recalling disputes in early 20th century philosophy of mathematics, but this has been lurking since the day Socrates was condemned, and we'll explore it further below.
In the Philebus, it is under the discussion if the form of the Good is axiomatized under the principle of pleasure or under the principle of reason. Socrates shows us that if exclusively, and thus, axiomatically structured by either of these two principles, one's soul would respectively lead either a life of a mollusk32, or a life of total insensitivity33. An alternative to these would be an unexcluded middle – a mixture of both. We cannot have indefinitely many things falling under the one pleasure, nor indefinitely many things falling under one reason. But we can have a third kind of life that is a mixture of those two kinds. On the one hand, we are confronted with the unlimited, on the other, with the limit.
Staying with this example, we can simply say that in unlimited pleasure we find its limit in reason – and conversely. The limiting of the unlimited is "a unity, the coming into being created through the measures imposed by the limit"34. Only so is the enumerable known in the unlimited many. This is what Socrates calls mixture. It is helps my purpose to follow the Philebus for a little longer, and show that Socrates adds a fourth principle, that of cause.
It is quite critical that he says that "there is no difference between the nature of what makes and the cause, except in name, so that the maker and the cause would rightly be called one", as well as claiming that "between what is made and what comes into being (…) they do not differ except in name."35. Crucially, that "the craftsman who produces [what comes to be and that from which it is produced] must be the fourth kind, the cause."36 My mentioning intuitionist philosophy of mathematics was not very far from what is being said here – that the craftful soul who mixes the limit with the unlimited is that which puts theory into practice. This far in the essay, I'm ready to say that this is the constructive ideal of organization of the polis, by all the souls which examine the unlimited, and limit it by virtue of realizing mixture.
This can, now, be seen to map onto the paideia of 'turning around'. To turn around is to set the dialectic of mixture in process, localizing a universal judgment in a contextualized practice and furthering friction between all four kinds – limit, unlimited, mixture, and craftsmind. Thus, elaborating the ability to glean intelligibilities along the Divided Line.
5. Either Tyranny or Death
Nearing the end, I must make now good on my promise of barring the Principle of the Excluded Middle from Platonic logic – and from the organizational tools of the polis.
It must be said, although pedantically so, that there was no recorded Aristotelian Principle of the Excluded Middle (PEM) when Plato wrote his works. What is put into question is if that logical principle (not a law!) is a foundational one for the organization of the polis. Many of Plato's ideals have weathered more or less healthily into the western 21st century; the PEM lasted amost as much, until intuitionism called into question. Still, the PEM has a strong foothold in the playground of the commons of contemporary cosmopolitics, and forecloses many a friendly discussion on modes of realizing the betterment of the polis.
It should be added that intuitionism had a wrongful pet peeve with Plato's account of mathematics, given that the school of mathematical thought seems to follow the Aristotelian account that Plato had hypostasized reality into metaphysics – but that is not what happens. I'd like to push the notion that Plato is also an intuitionist, in that his accout of intellection evades axiomatized abstraction. It does so in the Divided Line, precisely when, from the imagination, across belief, thought, into understanding, the craftful soul mixes and thus constructs, makes come-into-being, what unities are known in the unlimited many.
In this sense, I claim that intuitionist philosophy was not quite opposing itself to Plato, but furthering his project, "regarding proof construction an ontologically ampliative exercise which brings a truth into being."37 This almost amounts to saying that the Divided Line's status as an infinite continuum is undecidable, but is being constructed under such assumption. Still, the crux of the matter is that the PEM relies on a formalist desemanticized logic. AA Cavia suggests that "to extend the expressivity of a system, a formalist must add axioms, which in turn supplement the existing canon as immutable laws".38 On the other hand, an intuitionist logic "whose extensibility will rest instead on the formation of inferential rules which yield new types"39 is one that dispenses with the PEM and sees itself as able to provide its own semantics.
The key here is that the notion of the addition of axioms in a desemanticized logical system is mappable onto the eternalist iteration of the aristocracy's forceful political organization by force of divine law. There is no meaning to such political logic, only that of an uninterpreted, unexamined law. The PEM (Av¬A) is simply the tyrant's "either my way or the highway". As such, there is not even possibility of elaborating any assertion into an inference. Intelligibility does not die – it is not even born. As such, the tyranny of the PEM cancels enkráteia, autarky, and friendship – and collective realization.
Fortunately, we see that Socrates was so cunning that he did not even consider the highway; that his political act of mixture was that of creating the possibility of friction by abiding with the tyrant's way – he extended the political logic of tyranny into the unexcluded middle, by allowing for unjustness to be disclosed as mixed with the normative, imperfect notion of justice which had him condemned. This extension is not merely ampliative, but constructive – Socratic ethics formed new inferential rules for us to learn how to organize our polis. Much like Brouwer, Socrates demonstrated that "either...or" cannot – should not – be totalized across the whole of time. Otherwise, it forecloses intelligibility and the possibility of knowledge or any virtue whatsoever. What Socrates accomplished together with us was the construction of an ideal of pedagogy which cannot be subsumed under any one logic or law, but necessitates the rational realization of myriad meanings.
6. Conclusion
After Socrates, we saw that the form of the Good cannot be taught. He was able to reduce the sophists' moralizing fireworks to a serious epistemological problem. For Socrates, an epistemological problem is an ethical problem. Virtue cannot be taught, but is a knowledge. As such, it can be learned. Learning is the process realized by enkráteia, autarky, and friendship, and the virtue of the virtues is the vertiginous and exhilarating reward of practicing the dialectic in the Divided Line. The form of the Good can be known by being learned, and it can be learned by coming into being. An epistemological problem becomes an ethical problem that becomes an ontological task.
The intelligibility of the Divided Line seems thus to hinge upon the possibility that a judgment is an aporia. And so, the possibility of intelligibility – of realizability – lies not in the limit nor in the unlimited, but in the unexcluded middle. This is the true coming-into-being. What Plato accomplished through Socrates' dialectical paideia was to show that not everything is in flux, but that it should. In different degrees, in different circumstances, as the craftful souls of the citizen-learners turn around to organize themselves through mixture – as we begin to understand how to die, and begin to live according to the Good.
1Plato - Gorgias - in Complete Works. Translated by Donald J. Zeyl. Hackett Publishing Company. Indianapolis,1997. [492e]
2Plato - Crito - in Complete Works. Translated by G.m.A. Grube. Hackett Publishing Company. Indianapolis,1997. p. 37
3Jaeger, Werner – Paideia, a Formação do Homem Grego – translated by Artur M. Parreira. WMF Martins Fontes. São Paulo, 2021. pp. 21-83
7Plato - Protagoras - in Complete Works. Translated by Stanley Lombardo & Karen Bell. Hackett Publishing Company. Indianapolis,1997. p. 746
8Plato - "(…) the one aim of those who practice philosophy in the proper manner is to practice for dying and death." in Phaedo - in Complete Works. Translated by G.M.A. Grube. Hackett Publishing Company. Indianapolis,1997. [64a] And "The soul of the true philosopher (…) keeps away from pleasures and desires and pains as far as he can." - Ibid. [83b]
9Ibid. - Republic. Translated by G.M.A. Grube. [509d-511e]
10I am almost criminally compressing the notion of hotsubodaishin as explained by Dōgen Zenji in Shōbōgenzō, The Eye and Treasury of the True Law. Translated BY Kōsen Nishiyama Nakayama Shobō, Tokyo. 1988. [Following quotes are marked by page number] Hotsubodaishin is a state of "pure, lucid, undivided mind" (33), in light of Zen Buddhism classifying life and death as indestructible concepts with "absolute existence" (20) yet being "simply the result of causation". Against fear of death, Zen thought proposes hotsubodaishin as the true experience of mind and going beyond death as a mere duality of life. This may possibly be illustrated by this excerpt: "Zen Master Engo Kokugon said: "Life is the total activity of life, and death is the total activity of death. Life and death are the activities of great emptiness." Engo left many sayings about life and death but of course could never completely explain them verbally. To understand his sayings we must have the experience of hotsubodaishin.""(35)
11Plato - Apology - in Complete Works. Translated by G.M.A. Grube. Hackett Publishing Company. Indianapolis,1997. [41a-c]
17Brassier, Ray - "Spirit is not mastery but mastery of mastery; it is not the power to dominate but to dominate domination (one of Marx's conditions for communism) and thereby to abolish it (since it will not abolish itself)." - in The Human (unpublished) – 2020.
20The notion that, after Plato, the remainder of philosophy being footnotes to his work, could be understood as the sum of our attempts to find out how the Platonic system can acommodate abductive reasoning.
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