I've submitted this to an upcoming conference. It is a preliminary outline for public, oral presentation of my 2022 essay "The Unexcluded Middle: Socratic Death and Paideia."
THE UNEXCLUDED MIDDLE – SOCRATIC DEATH AND PAIDEIA
Still from 0000 - The Axiom - Fabien Giraud & Raphaël Siboni - "The Unmanned," Season 1, Prologue, HD video, 26 min, 2014, In coproduction with Casino Luxembourg
Forming the form of transformation; mixing the limited and the unlimited, gleaning ever more particularities and rendering them intelligible, through the friendly act of positing a question – that is, corrupting the youth.
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. His was the methodology of those who travel unencumbered by palliative comfort of axiomatic belief and the abstract negations of opinion – a recipe for self-determination and extricating oneself from the rote dullness of merely being alive.
Anguished friends try to coax 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 – to be clear, the idea of the social contract, not this social contract. 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.
It was by staying that Socrates managed to leave; in doing so, he allowed for the unjustness of his trial to be extricated from the false justness of it. Through this oxymoronic act of love, selflessness and self-love, Socrates becomes part of the explication that learning how to die, the paideia of philosophy, is the activation of mixture. To leave the city and evade his trial Socrates would be conceding to the unlimited – and worse, to unlimited power. In doing so, the intelligent act of mixture, of craftsminding the infinite determinations of the world, would be foreclosed. Unlimited power is limited only to itself – a monotonic amplification of a vague, unexamined concept. In many ways, the violent contrary of learning and of love.
The underpinnings of such fate are, nonetheless, transparent and contingent – as such, doors to spaces of possibility. To address Socrates' death sentence – and his life – as a question of affirmation or negation is to conform to a petrified, ahistorical semantics of all of the concepts involved, starting by those of life and crucially, death. To presume that evasion of the sentence is the negation of death and as such the affirmation of life is at odds with the theoretical framework where to practice philosophy is learning how to die. Under this very blunt logic, how would one become closer to death through the affirmation of life? Moreover, how does evading an interlocutor allow one to remain latched to a space of possibility where questions can still be asked?
The critical juncture of this pedagogical case study lies in the aforementioned bluntness of such logic. The principle here, not quite at play, but merely gaming the game, is that of the excluded middle. Though locally useful for simple, stop-gap determinations, it has no global purchase so speak of; it is one step forward making two steps backwards, a principle of semantic conservation and severance of conceptual linkage. A principle that only performs an end, and not the way towards it. Not quite the death, but the still-birth of mixture, with implications muffling the possibilities of rational self-determination to the organization of the polis.
In order to allow for the principle of mixture in Plato's construction of cosmopolitical citizenship, we need to barr entry of the logical principle of the excluded middle into the larger scale of the polis's organizational logic. Taking the platonic polis as an image of the structure of the soul, of that which is formed by pedagogy, so it will be the case that the principle of the excluded middle may only apply context-sensitively in the formation of those who will transform – themselves and the polis.
It can be sustained that Socrates's act was one of revolutionary love – which is to say that it was an act of intelligence. In tandem the assumption that intelligence is the form of transformation is the assumption that intelligence is an act of love – that is, love as the suspension of belief into the necessity logical strictures, as the rendering intelligible of the interpersonal space of possibilities, in order to allow one another – intelligence – to realize itself. An act of love is the determinate negation of abstract domination. It is isomorphic to the act of intelligence, which determinately negates the abstract hold of unexamined or naturalized pseudo-Ideas. As such, an act of love is an act of transformation. Concomitantly, it is an act of intelligent self-transformation. Through collaborative guidance across perplexity, that is what a pedagogy of mixture intends to craft.
Socrates's stance – staying in Athens and accepting his sentence – is one example of such pedagogy, through the realizing concepts of enkratéia (self-dominion), autarky, and friendship. As theoretical-practice ideals, all three hinge on their interplay – and they implode if ever considered somehow mutually exclusive. By submitting himself to the will of his contemporaries, Socrates is nonetheless effecting a suspension from its necessity: it is his ruling to do so. Ultimately, it is an act of friendship towards his judges, contemporary and future. It would be unfriendly towards intelligence to disavow the possibility of historical contingency – evading Athens would be to affirm the necessity of current laws; remaining is an act of love towards even those who condemn him, opening up the possibility that they will not be subject to the same logic of wilful ignorance; opening the possibility of learning. Although answering to the social contract, Socrates is not answering to his crime. His act appears to take shape as an ultimate question. The radical intelligence of it is that it is also the first question of all, the parrhesia – as parturition – of all questions to come.
THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK
The death of Socrates gives itself to examination through myriad methods. In this presentation, we intend to focus on how it serves as a case study for logic and meta-logic, specifically through its pedagogical aspects.
The historical contingency of the episode can be fruitfully analysed through a grasp of the fourth century BCE Greek meta-concept or ideal of paideia, as explored by Werner Jaeger. Briefly put, paideia is the ideal guiding the formation of the human – its aims, and methods. Notwithstanding various attempts to transhistoricize many such meta-concepts across western history, it is of critical importance to understand how such an ideal of formation was itself formed. Jaeger's work provides insights into the ancient Greek culture that do so, namely through bringing forth the concept of arete and its very significant links and transformations.
Plato's Republic appears to us as the first sustained immanent critique of the ideals of the formation of the human and of its self-determination in the polis. The Republic is the thought of that time thinking itself and how it forms itself – which is the role of logic and of pedagogy. As such, its speculative status is the springboard for the sort of diachronic intelligence required and proposed by Socratic paideia.
In order to render the case study intelligible to contemporary thought, and in order to render contemporary thought intelligible to itself, it is suggested that this historically contingent case study illuminates current dissensions in the philosophy of logic and its necessitation in day-to-day activity in the polis, such as formation of the young – these dissensions being the alleged epistemological and pedagogical purchase of the logical principle of the excluded middle, as criticized by the intuitionist school of Brouwer and Heyting. On the one hand, this critique is done through regimenting AA Cavia's research on philosophy of computation and semantics' role in models of intelligence; on the other, it is strongly embedded in Hegelian logic, whose account of particularity and universality as explored by Evald Ilyenkov is held by this author as an account of intelligence becoming intelligible to itself. That is, learning.
Learning – the object of pedagogy - is thus posited as informed by the platonic principle of mixture, as exposed in the Philebus; the theoretical-practice notion of "turning around," propounded in the Republic; and upon a reconstruction of the meta-conceptual diagram of the Divided Line.
Buttressing such historical transits are Lev Vygotsky's pedagogical investigations on the infant mind's development of conceptual grasp as a historical, contingent phenomenon – against a naturalized background of Piaget's Kantian developmental psychology. We believe there are intelligibilities to be gained by grafting this with logical intuitionism's critique of axiomatics (and Jean-Yves Girard's refinement of such critique), in order to examine of the historically contingent logics provided to the minds we form.
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