Actual Platonism
Disclaimer: I will use Socrates and Plato interchangeably throughout my notes. For me, these two are one in the same as far as this lecture is concerned. Plato is the changing voice of Socrates, Xenophon aside.
We've been beating around the bush for a little while now about Plato. This backdropping is a good thing. Where does Socrates stop and Plato start? How can one resolve Plato's apparent contradictions regarding the soul? Cheesecake? Without a sense of the spirit of the times one can quickly become confused. Xenophon and Xanthippe do not sound so dissimilar.
My central thesis for this blog is that before Socrates' philosophy was fundamentally different (second sailing). Today as well as in ancient Greece, people derived pleasure from dissolving boundaries. Take a rock concert, there is a point--within light and sound--that one is less of an individual; and it feels good. The collective takes over. This ca be a very enlightening experience under the right circumstances too. On the other hand, the herd can take on disastrous consequences.
Socrates was radical in that he was drastically individualistic. He wasn't continuously right, didn't always abandon faith, nor did he successfully avoid a state of perplexity (aporia). But for students today, Plato's (Socrates') various accounts show his willingness to explore the notion of the idea from various perspectives. So many centuries later it is important to note that Plato's thought was developed. Even at the very end, for Socrates,
"Whoever of us prepares himself best and most accurately to grasp that thing itself which he is investigating will come closest to the knowledge of it."
What was wise about Socrates was that he knew that he didn't know anything. He turned from an old tradition, gnothi seauton, "know thyself" to olda ouk eidos, "I know that I don't know." Socrates sought out to question statesmen, poets, and craftsmen. using the sophistic elenchus, he never refuted others theses, rather, he showed people that they didn't understadn how to arrive at their own deepest convictions without contradicting themselves; and that the result was people did not want to learn of their ignorance. Instead, they were just mad at Socrates. Having a coherent personality is an accomplishment in philosophy. To become the person you would like to be.
Socrates reinvents the elenchus as a tool to reject the traditional notion of the established order, but more importantly to seek the Truth. As I stated earlier, Socrates is the first to admit he knows nothing but simultaneously he attempts to stay true to his DAIMONION, which knows something,
"the safest answer that such a belief is absolute is the safest answer [he] can give to [himself] or others."
A daimon is a lesser deity, like a god. It never tells him what to do but it always stops him when he is about to make a mistake (the Greeks didn't have a word for conscience). In this daimon, Socrates is replacing the collective decision making of the polis under a more individual sense of self. His method of thinking becomes a hermeneutical device.
Web of Ideas
Disclaimer: Hermeneutics is Gadamer, see Truth and Method.
Ideas are falsely through of as individual entities. On the contrary, for Socrates, ideas are regulative in nature; they refer to the most basic structures of patterns of intelligible meaning that lend reality whatever intelligibility it has. In Plato's language, it is in reasoning if anywhere that any reality becomes clear. You can't see the Good, the Beautiful with your eyes or grasp them with your bodily senses; but language certainly exists.
It is through induction that we can reason. Similiar events cause similiar effects. So induction is the basis of all our thoughts--to use induction to simplify induction. And control produces the illusion of freedom.
Cause ---> Effect
(no necessary connection)
For Plato, ideas are not discrete individual entities--Plato rejects this in Parmenides when a, "young" Socrates is refuted (3rd man argument) this is too close to atomism and leads to problems.
The One and the Many
Being able to recognize that things are different at all recognizes sameness.
1 + 1 = 2
[The 2 as a unit (or whole) is also a measure of one.]
Justice is both one and many insofar as we can never say what justice is without relating it to the many other ideas which either make it up or of which it itself is a part of the Good. We can't grasp numbers (justice) with our hands but in our "construction of them" they are not illusions but have a reality and even seem to belong to reality, distinct from the indefinite.
3 + 5 = 8
(It isn't know thyself but knowing thyself)
By the real world application of the forms we can come to know them.
"There is likely to be something such as a path to guide us out of our confusion, because as long as we have a body and our soul is fused with such an evil we shall never adequately attain what we desire, which we affirm to be the truth...No sensible man would insist that these things are as I have described them, but I think it is fitting for a man to risk the belief--for the risk is a noble one."
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