Phaedo 1 -- Setting and Structure

Even though Phaedo is set narratively the day after Crito -- that is, on the day of Socrates' poisoning -- it is clearly a major stylistic leap from one dialog to the next. Phaedo is way longer, much more complex, and contains a whole positive philosophical theory of the soul.  The editor of the collection I'm reading is at pains to say that the grouping of Plato's works into an early, middle, and late period is fairly speculative history, but really it's pretty obvious that this is a more mature work.  According to this grouping, despite its depiction of the end of Socrates' life, Phaedo comes from the middle period of Plato's writings.  Apparently, almost all the dialogs of this period focus on Plato's famous theory of the Forms, and here, we find the theory applied to the question of death.  The basic idea is that the Soul is analogous to the Form of Beauty of Justice or the Good.  Hence it is part of an indestructible essential reality that only comes to occupy the body, and upon death it decamps for fairer realms.

Phaedo is philosophically and literarily complex, and I should say at the outset that I'm not sure I'll be able to completely do it justice yet.  Scrambling the order of the Cooper edition (which it inherits from the 100 A.D. collection made by Alexandrian philosopher Thrasyllus), I think I will continue by first reading through all the 'Socratic' or early dialogues before I tackle another of the major middle or late period works.  Whether this is reading them in strictly chronological order is an open question, but I think it may give me more context on some of the stylistic devices that I can already see the later dialogs layer on to the earlier ones.  Nevertheless, I just read Phaedo, so let's dig in and do the best we can to unravel it.

The dialog is a moving portrait of a man who dies doing what he loves.  Socrates said in his Apology that he would rather die than give up philosophizing, and in fact he spends the hours leading up to his death conversing with his friends about the nature of the soul, continuing his vocation right up to the end.  Which leads us directly to the first puzzling piece of Plato's account of his end -- after his conviction, Socrates suddenly dreams that he should start writing poetry!

The dreams were something like this: the same dream often came to me in the past, now in one shape now in another, but saying the same thing: "Socrates," it said, "practice and cultivate the arts." In the past I imagined that it was instructing and advising me to do what I was doing, such as those who encourage runners in a race, that the dream was thus bidding me do the very thing I was doing, namely, to practice the art of philosophy, this being the highest kind of art, and I was doing that. 

But now, after my trial took place, and the festival of the god was preventing my execution, I thought that, in case my dream was bidding me to practice this popular art, I should not disobey it but compose poetry. I thought it safer not to leave here until I had satisfied my conscience by writing poems in obedience to the dream.

This is very strange.  I remember from the Republic that poetry is a big Platonic no-no.  Also, here is yet another example of the paragon of rationality hearing little voices that tell him to do stuff.  What idea is this passage directing us to then?  Perhaps that Socrates was unsure of everything even up to the end?  Is this supposed to reinforce the irony of a man who is sentenced to death because of the unshakeable courage of his conviction that he knows nothing?  I don't know, but there are a couple of other odd moments in the story that might serve this same goal.  

The key drama in the dialog is obviously that the guy calmly discussing what happens after we die is himself about to die.  So when the question of the immortality of the soul is raised, Socrates could be subject to some motivated reasoning, to say the least.  In his public Apology, he claimed that it was pure ignorance to fear death, because no one could know whether it was good or bad or what it was like.  But now that he's speaking amongst friends, he will argue that the soul must be immortal, and that death is the philosophical moment par excellence because it is when the soul is liberated from the constraints of the body and free to focus exclusively on the contemplation of those things which go beyond the senses -- the Forms.  For a man who only knows he knows nothing, who famously follows the argument wherever it might lead, and for whom literally everything is open to discussion, this creates a real problem.  What if Socrates concludes that he's wrong, and, on the day of his death, becomes convinced that the soul doesn't exist or is destroyed along with the body?  

And how would you like to be the friend that convinces him of this?  There are several references in the dialog to his friends' squeamishness on this point.  Socrates always laughs off their delicacy and encourages them to ask the hard questions despite knowing what is at stake.  The most beautiful example of this is his reference to the literal swan song of this, his final conversation.

When Socrates finished speaking there was a long silence. He appeared to be concentrating on what had been said, and so were most of us. But Cebes and Simmias were whispering to each other. Socrates observed them and questioned them. Come, he said, do you think there is something lacking in my argument? There are still many doubtful points and many objections for anyone who wants a thorough discussion of these matters. If you are discussing some other subject, I have nothing to say, but if you have some difficulty about this one, do not hesitate to speak for yourselves and expound it if you think the argument could be improved, and if you think you will do better, take me along with you in the discussion.

I will tell you the truth, Socrates, said Simmias. Both of us have been in difficulty for some time, and each of us has been urging the other to question you because we wanted to hear what you would say, but we hesitated to bother you, lest it be displeasing to you in your present mis-fortune.

 

When Socrates heard this he laughed quietly and said: "Really, Simmias, it would be hard for me to persuade other people that I do not consider my present fate a misfortune if I cannot persuade even you, and you are afraid that it is more difficult to deal with me than before. You seem to think me inferior to the swans in prophecy. They sing before too, but when they realize that they must die they sing most and most beautifully, as they rejoice that they are about to depart to join the god whose servants they are. But men, because of their own fear of death, tell lies about the swans and say that they lament their death and sing in sorrow. They do not reflect that no bird sings when it is hungry or cold or suffers in any other way, neither the nightingale nor the swallow nor the hoopoe, though they do say that these sing laments when in pain. Nor do the swans, but I believe that as they belong to Apollo, they are prophetic, have knowledge of the future and sing of the blessings of the underworld, sing and rejoice on that day beyond what they did before. As I believe myself to be a fellow servant with the swans and dedicated to the same god, and have received from my master a gift of prophecy not inferior to theirs, I am no more despondent than they on leaving life. Therefore, you must speak and ask whatever you want as long as the authorities allow it."

But is Socrates really so certain of himself that he rejoices in death?  We've already seen how he's writing poetry because he wonders at the last minute if maybe that's what his dreams were all about?  And in this passage he seems to be saying that he'd rather delude himself about the immortality of the soul than find a convincing argument against it just now, because he would then worry his friends with his sadness about dying.

This then is the first thing we should guard against, he said. We should not allow into our minds the conviction that argumentation has nothing sound about it; much rather we should believe that it is we who are not yet sound and that we must take courage and be eager to attain soundness, you and the others for the sake of your whole life still to come, and I for the sake of death itself. I am in danger at this moment of not having a philosophical attitude about this, but like those who are quite uneducated, I am eager to get the better of you in argument, for the uneducated, when they engage in argument about anything, give no thought to the truth about the subject of discussion but are only eager that those present will accept the position they have set forth. I differ from them only to this extent: I shall not be eager to get the agreement of those present that what I say is true, except incidentally, but I shall be very eager that I should myself be thoroughly convinced that things are so. For I am thinking — see in how contentious a spirit — that if what I say is true, it is a fine thing to be convinced; if, on the other hand, nothing exists after death, at least  for this time before I die I shall distress those present less with lamentations, and my folly will not continue to exist along with me—that would be a bad thing—but will come to an end in a short time. Thus prepared, Simmias and Cebes, he said, I come to deal with your argument. If you will take my advice, you will give but little thought to Socrates but much more to the truth. If you think that what I say is true, agree with me; if not, oppose it with every argument and take care that in my eagerness I do not deceive myself and you and, like a bee, leave my sting in you when I go.

So while Socrates makes a forceful argument that the soul is immortal, the structure of the dialog appears to undermine the certainty of this conclusion, and relegate it to the role of mere hypothesis.  This reading culminates in the extraordinary myth that Socrates relates from 107c to 114d.  Socrates spends the whole dialog arguing for the immortality of the soul.  After meeting many objections, he manages to convince all his companies that death is nothing to fear, and indeed, will even supply the complete knowledge of the Forms we can only approach in life.  We'll look at the argument in detail in the next post.  From a literary perspective though, what's most interesting is the strange climax.  After triumphing by rational means, Socrates goes on to tell an elaborate fiction about what happens to our souls after they depart our bodies and head into the underworld.  We're talking Dantesque levels of elaborate here.  He describes the structure of the underworld and the earth's relation to it, how it is surrounded by rivers and the dead souls gather at a lake to be judged, some to be reborn, some to pass on to ethereal realms of beauty, and some to be cast forever into the pit of Tartarus.  After the careful argumentation of the dialog, the story comes off as completely delirious.  And then it ends with Socrates disavowing the whole works.

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—that this, or something like this, is true about our souls and their dwelling places, since the soul is evidently immortal, and a man should repeat this to himself as if it were an incantation, which is why I have been prolonging my tale. That is the reason why a man should be of good cheer about his own soul, if during life he has ignored the pleasures of the body and its ornamentation as of no concern to him and doing him more harm than good, but has seriously concerned himself with the pleasures of learning, and adorned his soul not with alien but with its own ornaments, namely, moderation, righteousness, courage, freedom and truth, and in that state awaits his journey to the underworld.

Even though Socrates takes it as more or less established that the soul is immortal (as established as things can be by argument) he still needs to spend his last breath telling himself this fable as if it were an incantation in order to go stoically to his death.  Perhaps this is some of the poetry he has been writing?  It's a strange and paradoxical move where reason joins forces with religion, and certainty and doubt come side by side.  It seems anything but obvious what exactly Plato wanted to convey with this structure.  It doesn't seem meant to undermine the evident courage Socrates shows in calmly facing death.  Nor does it really seem to suggest that this courage is just a blind faith with nothing rational about it.  Maybe the intent is just to show us a man who was willing to take the a risk right up to the end, the risk every seeker of truth takes that they are believing in a fairy tale.  

Crito

Crito bribes his way into the jailhouse on the eve of Socrates' execution with a plan to spring him and flee the city.  First though, he has to convince Socrates that such a plan would be the just course of action, rather than one motivated simply by the fear of death, or, in Crito's case, motivated by the fear that he will be criticized for not helping his friend out of a jamb.  In fact, knowing that Socrates is to die tomorrow has left Crito a little hysterical, so Socrates himself has to sort of fill in an argument for him.   After quickly putting aside Crito's worry about what the majority will think of their course of action -- since when has Socrates worried about what 'they' think? -- he gets to the heart of the question about whether it is just for the wrongfully convicted to flee.

SOCRATES: As we have agreed so far, we must examine next whether it is just for me to try to get out of here when the Athenians have not acquitted me. If it is seen to be just, we will try to do so; if it is not, we will abandon the idea. As for those questions you raise about money, reputation, the upbringing of children, Crito, those considerations in truth belong to those people who easily put men to death and would bring them to life again if they could, without thinking; I mean the majority of men. For us, however, since our argument leads to this, the only valid consideration, as we were saying just now, is whether we should be acting rightly in giving money and gratitude to those who will lead me out of here, and ourselves d helping with the escape, or whether in truth we shall do wrong in doing all this. If it appears that we shall be acting unjustly, then we have no need at all to take into account whether we shall have to die if we stay here and keep quiet, or suffer in another way, rather than do wrong.

At this point, the dialog takes an interesting turn.  Having supplied Crito's side of the argument, Socrates goes on to supply the opposing side as well by personifying the laws and the state of Athens.  In other words, he is not arguing just one side here, but imagining a dialog where The Laws question him about whether it is just to flee.  This is an interesting rhetorical maneuver -- Socrates questioning himself -- but it also has a philosophical point.  It elevates The Laws into its own character, meaning that they are not just the opinion of the majority of Athenians.  And it's this tension that is at the heart of the dialog.  We know from the Apology that Socrates was unjustly convicted by a narrow majority of Athenians based on nothing more than the flimsy opinions of supposedly wise men irritated by his questions.  So wouldn't it be in keeping with the Socratic premise that it's only truth and justice that count, not mere opinion, to flee his death sentence -- this most unjust, yet effective, opinion of the majority?  Obviously, for Socrates to accept his sentence when it is avoidable, he has to draw some distinction between the majority opinion and The Law.

What Socrates ends up outlining in the voice of The Laws is a simple sort of social contract theory.  The Laws point out that he was born and raised in Athens, that he liked it well enough never to move or travel, that he gained from all his associations in the city, etc ... and that this implicitly expressed satisfaction is tantamount to an agreement and commitment to abide by the laws of the city.  In this sense, The Laws deserve more obedience than even a father, because Socrates has chosen voluntarily to live by them, and was always free to try and change them through the court of public opinion.  Given this agreement, it would be unjust and unwise for Socrates to disobey The Laws at this point.

"Be persuaded by us who have brought you up, Socrates. Do not value either your children or your life or anything else more than goodness, in order that when you arrive in Hades you may have all this as your defense before the rulers there. If you do this deed, you will not think it better or more just or more pious here, nor will any one of your friends, nor will it be better for you when you arrive yonder. As it is, you depart, if you depart, after being wronged not by us, the laws, but by men"

To me this reads as only an unconvincing fragment of a larger argument.  Athens being democratic, The Laws are explicitly constructed by majority opinion.  Why does Socrates suddenly reify the majority opinion he normally disparages when it takes this public form?  Does this magic somehow happen through the process of public debate?  Is the contract signed simply by being in the city, or is it really through participating in those debates?  The dialog seems to beg the question of what makes the laws of a democracy more just than the opinions of those in it.

Apology

It's immediately evident why the Apology is situated at the beginning of Plato's works.  It provides the crucial backstory to the literary character of Socrates.  I'm guessing this may be the only time we really find out much about the man himself, as opposed to his questions or views.  Of course, there don't seem to be a whole lot of other sources describing the historical Socrates, so we should take Plato's account with a grain of salt.  But I doubt there's much point in questioning the now classic descriptions.  Socrates is only wise because he knows that he is not wise; he believes that the pursuit of virtue is more urgent than the pursuit of money or fame or pleasure; he thinks the unexamined life is not worth living; he has no fear of death because he cannot know what it's like; etc ...

Plato is able to present all this background because the Apology is not really a dialog.  There's some back and forth with Meletus, who has brought Socrates to trial on charges not believing in the gods of Athens and for corrupting its youth.  But basically it's just Socrates' long soliloquy defending himself.   And since the charges are a bit vague, it gives Socrates a chance to talk about what he's been doing all these years and why he's caught flak for it, not for the first time.  In fact, there's quite a lot of autobiography here, and since it is presented with a rhetorical flourish (however ironic) intended to convince the jury, it's a bit flowery compared to his usual speech.  So I'll just focus on what I consider the crucial bits.

Socrates got started in the philosophy business after he went to see the Oracle at Delphi.  He asked the Oracle if any man was wiser than he, and was told that "no one is wiser".  Since then, he's gone around talking to people who claim to be wise, asking them questions and discovering from their replies that they don't have the deepest questions any better figured out that he does.  Doing this publicly is enough to make a fella unpopular, which is why he's on trial.

I went to one of those reputed wise, thinking that there, if anywhere, I could refute the oracle and say to it: "This man is wiser than I, but you said I was." Then, when I examined this man — there is no need for me to tell you his name, he was one of our public men—my experience was something like this: I thought that he appeared wise to many people and especially to himself, but he was not. I then tried to show him that he thought himself wise, but that he was not. As a result he came to dislike me, and so did many of the bystanders. So I withdrew and thought to myself: "I am wiser than this man; it is likely that neither of us knows anything worthwhile, but he thinks he knows something when he does not, whereas when I do not know, neither do I think I know; so I am likely to be wiser than he to this small extent, that I do not think I know what I do not know." After this I approached another man, one of those thought to be wiser than he, and I thought the same thing, and so I came to be disliked both by him and by many others.

So Socrates is the original speaker of truth to power.  A gadfly as he describes himself.  Though the only truth he has to offer is that power is ignorant.  Philosophy begins with this circularity -- the paradoxical wisdom of ignorance.  Even though this is phrased, like pretty much all paradoxes, as a negation, it immediately implies some positive content.  We move in the direction of wisdom when we acknowledge and confront our ignorance.  Knowing that you know nothing still places a value on the pursuit of knowledge.  Socrates makes this positive content clear when he tells the jury that he's so convinced of this one thing he does know that he would rather die than give it up.

... if you said to me in this regard: "Socrates, we do not believe Anytus now; we acquit you, but only on condition that you spend no more time on this investigation and do not practice philosophy, and if you are caught doing so you will die;" if, as I say, you were to acquit me on those terms, I would say to you: "Men of Athens, I am grateful and I am your friend, but I will obey the god rather than you, and as long as I draw breath and am able, I shall not cease to practice philosophy, to exhort you and in my usual way to point out to any one of you whom I happen to meet: 'Good Sir, you are an Athenian, a citizen of the greatest city with the greatest reputation for both wisdom and power; are you not ashamed of your eagerness to possess as much wealth, reputation and honors as possible, while you do not care for nor give thought to wisdom or truth, or the best possible state of your soul?'

Still, I think it's not clear from this how consistent Socrates is being with his convictions.  He only knows that inquiry or the pursuit of knowledge stands above all else, because it provides the only means for overcoming our ignorant belief that we know something.  However, is this the same thing as caring for our soul in preference to wealth, reputation, and honors?  Or has he slipped in another assumption on the sly?  If we're totally ignorant, why bother to even pursue wisdom or truth or justice?  How do we even know what to aim at or what should be secondary?  How do we become aware that our ignorance is ignorance?  At this point, I'm not sure whether this is a separate question from the central circularity, or really just a restatement of it.  

On the other hand, Socrates is clearly consistent about one thing, even though it makes his impassioned commitment to philosophy a bit less dramatic -- he could care less about death.  He reasons that we really don't know anything about death, so it is pure ignorance to fear it.  He suggests perhaps we simply return to ashes, in which case there is no one there to suffer the death.  Or perhaps our soul is transported to some wonderful heaven.  Either way, Socrates is clearly committed to the counterintuitive idea that living well is more important than living, or that there's more to life than being alive.  I'm already tempted to interpret this as asking, "why fear death when we don't even know what the good life is yet?"  As in, "who am I and what makes whatever that thing is live?"  But this may be projecting Spinoza, Deleuze, and Zen back onto Socrates.

The same ironic or questioning attitude shows up in a few other comments Socrates makes in his defense.  First, in accord with his knowing nothing, he has never presented himself as a teacher of anything.  In particular, his is a purely public discourse, free to all, and he has never charged anyone a fee for any sort of private instruction.  On the other hand, he has also never sought any position of public political power that would enable him to impress his views on others.  He is thus the founder of a lineage that has mostly died out today -- the public intellectual who inspires us to think without having any specific expertise or authority.  As a private citizen, Sorcates did serve in the army, and on various citizen councils, but found that these posts were incompatible with his unbroken commitment to following his questions towards truth and justice and wisdom.  The way he explains how he discovered this incompatibility is curious enough to bear mentioning; the guy hears voices.

It may seem strange that while I go around and give this advice privately and interfere in private affairs, I do not venture to go to the assembly and there advise the city. You have heard me give the reason for this in many places. I have a divine or spiritual sign which Meletus has ridiculed in his deposition. This began when I was a child. It is a voice, and whenever it speaks it turns me away from something I am about to do, but it never encourages me to do anything. This is what has prevented me from taking part in public affairs, and I think it was quite right to prevent me. Be sure, men of Athens, that if I had long ago attempted to take part in politics, I should have died long ago, and benefited neither you nor myself. Do not be angry with me for speaking the truth; no man will survive who genuinely opposes you or any other crowd and prevents the occurrence of many unjust and illegal happenings in the city. A man who really fights for justice must lead a private, not a public, life if he is to survive for even a short time.

It seems important to note that even these voices preserve the open-endedness of Socrates' character.  They never tell him to do anything particular, only what not to do.  Even the guy's inner voice is only wise in recognizing he made a mistake.  I don't know how often Socrates' voices will appear in the dialogs, but they make a dramatic entrance at the end of the Apology by not appearing.  Even when the jury convicts him and sentences him to death, he tells them that he must have made the right decision in defending himself as he did because his voices never spoke up to warn him as they always have in the past.  In a sense the death of Socrates is divinely blessed.

Euthyphro

Not knowing where to start, I began at the beginning.  The Euthyphro is the first dialog in the Plato: Complete Works collection edited by John M. Cooper.  It takes place earlier on the same day that Socrates faced his famous trial for impiety and corrupting the youth of Athens.  Basically, Euthyphro and Socrates bump into one another on the courthouse steps.  Socrates is there to defend himself, while Euthyphro is there accusing his father of murder.  

It's quite the dramatic setting actually, if you let it sink in a bit.  Euthyphro's father mistreated one of his servants, one who had killed another of his slaves, and the mistreatment led to his (the slaves') accidental, though avoidable, death.  Euthyphro is in court to accuse his father of murdering the murderer.  I think these days we would call it manslaughter.  The main point of the dramatic setup though is to establish that Euthyphro is someone who feels utterly confident in his moral judgements.  Despite trolley problem levels of sticky dilemma, he sees the situation as black and white -- his father was responsible for a death, and it doesn't matter what the circumstances of the victim or the rank or family relation of the assailant were, he must be accused of murder.  Euthyphro just knows that this is the pious (we would say moral) thing to do because he has a lot of experience with what the gods want.  Since he claims to possess this knowledge that other men lack, Socrates immediately asks that Euthyphro teach him how he too can know what is pious and what is impious.  That way, when they accuse Socrates of impiety, he can claim that, however much trouble he caused by asking questions in the past, he has now received expert guidance on the matter, and need never be impious out of ignorance again.

SOCRATES: Whereas, by Zeus, Euthyphro, you think that your knowledge of the divine, and of piety and impiety, is so accurate that, when those things happened as you say, you have no fear of having acted impiously in bringing your father to trial?
EUTHYPHRO: I should be of no use, Socrates, and Euthyphro would not be superior to the majority of men, if I did not have accurate knowledge of all such things.
SOCRATES: It is indeed most important, my admirable Euthyphro, that I should become your pupil, and as regards this indictment, challenge Mele- tus about these very things and say to him: that in the past too I considered knowledge about the divine to be most important, and that now that he says that I am guilty of improvising and innovating about the gods I have become your pupil. I would say to him: "If, Meletus, you agree that Euthyphro is wise in these matters, consider me, too, to have the right beliefs and do not bring me to trial. If you do not think so, then prosecute that teacher of mine, not me, for corrupting the older men, me and his own father, by teaching me and by exhorting and punishing him."

Obviously, the drama is not without a certain humor as well.  Because Socrates is about to lead the self confident Euthyphro in circles by asking him to define piety.  

1) First Euthyphro claims simply that what the gods like is pious, and what they don't like is impious.  

2) Socrates accepts this at face value, but then asks what happens if the various gods like different things.  Greek gods are constantly quarreling, and Socrates points out that they don't quarrel about simple things like how many or how big or how heavy, they only quarrel about the big important stuff like, "the just and the unjust, the beautiful and the ugly, the good and the bad".  

3) Euthyphro admits this, but responds that of course all the gods would like the fact that he's accusing his father of murder.

4) Whereupon Socrates says he should ask for a concrete sign that proves the gods really agree on this point.  But before he asks this, he wonders aloud what good the response will do him.  He will have learned what the gods think of Euthyphro's current lawsuit, but will he really have learned anything about what makes something pious in general?  So instead of bothering with the epistemological question of how would Euthyphro know, he proceeds to accept the new definition that what all the gods love is pious and what they all hate is impious.

5) Unfortunately for Euthyphro, this just leads to more problems.  Because now Socrates asks whether something is pious because the gods all like it, or whether the gods all like it because it is pious.  He points out that "god-loved" is a sort of performative adjective -- it just describes anything that the gods happen to love, and doesn't really tell you anything about that thing in itself.  By contrast, the pious, we suppose, is loved by the gods for some reason like its inherent piety.  In other words, "god-loved" and "pious" work differently as adjectives.  So when Euthyphro claims that the pious is the god-loved, he's not really telling us about the pious in itself, he's just telling us about one of its qualities.

I'm afraid, Euthyphro, that when you were asked what piety is, you did not wish to make its nature clear to me, but you told me an affect or quality of it, that the pious has the quality of being loved by all the gods, but you have not yet told me what the pious is.

6) Having again reached an impasse, Socrates changes directions, and asks whether what is pious is also just.  Predictably, given the circumstances, Euthyphro agrees that it is.  But Socrates points out that these two can't literally be the same thing, because they cover different amounts of area, so to speak -- what is pious is always just, but what is just may not always be pious.  No Venn diagrams are provided.  Socrates then proceeds to inquire exactly what part of the just is pious.

7) Euthyphro claims that it is the part of the just concerned with care for the gods.

8) Socrates goes on to clarify that there are at least two types of care, the type of care a horse breeder shows for horses, and the type of care a servant shows for his master.  Euthyphro clearly must mean that piety is the second type of care.  But then, if piety is caring for the gods in the sense of performing a service for them, then what service is it they want us to perform, and to what ends?

9) Of course, Euthyphro doesn't know what goal the gods have in mind in demanding piety, so he simply characterizes our side of the action.

EUTHYPHRO: I told you a short while ago, Socrates, that it is a considerable task to acquire any precise knowledge of these things, but, to put it simply, I say that if a man knows how to say and do what is pleasing to the gods at prayer and sacrifice, those are pious actions such as preserve both private houses and public affairs of state. The opposite of these pleasing actions are impious and overturn and destroy everything.

10) At which point Socrates thanks Euthyphro for finally offering a definition of piety -- knowing how to pray and sacrifice, to beg and to give, in a way pleasing to the gods.  He even terms it a sort of trading skill with the gods, we sacrifice stuff to them and get things we want in return.  But, wait, what do they get out of the deal?  Does our sacrifice actually benefit them in some specific way.

11)  Euthyphro responds that it's ridiculous to think we can benefit the gods.  It's just that our sacrifices please them.  So again, we've come full circle and have defined piety as something that pleases the gods.

I've summarized this at such length in order to set the stage for reflecting a bit on the form of the dialog, and on what Plato's philosophical point might be.  Because it's obvious that we've gotten nowhere on the supposedly central question of what is piety.  You could take this as Socrates knowingly slaughtering all his friend's sacred cows, with the ultimate intent of demonstrating that there is no such thing as piety.  That strikes me as the reading I might have had a sophomore though.  Now it seems to me that while there is some irony and humor in Socrates's questions, he is not just a pedantic non-believer who planned the whole trajectory in advance.  

The real interest lies elsewhere, precisely in the dialectical method that the dialog employs.  What's interesting here are the distinctions that Socrates introduces.  First, a distinction between the definition of piety, and some examples of it.  Second, with his bracketing of the question about discord amongst the gods, he distinguishes between what we know and how we know it, what we would call epistemology and ontology today.  Third, he goes on to distinguish between definitions with content and those without, or, equivalently, between what piety is and its attributes.  Finally, we have the distinction between types of care, which adds a nuance to the third distinction; if we knew why the gods were pleased by our actions, what benefits we provided, then perhaps we would be closing in on a true definition of piety.  The dialectic is this art of making distinctions to construct or define a problem.  I suspect we are going to see these same distinctions made many times in the course of other dialogs.

The other thing I found interesting here from a literary perspective is the way the style actually encapsulates another philosophical distinction, this time between authority and understanding.  The frame story tells us that Socrates is delighted to meet an expert on piety, and, having none of his own, would happily defer to this expertise.  But he insists on being able to understand exactly what the expert means, and is unwilling to accept it simply on the basis of his social authority.  In a sense, this is probably the most crucial distinction of all and why we consider Socrates the first philosopher.  He's not a sage or a guru, and he insists that no one else get to pose as one either.  So we've actually already implicitly met the crucial Socratic idea that no one may be able to possess the wisdom we are all in search of.

F as in History

Like a phoenix rising from the ashes, FPiPE is making a comeback.  It will need a new tag line though, since this time I intend to also write about non-French philosophers.  After reading Difference and Repetition, I really began to feel like my basic philosophical education was sorely lacking.  So I've decided to try and read through and live blog a list of philosophical classics in roughly chronological order, starting with Plato.  Obviously, any such list will be subjective and incomplete.  I will combat this problem by ignoring it completely; all that holds this list together is the fact that I've been curious about each of these folks.  

I'll start with a selection of Plato's dialogues and go from there.  Other stuff maybe on the list:

Lao-Tzu

Zhuang Zhou 

Nagarjuna

Duns Scotus

Ibn Sina [Avicenna]

Spinoza

Leibniz

Hume

Kant

Kierkegaard

Nietzsche

Bergson

C.S. Pierce

William James

Husserl

Merleau-Ponty

Whitehead

Nishida

Sartre

Kuhn

I have not sat down to try and figure out how long this will take, especially considering the intention to live blog the whole works.  But it doesn't really matter because this list is subject to change without notice.  

Now that we've got a simple plan, let's take that hill!

Coming Soon ...

Phase 2 -- FPiPE reborn!

Practice Requires Time

Well, we've made it to the end of chapter 2, and I think I may hang up the spurs at this point.  I've thoroughly enjoyed all this writing; I've never been so involved in a book, and it's fortunate that the book rewards involvement to an almost unique degree.  While I may continue to write more in this space, I need to take a step back and figure out what the point of that might be.  If I return, I suspect it will be in a completely different form than the line by line reading I've been doing. 

But before signing off, I'd like to pay my respects to the reader whose joke about live-blogging Difference & Repetition was so funny that it launched 127 posts -- 1 per page of text we've covered -- over the past two years.  Hooocoodanode!?  As I've said before, here at FPiPE we are deeply committed to answering reader's questions so thoroughly that they are bored to death by the response.  So when I was asked, "What's the point of reading a book where you only cover 0.174 pages per day?" we all knew that no simple answer was going to satisfy ... 

One thing is fairly obvious from the start.  You don't read a book like this looking for information.  If the goal were to efficiently transmit knowledge -- either factual knowledge or description of a metaphysical system -- the book would be a complete and total failure.  I mean, 0.174!?  This is the kind of baud rate you expect from a dial-up opera.  

It's natural at this point to ask questions like, "What is Deleuze's thesis?"  or, "What is his metaphysical system like?"  And of course we can surely think of various ways to summarize the thesis and describe the system.  Actually, I could probably reel off quite a list of possibilities here.  Every thing contains the entire universe within it. The core building block of reality is difference, not identity, though this can't really be described as a block.  Difference thought in itself is a verb -- the act of differentiating.  The only things that repeat are questions.  Thought has been civilized and colonized, domesticated, by an obsession with paternity and property.  Etc ... 

These are all fine as far as they go, but I think they are mostly unhelpful in explaining what you get out of a book like this.  Many people, even many philosophers, seem to think of the history of philosophy as a sort of series of propositional flash cards -- Plato said X; Kant believed Y; Heidegger thought Z.  If you're feeling ungenerous, you might look at these cards as just a pile of disorganized beliefs that show no progress towards truth. The whole series has no universally accepted criterion for data and no first principle of reasoning, and is therefore a bunch of wanky and meaningless speculation.  Or you might look at the cards as a progression of ideas structured by arguments and refutations, giving it at least some sense of continuous forward motion even if it's not clear where it's headed.  Either way, the goal in studying philosophy is to know what each philosopher believes.  We extract this information and write it down on a flash card and compare that to what other philosophers believe and what we ourselves believe.  

This isn't the only approach to learning, however.  In fact, when you think about it more, learning mere information is actually the very shallow end of the pool of thought.  Do you remember memorizing state capitals in middle school?  I imagine being able to state propositionally what we think Deleuze believes is about that important.  Even to ask why he believes what he does, what are his arguments for believing one thing versus another, is to miss the point of the book.  In fact, I don't think there's been anything so far that we could describe as an argument or justification.  The problem is that a learning that focuses on either what or why we should believe something is one that implicitly takes for granted the idea that the goal of learning is reproducing a true belief in our heads.  We know by now that Deleuze isn't interested in truth as a correspondence between our ideas and the world, or in the reproduction of a truth in the form of its transmission from one brain to another or from the world to our brain.  He doesn't have some packet of information or belief to give us.  There's nothing we can copy from the model Deleuze provides.

Luckily, we have another familiar model of learning.  How do we learn to swim, or play tennis, or meditate?  Learning a craft or a skill is not the same as learning knowledge.  Learning how is not learning that.  How exactly these are different is a difficult question, but I think we'd all accept that we don't learn a skill by copying a model in any simple sense.  As we saw with swimming, you don't learn by standing next to the pool and imitating the instructors' motions, even if they give you feedback about how well your imitation matches what they think it looks like when they do it.  Instead, something about their words and motions resonates with some process of your own and enables you to feel how to manipulate the medium for yourself. 

Deleuze wants to teach us how to swim.  Or perhaps how to meditate.  He wants to teach us a craft of thinking, how to fabricate thoughts for ourselves, how to sculpt in whatever medium thoughts are made of, or at least to appreciate this sculpture as an art form.  This has nothing to do with truth or belief.  Or perhaps, as Deleuze put it in the case of the Eternal Return, it has to do not with true beliefs, but with the truth of belief.  What do the concepts we fabricate and believe in enable us to feel and do once we bring them into the world?  What new experiences do they open up?  Deleuze changes the idea of what we are meant to learn in philosophy.  We are not supposed to "do as he does" but to "do with him", and to evaluate what happens to us for ourselves.

Once we relate the book to this other model of learning, we immediately appreciate why it takes so long to read.  Learning skills requires practice, and practice takes time.  We already accept this notion with physical skills.  No one expects to play the piano or win the US open or swim the English channel after watching just one youtube video. You have to watch 3 or 4 at least.  The repetition isn't accidental or optional, but necessary, precisely because you are not repeating the same thing every time.  But we don't normally think of learning mental skills in this light, at least beyond early education.  In fact, we don't normally think of intellectual activities as skills at all.  So we find ourselves surprised when they take time to develop.  We wonder whether there isn't some short cut.  For some reason, we assume that knowledge can be transmitted instantaneously.However, if our goal is to learn a skill, or acquire a habit of thinking, that changes our lives, then we need time in which to practice.   

This then is the point of reading 0.174 pages per day, the same point as meditating for 20 years -- to practice.  Of course, this practice isn't self-justifying or self-contained; the ultimate goal is to live better and more fully through the practice.  This is a pretty open-ended goal though, so we are never really done practicing unless we are also done growing and changing.  A good teacher may help speed this practice on its way, but there will never be a substitute for time.  No matter how fast we imagine acquiring a skill, there will still be steps to move through that define a qualitative change from before to after.  Practicing skills literally requires the form of time.  Ultimately, for us humans, maybe this takes the form of the time required for neural plasticity.  What we're after in this form of learning is not the production of a particular brain state, but a whole process of rewiring that changes the structure of the brain.  New connections need to grow in order for us to make something different happen.  It's not so much that this takes time, as that it is time -- the possibility of change, the practice of thinking differently.