Needed: One Rickety Raft
I am delighted to offer a guest post from a friend, and a fine writer. The choice is perennial and ancient, and as contemporary as that offered to Neo in the Matrix movie, “You take the blue pill, the story ends. You wake up in your bed and believe whatever you want to believe. You take the red pill, you stay in Wonderland, and I show you how deep the rabbit hole goes.” What will it be, — the blue pill of the “promise of immortality,” or the red pill of a rickety raft to find one’s way home?
Many in the philosophy group know that from time to time, I complain about “beautiful thoughts” commentary on ancient philosophers by 19th century German scholars. When I was looking for straight explication of specific passages, I had to wade through general ruminations on philosophy and life occasioned by those texts. Imagine my surprise, when I found myself doing the same a couple of weeks ago.
It began with the Jan.3 reading, “What Is Philosophy and How Do We Do It?” Most of the people wrote about academic philosophers and what they do. Long ago, it struck me that much academic philosophy was picking holes in someone else’s work instead of doing your own. Much of what passed for philosophical discourse struck me as contentious cut, thrust and parry on the professional side, skirmishing for appointments, publishing and tenure. On the amateur side, “philosophical” discussions often seemed like somewhat elevated barroom brawls designed to shut one’s opponent down rather than work through mutual exploration toward a common goal. Real philosophy, I thought, was asking serious question and working toward some feasible answers. That kind of philosophy was too important to leave only to the professionals, I thought then and still do. But care needed to be taken to avoid argument just for the sake of argument. So I kept reading. But all the while I was reading, I kept seeing a rickety raft bouncing on the waves in my mind’s eye.
The raft image was easy. It came from Plato’s Phaedo, a much more complex dialogue than simply an account of Socrates’ death. Set in the hours before the philosopher must drink hemlock, the dialogue shows Socrates and his friends exploring arguments for the immortality of the soul. Simmias and Cebes, desperately want to find an argument that will convince them they are not losing their friend forever. But the arguments they offer collapse under further examination. Nonetheless, Simmias says he will cling to philosophy as the best human endeavor to answer these and other questions while alive, like a raft on which to risk the journey of life (approximation from memory at 1 a.m., not a direct translation from the text in front of me.)
Let me digress a bit on rafts. The Athenians were a maritime power. Plato traveled from Athens to Sicily and back again that we know of and perhaps elsewhere that we do not. There were many different kinds of ships and boats and the Greeks had names for all of them. But Plato uses “raft” here. That reminded me of one the earliest rafts in Greek literature. In Book v of the Odyssey, Odysseus builds himself a raft to leave the nymph, Calypso. It’s a heroic and, some would say, foolish endeavor. He’s leaving a goddess ( a minor one, but powerful, beautiful and immortal nonetheless) who wants to keep Odysseus as her lover, and make him immortal so they can enjoy each other and the never ending pleasures of her island. He’s leaving the promise of immortality, a life of timeless ease with a beautiful and attentive companion, what would seem like paradise to many, to risk his life in a strenuous and dangerous voyage over the sea, Poseidon’s realm — who, by the way, wants to kill Odysseus but can’t do so directly since the rest of the gods decided against it. Ah, but storms and rough seas happen all the time, as do shipwrecks and drownings, tragic the lot of mortals. Nevertheless, Odysseus wants to leave and get back to Ithaka and to Penelope. Mortal Penelope, certainly not as beautiful or powerful as the nymph. Penelope will get old and wrinkled, so will Odysseus. Both of them will struggle, worry, lose strength and ultimately die. But that’s what Odysseus wants and he builds a raft (with Calypso’s regrets and help) to do it. It’s a gamble. Of course, the raft gets smashed to bits by the waves, but Odysseus does get someplace else where he can find help and ultimately get home.
Socrates picks up on Simmias’ raft image as he recounts his own passage in philosophy. From following earlier philosophers who were intent on finding a reasonable account of the natural world and being confounded by the multiplicity of those accounts, Socrates turns instead to the dialectics we are familiar with as the philosopher’s general mode of interaction, namely, formulating, analyzing and testing arguments by pushing their consequences to the limit. That is his deuteros plous, second sailing or second voyage. If you google either one of those phrases, you’ll find many interpretations of just what Socrates’ second sailing/voyage may mean but disputation and argument are always the means.
However, those means are problematical. Argument and disputation did not arise with Socrates for the sake of philosophical inquiry. They were already in place for trials in the agora as verbal assault weapons. The Sophists simply taught men how to use them better, how to “make the weak argument look stronger and the strong argument weaker”. They taught their followers to demolish the opponent’s case by entertaining the jurors with a well-turned phrase, a striking non-sequitur, an equivocation and a turn toward the exquisitely timed insult. Why? Litigation had become a substitute for the blood feud. These days, we tend to consider blood feuds like the Hatfields and McCoys quaint and almost comic. But ancient blood feuds were more like gang wars with escalating violence, bystanders continuously pulled into the fight because blood spilled calls for more blood to spill. There is no logical end unless a third force steps in. The law courts, the judgement of the community, had become that third force.
Socrates’ genius was not to turn philosophy from regarding the heavens to examining the lives of men as is commonly asserted but to take this method of disputation from the antagonisms of the legal contest and turn it to mutual cooperation in examining assumptions about what constitutes justice, beauty, noble behavior and arête, the excellence of the soul. But sometimes the difference between the two uses was difficult to discern. In a number of dialogues, Plato worked hard to distinguish between Socrates’ inquiries and the Sophists’ logic-chopping rhetoric. The most hilarious of these, though little read today, is the Euthydemus in which Socrates earnestly tries to rescue the young Klinias from two fast-talking Sophists, Euthydemus and his brother, who claim to have left mere rhetoric behind and now teach arête. Furthermore, they can teach arête to anyone and everyone cheaper and faster than anyone else in the field. They demonstrate the arts of equivocation, logic chopping and facile word-play in a dazzling display worthy of the best vaudeville stage as Socrates limps along behind them to counter and extract some serious nuggets of philosophy. One might well think that these sophists for hire are the complete opposites of the philosopher. They are, but not because they are sophists.
In the Phaedo, Plato shows us that the real antithesis of the philosopher is the philonikos. The true philosophos, Socrates as the best example, desires and loves sophia, wisdom. Thus, he pursues it. In contrast, the philonikos desires and pursues nike, victory. Each pursues what he does not yet have. The philonikos argues to win. In the court, this makes sense. Each litigant argues for what he already knows is the right answer. He wants his answer to win. The philosophos does not yet know what the right answer is; sometimes, he does not even know what the right question is. In the pursuit of wisdom, wanting to win gets in the way. Toward the end of the dialogue, Socrates worries that because of the proximity of his death, he has almost become philonikos himself in regard to the immortality of the soul. But he recognizes the limitations of the argument he proposed, even if his friends will not. Dialectics can take one only so far. And perhaps the answers cannot be learned, reasoned or perceived while the soul is immured in the flesh. Or perhaps not at all.
Hence, the raft. Philosophy may not get us there all the way; but it gets us off the island if we want to leave. Books showing the paths taken by others in pursuit of wisdom and good friends are all part of the journey. We might find that ultimately there is no “there” there, but the journey itself is worth the risk.
N.B. I have left arête in a transliteration of the Greek with the gloss “excellence of the soul” rather than using the standard translation, “virtue”. The word, virtue, has too many overtones of preacher, pulpit and moralist to convey the full import of the Greek. “Be all that you can be” comes closer and retains the ambiguity that made arête such a frequent topic of debate.
Maria-Viktoria Abricka 2/1/17