Motives for Philosophy in Plato’s Protagoras

 

     Though philosophy today is most often regarded as an abstruse special interest which, indeed, struggles to survive even within academia, this isolation is distinctly modern.  If one sees the end of philosophy as the search for a formula for leading the best possible life, it is clearly a matter for everyone’s consideration.  If philosophical speculation is aimed at a determination of ethics, it is likewise a subject that engages all people.  The goal of understanding one’s place in  the cosmos or getting some sense of ultimate reality has been ceded to religion.  Yet we understand that in ancient Athens Socrates plied his trade in public places, the gymnasia and the agora, always a devoted amateur, and in such places made a name and attracted followers and challengers.  General interest in philosophy and skill with words became sufficient to support a class of teachers, the sophists, who, unlike Socrates, were professionals whose tutelage came at a price.  In one Platonic dialogue, Protagoras, traditionally regarded as the first sophist, engages wits with Socrates before an audience of over twenty onlookers who probably would have considered such an encounter as a world-class contest of ideas, as worthy of watching as the Olympics.  From their disputation two motives for philosophic training emerge that suggest that intellectual training has value for everyone. 

     The course of their dialogue suggests several purposes for philosophic thought, though the putative topic under discussion is a somewhat different theme: whether virtue is teachable.  These days few would think of justifying the work of philosophers by its value in furthering social ends, since their expertise seems irrelevant to the lives of most citizens.  Yet Protagoras claims that that he can “promise to make men good citizens” [1], only for Socrates to object, saying that social decisions are made by everyone together, regardless of profession, and neither any individual nor any particular profession has particular expertise in statecraft.          

      Of course, in Classical antiquity, skill in logic and rhetoric was closely associated with deliberative and forensic arenas, either the assembly and other governmental forums or the courts.  Not only did every free Athenian male have a voice in deciding issues of the common good, but, for those engaged in litigation or legal defense, the jury system made persuasiveness of cardinal importance.  Today a mere vote is thought to be all an individual owes the state, though some will go so far as to write an occasional letter to the editor or to put out an election yard sign.  Yet in the view of the ancient Greeks (and the founders of the United States), a healthy democracy requires fuller participation by all, apart from slaves, foreigners, and women.  The disastrous recent American election of a would-be dictator, propelled to power by uneducated voters, reveals the hazards of an ignorant population. 

     For the Greeks a man’s identity was largely constituted by his political role, and the necessity of sound reasoning by the populace is required for a healthy, well-functioning democracy.  Moreover, the training that qualified one to formulate one’s views in a coherent and convincing way and present persuasive arguments when discussing legislation or pleading a legal case, is applicable in many  arenas of life.  The ability to manipulate symbols is the distinguishing characteristic of our species.  The general intellectual skills of taking in information, analyzing it, and producing astute responses are, of course, critical in all endeavors requiring thought and judgement.  Often in our era, with the decay of debating as a common practice in American secondary schools and philosophy classes on that level virtually non-existent and ignored by mot collegians, the development of even fundamental proficiency in thinking and self-expression is left to the belated attention of those who teach freshman English classes in universities.  Whether one engaged with a professional teacher like Protagoras or simply a talkative figure familiar about town like Socrates, the Greeks’ system may have been more effective at encouraging a generally educated populace, more capable in their civic role and in private life as well.  The assumption that every person should possess logical and verbal skills is so strong that people are suspicious of sophists who claim a special expertise and work for hire, and Protagoras concedes that some think ill of professionals like himself, though he is willing to proudly affirm his profession in spite of the “malice and ill-will” and “intrigues” of their critics [2].

     In Plato’s Protagoras Socrates is pleased to be able to meet with Protagoras, ostensibly to gain wisdom from him, but  the reader suspects, even more to enhance his own reputation by showing up a rival in philosophical argumentation.   The traditional subtitle of “On the Sophists” suggests a focus on evaluating those who teach logic and speaking professionally, so, though the general topic is whether virtue may be taught, the rivalry of Socrates and Protagoras provides the drama.

     In the end, as in other Platonic dialogues, especially early ones, most of the logical argumentation has been negative, indicating that received ideas are flawed yet providing no definitive alternative answer to settle the question.  The reader, along with Protagoras and Socrates’ friends, is left wondering.  In  the Meno this process, at the heart of much Platonic ἔλεγχος, is described as a beneficial in itself [3], though in that dialogue aporia is simply a way-station preceding truth.  In the Protagoras there is no further resolution.  The discussion can dislodge error, but it makes little attempt to formulate a correct answer.  What, then, is the point? 

     Greek philosophy offers several options to avoid the cul-de-sac of finding a desired answer unknowable.  In Stoicism suspended judgement, or ἐποχή, is appropriate for some sense experiences (φαντασίαι), while others are sufficiently convincing as to be kataleptic  or “graspable.” [4]  For Skeptics, however, particularly the Pyrrhonist variety, all impressions are doubtful, but in withholding assent and denial alike, the individual might find a serene mental state or ἀταραξία, following the recognition that nothing can be certainly known.  Here, in a mysterious reversal, not-knowing is transformed into enlightenment. 

     Both Plato’s Protagoras, though, and his Socrates seem clearly to be in pursuit of answers.  They are also competitors as providers of wisdom, and each is characterized as polite yet jealous of his reputation.  So the reader might imagine Socrates here as elsewhere playing devil’s advocate for the more vigorous play of ideas and the chance to display his ratiocination to greater advantage.  He may care more about out-talking Protagoras than in finding Truth.  The discussion is civil and good-humored, more in the nature of a friendly game of cards than an angry argument.  The audience listens to both and the conversation, enjoying the spectacle, making the event resemble an athletic contest or a dramatic production, both of which encode tensions and antagonisms in  a generally harmonious form. 

     In the last analysis, the Greeks at Callias’ [5] house were passing the time of day, amusing themselves with intellectual calisthenics that they found pleasurable for their own sake, without necessarily coming to a conclusion or uncovering new knowledge, a form of play very like attending the theater, a foot-race, or any other diversion.  What makes philosophy superlatively entertaining is that human cognitive skill, the ability to deal in subtle symbols and recombine words in ever new combinations , is the distinguishing characteristic of our species.  The speakers and the audience in the Protagoras are doing neither more nor less than having fun with their brains.  So philosophy here is a sort of highest level divertissement with no further end in view than the kitten has when tossing a stuffed mouse, the dog in retrieving a stick, people idly chatting over a backyard fence, or while sitting on barstools. 

     Though neither good citizenship nor amusement is likely to occur to people today as motives for philosophy, their endurance in antiquity is suggested by the fact that both are cited by Cicero three hundred years after Plato.  In his Tusculan Disputations he argues that civilization itself is the result of philosophy, allowing people to live together in large numbers.  He then notes that some come to the Olympic Games to compete, while others come to sell their goods to the crowds, and yet a third group come simply to look on, for the sake of the spectacle.  This last, he says, resembles philosophers, who observe life itself, purely out of curiosity, because they wish to “look with interest into the nature of things.” [6] 

     Philosophy as an enabler of democracy and as an entertainment may seem to have little in common, even to be opposed: one seems serious, even lofty, aiming toward the betterment of society, while the other might appear frivolous and trivial, simple amusement.  Yet casual conversations such as that depicted in the Protagoras form the basis for close ties among fellow-citizens while providing practice in ratiocination and communication that can equally serve the larger community in legislative and legal deliberation.  Philosophy here represents a shared belief that people do have common problems and a common language for inquiring after solutions, and that the quest for knowledge is a primary human pleasure, whether or not anyone ever can arrive at the Truth. 

     Practice in thinking, analyzing, understanding, writing, and speaking had been the basis for all education for millennia.  We moderns can deplore, though we cannot change, the contemporary destruction of the ideal of a liberal education and the transformation of post-secondary schooling into vocational training.  Perhaps a rebirth of philosophic studies justified by social utility or the pure fun of it might rejuvenate our stricken American political culture and reawaken people to the joys and benefits of juggling concepts.  

 

1.  ὑπισχνεῖσθαι ποιεῖν ἄνδρας ἀγαθοὺς πολίτας 319a.

2.  In Greek the terms are φθόνοι and δυσμένειαί (316d).

3.  See Meno (84c)  “Isn’t this numbing then a good thing?” (ὤνητο ἄρα ναρκήσας;).

4.  Epictetus, Discourses 1.18.1 maintains that all human decisions originate in “feeling,” including the suspension of judgment associated with uncertainty.  Thus the ignorant are not to be blamed for their errors.

5.  According to numerous authorities (Andocides, 130, Aristophanes, The Frogs, v. 432, Athenaeus, iv. 67; and Aelian, Varia Historia, iv. 16 as well as Plato Apology 20a), Callias is said to have spent his patrimony in support of sophists and ended his life in penury. 

6.  Book V, section 5 for the growth of civilization and V, 9  for the disinterested inquirer into truth, acting out of curiosity.  In this latter passage the relevant Latin phrases are “sed visendi causa venirent studioseque perspicerent, quid ageretur et quo modo” (“but come to visit to see what was going on and how”).  It is these who “rerum naturam studiose intuerentur” (“look with interest into the nature of things”). 

Parmenides and the Perennial Philosophy

Numbers in parentheses refer to the standard listing of Parmenides’ fragments.  Those in brackets are endnotes.

    Parmenides was my favorite when as a student I first read the pre-Socratic philosophers.  I was, I imagine, attracted by his dramatically startling claims.  The paradoxes of his disciple Zeno delight everyone with a taste for tossing concepts about.  A generation or two later Socrates’ dialectics, Aristotle’s ratiocination, and the theatrical gestures of Diogenes would open up philosophy in other directions, but the fundamental challenge of Parmenides’ thought remained unchanged, as immovable as the plenum he imagined.

     Paradoxically, though Parmenides’ conclusions seem outlandish from the perspective of everyday reality, they are peculiarly reasonable to a skeptical modern sensibility.  To me he represents the most profound ancient Greek statement of a perennial philosophy in the classic modern form represented by Transcendentalism and, in the twentieth century, Neo-Vedanta.  Parmenides has in common with Huxley (and mystics in different parts of the globe throughout the centuries) the apprehension of an ultimate reality underlying sense experience which is, to use Parmenides’ language “unitary, unmoving and without end” (μουνογενές τε καὶ ἀτρεμὲς ἠδ᾽ ἀτέλεστον). (347)

     After millennia in which our species had used the poetic devices of analogy and metaphor in religion, magic, ritual, and mythological thought, Parmenides proposed using only the mind.  From the simple proposition that one can say nothing about the nonexistent or “what is not,” Parmenides developed provocative and astonishing conclusions.  The phenomenal world is in some sense “unreal;” motion and change are impossible as the cosmos is monistic, the only thing that exists. 

     He arrives at such a strikingly counterintuitive position by significant rhetorical and dialectical routes.  The title of his principal work Περὶ Φύσεως is sometimes translated On Nature but its concerns are so fundamental that it might have been called On What Exists.  A dramatic proem sets the angle of Parmenides’ approach.  The philosopher’s insight is attributed to his having been taken on a journey by the maiden daughters of the sun, arriving at a gate in the borderland between Night and Day at which point he encounters a goddess [1] who delivers to him the knowledge he conveys to the reader.  Though the location signifies the duality that constitutes the ordinary experience of reality, [2] she offers a route to a unified vision.  

     The divinity would seem to be Night herself: Parmenides goes to “the halls of Night,” and the goddess who greets him welcomes him to “our home” (1).  The goddess Night serves as counselor to Zeus in some of the major Orphic texts, including the Derveni cosmology. In the closely related Orphic Rhapsodies, Night instructs Zeus on how to preserve the unity produced by his absorption of all things into himself as he sets about initiating a new cosmogonic phase. It is thus appropriate that Night should be the source of Parmenides’ revelation, for Parmenidean metaphysics is very much concerned with the principle of unity in the cosmos.

     This deity’s specific identity, though, is less important than the fact that the mythological language implies that Parmenides’ ideas are not as attributable to rigorous ratiocination as to revelation or intuitive insight.  The goddess promises to reveal to him “well-rounded truth” (aληθείης εὐκυκλέος) [3] in contrast to the “opinions of people, in which there is nothing true at all” (βροτῶν δόξας͵ ταῖς οὐκ ἔνι πίστις ἀληθής). (fr. 342, stressed again in 346)

     In the voice of this goddess, Parmenides proceeds, arguing that, as no one can meaningfully conceive of what does not exist, human thoughts must concern only “what is.”  (2)  His language here outpaces his reasoning which has been criticized as specious by modern scholars who note his conflation of the existential and predicative uses of the verb “to be.” [4]  The criticism will carry little weight for readers who have accepted the introduction with its mystic quasi-shamanic flight, suggesting that the philosopher’s vision rests on experience and intuition, on meditation perhaps, rather than on logic. 

     He argues that most people conveniently ignore logic when they treat what is and what is not sometimes as the same and sometimes as differing.  They are “two-headed,” helpless in their ignorance. (6)  Yet this error is the basis for the conventional way of seeing the world, what Parmenides calls the “way of appearances” [5](or seeming or opinion).  (See 1 and 8)

     “What is” is a kind of universal substance that must be “unitary, unmoving and without end.”  There is no void or emptiness since a plenum fills all of existence.  Contrary to appearances, there is no growth, there is no change, there is no beginning or end.  Reality cannot be divided, for it is alike everywhere (οὐδέ τι τῇ μᾶλλον, τό κεν εἴργοι μιν συνέχεσθαι).  Like Einstein’s universe, it is finite, though without beginning or end.  It may best be imagined as a sphere. (8)

     I am not concerned with tracing sources, among which others have noted Xenophanes, Pythagoras, and others, nor do I wish to detail influences, through neo-Platonism, Epicureanism, Pyrrhonisn Skepticism, pseudo-Dionysius, certain medieval mystics and Spinoza.  My point is quite simply the fundamental similarity of Parmenides’ monism and the tradition some have called the perennial philosophy.  Perhaps the most significant and concise statement of this view is the Advaita Vedanta teaching grounded in the Chāndogya Upanişad.  In the seminal sixth book Uddalaka explains to his son Śvetaketu that a single substance underlies all phenomena including themselves.  “Tat tvam asi.” (“That art thou!”) he declares.  There is no other -- the fabric of reality is continuous.  According to Advaita Vedanta, the individual and the deity or cosmos are identical: atman = Atman. 

     Parmenides goes on to relate what he calls the “way of opinion” providing an elaborate cosmology that once occupied the greater part of his book, but which is largely lost.  Though this portion of his work more closely parallels the speculation of earlier philosophers, it was less distinctive as well as being undercut by the author’s repeated assurances that his assertions in this section refer to appearances only, the way things seem, and not their real nature, rather like the Hindu concept of maya.  

     Parmenides is associated by Strabo with the cult of Apollo Oulios, an epithet usually rendered as the Healer, though the primary meaning of the word in Liddell and Scott is “pestilential” suggesting the hand of the Far-darter in plague and disease. [6]  Apollo is then defined, in sum at least, as indifferent to human desire just as the Hindu deities often have beneficent and malign manifestations.  Apollo and the cosmos as a whole are not so much ambivalent or unpredictable as utterly beyond good and evil.  For Parmenides would deny the final validity of disease and health, pain and joy, indeed of all dualities.  For him such contraries are the illusion from which arises the “way of appearances” as opposed to the “way of truth.” 

     Such insights have rarely attracted many disciples.  Whatever heights Hindu philosophers achieved, the average Indian is satisfied with customary sacrifices and other forms of formulaic worship.  In ancient Greece Pythagoreans and other mystery religions (including eventually Christianity) gained many followers with the promise that the individual soul was immortal and only the cult could provide supposed means to improve well-being after death.  Conventional religion has often displayed little patience with the monistic assertions: Meister Eckhart, John of the Cross, and Spinoza were all indicted by their communities for expressing European versions of the Upanishad’s “tat tvam asi.”

     Specifically because their conclusions are experiential, attempts to rationalize the revelations of mystical flights like that Parmenides relates at the outset of his work, such thinkers are as immune to logical refutation as to proof.  They can only record their own insights (or seeming insights) and point a way for others seeking the “way of truth.”  Side-stepping the slipperiness of language and the dubious claims of syllogisms, they present a spirituality independent of supernaturalism, authority, and tradition.

    

 

1.      1.  Identified variously as night, Nature, Wisdom, Necessity or Themis.

 

2.      2.  Thus the account in Genesis describes creation of material reality through a series of oppositions: light and dark, earth and sky, water and land.

 

3.      3.  Compare this usage to the description of the cosmos as spherical in Plato, Timaeus 32c-34b.

 

4.      4.  See, for instance, G. S. Kirk and J. E. Raven, The Presocratic Philosophers, p. 269-70.

 

5.      5.  Parmenides’ word δόξα might also be translated as “seeming” or “opinion.”

 

6.      6.  The pattern is the same with φάρμακον, meaning both medicine and poison, a circumstance of which Derrida made a great deal in “Plato’s Pharmacy” in Dissemination.

Knowing and Not Knowing

     We value knowledge and regard its lack as a simple deficiency, but that view is neither inevitable nor is it always serviceable. In fact knowing and not knowing, like all bipolar oppositions, have a dialectical complementarity. [1] Their relation is so intimate that ignorance is entailed by every specific claim to knowledge, and skepticism in general need not be a logical cul de sac. The apophatic tradition’s route even as far as the divine is only the most spectacular use of not-knowing. Neither the lack of direct demonstrable evidence (of God, for example) nor an insufficiency of evidence (for any other proposition) need bring an end to inquiry.
     There is an inescapable figure/ground relationship involved in sense perception and no less in cognitive processes. Gestalt psychologists have demonstrated that, when one focuses on an object, one necessarily, at the same time, becomes unaware of its context. For every apparent gain in understanding, there is a corresponding loss. It is no more possible to maintain an equal awareness of all parts of a field than to fix both the position and momentum of a quantum object. To understand an utterance means to ignore other associated data. To recognize one reality means to be unconscious of many others. For functional problem-solving and most science, this presents no difficulty; indeed, the limited focus is essential and fruitful. In this way, not knowing is harmoniously intertwined with knowing throughout daily experience.
     Rightly understood the apparently limiting condition of our inescapably partial vision is more often the enabler of conviction than an obstacle. Growing up one is educated by acquiring the beliefs cultivated in one’s own culture. While the process enables an individual to function effectively in a social situation, it requires becoming blind to other possibilities. Yet societies do change, and, for the individual as well, this patterning of blindness and insight [2] may develop, evolve, and alter. The comfortable certainties of received ideas may be threatened or overturned by exposure to other societies with other visions, which may leave the thinker hopelessly at sea, but which often results in an eclectic or a skeptical point of view, or simply a more informed conclusion. A similar step toward enlightenment may occur due to ratiocination, meditation, drugs, or any of the range of techniques people have developed for altering consciousness and thus broadening the mind’s horizon.. Only then does the individual realize the significant role ignorance played in what had felt very much like secure conviction.
     But there can be no eliminating a residue of uncertainty about even the most superficially self-evident facts. One of the most systematic and influential philosophic formulations of this is the Indian catuṣkoṭi, a series of propositions that has been used in a wide variety of ways by Asian philosophers; my own use is doubtless different from theirs. [3]
     The catuṣkoṭi is generated by considering the array of possibilities when considering the truth of a proposition P. It may be so (P) or it may not (not-P). It also may be that both P and not-P are true, or that neither P nor not-P is, resulting in the following. Clever logicians including the great Nagarjuna then doubled this to eight propositions and added a capping ninth term sunyata, or emptiness.


Positive configuration
1. P
2. Not-P
3. Both P and Not-P
4. Neither P nor Not-P


1.
Negative configuration
1. Not (P)
2. Not (Not-P)
3. Not (Both P and Not-P)
4. Not (Neither P nor Not-P)

Sunyata


     This catuṣkoṭi has been used in a wide variety of ways by Asian philosophers; my own use is doubtless different from theirs. [4] To me it is a dialectical series of oppositions that, rather than resolving, leads to a further bipolar pair. It expands indefinitely like a human embryo starting with a single cell, then doubling and redoubling into nearly unfathomable complexity. In the broadest application the formula applies to any proposition, that is to say, to the world at large.
     One may walk through the progressively unfolding implications of the catuṣkoṭi until their complexity becomes unwieldy. One naturally takes the reality of the phenomena one can perceive for granted. This is the first term of the original tetralemma. The first duality then appears with the suggestion that the world is in fact illusory, a veil of maya, avidya, or not-knowing into which one must look more deeply to achieve enlightenment. At this point the critical doubt is productive, suggesting possibilities which would not otherwise arise. This skeptical questioning, flying in the face of common sense, produces the second term.
     Yet the world is not wholly and simply non-existent either. Even if it be a magic show, a puff of smoke, a flash of light, even these are something. The world must simultaneously exist in some sense while not existing in the last analysis. On the other hand the paradox forces the observer to conclude that it neither fully exists nor fully lacks existence in the ordinary understanding. These then are the third and fourth terms.
     This schema already gives the juggling thinker too many thoughts to keep airborne at once, but the savants’ increasingly exquisite metaphysical elaborations may serve the receptive mind as a basis for epistemology. Frustrating though it may be for those with little tolerance for paradox and mystery, this view, in which knowing and not-knowing are symmetrically intertwined, seems the closest approach we may attain to Truth.
     The view of those pursuing the apophatic conception of Ultimate Reality makes an even stronger claim: that the divine is “the affirmation of all things, the negation of all things, and beyond all affirmation and denial.” Nirvana etymologically refers to being extinguished, blown out like an oil lamp, yet it is the goal of Hinduism, Jainism, and Buddhism. Recent studies have pointed out significant parallels between these spiritual traditions and the discoveries of modern physics. [7]
     What can it mean that the positive and negative charges in the universe are equal? Surely the same should be true of matter and antimatter, though, for the present, these seem stubbornly unequal. [7] When one totals up the entire cosmos the answer must be zero, but a simple blank is not the result, or we would not be here wondering. On the contrary the observer, knowing and not knowing at the same time, gazing through the optical lens of ordinary vision corrected by the additional lens of philosophic speculation, sees most often instead the phantasmagoric phenomena of the world which are both there and not there. We know only by not knowing and see only by blindness.



1. Among the classic statements of this idea is the second poem in the Dao de Jing. As it is critical to the concepts to follow, I include a translation of a portion of that poem in James Legge’s clunky old translation for which, despite all its awkwardness (and its author’s Christian bias), I retain an affection: “All in the world know the beauty of the beautiful, and in doing this they have (the idea of) what ugliness is; they all know the skill of the skilful, and in doing this they have (the idea of) what the want of skill is. So it is that existence and non-existence give birth the one to (the idea of) the other; that difficulty and ease produce the one (the idea of) the other; that length and shortness fashion out the one the figure of the other; that (the ideas of) height and lowness arise from the contrast of the one with the other; that the musical notes and tones become harmonious through the relation of one with another; and that being before and behind give the idea of one following another. Therefore the sage manages affairs without doing anything, and conveys his instructions without the use of speech.”

2. This tidy phrase is, of course, the title of Paul de Man’s virtuoso critical performance. Deconstruction, with its insistence on the statement which is sou rature, “under erasure,” directly engages the dialectic of knowing and not knowing.

3. In fact this gap may well be considered an example of my own ignorance or blindness fostering a new conclusion. The catuṣkoṭi is closely paralleled by reports of the philosophy of Pyrrho of Elis in Sextus Empiricus. As Pyrrho is known to have traveled east with Alexander where he conferred with Persian magi and Indian yogis it is likely that he returned with some Eastern ideas. See Diogenes Laertius 9.61. For a useful sketch of parallels between Pyrrh and Madyamika, see Thomas McEvilley, “Pyrrhonism and Maadhyamika,” Philosophy East and West xxxii, 1 (January 1982), 3-35.

4. Note that, unlike some of the Asian thinkers I accept all these propositions as finally equal in truth value. For some they are alternatives among which one must choose.

5. Eriugena's translation of the pseudo-Dionysius “omnium positio, omnium ablatio, super omnem positionem et ablationem inter se invicem.” (Patrologia Latina CXXII 1121 c-d).

6. The seminal work was Fritjof Capra’s The Tao of Physics. Capra was qualified both as a particle physicist and a psychedelic veteran. His books have, not surprisingly, had a mixed reception. I have not read them.

7. This is called baryon asymmetry.

In Praise of Bias

     People often speak as though a writer’s bias is an undesirable thing, indicating a beclouded vision. Yet surely the only unbiased person would be one who has never had a thought or made an observation. In fact “bias” is what enables significance and instills meaning into what would otherwise be mere information. Far from warning readers to beware, an openly confessed bias promises well-thought-out conclusions and the active engagement of the author.
     In fact bias is universal. Perhaps the writer who pretends to objectivity might be honestly unaware of bias, leading the reader to wonder how much else he or she might be in the dark about. A great proportion of our intellectual blind spots arise because certain assumptions strike us as so self-evident or natural that they seem raw data rather than conclusions. It is just such ideas, often the idées reçues of an entire culture, that an original author will seek to interrogate or at any rate to reinforce in an original manner. As Max Friedländer noted in commenting on the case of forger Han Van Meegeren , “Forgeries must be served hot,” since the tell-tale stylistic nuances, the assumptions characteristic of each age are invisible to viewers at first, but inevitably emerge as obvious with the passage of time. The very same principle applies to reasoning and logic.
     Worse but less insidious is the intentional concealing of bias. The consciously deceitful propagandist need not concern us. Everyone will find such a fraud offensive (with the exception of sophistic rhetoricians to whom falsity may present an opportunity for a more dazzling epideixis). In such cases the writer, aware of the deception, can only be thought to consider a legitimate case unconvincing. Such arguments are far from insignificant – they are the very stuff of advertising and political discourse -- but such biases are less likely to hoodwink the alert reader or listener if they cannot deceive their own creator.
     This principle emerged clearly during the late 1960s when many concluded that it was impossible to be apolitical. Passivity in the face of injustice came to be regarded as tantamount to endorsement of the status quo (particularly when combined with other clues such as the pursuit of income), while such transgressive practices as dope-smoking and gay sex naturally, though not inevitably, situated people in the opposition , and poverty implied integrity. These are, of course, biases and less than absolutely predictive, yet they possess both meaning and analytical value. Like other prejudices, stereotypes, and clichés, they were found to be quite often true.
     Some, but not all biases, are also value judgments. I recognize my bias against Western movies and musicals as individual and subjective; I would not argue the inherent superiority of who-dun-its, but I would not voluntarily spend an evening watching John Wayne drawl as he rides through the sagebrush. Likewise, my fondness for ancient Skeptics, medieval troubadours, and early modern avant-gardists is not prescriptive, nor is my coolness toward Chinese traditional music or the Grand Ole Opry. I recognize my unfortunate sluggishness to appreciate the work of artists and writers younger than myself. Most blues music is for me good, while all polkas with the exception of those written by Chopin are not.
     Yet I do not deny that I hold biases about biases. Father Arrupe’s “preferential option for the poor” is a good bias to me as is affirmative action while sexism, racism, and homophobia are bad ones. These preferences may be traced to morality, but the association is not necessary. If I encounter an individual with a prejudice in favor of bland food, I will prejudge that person’s other values as dubious, while I will be predisposed in favor of the attitudes of a cook with an ample spice cabinet. I would be more likely to agree with the judgment of a leftist opera buff than a reactionary Nascar fan. The fact is that biases are so potent in human social relations that I never encounter a Nascar fan in my social circles. Such an event would be as unlikely as dinner with Republicans. (A radical car racer might be an interesting character; a conservative lover of La Traviata sounds boring.)
     Intelligence is no safeguard against bias. Indeed the research of Daniel Kahneman and Amos Twersky has indicated that intelligent people are not only fallible like everyone else, but that they are in fact slightly more likely to make erroneous decisions based on bias.
     The word itself derives through French, Provencal, and Latin from the Greek epikarsios meaning “athwart, crosswise, at an angle,” and that is the basis for its applications in tailoring and the sport of crown green bowls. The quality of obliqueness it shares with metaphor and other rhetorical figures is what opens biased judgments to significance based on connotation, association, and implication. Such ambush on a question from an angle other than warp or woof often releases insight. Biases are instrumental in weaving a texture of meaning that may be decoded (not always accurately) like a poem, a profile, or a tone of voice.
     My biases include a preference for black over blue, red wine over white, pinot noir over cabernet, for lamb over beef, pork over chicken, for spinach over chard, cauliflower over broccoli, cherries over grapes, pears over apples, hazelnuts over Brazil nuts, and, I must confess, peanuts over all tree nuts. Bring me a heap of beans rather than of meat. I like Victorian houses rather than modern ones, cities over suburbs, San Francisco over Los Angeles, Iowa over New Jersey, but the Northeast over the South. I have a bias in favor of traveling anywhere outside of my own country such that I have never seen the Grand Canyon or Yellowstone Park. Talk is more pleasant than television, the fall preferable to the spring, and the mountains to the seashore. I would never ever dye my hair. I always wore a tie while teaching. Though biased against church-going Christians, fundamentalists, and hierarchies, I feel sympathetic toward Meister Eckhart, Quakers, and the Catholic Worker movement. I like Plato rather than Aristotle, the Greeks in general more than the Romans, the Nibelungenlied better than Roland, troubadours before trouvères, Wyatt before Surrey, Lear before Hamlet, Keats better than Shelley, Pound more than Eliot. The early poems of Gary Snyder and Robert Bly are far superior, I think, to their later work.
     The value of biases need not arise from their truth. Naming a few among my myriad biases sketches my nature with greater precision and accuracy than the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory. To eliminate my biases would be to erase the host of specifics that define me far more than my physical features. The fact is that bias cannot be avoided. There is no escaping the perspective through the holes in the front of the skull. Even a physicist contemplating subatomic particles must view the spectacle of existence using all-too-human eyes and a brain full of assumption derived from teachers and words and the chances of grants and fashions in science, but, far from lamentable, these limitations give a point to science as they do to art and to life.

Axiology and Subjectivity

     Should any reader turn to this page expecting a philosophical discussion, I wish to declare at the outset that I am not competent to paraphrase leading ideas in axiology, far less to comment on them or to criticize. Indeed, that inability is in a way my point, for I wish to suggest that value of all sorts is, like other aspects of reality, always and inevitably subjective, though that fact does not mean that value judgments are arbitrary or without significance.
     In pragmatic decision-making, some, however, may seen hardly disputable: if one wishes to turn a screw, a screwdriver is good, because it does the job efficiently; a city map is good if one wishes to find the train station; food is good since it is required for life. Yet even these include an implied subjectivity. One cannot assume that turning the screw is desirable, or finding the train, or even continuing to live. Each of these consequences is a concrete result. When no such observable cause and effect is involved as in theoretical ethics and even more so in aesthetics, a demonstration of value becomes exceedingly obscure.
     If a critic prefers the novels of Samuel Richardson to those of Henry Fielding (as Leavis does), he may provide ample reasoning and bolster his arguments with supporting evidence from the books in question, yet he cannot, like a scientist, present a compelling “objective” case. Literature and criticism have histories, to be sure, yet it is difficult to conceive of those histories as recording incremental progress over the centuries. The same might be said for all aesthetic judgments. To one individual opera provides the most moving and powerful experience of beauty while another may react only with snores in the manner of George McManus’s comic strip character Jiggs.
     Indeed the situation is no different with all acknowledged matters of taste. Not only art, but food, clothing, style in general is highly subjective. Is Greek retsina wine tasty? Are tattoos becoming? Is a huge SUV beautiful? There is no reasonable way to convince either opponents or proponents to change their attitudes.
     While some would be willing to concede that aesthetic judgments are not subject to proof, many would consider moral and ethical decisions a different matter. Most commonly, due to religious teachings which specifically resist rational investigation, requiring instead faith, people of various traditions claim an absolute, “revealed” certainty in their ethical precepts. Here is a clear case of the power of subjectivity. For internal intuitive reasons that cannot be conveyed to an unbeliever, the faithful accept dogmatic teachings.
     The fact is that, contrary to the claims of some religionists, an entirely adequate system of morality can be elaborated from a simple principle of self-interest. By a secular application of the Golden Rule the entire legal code can be constituted. But my own preference to shrink from theft in order not to worry about my neighbor’s thieving from me, while compelling in practical terms to govern my behavior, is not in fact universal. A considerable share of people do, in fact, steal. Plenty of medieval knights went campaigning for booty. Big businessmen steal from us all while thinking they are exemplary and “successful.” Further, these last examples point out the fact that individuals, ages, and cultures may have significant differences in their definition of theft. Even such an apparently self-evident and natural conclusion as the evil of slavery was never recognized by Moses, Plato, Aristotle, or Christ.
     Furthermore, ethics is clearly a matter between human beings, a social issue, not one related to Ultimate Reality in any way. The cosmos is indifferent to my conduct and any view that looks beyond the human sphere will see that morality does not exist in the Milky Way, only magnificent grandeur. The regulation of human behavior, though a critical element in making life livable, is wholly functional; it exists to accomplish a purpose and not for its own sake.
     Yet, if I might be considered in some ways to display “good behavior,” my motive is not to protect myself. In fact my actions are most generally shaped by a desire to look good if only in my own eyes. Base behavior is ugly; to act in a degraded fashion diminishes oneself. Generous-hearted and compassionate behavior, on the other hand, is beautiful; to act nobly is to become more comely. With eyes open to the phantasmagoria of this world, I selfishly seek to spend my time in the best possible way, keeping myself healthy, learning constantly, bathing in art, trying to deal sympathetically and magnanimously with the people I encounter. And for no other reason than that it feels right to me, it seems the more beautiful choice. I feel as though I react spontaneously and naturally to each choice. While I am quite aware that I have been taught a code of moral response to various situations, I nonetheless experience each decision as a fresh mover expressing my nature. Awareness of my earlier training does not eliminate or invalidate it, though I experience my moral, aesthetic, and culinary decisions as expressing myself, not replicating a formula.
     This should be hardly surprising. It is impossible to escape the subjectivity of our experience of reality. The images on my retina are transformed by strange and elaborate codes translating the activities of all those sub-atomic particles hovering in my office and looking so settled and inert as desks and books and rugs. It means nothing to ask what is real when one’s human consciousness cannot escape setting the parameters of the investigation.
     So we muddle on, making constant value judgments, almost always without conscious consideration, making fallible predictions, feeling our way through the darkness of our general ignorance. If one acquits oneself well, the reward must be in the performance, a graceful turn, a beneficent influence, a settled sense of self at day’s end. Just as some people define themselves through their postings of products on Pinterest, others may turn to Homer, but who is to say which is “best”? We can object if a stranger treads on our toes, but we cannot prescribe a code of morality as though it had absolute value.
     In this way ethical, gastronomic, and aesthetic decisions have much in common. Should a constellation formed of caritas and Beaujolais and Charlie Parker, one evening at a dinner party, cross that of mind-your-own-business and IPAs and Verdi, the two might cross-fertilize like the joyful reshuffling of genes or the vast drifting of galaxies and produce wholly new configurations.

The Mannerly Hedonist

     In the fifties James Olds and Peter Milner demonstrated that rats allowed to electrically stimulate a particular area of their brains, thought to be the “pleasure center,” would do so in preference to all other activities, including eating, to the point of exhaustion and finally death. This happened not only to rats with addictive personalities or those with insufficient self-discipline, but to all rats. How could it be otherwise? All creatures seek to avoid pain and to experience pleasure. I cannot tell to what extent the human brain might make a telling difference, but I feel as though, in their situation, I would prove more rat-like than angelic. Desire makes the world turn – whatever other motive could exist? From where could it come?

     Yet hedonism is less straightforward than it might seem. To begin with, it can lead to widely various decisions. In an address to the inmates at Cook County Jail (printed in Crime and Criminals), Clarence Darrow, the great defense attorney, says that the inmates, like himself, have regularly made the choices that seemed to them most likely to lead to happiness. For him it was attending law school; for them, perhaps, burglarizing a house. A man who thinks of the latter as his best opportunity needs, Darrow suggests, not some mystic moral regeneration, but more practical choices.
     Some would expect that, though the demise of the strung-out rodents did not deter their fellows from pursuing the same path to perdition, perhaps we two-leggers could imagine inevitable ill effects vividly enough to alter our compulsions. The implications of addiction, whether to over-eating, opiates, video games, money, romance, or power, suggest that such prudence is far from certain. Epicurus specifically taught his followers that the only way to increase happiness is to reduce desire. But can happiness exist without desire?
     In recent years the study of well-being has been quantified and researchers using the terms hedonic adaptation and then hedonic treadmill have indicated people’s experience of subjective well-being is highly relative. (I am thinking of Brickman and Campbell in the early seventies and then Eysenck in the nineties.) Not surprisingly, an individual in a given set of circumstances will feel satisfaction if the situation has slightly improved and dissatisfaction if it has recently declined. Such changes are temporary as the person adjusts to a new norm, reacting only when there is a fresh movement up or down. Some are happier than others, but this tends to correlate with permanent personality types more than outward conditions. Across a broad range of settings one will find populations with roughly the same distribution of happy and unhappy people. Those living with little feel no lack until they know of others with more, and even in a concentration camp people could have “good days.”
     On the other hand Socrates says in Plato’s Apology that even the King of Persia with his unlimited luxury and power still had “few” days or nights of net pleasure. The millionaire yearns to be a multi-millionaire, the privileged child becomes neurotic, the successful seducer seeks novelty, the CEO wishes to lead an even bigger corporation.
     An artist wishing to create a masterpiece may be miserable while a stamp collector may regularly enjoy more modest goals. The Buddhist pursues the big payoff of enlightenment, but perhaps that goal only sheds a more modest radiance on the small daily routines of everyday experience. The person with a satisfying marriage or a fulfilling job doubtless enjoys more net happiness than the high-stakes player who occasionally makes a hit.
     Human pleasure is often strategically based on a kind of speculative cost accounting. Though I might wish to snatch my neighbor’s venison haunch or Smartphone, I refrain from doing so if he will likewise leave my things alone. His mate may be desirable, but I expect I will find more suffering than delight in seizing her. To the Cyrenaics altruism led to pleasure. In this way nearly all moral choices may be rationalized, but human ingenuity devised a way to enhance the rewards of ethical behavior. The good person learns to feel satisfaction at doing good. The day can be a series of self-congratulations for the moral individual. The glow that even casual church-goers feel is distributed through the entire week. The selfish person is always meeting the challenges and the hostility that arises from less than open-hearted decisions and doubtless generates anxiety and apprehension, feeling isolation rather than support. The difference is central to the well-being of such a profoundly social animal as Homo sapiens.
     For the more subtle, the game goes on. Plato, in the myth of the ring of Gyges (Book II of the Republic, 359a–2.360d) posits the question of whether one might enjoy doing injustice were there no chance of being caught. For the philosopher at any rate (II, 612), virtue is its own reward because the soul is divine and it departs from its own nature when it accedes to vice. Given a continuous history of war and exploitation of others, it may seem dubious whether such a conviction has sustained many humans over the years, but the fact is that society is based on the voluntary cooperation of most people most of the time. Given the inherent selfishness of the ego, one can only conclude that this route seems most likely to bring happiness to such social animals as ourselves. No culture anywhere lacks moral rules; indeed, those of traditional societies are rigorous and demanding. To “break the law” in a small village would destroy one’s vital connections. Only a madman or one corrupted by the values of what passes for more advanced cultures would dare be a deviant.
     Religion has typically challenged the ego, asking for humility if not for the actual extinguishing of self. But surely the seeker after nirvana or heaven aims for pleasure. Mother Teresa lived the life she thought would give her the greatest joy. The Buddhist monk who told me a week ago, “Perhaps you will reach enlightenment before I do,” must have relished his own grace. The psychologists can tell us of people today who cut themselves for the good feeling that it brings.
     The definitive human skill is the manipulation of symbols; and naturally the practice of this ability gives us pleasure, pleasure of the same sort enjoyed by the house cat on the hunt. It is not the stomach full of mouse that the tabby pursues as much as the full feeling of felineness. For humans, the most common form of recreational symbolic play is conversation. Most people in the developed world experience constant stimulation by stories on television and film, lyric-like word strings in advertisements, graffiti, and bumper stickers, and a host of other inputs. With Smart phones and tablet computers, people tend even more today to be constantly absorbing symbolic patterns for the sheer fun of it. No single experience may be significant, but they supply themselves with an unending series of small and completely reliable satisfactions.
     As with the refined philosophical morality of the Platonist, there is the aesthete’s pleasure in sign-juggling, either as creator or consumer. Art is nothing if not the creation and consumption of symbolic structures for their own sake. The pleasures of decoding Chaucer’s Middle English, discerning the dance within the structure of an Elizabethan sonnet, recognizing the antecedents of a contemporary poet, feeling a minute thrill at a turn of phrase, every reader’s experience, somewhat different for each but always derived from the rich suggestibility of the text, all these joys of literature are joys indeed. The same, of course, is true of other arts and well beyond. In Heian Japan the sophisticated Fujiwara aristocrats competed in inventing new aesthetic delights like moon-viewing parties and other expressions of miyabi. One who cultivates a connoisseur’s taste whether in opera, wine, or NASCAR competitions, has simply learned how to obtain pleasures unavailable to all.
     The true hedonist, then, is no disordered dissolute boor, but the most moral, polite, and sociable of people, likely to be quick with a thank you note, well-versed in Beethoven quartets, perhaps holding a highly valued recipe for Thai tom yum soup. We cannot always dodge suffering, but we can always seek pleasure. If we share this tendency with the microbes, let us not lament the fact, but make the most of it. Finding ourselves waiting about in this anteroom of death, if we wish to pass our time in the best possible manner, we may find beautiful behavior and beautiful art more crucial to our well-being than promiscuity and intoxicants.

Two Passages from Marcus Aurelius

1.
     Marcus Aurelius is neither a sublime mystic nor a brilliant poet, but he is an admirable devotional writer. He convinces every reader of his sincerity, even of his humility, no mean trick for a Roman emperor, and he seems primarily concerned with stilling his own mind; indeed, he seems indeed to have called his volume Τὰ εἰς ἑαυτόν or To Himself. Christians were quite right to value this work; its attitude, though not its language and imagery, is strikingly similar to Thomas a Kempis in urging ego-sacrifice and acceptance as the highest wisdom.
     Yet, the philosophical and emotional differences are significant. Concerning the former, I will only note that, though Marcus intuitively accepts the quasi-theistic Logos, he consistently qualifies his comments by admitting that the more materialist Epicureans may in the end have it right. Though this may imply that Thomas embraces god more whole-heartedly, yet Marcus is the one for whom the world is illuminated, with divinity all about him, while Thomas focuses on his own shortcomings, the “fallen-ness” of the world, and the otherness of the divine.
     After reminding readers at the beginning of Book III of the fragility and brevity of life, Marcus pushes the point, adding that one must strive for enlightenment since, even before death, senility can destroy an individual’s mind. Immediately then, without transition, he moves into a glorious poetic passage that betrays the fundamental emotional origins of the joyful affirmation that underlies his philosophic posture.

It is necessary to pay close attention to those things consequent to nature’s changes which have each one a charm and an allure. Thus some splits appear in the crust of baking bread, and these have nothing to do with the baker’s plan, yet these have always a certain rightness and stir up a stronger desire for food. And also figs, when they are ripest, gape, and in overripe olives the very closeness to decay adds some beauty to the fruit, and the lion’s furrowed brow, and the foam from the mouths of a boar at bay, and many other things, which, if examined severally, seem far from fair in form, still, having developed closely following the principles of nature, these all help to adorn the world and attract the soul. Thus, if one has a feeling and deeper thoughts concerning the things that come to be in the cosmos, hardly any at all of the things that happen fail to be sweet.


2.
     This enthusiastic attitude is the more striking as he regularly goes beyond skepticism into what sounds like nihilism. In Book VII he compiles a list of metaphors for life reminiscent of Macbeth’s “Life's but a walking shadow . . . a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.” The Diamond Sutra offers a longer series: “like a tiny drop of dew, or a bubble floating in a stream; like a flash of lightning in a summer cloud, or a flickering lamp, an illusion, a phantom, or a dream.”
     I do not mean to suggest that these poetic assertions are precisely equivalent. Marcus’ metaphors form a unique semiotic field. It is useful to consider each separately. The notion of a “grand procession of empty bustle” suggests indeed the vacancy or vanity of “busy-ness,” but sets it against the magnificent pageant of existence. The theater metaphor (similar to Shakespeare’s Jaques saying “All the world’s a stage” or the implications of Calderón’s La vida es sueño) justifies his reminders to himself that, born an emperor, he must accept his lot no less than a peasant or a beast; one is, after all, simply playing a role. As a play, the human condition is presumably beautiful and absorbing, though it may be ultimately absurd. The animals come next, reminding the reader that a human has no greater place in the cosmos than they. And even then, after sheep and cattle, the image shifts following the interruption of the “contending spears” image, a neat representation of pushy egos. The zoological diminuendo then continues, first to puppies, then fish, then ants, then not mice merely, but little mice. The series concludes with the grim determinist metaphor of puppets. (Elsewhere, Marcus says our desires are what make us puppets.) The potentially bleak implications of this may seem to overwhelm the joy of apprehending the the Logos or World-Fire, but in fact, the final clauses warn against pride, admonishing the reader to be generous and great-hearted to others who may be less enlightened.

[Life is] a grand procession of empty bustle, action on a stage, flocks of sheep, herds of cattle, clatter of contending spears, a little bone tossed to puppies, bits of food tossed into a fishpond, the arduous labor of ants who carry great burdens, a scattering of little mice in all directions, puppets controlled with strings. It is necessary then to be gracious and not to show disdain, realizing that each has merit to the extent that those things do with which he occupies himself.