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Sunday, June 11, 2006
Dialectic - Enrich Your Word Power Edition
This is a philological footnote to Adam’s ‘contra contra’ dialectics post, below. (Perhaps this post at J&B is sufficient to establish my dialectical bona fides.)
The term dialektikos - dialectician - is a neologism that features prominently in Plato’s Republic, book VII and following. It is derived from ’dialektoi‘, the perfectly ordinary term for ‘conversation, arguing, discussion’. The Cratylus first introduces dialektikos as a term for ‘one who has mastered the techne of conversation’. This person will have the skill of telling whether name-givers have done their job right, just as ship’s pilots will have the skill of telling whether ship-builders have done their job right. (I don’t want to spoil the ending - it turns out he has access to the Forms - but things get pretty crazy round about post Book VII.)
Anyway, while I concur with Adam’s concern that dialectic is discourteous and egotistical, it is interesting to note that the first complaint about knee-jerk ‘no’ saying, as an ersatz, eristic substitute for true dialectic, comes in Book V:
How grand is the power of disputation, Glaucon. – Why?
Because, I said, many people fall into it unwittingly and think they are not disputing but conversing [dialectizing] because they cannot analyze their subject into its parts, but they pursue mere verbal contradictions of what has been said, thus engaging in a dispute [eristic] rather than a conversation [dialectic]. (454a)
Why am I writing this post? Because, by coincidence, I’m reading a book that talks about all this. A pretty good book, by Charles Kahn, Plato and the Socratic Dialogue: the Philosophical Use of a Literary Form [Amazon]. Let me just shift gears a bit, but it’s damned interesting ...
The first chapter discusses the so-called ‘minor socratics’ - Xenophon, Antisthenes, Phaedo, Eucleides and Arisitippus. It’s eye-opening. Writing socratikoi logoi - Socratic dialogues - was a minor, literary cottage industry, and Plato entered the field comparatively late. (Did you know that? Many people do not. It really ought to figure in our conception of Plato more than it does.) Let me just quote a bit:
In the first fifteen years after Socrates’ death, Antisthenes was probably regarded as the most important follower of Socrates. The dominant position of Plato, both as author and as leader of a school, was only established later, probably after 385 BC ... Antisthenes was a prodigious author. The catalogue of his works in Diogenes Laertius lists over sixty titles, some of which may represent very short pieces like the two extant display speeches Ajax and Odysseus. But others seem to be of considerable length, for example, three Proleptics on Justice and Courage, five books On Education, or on Names, four books On Opinion and Knowledge. At least nine of these works were in dialogue form. The range of subjects covered was very wide, from the discusion of Homer and poetry to topics in natural philosophy and philosophical method. Unfortunately, except for the two speeches mentioned, we have no substantial verbatim quotations. (pp. 9-10).
So much of Platonic scholarship is brilliant hallucination of sufficient textual basis for secure inferences about the whole Socrates/Plato thing, to console us for the sheer bummer that is losing all that stuff.
Comments
Strauss wrote three books on Xenophon. So one Plato scholar did not entirely ignore the Socratics. Does Kahn discuss Strauss?
Charles Kahn’s book on Heraclitus is great. Everyone should read it.
Certainly Xenophon comes in second, because we’ve actually GOT something. Kahn doesn’t actually spend more than a chapter on the minor Socratics, and he doesn’t mention Strauss. I’m not really faulting people for not writing about the others - how could they? They’ve got nothing. The problem is: we NEED them to understand some things that people insist on talking about, e.g. the relationship between Plato and Socrates. So we are just stuck. It’s impossible not to press on, try to see what you can see. But it’s a nigh forgone conclusion that if, suddenly, all this minor Socratic writing just showed up in the library, everything written about the Plato/Socrates relationship would acquire some new and fundamentally unanticipated angle. It’s sort of depressing.
John...it’s not at all surprising that “things get pretty crazy” later on in any given “Socratic” “dialogue”...as you yourself know - was it not you that coined the (entirely-apt) phrase “Socratic stooging” in a piece that I well-remember from the auld days before the (sainted) Valve?
So much for Platonic “dialectic” as (genuine) dialogue, eh?
The only reason we credit Plato/Socrates w/such as you note here, I’d say, is that the latter (mostly due to his key prose style - see Eric Havelock’s “Preface to Plato") managed to stamp his ideas on thought so successfully that earlier (and MUCH, much better thinkers, such as Democritus - see Eric Havelock’s seriously under-rated & out-of-print “The Liberal Temper in Greek Politics") were relegated to fragmentary status by history’s very dodgy selection processes…
Hell...do you REALLY think that Plato was the first to raise said complaint? Of course not...in which case, why raise the point? (especially w/out qualification). Crediting damn-well OBVIOUS stuff to Plato - and, I do mean obvious to all, not just obvious in retrospect (given our deep history in Platonic ways of thought - again, see Havelock) - simply disfigures our (potentially, far more enlightening) possible relations w/earlier thinkers that, today, are revealed to be far more useful to us than Plato could ever be!
And so...I think you really ought to have noted that a much bigger “bummer” was losing virtually all of the other sophists & the most thought-provoking pre-Socratics (a false distinction, by the way, to my mind). Because, when I, personally, look back at ancient Greek thought, it’s these that are the REAL loss...rather than Antisthenes & co…
all the best
my 5 pence
plato and all the footnote authors that came after him are hopelessly overrated.
since we can’t reconstruct the sophists’ teachings we will have to build them ourselves, and quick before this whole mess turns really ugly
“So much of Platonic scholarship is brilliant hallucination of sufficient textual basis for secure inferences about the whole Socrates/Plato thing, to console us for the sheer bummer that is losing all that stuff.” - John Holbo
Professional philosophers don’t miss the rest, in my experience. They should, but they won’t even read Xenophon, very sadly. First because the social context that Socrates had to adapt his teaching to crystal clear there - Xenophon never writes a word that isn’t intended to directly contradict one charge or other raised against Socrates. Second, because some bad arguments by Socrates, probably not badly mangled by Xenophon, slip through and tell us a great deal about how Socrates, as opposed to Plato, viewed the world.
But pro philosophers nowadays prefer to believe that Socrates was wearing a lab coat, not a toga, and reading Xenophon gets in the way of that, rather.
Interesting recent biographical highlight:
We found textual evidence that his daimonion was probably a simple partial seizure (SPS) of temporal lobe origin. It was a brief voice that usually prohibited Socrates from initiating certain actions. It started when he was a child, and it visited Socrates unpredictably. Moreover, we found at least two descriptions of Socrates’ unique behavior that are consistent with complex partial seizures (CPSs). The fact that Socrates had been experiencing both SPSs and CPSs periodically since childhood makes the diagnosis of temporal lobe epilepsy (TLE) likely.
Epilepsia. 2006 Mar;47(3):652-4.
Socrates and temporal lobe epilepsy: a pathographic diagnosis 2,400 years later.
Muramoto O, Englert WG.
Department of Neurology, Kaiser Permanente Northwest Division, Portland, Oregon
PMID: (pubmed.com ID) 16529635
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