DRAFT
990817 Revised 001129+220913
Handout for seminar 1999-11-10 on sabbatical background of
Platonic Theorizing for Information Technology
Platonic perspectives of IT-problems
by Kristo Ivanov
Umeå University, Department of Informatics, S-901 87 UMEÅ (Sweden).
Phone +46 90 7866030, Fax +46 90 7866550, E-mail:
kivanov@informatik.umu.se
©Kristo
Ivanov. Permission to make digital/hard copy of this work for personal or
educational use is granted provided that it is not done for profit or
commercial advantage, and notice is given of the source.
2.2. Master of many arts
2.3.
Dialectic: design of information vs of objects
2.6. Visualization & Virtual Reality
2.7. Body: senses and pleasures
2.8.
Bricolage, Improvisation, empirical pragmatic "Schön-paradox"
2.10. Use, participation, democracy
2.11.
Cultivation, care, hospitality
2.12. Market-client orientation
2.13. Money
2.14.
Consultancy
3. Thinking: Knowledge and information
3.2. The will
3.3.
Technique, tool-instruments
3.4. Pluralism, relativism, perspectives
3.5. Measurement against appearances and perception (VR)
3.6. Strong
visions supposed to be good visions?
3.7.
Metaphors vs definitions
3.8. Science
and scientific method
3.9. Figures of thought
3.10. Small
smart minds
3.11.
Against philosophy
3.12. System
3.12.11. Concluding commentary
4.1. Leisure
4.2.
Success: profit, power and ethics
4.3. Action
4.4.
Management and change
5.1. Socratic method, seminars, and mentorship
5.2. Basic
undergraduate education
5.3.
Teaching, learning, instructing
5.4. Writing
The endless cycle of idea and action,
Endless invention, endless experiment,
Brings knowledge of motion, but not of stillness;
Knowledge of speech, but not of silence;
Knowledge of words, and ignorance of the Word.
All our knowledge brings us nearer to our ignorance,
All our ignorance brings us nearer to death,
But nearness to death no nearer to God.
Where is the Life we have lost in living?
Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge?
Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?
1.1. The purpose of this confessional-working seminar
is the same as expressed in a couple of elaborated excerpts that were published
as Ivanov, K. (2000). Platonic information technology. Reading Plato: Cultural
influences and philosophical reflection on information and technology. In Proc.
of ISTAS 2000, IEEE Int. Symposium on Technology and Society, 6-8 September
2000, Rome, Italy (pp. 163-168). New York: IEEE Institute of Electrical and
Electronic Engineers' Society for Social Implications of Technology SSIT.
(Available here or here).
1.2. The understanding of information technology (IT)
and its spread starting from the industrial and post-industrial Western world
requires an understanding of both "information" and
"technology". Technology in its various historical mechanical,
electrical, and nuclear physical forms has been well studied. It is far less
known in its newer forms of bio-technology and information technology. Information
has been studied in its various contexts of information systems, information
management, artificial intelligence, and such. It has not, however, been
studied in its essence which would determine also the peculiar character of
information technology in its differentiation from other earlier known forms of
technology. Philosophy is needed also in order to make sense of the
proliferation of opinions about IT resulting from IT-theories, models, methods,
conceptual frameworks, and other loosely used terms in what appears to be a
relativistic pluralism which also may be a symptom of crisis of disparate
Western philosophical currents. Plato and Aristotle together with the
Judaeo-Christian thought, may be used as a more unified source of inspiration.
The two sections of this paper that follow this introduction consist of two
samples out of an ongoing study which starts from an integral reading of
Plato's collected works and present slightly edited excerpts out of these
works. They are completed with an analysis in the form of comments which show
the relevance of the texts for the definition and evaluation of information as
it is found in information technology, and its relation to the problems of
stability and change. In the subsequent section the criticism of Plato in a
recent study of science is briefly considered in order to confirm the
continuing relevance of Plato's thought.
1.3. With the drawing of this Love and voice of this
Calling
1.4. We shall not cease from exploration
1.5. And the end of all our exploring
1.6. Will be to arrive where we started
1.7. And know the place for the first time
1.8. The following commented headlines which are not
yet elaborated help also to explain the purposes of the text.
1.9. Thomas Stearns Eliot's quotations abobe are from
Eliot, T. S. (1963). Collected poems 1909-1962 . London and Boston: Faber and
Faber. They express aptly my sense of crisis triggered locally by the
development at the university in general and IT in particular, with the post-positivistic
systems trend being followed by marxian and design trends.
1.10. The continuity of my research with my earlier
documented research plans in the "Prefekttestamente" (Department
chairman's report and last will, seminar held on June 10th and 11th 1998, last
version of June 30 1998, item #8), which is to be found in my computer's
Public-folder or in our computer jupiter.informatik.umu.se, in the folders
<Gemensamma original> and <Ivanov>. A related relevant
background-document is the handout summarizing my seminar on our research
education "Seminar-FoUtb 980408" (held on April 8th 1998, revised
version 980501, esp. items # 5 and 7-9), also to be found in the above mentioned folders.
1.11. This and the following seminar(s) with
respective materials seen as trip report and sabbatical report.
1.12. After 40 years in the field, on technical,
psychological, and social basis, and after 30 years at academia. Present lack
of historical perspectives, even at a rough level like those advanced by
Ivanov, K. (1999), En enastående intellektuell gestalt, in J. De Geer (Ed.), Vänbok
till Tage Lindbom, Skellefteå: Norma.
1.13. My role: cf. political economics on
"comparative advantages". Cf. mainstream vs. counterpoint research,
with sacrifice of recurring empirical project work but with personal experience
of repeated equivalent empirical findings, "failures", etc.) Possible
integrative role of "university" which is being changed: research
group(s), cross-contact between advisors, range of department's graduate
competence.
1.14. The role of empiricism in my earlier career in
computer-supported engineering, manufacturing IT-business, and library.
Empirical research indicated different expressions of recurrent basic facts
that continue unexplained. Rediscovering of apparent irrationalities consistent
with application of my hypersystem approach (HySy) to explain e.g. different
conceptions and uses of Lotus Notes as network, database, wordprocessing into
spreadsheets. My dissertation still congruent with our latest research, in
addressing transperspectivity for the challenging of views and stimulating
imagination.
1.15. I am conscious of the puer-senex archetype
phenomenon in Hillman, J. (1979). Senex and puer: An aspect of the historical
and psychological present. In J. Hillman, et al. (Ed.), Puer papers (pp.
3-53). Irving, Texas: Spring. The import of aging.
1.16. Examples of weak uncritical scientific attitudes
in university research environments and faculty's previsions. Not only untrendy
"definitions". E.g. C-D courses attendance as function of quality vs
statistics, or success =popularity-demand or Alta-Vista hits or web-statistics
for visits of home-pages as indication of quality of web-design or of
scientific quality, analyze fluctuations of number of students demanding our
undergraduate education, or Churchman's vs. Simon's citation index, or the
former not having written about I.S. Ranking of universities, freedom of
research, affirmative action, nazist seminar. Internet economy or old
"administrativ data processing ADB" which still exists as at
strike-hit BNF in Paris (October 1998), airports and airline-bookings and in
quantitative methods as they appear in industry and business. An increasing
part of research goes to "web-design" and "experimenting"
with released software? Cf. the rhetorical counterquestion "do you, then,
prefer to minimize demand-statistics?"
1.17. My experience of mentorship and graduate
students' advisor: risk of becoming an encyclopedic consultant who edits executive
summaries and helps to streamline feasible dissertations? Gap towards PhD
colleagues who cannot bridge my wider gap towards undergraduate students, with
consequent difficulty to create midway study opportunities in final examination
work (C-D uppsatser). Cf. Platonic-Jungian lack of systematization. My
consciousness of, and prevision that the direction of my development would
widen the gap. An apparent gradual neglect of the "system approach"
in undergraduate literature in also mirroring this trend.
1.18. Empiricism and the present questioning of
philosophy in IT. Is "philosophy" useful and is it a philosophy in
the flesh which is empirically relevant or responsibly testable and based on
deep knowledge of what it criticizes? Cf. Habermasian technical, hermeneutic,
emancipatory (+Weltanschauung +existential) interests: my research as
"existential"?. Does philosophy reflect only
on words or also on bodily experiences. But: philosophy≈discussion on how to
think, including relation to empirical action and emotion, and to theology
≈discussion of ultimate presuppositions. (IT)-concepts vs. percepts, body vs.
mind. Importance of definitions (cf. the FRISCO report
www.wi.leidenuniv.nl/~verrynst/ frisco.html). E.g. design or creation, system
or whole, designer or legislator, interaction or motor response, body or
perception, creativity or change or innovation, technical bricolage or mythical
reflection, alignment or adaptation, practice or praxis or empiricism, experimenting
or experience "erfarenhet-upplevelse", theory or frameworks,
understanding or intelligence or learning, success or implemention,
illustration or example, image or figure of thought, perspectives or points of
view or views, parti-formats and representations, character and judgment, flow
and fitness, care or interest, cultivation or evolution, hospitality or trust,
project or organization (cf. Kallinikos' struggle in Technology and society,
etc.). And cf. gap between software practice and social thinking (vs.
software thinking and social practice?). Research empiricists as
"Sophists" opposing Socratic philosophy, or voyeuristic parasites of
doers who design and use the technology, or symptoms of empiricism of
"crisis" (Lindbom 1999)?
1.19. I am conscious of the dangers of "infinite
regress" (legitimate if no linear beginning, cf. Eliot-quotes &
Lindbom 1999) in following postromantic or postmodern design-civilization (in
Spengler's meaning) back to Nietzsche and Kant through Lyotard's Lessons on the
Analytics of the Sublime, and further back to Renaissance, Aquinas,
Aristoteles, Plato, And what about Eastern wisdom as applied in theorizing
about improvisation and intuition, or about bricolage and myths borrowed from
anthropology & ethnographic studies, etc? Why Kant not enough: less clear and
more polemical than Plato and Aristotle while he himself had the benefit of
their basis. The alternative is to be "seduced" by Kant in the sense
that to be able to follow him at all is a prohibitively heavy investment of
time with scanty possibilities to be able to prove him wrong as his critics
could try. And Kant is heavily used in legitimating aesthetic science.
1.20. Why Plato (and Aristotle): I could have tried to
create "executive summaries" through secondary sources like
encyclopedias or MacIntyre, A. (1998), A short history of ethics (chap.
8, pp. 85-109 "Postscript to Greek ethics"), or Rothenberg, D.
(1993), Hand's end: Technology and the limits of nature, or Mitcham, C.
(1994). Thinking through technology: The path between engineering and philosophy .
Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. (Esp. pp. 105ff, 228ff.), or Flusser,
V. (1999), The shape of things: A philosophy of design or his chapters
30-32 in his recent book in portuguese on Philosophical Fictions. But my
focus is not on ethics, nature vs. technology, or design in general but rather
in particular on information, knowledge & technique which must be
understood at a basic level.
1.21. Why Plato. Did we need heideggerian
"breakdown"? Understand how design, knowledge and technique was
conceived before the anglo-american word "design" was launched, and
why it became so attractive. Ferry's "Homo aestheticus" and or
Spengler's the "Decline of the West" seem to give a definite but
incomplete answer. Consider Jungian ego-inflation, or popularly assumed Kantian
autonomous intuitive "genius", bolstering "Faustian"
feelings of creativity. Avoidance of anxiety when relieved from responsibility
thanks to the legitimation provided by the encouragement to improvise and rely
on "experimenting" trial & error? Cf. Maffesoli, M. (1996), Éloge
de la raison sensible. Spengler's paradoxical recommendation would be to
forget second or third-rate social science as philosophizing, in favour of
satisfactorily good engineering, but this would be done within the frame of a
"decline of the West" which is far more problematic than Lindbom's Västerlandets
framväxt och kris (1999).
1.22. I wished I had had time, before philosophizing,
to write down and contribute my own (cf. Eliot quotes) views improving the
understanding and application of core concepts like "success" or
"design" of computer application or commenting constructively others'
work, books and seminars, as it is done in our latest departmental
dissertation. Such a task would also be a sort of empiricism. Cf. the reliance
of empirical work on Marx, Habermas, Heidegger, Wittgenstein, Claude
Lévi-Strauss, Foucault, Mark Johnson, Giddens, Ciborra, Orlikowski, Buchanan,
Maldonado, and their key-terms which easily get misused as catchwords. My
intention of synthesizing comments on our local graduate students' and
advisors' work was inhibited by delays and failures in satisfying my request
for feedback on others' most important personal references.
1.23. Why Plato: The roots of the design approach, are
not satisfactory in Buchanan, R. (1995). Rhetoric, humanism, and design. In R.
Buchanan, & V. Margolin (Ed.), Discovering design: Explorations in
design studies are not satisfactory. Ferry, L. (1993). Homo aestheticus : the invention of taste in the democratic age,
however, as well as the review of "romanticism" in Lindboms's Fallet
Tyskland (1988), addresses the aestheticizing philosophizing behind design,
and push the reader back to Plato, enabling to make sense of the political
discussions in e.g. Selle, G. (1973). Industriell formgivning: Sociala utopier och ideologier . Lund: Studentlitteratur.
(Orig. Ideologie und utopie des Design – Zur gesellschaftligen Theorie der
industriellen Formbebung.)
1.24. Why (not) Plato, in face of the absurdity of my
situation? The paradox confronting me, having to read hundreds of manuscript
pages saturated with references to many new fashionable trend-names renewed
every 5 years, while tens of top quality book await me
to be read in order for me to be able to orient my graduate students ≈instructors
of undergraduate students, and while I myself cannot expect to be read or
obeyed in my recommendations for readings.
1.25. Why Plato? Cf. increasing references to
pre-Socratics especially through Heidegger. Cf. also Plato's importance for
following discussions about Western thought and its technology (and its science
and technology) in e.g. Lindbom,Västerlandets
framväxt och kris.
1.26. Why Plato? Churchman has written in Plato's
style. Cf. the postgraduate and undergraduate & graduate students' frustration
and misunderstandings (e.g. that Churchman did not write on information
systems) when they have read text written in a Socratic style. And Socrates was
condemned to death!
1.27. Why Plato? Our historical ground for discussion
of what knowledge (or information) is or should be, as in "knowledge
management" (Ulrike Schultz's seminar 991012, and her suggestions on the
desirability of ignorance?).
1.28. Sense of crisis: the absurdity of the
"change"-trend, no standards and no extrapolation possibilities on
"growth", "progress" or "strategies".Cf.
"Top managers of big firms devote the bulk of their efforts to formulating
strategy, though there is remarkably little agreement about what it is" in
The Economist, (March 20th 1993, pp 80-81, 96), also in relation to
education and infinite regress of ex-post research.
1.29. My partial concern for the development of
postgraduate careers, perceived to be in direction of postmodern relativistic
pluralism and tolerance which can be tolerance which may be indifference or not
caring for closest colleagues' work, face to the alternative opportunities
opened by consensual net "communities". Why different and isolated
commitments? I realize the possible importance of esoterism as explained by
Lindbom (1999).
1.30. Why Plato: the search for bridges to ethical and
political discussion, through philosophy, to theology. But I do not mean that
"all" should be trying to do that.
1.31. Why Plato: if one means to take seriously the
requirement of dialogue and "understanding", and understanding nature
vs understanding others who challenge us because they are indeed radically
different from us, like in an ethnographic study of the "savage
mind", or being able to stand in or take in "different
perspectives". Cf. also the requirement of client – if not market –
orientation. It is a matter of different social organization, and different
mentality of people, like Tage Lindbom in his authorship, and the relationship
to "traditionalist conservatism" (cf. www.panix.com/~jk/trad.html). And
if we do not wish to read dead or old authors why should older people read
young authors if not as occasional daily news?
1.32. Why Plato: For understanding Kant's adduced
aesthetics which includes the "sublime" as mentioned by Simon
Niedenthal from från Art Center College of Design, on 991008 in the seminar on
ACCD: Six St. Jeromes. Notes on the Technology and Uses of Computer Lighting
Simulations. Also reference to the "philosopher king" by Victor
Kaptelinin and Hans-Erik Nissen in the seminar 991013 on the Dagstuhl
conference on the gap between social thinking and software practice.
1.33. Why Plato: possible solution to the paradox
implied by my judgment that it is not worthy at the available intellectual
level to try to review or criticize so many new trend-names arising among
different people in the field in general, and in our department in particular.
Consider the more advantageous alternative to try to write directly something
good and valid as motivated by trying to help (among others) the own community,
especially when it is not anymore, at advancing age, a question of trying to
make career by means of "socializing" publications. Implications for
teaching of students and for their own career planning, comparing with the
circle of young intellectuals around Tage Lindbom? Publish or perish or a third
way suggested also by my own or Lindbom's (90th birthday recently celebrated by
De Geer's editing of Vänbok published by Norma in Skellefteå, and by
Martin Lindström in Statsvetenskaplig Tidskrift nr. 2, 1997) or Richard
Matz's (Sammanbrott och gryning, Pan Norstedts 1971) or Vilém Flusser's
careers and "failures" by graduate students. Go through my selections
out of Plato, or Kant, or Tage Lindbom with special reference to IT, or go
through recently published trend-articles with school-building potential with
the purpose of submitting them to a severe critique?
1.34. Why Plato: enables and facilitates the review of
many interesting and relevant but problematic new books like chap. 30 on
"artistic vs. scientific creation" in Flusser's recent Philosophical
Fictions. It can be sign of cultural crisis if one perceives that an
understanding of Plato is necessary in order to understand why chapters 2-3 in
Lindbom (1999),Västerlandets framväxt och
kris , complete Ferry's explanation in his Homo Aestheticus of the
problems implicit in Flusser's thought which also is basis to his philosophy of
design in the newly published The shape of things-A philosophy of design.
1.35. Why Plato (and Aristotle): suspicion of increased
misunderstandings and misuse in IT-research by third-hand references to Kant
(through Makkreel), Heidegger (through Winograd), Aristotle (through Nussbaum),
but, symptomatically not to Plato, and this is done without even the
qualification of "Kantian", "Heideggerian" or
"Aristotelian" (as Churchman in The Design of I.S.).
1.36. Crisis: scientific-strategic cultural crisis
also in the paradoxical problem that academic refutation of many present and
emergent IT-schools of research is seen to require "empirical"
research which in turn requires economic and political basis which would
distort its nature and possibilities. Consider also that several approaches to
e.g. design may sometimes have a strong financing but report no common intellectual
background in the form of, for instance, common references. Cf. Dubuisson, S.,
& Hennion, A. (1997), Le design: L'objet dans l'usage: La relation
objet-usage-usager dans le travail de trois agences, Paris: Les Presses de
l'École de Mines, and R. Buchanan, & V. Margolin (Eds.) (1995), Discovering
design: Explorations in design studies . Chicago: The Univ. of Chicago Press. See also the
seldom acknowledged sense of crisis sometimes acknowledged as in Wigley, M.
(1998), Whatever happened to Total Design? in Harvard Design Magazine, (Summer),
18-25, also an example of a journal source which seems to be seldom referenced
in Scandinavia.
1.37. Crisis: why the "China twist" as
indicated in my Ivanov, K. (1997). Strategies and design for information
technology: Eastern or neo-romantic wholes, and the return to Western systems
and its later revised shorter version of the paper co-authored with Ciborra,
(1998). East and West of IS, in Proc. of ECIS'98. Cf. Flusser's hint of
the why of the China crisis twist on pp. 110 in his Philosophical Fictions.
The China-twist can also be the rebirth of a superficial or unconscious
Nietzsche-cult, as also apparent in the opposition intellect vs blood in
Spengler, O. (1981-1983/1918). The decline of the West - (2 Vols.) . New York: A.
Knopf.
1.38. Crisis: my attitude perhaps should have been the
same as at the beginning (1) of Jung's professional life according to his
auto-biographical notes. Not to teach (except in socratic dialectics?) until
one has something to say that is not only convincing but also corresponds to
own convictions.
1.39. My concern: unnoticed "deconstruction"
of the psyche and reason, and TV or VR as games and gambling vs programmatic
educational visualizations and playfulness. Cf. Sass, L. A. (1992). Madness
and modernism, New York: Basic Books, and Reichmann, S. (1993). Kulturen
utan Gud, Stockholm: Interskrift.
1.40. Why Plato and my way "on the shoulders of
giants": my dissertation results still holds, for instance, for
appreciating the "transperspectivity" of Mark Johnson, because it
happens to rests on the traditions of Western philosophy leading further to the
"romanticism" of Jung and of the I Ching (cf. the recent
"chinese" twist). From the unprofitable Jung and I Ching to the Bible
(and lately the Jerome Biblical Commentary) and theological matters clarified
by Plato and Aristotle, revived by equally unprofitable numerous books by T.
Lindbom. Your way is your choice of family and friends and determines who you
are to become through your choice of influences and where you want to go. Cf.
various metaphors of knowledge and their implications for
"pluralism". My perceived paradoxical sacrifice of "career"
or at least of "influence".
1.41. Why Plato: a better understanding of
Christianity related to science. Paul "Christianizes" Platonism, and
theological questions stand at the basis of an understanding of technology, cf.
especially Mitcham, C., & Grote, J. (Ed.) (1984), Theology and
technology: Essays in Christian analysis and exegesis. Lanham: University
Press of America. (Esp. pp. 3-42, 53-119, 193-225. Bibliography of 478
entries.)
1.42. Example of a modern "platonic"
problem: body-mind and Paul's anthropology: inability to observe the Mosaic law
stems in part from the carnal condition of a human being as sarkinos. What
does Paul mean by this? To explain, we must try to ascertain what he means by
soma, "body," sarx, "flesh," psyche, "soul,"
pneuma, "spirit," nous, "mind," and kardia,
"heart." In Brown, R. E., Fitzmyer, J. A., & Murphy, R. E. (Ed.)
(1993). The new Jerome biblical commentary. London: Geoffrey Chapman, p.
1406, and see also the essays on e.g. criticism, hermeneutics, and mythopoieic
thought, pp. 1135, 1146, 1288). Note that the structure of thought or of the
so-called mind is basic to the study of design processes especially if attempts
are done to keep them isolated from the social dimension of politics.
1.43. Beginning to summarize: my conception of my
responsibility in this university and this department: compare with
"comparative advantages" and "bottleneck" metaphors. Relate
to the comparative advantages of the university vs. of product development
departments of firms, consultancies, or technological or business schools.
Dialog with students.
1.44. My pedagogical problem: in contrast to others I
cannot expect that my students will read the litterature which I have used or
will have to use, and cannot expect help in my task. The dilemma of
experiencing insight with increasing burden of expressing extense thoughts with
decreasing physical energy, and at the same time avoiding to appear as
overbearing ("jantelagen") in a "democratic" environment
where, by sure, lip-service is paid to "personal silent knowledge"
and "bodily experience" but age and life in the body - experience do
not count so much. The consequent search for en "grundbult" (not in
Kenneth Ahl's spirit) or for a "main key". The "socratic"
dilemma of thought vs. political action (ref Churchman vs. Ackoff, or
Koestler's yogi vs. commissar, or Spengler's nietzschean intellect vs. blood).
Cf. crisis-consciousness.
1.45. My research attitude: Socratic, but Socrates was
condemned to death. Analog to a psychotherapeut or its modern successor, the
strategic consultant. Refer back to Eliot's quotations. and concerning my
future plans: I refer to my "prefekttestamente" and to October 2002.
1.46. So here I am, in the middle way, having had
twenty years–
1.47. Twenty years largely wasted, the years of
l'entre deux guerres–
1.48. Trying to learn to use words, and every attempt
1.49. Is a wholly new start, and a different kind of
failure
1.50. Because one has only learnt to get the better of
words
1.51. For the thing one no longer has to say, or the
way in which
1.52. One is no longer disposed to say it. And so each venture
1.53. Is a new beginning, a raid on the inarticulate
1.54. With shabby equipment always deteriorating
1.55. In the general mess of imprecision of feeling,
1.56. Undisciplined squads of emotion. And what there
is to conquer
1.57. By strength and submission, has already been
discovered
1.58. Once or twice, or several times, by men whom one
cannot hope
1.59. To emulate–but there is no competition–
1.60. There is only the fight to recover what has been
lost
1.61. And found and lost again and again: and now,
under conditions
1.62. That seems unpropitious. But perhaps neither
gain nor loss.
1.63. For us, there is only the trying. The rest is
not out business.
1.64. Some literature which was more closely studied
during the first months of the sabbatical (followed by the Plato's and
Aristotle's collected works):
1.65. Ferry, L. (1990). Homo aestheticus:
L'invention du goût á l'age démocratique . Paris: Grasset. (English trans.:
Homo aestheticus : the invention of taste in the
democratic age, trans. by Robert de Loaiza. Chicago :
The University of Chicago Press, 1993.)
1.66. Giovanni Paolo II. (1998). Fides et ratio:
Lettera enciclica circa i rapporti tra fede e ragione . Milano: Paoline. (English trans.
at http://www. vatican.va/holy_father/john_paul_ii/encyclicals/documents/hf_jp-ii_enc_15101998_fides-et-ratio_en.html),
1.67. Goffi, J.-Y. (1996). La philosophie de la technique . Paris: PUF (Que Sais-Je?). (2nd ed. First ed. 1988.)
1.68. Gras, A. (1997). Les macro-systèmes techniques .
Paris: PUF.
1.69. Kenny, A. (1993). Aquinas on mind . London and
New York: Routledge.
1.70. Maldonado, T. (1993). Reale e virtuale . Milano: Feltrinelli. (1st ed. 1992.)
1.71. In writing this paper I am conscious that it counters
a dominant attitude against philosophy in the scientific IT-community. This
attitude which also implies a dislike for older emphasis on definitions and
testing of validity claims is sometimes masked behind the requirement that a
legitimate philosophical interest be "empirically relevant". A
dislike for definitions is, for instance, expressed when somebody emprehends
empirical research on the use of IT for enhancing creativity in design without
bothering to define what is to be meant by creativity or by other substitute
words like imagination or fantasy. One hidden presupposition of such
requirement of empirical relevance seems often to be that there is no meaning
in requiring that empirical work be philosophically relevant or be evaluable
for its worth. Because of some reason it is philosophical work that must prove
its worth empirically, whatever that means when empiricism itself is not
supposed to be defined or questioned.
1.72. To the extent that we take the
anti-philosophical attitude seriously some insight into this conundrum is
supplied by a section of this paper dealing with "Against philosophy"
below, in Plato's own reflections over opposition to philosophy. Cf.
"Against philosophy" below. For the rest it may be noted that much of
design theory today with its emphasis on visualization, has an often unacknowledged dependence upon romantic philosophy.
Such dependence can be ignored in works that are framed in terms of so called cognitive science but it is clearly manifested in
cultural criticism which considers the present status of Western society with
reference to both romanticism and Greek philosophy. So, it is the case that
studies of the development of crisis of the West[1] dedicate whole chapters to Platonism and to Aristotle reminding the
readers that much of our IT-design theories are ignoring the political and
spiritual dimensions of design. Similar reminders on the importance of Plato
are to be got when studying romantic and post-Kantian philosophy that underscore
much of the thinking in IT-design in the context that is very relevant to the
present issue of researchers' responsibility.[2]
1.73. To make things more difficult in the
appreciation of this paper, "Platonic IT" may be interpreted as
analog to platonic love, which in the superficially popular version is equated
to a sort of nominal love without concretion and consequences. The answer to
such analogy will be to direct the reader to a better acquaintance with the
meaning of love in general, and platonic vs. so called erotic love in
particular, in order that the analogy gets its proper meaning.
1.74. This paper was written in the conviction that
the discipline of informatics, for all the assurances about the advent of
"the new informatics" which is a "design science", etc. is
in serious crisis which, however, is not necessarily deeper or more serious
than the crisis of Western thought in general. While fragmentation in different
and isolated schools is sometimes taken to be a mark of vitality and crativity,
it is very probable that the relative isolation of most of these schools,
depending upon hidden different presuppositions and upon inconsistens language
and terminology, is, rather, a sign of crisis. It is my belief that many presuppositions
can be made conscious, and language can be purified,
1.75. Isolated arguments that are quoted require to be
put in the context of the respective works, and of the total work by Plato.
1.76. Duplications of some paragraphs when they
forcefully can be said to belong to more than one section.
1.77. Edited text in order to make it more readable
without its context, while at the same time taking into
account that context.
1.78. I do not take a stand on the value of Plato's
thought for our contemporary problems but I assume it (with knowledge of, and
reference to, key contributions by post-Socratic Western philosophy, in
particular Kant's critique as reference point but not necessarily
"basis" for modern philosophy and late returns to pre-Socratic thought).
But note that mistakes were to great extent caused by limited power
(instruments) of observation that are now available thanks also to old work and
valid methods.
1.79. Plato about the dangers and limitations of
writing at all.
1.80. Empirical work as a drug delaying, especially in
academia, a normative critical appreciation and purposiveness of research.
1.81. "My anxiety will be not to convince my
audience, except incidentally, but to produce the strongest possible conviction
in myself."[3]
1.82. "But with the advance of age, when the soul
begins to attain its maturity, they should make its exercises more severe, and
when the bodily strength declines and they are past the age of political and
military service, then at last they should be given free range of the pasture
and do nothing but philosophize."[4]
1.83. Empirically relevant philosophy OK but
philosophically relevant empiricism? And what is "action"? How this
written material can be "applied"?
1.84. What "is" informatics?
1.85. Body and mind, + flesh and soul and spirit?
1.86. Definition ("game") and cognition vs
recognition (it can be something else than that I believe it to be).
1.87. Vico's language about bodily experiences
1.88. Reflection is about what has passed, vs.
flow≈phenomenological flux, ref Schütz≈Husserl+Bergson
2.1.1. Rhetoric is a creator of persuasion, the kind
of persuasion employed in the law courts and other gatherings, and claims to be
concerned with right and wrong. Rhetoric seems to possess almost superhuman
importance and includes then practically all other faculties under her control.
Teachers of rhetoric impart their instruction for just employment and they say
are not guilty of wrong employment of the skill [NEUTRAL TECHNIQUE]. The craft
is not for this reason evil or to blame, but, rather, those who make improper
use of it. But then there is a contradiction regarding the concern for right
and wrong. Rhetoric is then not an art but only a kind of routine and a knack
that produces gratification and pleasure, a part of an activity that includes
cookery and is but the occupation of a shrewd and enterprising spirit, and of
one naturally skilled in its dealings with men, a flattery. If one considers
that difference between apparent and real health of bodies and souls, sophistic
is to legislation what beautification is to gymnastics, and rhetoric is to
justice what cookery is to medicine. Sophist and rhetorician, working in the
same sphere and upon the same subject matter, tend to be confused with each
other. For if the body was under the control, not of the soul, but of itself,
and if cookery and medicine where not investigated and distinguished by the
soul, but the body instead gave the verdict, weighing them by the bodily
pleasures they offered, all things would be mingled in indiscriminate confusion
[PM]. Rhetoric is the counterpart in the soul of what cookery is to to the
body.[5]
2.1.2.1. Rhetoric is a textual equivalent to design
theory inasmuch the classical theory of design as represented by Vitruvius is
considered to have been formed as an adaptation of rhetoric to the needs of
architecture [REF BUCHANAN]. In approaches to design it has been pointed out
that it is important to check the quality of a particular design by appeal to
"the right feeling", to the experiencing of "flow", or to
the importance of trusting one's own feeling of conviction as an equivalent to
ethics, an ethics of personal conviction. The text above raises the need of a
definition or determination of the difference between such a feeling and sheer
conviction arising from persuasion. If we, furthermore, consider the late
appeals to the importance of the "body" or or perceptions in design
creativity then appears the question of whether such appeals to the body are
not theoretically a self-fulfilling prophecy in their justification of the
confusion between conviction by aesthetic pleasure of beautification, and
ethical "health". The body under the control of itself recalls also
the auto-poietic issue of self-reference where the criterion of survival is a
particular kind of pleasure (of survival) or avoidance of pain of the death
process. The observation that rhetoric is not an art but rather a kind of
routine or a knack (belief without knowledge) removes it further away from
science (belief with knowledge). The observation that rhetoric seems to possess
almost superhuman importance and includes practically all other faculties under
her control recalls the claims of design theory of being an all-encompassing
knowledge applicable to design of all things and organizations.
2.1.2.2. The reference to a "shrewd and
enterprising spirit, and of one naturally skilled in its dealings with
men" is to be related to what today in the so called
social competence that is expected and required from personnel dealing with
IT-projects and IT-research. Such a social competence is certainly a main
component in the formation of consensus in local subcultures of the modern
scientific pluralistic community, as well in the academic community at-large
where management by consensus is often equated to genuine democracy. The
observation that teachers of rhetoric impart their instruction for just
employment and they are not guilty of wrong employment of the skill, or that
the craft is not for this reason evil or to blame, but, rather, those who make
improper use of it recalls also the liberation of the shrewd and enterprising
IT-expert with his essentially instrumental technique from any ethical
responsibility in the application of his technique.
2.2.1. One supposes, as the name implies, that a
Sophist is one who has knowledge of wise things. One could say the same of painters
and builders, that they are those who have knowledge of wise things. But if
they were asked what sort of wisdom painters understand, we should reply,
wisdom concerned with the making of likenesss, and so on with the others. If
then we were asked what sort of wise things the Sophist has knowledge of, what
should we answer? Of what is he the master? The only answer we could give is
that he is master of the art of making clever speakers. It invites the further
question, On what matter does the Sophist make one a
clever speaker? Do you realize the sort of danger to which you are going to
expose your soul? The Sophist is really a merchant or peddler of the goods by
which a soul is nourished. So too those who take the various subjects of
knowledge from city to city, and offer them for sale retail to whoever wants
them, but it may be that some of these men also are ingorant of the beneficial
ot harmful effects on the soul of what they have for sale, and so too are those
who buy from them, unless one of them happens to be a physician of the soul. Indeed the risk you run in purchasing knowledge is much
greater than that in buying provisions. When you buy food and drink you can
carry it away from the shop in a receptacle, and before you receive it into
your body by eating or drinking you can store it away at home and take the
advice of an expert as to what you should eat and drink and what not, and how
much you should consume and when; so there is not much risk in the actual
purchase. But knowledge cannot be taken away in a parcel. When you have paid
for it you must receive it straight into the soul. You go away having learned
it and are benefited or harmed accordingly.[6][cf. NEGATIVE VALUE OF INFORMATION]
2.2.2. A phantom, for example, a painter, will paint
us a cobbler, a carpenter, and other craftsmen, though he himself has no
expertness in any of these arts. Nevertheless is he
werea good painter, by exhibiting at a distance his picture of a carpenter he
would deceive children and foolish men, and make them believe it to be a real
carpenter. And when anyone reports to us of someone that he has met a man who
knows all the crafts and everything else that men severally know [cf. AI
KNOWLEDGE-BASES], and that there is nothing that he does not know more exactly
than anybody else, out tacit rejoinder must be that he is a simple fellow, who
apparently has met some magician or sleight-of-hand man and imitator and has
been deceived by him into the belief that he is all-wise, because of his own inabiblity
tu put to the proof and distinguish knowledge, ignorance, and imitation.[7]
2.2.3. When one who is known by the name of a single
art appears to be the master of many, there is something wrong with this
appearance. If one has that impression of any art, plainly it is because one
cannot see clearly that feature of it in which all these forms of skill
converge [cf. VISUAL VR], and so one calls their possession by many names
instead of one. Suppose a man professed to know how to produce all things in
actual fact by a single form of skill, in some kind of play, like imitation.
The man who professes to be able by a singe form of skill, to produce all
things, when he creates with his pencil representations bearing the same name as
real things, he will be able to deceive the innocent minds of children, if he
shows them his drawings at a distance, into thinking that he is capable of
creating, in full reality, anything he chooses to make.Then we must exptect to
find a corresponding form of skill in the region of discourse, making it
possible to impose upon the young who are still far removed from the reality of
things, by means of words that cheat the ear, exhibiting images of all things
in a shadow play of discourse, so as to make them believe that they are hearing
the truth and that the speaker is in all matters the wisest of men. It is
inevitable that, after a long enough time, as these young hearers advance in
age, and, coming into closer touch with realities, are forced by experience to
apprehend things clearly as they are, most of them should abandon those former
beliefs, so that what seemed easy, difficult, and all the illusions created in
discourse will be completely overturned by the realities which encounter them
in the actual conduct of life.[8]
2.2.4. There are two forms of imitation. One art is
the making of likenesses. The perfect example of this consists in creating a
copy that conforms to the proportions of the original in all three dimensions,and giving moreover the proper color to every
part. The other form is of those sculptors or painters whose works are of
colossal size. If they were to reproduce the true proportions of a wellmade
figure [FERRY], the upper parts would look too small, and the lower too large,
because we see the one at a distance, the other close at hand. So artists, leaving truth to take care of itself, do in fact
put into the images they make, not the real proportions, but those that will
appear beautiful. The first kind of image, being like the original, may fairly
be called a likeness (icon). The other, the kind which only appears to be a
likeness of a well made figure because it is not seen
from a satisfactory point of view, but to a spectator with eyes that could
fully take in so large an object [SYSTEM] would not even like the original it
professes to resemble, we may call it a semblance (fantasma). We are faced with
an extremely difficult question. We are faced with an extremely difficult
question. This "appearing" or "seeming" without really
"being", and the saying of something which yet is not true – all
these expressions have always been and still are deeply involved in perplexity.
It is extremely hard to find correct terms in which one may say or think that
falsehoods have a real existence, without being caught in a contradiction by
the mere utterance of such words. [9] We ought to begin by studying
"reality" [VR] and finding out what those who use the word think it
stands for. One party affirms that real existence belongs only to that which
can be handled and offers resistance to the touch.
They define reality as the same thing as body. Their adversaries mantain that
true reality consists in certain intelligible and bodiless forms. In the clash of
argument they shatter and pulverize those bodies which their opponents wield,
and what those others allege to be true reality they call, not real being,but a sort of moving process of becoming [cf.CHANGE].
I suggest that anything has real being that is so constituted as to possess any
sort of power either to affect anything else or to be affected [PRAGMATISM]. I
am proposing as a mark to distinguish real things that they are nothing but
power. We have intercourse with the becoming by means of the body [BODY-CHANGE]
through sense, whereas we have intercourse with real being by means of of the
soul through reflection. Intercourse is the experiencing of an effect or the
production of one, arising, as the result of some power, from things that
encounter one another.[10]
2.3.1. The name of a thing is an instrument. When we
name we give information [INFORMATION DEF] to one another and
distinguish things according to their nature. Then a name is an instrument of
teaching and of distinguishing natures, as the shuttle is of distinguishing the
threads of a web. The weaver is the one who uses the shuttle well. When the
weaver uses the shuttle he will be using well the work
of the skilled carpenter. In an analog way the teacher who uses the name will
use the work of the maker of names, that is the legislator. When the carpenter
makes shuttles he will look to that which is naturally
fitted to act as a shuttle. And whatever shuttles are wanted, for the
manufacture of garments, thin or thick, of flaxen, woolen or other material,
all of them ought to have the true form [DESIGN] of the shuttle, whatever is
the shuttle best adapted to each kind of work, that ought to be the form that
the maker produces in each case. And the same holds of other instruments. When
a man has discovered the instrument which is naturally
adapted to each work, he must express this natural form, and not others
which fancies, in the material, whatever it may be, which he employs. The one
who is to determine whether the proper form is given to the shuttle, whatever
sort of wood may be used, is not the carpenter who makes, but the weaver who is
to use it. In an analog way he who will be best to direct the legislator in his
work will be [USER] the user, and this is he who knows how to ask
questions, that is a [SYSTEMS ANALYST-SYSTEMS PHILOSOPHER-DESIGNER] dialectician.
The work of the legislator is to give names, and the dialectician must be his director
if the names are to be rightly given. Things have names by nature, and not
every man is an artificer of names, but he only who looks to the name that each
thing by nature has, and is able to express the true forms of things in letters
and syllabes, that is the natural fitness of names [FLOW?].[11]
2.3.2. What is true about numbers, which must be just
what they are, or not be at all, does not apply to that which is qualitative
or to anything which is represented under an image. We must find some other principle
of truth in images, and also in names, and not insist that an image is no
longer an image [depiction, descritpion] when something is added or subtracted.
Images are very far from having qualities which are the exact counterpart of
the realities which they represent. The effect of names on things would be
ridiculous if they were exactly the same with them. For they would be the
doubles of them, and no one would be able to determine which were the names and
which the realities. Have the courage to admit that one name may be correctly
and another incorrectly given, and acknowledge that the thing may be named, and
described, so long as the general character [QUALITY AESTHETICS
SUBJECTIVE VS. QUANTITATIVE] of the thing which you are describing is retained.
We must find some new notion of correctness of names or representations of
things.[12]
2.3.3. The nobler and clearer way to learn things is
not to learn of the images, but to learn of the truth. How real existence is to
be studied or discovered is, we suspect, beyond us, but we admit so much, that
the knowledge of things is not to be derived from names. They must be
investigated in themselves. Let us not be imposed upon by the appearance of a multitude
of names given under the mistaken opinion of the idea that all things are in
motion and flux [PM PLURALISM]. Having fallen into a kind of whirlpool
themselves, the givers of names are carried round and want to drag us in after
them. Then let us seek the true beauty, not asking whether a face is fair, or
anything of that sort [DESIGN], for all such things appear to be in flux, but
let us ask whether the true beauty is not always beautiful.[13]
2.3.4.1. Information technology seen as an instrument
is closer to the instrumentality of names, of giving information, rather than
the instrumentality of conventional technology as expressed in, say, the
shuttle for the weaver. The maker of names is the legislator but the user who
must direct his work is the dialectician who knows how to ask questions. In the
IT-field the maker or "carpenter" of names is the designer who
knows the relation between form and material and knows how to expresses the
form in the material, but the determiner of the natural form adapted to the
particular work will be the educated dialectical philosoper-user who knows how
to ask questions. The blurring of information with other techniques and of the
different roles under the name of designer, combined with a distrust if not
outright rejection of philosophy in design amounts to a turning of systems
analysts into either uneducated users who do not know
how to ask questions socially, relying rather on their own intuition, or into
maker technicians who assume that the forms have been rightly determined. The
integration of dialectics in the design of information systems was shown in
dialectical inquiring systems[14], but its disregard in the more recent trend of design theory coupled to
emphasis on perception, body, and (political or social) "practice"
indicates a regress into the subjectivistic thinking of variants of empiricism
and postmodernism.[15]
2.3.4.2. The text above goes further in remarking that
too many of today's philosophers and strategists of adaptation to
"change", in their search after the nature of things, get dizzy from
constantly going round and round, imagining that the
world is going round and round and moving in all directions, and that this
appearance, which arises out of their own internal condition, they suppose to
be a reality of nature. "Having fallen into a kind of whirlpool
themselves, the givers of names are carried round and want to drag us in after
them": this appears to be an apt description of our postmodern trends
towards pluralism, flexibility and change, where IT has often proved to be
inimical to necessary change and, yet, is hoped to enable us to cope with
change.
2.3.4.3. The discussion that follows, concerning the
nature of representations, textual or visual, recalls the question of names or
words, and images. The apparent rigor of mathematical or "depictive"
representations is rejected in favor of textual and qualitative representations
which, in any case, are necessary but are not to be confused with the truth of
the thing. The requirement that we must find some new notion of correctness of
names or representations of things seems to be a prelude to our newly
discovered aesthetic dimension in, for instance, virtual reality. The
difference, of course, is that in Plato's text the importance of this sort of
representation does not obfuscate the severe requirement of distinguishing
between virtual and real, or, we could say with Singer, between ideal and real[16], in the name of multiple
perspectives which claim to substitute the Kantian "thing in itself".
The final appeal to investigate the things in themselves seems to be a welcomed
humble recognition of the need of some sort of phenomenology. The humility of
the expectation, contrary to contemporary brands of phenomenology is, however,
expressed in the statement that "how real existence is to be studied or
discovered is, we suspect, beyond us, but we admit so much, that the knowledge
of things is not to be derived from names".
2.4.1. Let us create a city from the beginning, in our
theory. Its real creator, as it appears, will be our needs: food, housing,
raiment, etc. One man is naturally fitted for one task, and another for
another. If one lets slip the right season, the favorable moment [IMPROVISATION
KAIROS LATOUR-CIBORRA-CHINA] in any task, the work is spoiled. The result, then
is that more things are produced, and better and more easily when one man performs
one task according to his nature at the right moment [DIVISION OF WORK, KAIROS,
TAYLOR, ADAM SMITH], and at leisure from other occupations. [SYSTEM][17]
2.4.2. The true state – the healthy state, as it were
– will aim at the satisfaction of legitimate needs. But if we contemplate a
fevered state, couches will have to be added thereto, and tables, and other
furniture, yes, and relishes and myrrh and incense and girls and cakes. And the
requirements we first mentioned, houses and garments and shoes, will no longer
be confined to necessities, but we must set painting to work and ombroidery,
and procure gold and ivory and similar adornments. For that healthy state is no
longer sufficient, but we must proceed to swell out its bulk and fill it up
with a multitude of things that exceed the requirements of necessity in states,
as, for example, the entire class of huntsmen, and the imitators, many of them
occupied with figures and colors and many with music – the poets and their assistants,
rhapsodists, actors, chorus dancers, contractors – and the manufacturing of all
kinds of articles, especially those that have to do with women's adornment.[18]
2.4.3. There is no man whose natural endowments will
ensure that he shall both discern what is good for mankind as a community and
invariably te both able and willing to put the good into practice when he has
perceived it. If ever, by God's mercy, a man were born
with the capacity to attain this perception, he would need no laws, to govern
him. No law or ordinance whatever has the right to sovereignty over true
knowledge. But as things are, such insight is nowhere to be met with, except in
faint vestiges, and so we have to choose the second best, ordinance and law. Now
they can consider most cases and provide for them, but not all. The different
cases are countless and their circumstances are widely unlike. So it is equally impossible to leave everything to the
discretion of the courts and to leave nothing. One issue, indeed, we cannot
avoid leaving to their discretion in all cases, that of the occurrence or
nonoccurrence of the alleged event. The question, then, is which are the points
to be thus dealt with by statute, and which should be entrusted to a court's
discretion.[19][DESIGN SUBJECTIVE JUDGMENT,
IMPORTANCE OF FACTS VS POSITIVIST & MEASURE OF NEEDS VS DESIRES]
2.4.4.1. This introduces the design of a city in the
"Republic", and points to a basic theory of design which – like the
design of the human body in Timaeus[20] – is remarkably different from other theories of design that have been
launched in the IT-field[21]. For one, is takes its starting point in an enumeration of needs or, in
a certain sense, is teleological, aiming at necessary vs. desired goals or
objectives. The various needs represent in turn as many "subsystems"
whose exchanges include economics. We find there also the pristine recognition
of a principle of systemic division of work and skill which today is
"democratically" supposed to be uniformly distributed or is brushed
away as "Tayloristic" in favour of the pre-industrial noble artisan
skills. It is important to observe that the design of a "city" is
closer to the design of an information system in its social och human context
than the design of an inanimate object seen as a tool or an artefact.
2.4.4.2. The reference to the "fevered
state" introduces, in one way, considerations of what could be called
aesthetics but is, rather, closer to the attractions of consumerism and to
certain brands of "client-market orientation". Legitimate aesthetics
as such is properly acknowledged and considered in other contexts labeled often
as beauty[22].
2.5.1. The primary classes of men are three, the
philosopher or lover of wisdom, the lover of victory, and the lover of gain
[MARX]. And there are three forms of pleasure, corresponding repectively to
each. The financier will affirm that in comparison with profit the pelasure of
honor or of learning are of no value except in so far as they produce money.
The lover of honor regards the pleasure that comes from money as vulgar and
low, and again that of learning, save in so far as the knowledge confers honor,
mere fume and moonshine. And the philosopher will think that these pleasures
are far removed from the true pleasure of knowing the truth and the reality,
and being always occupied with that while he learns. He will call them the
pleasures of necessity [CF NEED VS DESIRE - OF PLEASURE AESTHETICS], since he
would have no use for them if necessity were not laid upon him. Since there is
contention between the several types of pleasure and the lives themselves, not
merely as to which is the more honorable or the more base,
or the worse or the better, but which is actually the more pleasurable or free
from pain, how could we determine which ot them speaks most truly? If things
are to be judged rightly they must judged by experience,
intelligence, and discussion. The philosopher must needs
taste of the other two kinds of pleasure from childhood, but the lover of gain
is not only under no necessity of tasting or experiencing the sweetness of the
pleasure of learning the true natures of things, but he cannot easily do so
even if he desires and is eager for it. The lover of wisdom, then surpasses the
lover of gain in experience of both kinds of pleasure. And honor, if the three
classes of men achieve their several objects, attends them all so that all are
acquainted with the kind of pleasure that honor brings, but it is impossible
for anyone except the lover of wisdom to have savored the delight that the
contemplation of true being and reality brings. Then, as so far as experience
goes, he is the best judge of the three. And, again, he is the only one whose
experience [EXPERIENCE SENSATION PRACTICE] will have been accompanied by
intelligence. And yet again, that which is the instrument of judgment, words
and discussion, is the instrument mainly of the philosopher. Now, if wealth and
profit, or if honor, victory and courage were the best criteria by which things
are judged, the things praised and censured by the lover of gain or by the
lover of honor and victory would necessarily be truest and most real. But since
the tests are experience and wisdom and discussion, it follows that the things
approved by the lover of wisdom and discussion are mos valid and true.[23]
2.5.2. The mind contemplates some things through its
own instrumentality, others through the bodily faculties [VR BODY]. Existence,
likeness and unlikeness and sameness and difference, and about 'honorable' and
'dishonorable' and good and bad, those again seem to me, above all, to be
things whose being is considered, one in comparison with another, by the mind,
when it reflects within itself upon the past and the present with an eye to the
future [IMPROVISATION PRAGMATISM]. The hardness of something hard and the
softness of something soft will be perceived by the mind through touch, but
their existence and the fact that they both exist, and their contrariety to one
another and again the existence of this contrariety are things that the mind
itself undertakes to judge for us, when it reflects upon them and compares one
with another. It is not true, then, that whereas all the impressions which
penetrate to the mind through the body are things which men and animals alike
are naturally constituted to perceive from the moment of birth, reflections
about them with respect to their existence and usefulness only come, if they
come at all, with difficulty through a long and troublesome process of
education? It is impossible to reach truth when cannot reach existence, and if
a man cannot reach the truth of a thing, he cannot possibly know that thing. If
that is so, knowledge does not reside in the impressions, but in our reflection
upon them. It is there, seemingly, and not in the impressions, that it is
possible to grasp existence and truth. Then, perception [PERCEPTION] and
knowledge cannot possibly be the same thing. And knowledge cannot be said to be
judgment as a whole, because there is false judgment, but perhaps true judgment
is knowledge.[24] [NO CONCLUSION, BUT STILL TRUTH VS.
"LESSONS", KNOWLEDGE MGMT X DEF?]
2.5.3. In the case of objects one does not know and
has never perceived, there is, it seems, no possibility of error or false
judgment, but it is precisely in the field of objects both known and perceived
that judgment turns and twists about and proves false or true–true when it
brings impressions straight from their proper imprints, false when it
misdirects them crosswise to the wrong imprint.[cf.
MEMORY RECALL PERCEPTION]. The difference between true and wrong judgment is said
to arise in the following way. When a man has in his mind a good thick slab of
wax, smooth and kneaded to the right consistency, and the impressions that come
through the senses are stamped on these tables of the "heart"–Homer's
word hints at the mind's likeness to wax–then the imprints are clear and deep
enough to last a long time. Such people are quick to learn and also have good
memories, and besides they do not interchange the imprints of their perceptions
but think truly. These imprints being distinct and well spaced are quickly
assigned to their several stamps–the 'real things' as they are called–and such
men are siaid to be clever. When a person has what the poet's wisdom commends
as a 'shaggy heart', or when the block is muddy or made of impure wax, or
oversoft or hard, the people with soft wax are quick to learn, but forgetful,
those with hard wax the reverse. Where it is shaggy or rough, a gritty kind of
stuff containing a lot of earth or dirt, the impressions obtained are
indistinct; so are they when the stuff is hard, for they have no depth.
Impressions in soft wax also are indistinct, because they melt together and
soon become blurred. [PRECISION-ACCURACY AVH] And if, besides this, they
overlap through being crowded together into some wretched little narrow mind
[NARROWMIND], they are still more indistinct. All these types, then are likely
to judge falsely. When they see or hear or think of something, they cannot
quickly assign things to their several imprints. Because they are so slow and sort
things into the wrong places, they constantly see and hear and think amiss, and
we say they are mistaken about things and stupid....We must account for false
judgments in some other way than as the misfitting ot thought and perception,
and we must describe what knowing is like, and what knowledge is.[25]
2.5.4. Well, thinking and discourse are the same
thing, except that what we call thinking is, precisely, the inward dialoge
carried on by the mind with itself without spoken sound, whereas the stream
which flows from the mind through the lips with sound is called discourse. And
further, assertion and denial occur is discourse. When this occurs in the mind
in the course of silent thinking [TACIT KNOWLEDGE], we call it judgment [JUDGMENT].
Judgment occurs not independently but by means of perception; the only right
name for such a state of mind is 'appearing' [FLOW NOTITIA]. Well, then, since
we have seen that there is a true and false statement, and of these mental
processes we have found thinking to be a dialogue of the mind with itself, and
judgment to be the conclusion of thinking, and what we mean by 'it appears' a
blend of perception and judgment [AESTHETICS], it follows that these also,
being of the same nature as statement, must be, some of them and on some
occasion, false.[26]
2.5.5. Though a person holding any opinion at all must
hold in in fact, yet it might sometimes have reference to what was not a fact,
either of the present, the past, or the future. And there, I think, lay the
source of our false opinion, of our holding opinions falsely. Well then, should
we not ascribe a corresponding condition, as regards these references, to pains
and pleasures? I mean, that though anyone who feels pleasure at all, no matter
how groundless it be, always really feels that pleasure; yet sometimes it has
no reference to any present or past fact, while in many cases, perhaps in most,
it has reference to what never will be a fact. And the same principle will hold
good in respect to fear, anger, and all such feelings, namely that all of them
are sometimes false.[27][AESTHETICS & VS FEELINGS ALWAYS RIGHT ≈COTTINGHAM]
2.5.6. We may take it that any human being is one
person, but one person who has within himself, as a pair of unwise and
conflicting counselors, whose names are pleasure and pain. He has, besides,
anticipations of the future, and these of two sorts. The connom name for both
sorts is expectation, the special name for anticipation of pain being fear,
and for anticipation of its opposite, confidence. [HOPE]And on the tops
of all, there is judgment, to discern which of these states is better or
worse, and when judgment takes the form of a public decision of a city, it has
the name of law. Let us look at the whole matter in some such light as this.[THINKING METAPHOR] We may imagine that each of us
living creatures is a puppet made by gods, possibly as a plaything, or possibly
with some more serious purpose. That, indeed, is more than we can tell, but one
thing is certain. These interior states are, so to say, the cords, or strings,
by which we are worked; they are opposed to one another, and pull us with
opposite tensions in the direction of opposite actions, and therin lies the
division of virtue from vice. In fact, so says our argument, a man must always
yield to one of these tensions without resistance, but pull [CF WILL] against
all other strings–must yield, that is, to that golden and hallowed drawing of
judgment which goes by the name of the public law of the city. [VS POSTMODERN
SUBJECTIVITY] The other are hard and ironlike, it soft, as befits gold, whereas
they resemble very various substances. So a man must
always co-operate with the noble drawing of law, for judgment, though a noble
thing, is as gentle as free from violence as noble, whence its drawing needs
supporters, if the gold within us is to prevail over the other stuff. In this
wise our moral fable of the human puppets will find its fulfillment. It will
also become somewhat clearer, first, what is meant by selfconquest and
self-defeat, and next that the individual's duty is to understand the true
doctrine of these tensions and live in obedience to it, the city's
to accept this doctrine from god, or from the human discoverer, and make it law
for her converse with herself and other societies. This will lead us to a more
exact articulation both of vice and of virtue, and the elucidation of the
subject will presumably throw further light on education and institutions at
large.[28]
2.5.7. The chief value of all things which have an
attendant charm lies in this mere charm itself [AESTHETICS], in their rightness
in some sense, or, finally, in their utility. For example, meat and drink, and
articles of nutriment generally, are attended bu a charm which we call flavor.
As to rightness and utility, it is precisely what we call wholesomeness of the
various viands which is also their true rightness. Again, the act of learning
if attended by a charm, a gusto, but it is the truth of what is learned which
gives it its rightness and utility, its goodness and nobility. [PED LEARN≠LEARN
RIGHT] And of the various arts of imitation which work by producing likenesses,
if they are so far successful in giving rise to an attendant pleasure, charm
will be the right name for it, whereas their rightness depends not on their
pleasantness, but on accurate correspondence in quality and magnitude. Thus,
the only case in which it will be right to make pleasure our standard of judgment
is that of a performance which provides us with neither utility, nor truth, not
resemblance, though, of course, it must do us no harm either. It will be an
activity practiced solely with a view to this concomitant charm, which is very
properly called pleasure, unattended by any of the results just specified. We
can also use the name play for it in cases where it does neither harm nor good
worth taking into serious account[29].[WHY AESTHETIC VR-PLAY]
2.5.8. A man's feeling of pleasure, or his erroneous
belief, is never a proper standard by which to judge of any representation and
proportionality. [VS AESTHETICS] Since music [MUSIC≈≈] is an art of producing
likenesses or representations, citizens should aim not at a music which is pleasing,
but at one which is right. A man who is to make no mistake of judgement about a
particular production must, in every case, understand what that production is.
If he does not understand what it is, what it is meant for, or of what it in
fact an image, [IMAGE VISION] it will be a long time before he will discern the
rightness or wrongness in the artist's purpose. One who is to be an intelligent
judge of any representation, whether in drawing, in music,or
in any other branch or art, must have three qualifications. He must understand,
first, what the object reproduced is, next, how correctly, and third and last,
how well a given representation has been effected, in
point of language, melody, or rhythm.[30]
2.5.9. When a poet takes his seat on the Muse's
tripod, his judgment takes leave of him. He is like a fountain which gives free
course to the rush of its waters [IMAGINATIVE CREATIVITY], and since
representation is of the essence of his art, must often contradict his own utterances
in his presentations of contrasted characters, without knowing whether the
truth is on the side of this speaker or of that. Now it is not the legislator's
business in his law to make two such statements about one and the same topic,
he has regularly to deliver himself of one pronouncement on one matter.[31][VS DIALECTIC CONTRADICTIONS]
2.5.10.1. The statement that "Again, the act of learning
if attended by a charm, a gusto, but it is the truth of what is learned which
gives it its rightness and utility, its goodness and nobility" explains
why, when it is ignored, it easy to fall into the remarkable attitude of seeing
learning, vaguely associated with creativity, as a good in itself. Learning,
like creativity, is regarded as a good in itself, disregarding whether what is
learnt or created is a good or bad, right or wrong thing.
2.5.10.2. There are clear tendencies in late
theoretization of the design of computer artifacts to appeal to the importance
of good design of play, improvisation, bricolage, and such. In the light
of the text above, play being "the only case in which it will be right to
make pleasure our standard of judgment" it can be the case that such
tendencies are fostered by the attraction of procuring pleasure to the
disadvantage of genuine ethical concerns. Alternative but equivalent
explanations of the tendencies are to be found in the emphasis on the
"body" with its sensory pleasures or stimulations of an undefined
creativity.[32] Another alternative is the belief
in an immanent order of nature that does away with the need of a purposeful
intelligence behind nature or behind "naturally" found human
organizations: teleology, immanent as well external, is dispensable, and
totally non-telic processes of chance variations come to characterize what it
called evolutionary thinking[33].
2.5.10.3. Ultimately these discussions correspond to
the controveries about the place of aesthetics in relation to information,
knowledge, and ethical action, where the problematic Kantian approach in the
third critique (of judgment) needs to be critically appreciated in the light of
new readings of Plato's work.[34]
2.6.1. It is indeed no trifling task, but very
difficult to realize that there is in every soul an organ or instrument of
knowledge that is purified and kindled afresh by such studies [of the science
of arithmetic, geometry, and astronomy] when it has been destroyed and blinded
by our ordinary pursuits, a faculty whose preservation outweighs ten thousand
eyes.[35]
2.6.2. Tragic poetry and all other imitative arts seem
to be a corruption of the mind of all who do not possess as an antidote a
knowledge of its real nature. In considering what imitation is, taking, for
example, couches or tables, there are three couches, made by the painter, the
carpenter or cabinetmaker, and [the idea] God. Painting is directed to the
imitation of appearance as it appears, and not of reality as it is. It is an
imitation of a phantasm, not of truth. The mimetic art is far removed from the
truth, and this is the reason why it can produce everything, because it touches
or lays hold of only a small part of the object. [VS VR (MOST VISUAL)
MOBILIZATION OF SENSE PERCEPTION EMBODIED COGNITION] A phantom, for example, a
painter, will paint us a cobbler, a carpenter, and other craftsmen, though he
himself has no expertness in any of these arts. Nevertheless
is he were a good painter, by exhibiting at a distance his picture of a
carpenter he would deceive children and foolish men, and make them believe it
to be a real carpenter.[36]
2.6.3. The poet himself, knowing nothing but how to
imitate, lays on with words and phrases the colors of the several arts in such
a fashion that others equally ignorant, who see things only through words, will
deem his words most excellent, whether they speak in rhythm, meter, and harmony
about cobbling or generalship or anything whatever. So mighty is the spell that
these adornments [AESTHETIC] naturally exercise[37].
2.6.4. There are three arts concerned with everything,
[DESIGN SYSTEM] the user's art, the maker's, and the imitator's.
The beauty, the rightness of every implement, living thing, [NONHUMAN] and
action refer solely to the use [USE] for which each is made or by nature
adapted [DARWIN?]. The user, possessing knowledge, reports about the goodness
or the badness of anything he knows most by experience, and the maker,
believing, will make it. The maker will then have right belief, [MAKER
≈SYSANALYST/PROGRAMMER ≠DESIGNER] but the user will have true knowledge. The
imitator [VR] will have neither knowledge from experience of whether the thing
is or is not beautiful and right, nor will he have right opinion from
compulsory association with the user who knows. [CONSULTANT] Then the imitator
will neither know nor opine rightly concerning the beauty or the badness of his
imitations, but the thing he will imitate will be the thing that appears
beautiful to the ignorant multitude. His imitation will be a form of play, not
to be taken seriously.[38]
2.6.5. This business of imitation is then concerned
with the third remove from truth, and its function and potency is related to
the element in man, or part of the soul that reasons and calculates. The same
things appear bent and straight to those who view them in water and out, or
concave and convex, owing to similar errors of vision about colors, and there
is obviously every confusion of this sort in our souls. [FERRY AESTHETICS VS
VR] And so scene painting in its exploitation of this weakness of our nature
falls nothing short of witchcraft, and so do jugglery and many other such
contrivances. Measuring and numbering and weighing proved to be most gracious
aids to prevent the domination in our soul of the apparently greater or less or
more or heavier, and to give control to that which has reckoned and numbered or
even weighed, i.e. the function of part of the soul that reasons and
calculates.[39]
2.6.6. This isolation of everything from everything
else [VS SYS] means a complete abolition of all discourse, for any discourse we
can have owes its existence to the weaving together of forms. We have next to
consider whether 'not being' blends with thinking and discourse. If it does not
blend with them, everything must be true, but if it does, we shall have false
thinking and discourse, and if falsity exists, deception is possible. And once
deception exists, images and likenesses and appearance will be everywhere
rampant.[40]
2.6.7. We got hold of, and expressed, the idea that
gold is beautiful or not beautiful according as it is placed in an appropriate
setting, and similarly with everything else to which this qualification can be
added. Now consider this appropriateness, [AESTHETICS] and reflect on the
general nature of the appropriate, and see whether it might not be beauty. The
question if whether we define the appropriate as that which by its presence
causes the things in which it becomes present to appear beautiful, or
causes them to be beautiful, or neither. If it is that which makes
things to appear beautiful. But then the appropriate is a kind of fraud in
relation to beauty. If the appropriate causes things both to be and to appear
beautiful, then it is our conclusion that all established usages and all
practices which are beautiful are regarded as beautiful by all men, [KANT
AESTHETIC TASTE] and always appear so to them, while we think the exact
opposite, that ignorance of them is prevalent, and that these are the chief of
all objects of contention and fighting, both between individuals and between
states. Ignorance would not prevail if the appearance of beauty were but added
to such usages and practices and moreover caused them to appear as well
as be beautiful. It follows that if the appropriate is that which causes
things to be in fact beautiful, then it would be that beauty for which we are
looking, but still it would not be that which causes them to appear beautiful.
If, on the other hand, that which causes things to appear beautiful is the
appropriate, it is not that beauty for which we are looking. That for which we
are looking makes things beautiful, but the same cause never could make things
both appear and be either beautiful of anything else. [KANT AESTHETIC BRIDGE]
Let then instead assume that whatever is useful is beautiful, [FUNTIONALISM]
since we do not say that eyes are beautiful when they appear to be without the
faculty of sight, but when they have this faculty. [FUNCTIONALISM] Similarly we
say that the whole body is beautifully made, sometimes for running, sometimes
for wrestling, and we speak in the same way of all animals. A beautiful horse,
or cock, or quail, and all utensils, and means of transport both on land and on
sea, merchant vessels and ships of war, and all instruments of music and of the
arts generally, and if you like, practices and laws–we apply the word
'beautiful' to practically all these in the same manner. In each case we take
as our criterion the natural constitution or the workmanship or the form of
enactment, and whetever is useful we call beautiful in that respect in which is
is useful and for the purpose for which and at the time at which it is useful.
And that which has the power to achieve its specific purpose is useful for that
purpose. Then power is a beautiful thing, and the lack of it ugly????[p. 1549 -
§295e][41]
2.6.8.1. These statements expose a theory of art and
aesthetics that became more controversial after Kant. In any case the theory of
appearance as related to reality which is highly relevant to work in visual
rality (VR) is far from resolved in present conceptions of aesthetics or their
simplifications in design theory with references to improvisation, pluralistic
perspectives, viewpoints, frameworks, and such[42]. That "mimetic art is far removed from the truth, and this is the
reason why it can produce everything, because it touches or lays hold of only a
small part of the object" is highly relevant to computerization in general
where it is sometimes wrongly equated with "cognitivization" or
narrow use of only the cognitive faculties of the soul. Such conception of mind
is indeed a "corruption of the mind of all who do not possess as an
antidote a knowledge of its real nature" or, does not have an adequate
definition of cognition as related feeling and intuition and to other faculties
of the soul or mind. Measuring and numbering and weighing which
"proved to be most gracious aids to prevent the domination in our soul of
the apparently greater or less or more or heavier" have been reduced, in
many computer applications to only numbering, applied to implicit models that
are sheer assumed images of reality. In visual interfaces and virtual reality
numbering, represented by cartesian analytic geometry, is further masked and
further removed from reality with an appeal to aesthetic intuition and assumed
rightness of feeling.[43]The statement that "a good painter, by exhibiting at a distance his
picture of a carpenter he would deceive children and foolish men, and make them
believe it to be a real carpenter" is relevant to the discussion on expert
systems, the implication being that the imitation of an expert tends to be most
successful with children and foolish men that lack a critical appreciation of
reality[44].
2.6.8.2. The statement that there are three arts
concerned with everything, the user's art, the maker's, and the imitator's, is
interesting not only for its problematization of the absent
"designer" but also for its conclusion that the maker will then have
right belief, but the user will have true knowledge. The playing down of truth
in our postmodern and late theories of design amounts then to a questioning of
the knowledge of the user, while at the same time the designer claims to be a
self-appointed representative of the user, if not also of the maker. This is
consistent also with the abandonment in the IT-field of Marxist theories of
users and their political representation – not to mention the connections with
design theories of "Arts and crafts" and "Bauhaus" – in
favor of rhetoric emphasis on skill and design. If the designer is equated with
the role of imitator (of users and makers) then design reveals itself close if
not identical to sophistry.
2.7.1. Those who have no experience of wisdom and
virtue but are ever devoted to feastings and that sort of thing are swept
downward, it seems, and back tothe center, and so sway and roam to and fro
throughout their lives, but have never transcended all this and turned their
eyes to the true upper region nor been wafted there, not ever been really
filled with real things, nor ever tasted stable and pure pleasure, but with
eyes ever bent upon the earth and heads bowed down over their tables, they
feast like cattle, grazing and copulating ever greedy for more of these
delights, and in their greed kicking and butting one another with horns and hoofs
of iron they slay one another in sateless avidity, because they are vainly
striving to satisfy with things that are not real the unreal and incontinent
part of their souls.[45]
2.8.1. I maintain that medicine is under the sole
direction of the god of love, as are also the gymnastic and the agronomic arts
[cf. cultivation-bricolage]. And it must be obvious that the same holds good of
music–which is, perhaps, what Heraclitus meant us to understand by the rather
cryptic pronouncement 'The one in conflict with itself is held together, like
the harmony of the bow and of the lyre.' Of course it
is absurd to speak of harmony as being in conflict, or arising out of elements
which are still conflicting, but perhaps he meant that the art of music was to
create harmony by resolving the discord between the treble and the bass. There
is a kind of discord which it is not impossible to resolve, and here we may effect a harmony–as, for instance, we produce rhythm by
resolving the difference between fast and slow. And just as the concord of the
body was brought about by the art of medicine, so this other harmony is due to
the art of music, as the creator of mutual love and sympathy. And so we may describe music too, as a science of love, or of
desire–in this case in relation to harmony and rhythm. It is easy enough to
distinguish the principle of Love in this rhythmic and harmonic union, nor is
there so far any question of Love's dichotomy. But
when we come to the application of rhythm and harmony to human activities–as
for instance the composition of a song, or the instruction of others in the
correct performance of airs and measures which have already been composed–then
we meet with difficulties which call for expert handling. And this brings us to
the conclusion that we are justified in yielding to the desires of the
temperate–and of the intemperate in so far as such compliance will tend to
sober them, and to this Love we must hold fast, for he is the fair and heavenly
one. But as for that other, the earthy Love, whatever we have to do with him we
must be very careful not to add the evils of excess to the enjoyment of th
pleasures he affords–just as, in my own profession, it is an important part of
our duties to regulate the pleasures of the table so that we may enjoy our
meals without being the worse for them. And so in
music, in medicine, and in every activity, whether sacred or profane, we must
do our utmost to distinguish the two kinds of Love, for you may be sure that
they will both be there.[46]
2.8.2. God is altogether simple and true in deed and
word, and neither changes himself nor deceives others by visions or words or
the sending of sings in waking or in dreams. This is our second norm or canon
for speech and poetry about the gods–that neither are they wizards in shape
shifting [JUNGIAN TRICKSTER] nor do they mislead us by falsehoods in words or
deed. Furthermore, if our guardians of the state are to be brave, we must
extend our prescription of their education to include the sayings that will
make them least likely to fear death. [cf. JULLIEN CHINA MANIPULATION] We must
exercise supervision in matters of tales about the underworld, over those who supply
them and request them not to dispraise in a
undiscriminating fashion the life in it.[47]
2.8.3. The overseers of our state must cleave and be
watchful against its insensible corruption. They must throughout be watchful
against innovation in music and gymnastics counter to the established order,
and to the best of their power guard against them, fearing that anyone says
that that song is most regarded among men 'which hovers newest on the singer's
lips', lest haply it be supposed that the poet means not new songs but a new
way of song and is commending this. But we must not praise that sort of thing
nor conceive it to be the poet's meaning. For a change to a new type of music
is something to beware as a hazard of all our fortunes. For the modes of
music are never disturbed without unsettling of the most fundamental political
and social conventions.[48]
2.8.4. Whenever we have to accord praise or blame to
an argument on the score of its lengh of its brevity we must never forget the
second section of the art of measuring, and it is this standard we must always
apply in judgments like these–the standard of suitability [FITNESS-RIGHT
FEELING]. But even "suitability" is not in every case an adequate
criterion. For instance, we shall not look for such length in an argument as is
'suitable' for giving pleasure, except as a very incidental consideration.
Again, ease and speed in reaching the answer to the problem propounded are most
commendable, but our principle requires that this be only a secondary, not a
primary reason for commending an argument. What we must value first and
foremost, above all else, is the philosophical method itself, and this consists
in ability to divide according to real forms. If, therefore, either a
full-length statement of an argument or an unusually brief one leaves the
hearer more able to find real forms, it is this presentation of it which must
be diligently carried through; there must be no expression of annoyance at its
length or at its brevity as the case may be. Furthermore, if we find a man who
criticizes the length of an argument while a discussion like the present one is
in progress and refuses to wait for the proper rounding-off of the process of
reasoning, he is not to be permitted to escape thus with a mere grumble that
'these discussions are long drawn out'; he must be required to support his
grumble with a proof that a briefer statement fo the case would have left him
and his fellow disputants better philosophers, more able to demonstrate real
truth by reasoned argument. Blame and praise on other grounds, aimed at other
merely incidental traits in our discourse, we must simply ignore and act as
though we had not heard them at all.[49]
2.8.5. We may divide the knowledge involved in our
studies into technical knowledge, and that concerned with education and
culture. Then taking the technical knowledge employed in handicraft, let us
consider whether one division is more closely concerned with knowledge, and the
other less so. We should then mark off the superior types of knowledge in the
several crafts. If, for instance, from any craft you substract the element of
numbering, measuring, and weighing, the remainder will be almost negligible.
For after doing so, what you would have left would be be guesswork and the
exercise of your senses on a basis of experience and rule of thumb, involving
the use of that ability to make lucky shots which is commonly accorded the
title of art or craft, when it has consolidated its position by dint of
industrious practice. We find plenty of it, to take one instance, in music,
medicine, agriculture, navigation, and military science. Building, however,
makes a considerable use of measures and instruments,and
the remarkable exactness thus attained makes it more scientific that most sorts
of knowledge. Let us then divide the arts and crafts so called into two
classes, those akin to music in their activities and those akin to carpentry,
the two classes being marked by a lesser and a greater degree of exactness,
respectively. We find fixity, purity, truth, and what we have called perfect
clarity in those things that are always, unchanged, unaltered, and free from
all admixture, or in what is most akin to them. Everything else must be called
inferior and of secondary importance. The names of reason and intelligence,
that command the greatest respect can be properly established in usage as
precisely appropriate to thought whose object is true being. Then, here, we
have at hand the ingredients, intelligence and pleasure ready to be mixed, in
the materials in which, or out of which, we as builders are to build our
structure. But to mix with reason the pleasures that always go with folly and
all other manner of evil would surely be the most senseless act for one who
desired to see a mixture and fusion as fair and peaceable, so that he might try
to learn from it what the good is, and what form he should divine it to
possess. In our present discussion we have then created what might be called an
incorporeal oredered system [cf. SYSTEM] for the rightful control of a
corporeal substance in which dwells a soul. But any compound, whatever it be,
that does not by some means or other exhibit measure and proportion, is the
ruin both of its ingredients and of itself. So now we find that the good has
taken refuge in the character of the beautiful [cf. ethics vs. aesthetics], for
the qualities of measure and proportion invariably, I imagine, constitute
beauty and excellence. And of course we said that truth
was included along with these qualities in the mixture. Then if we cannot hunt
down the good under a single form, let us secure it by the conjunction of
three, beauty, proportion, and truth, and then, regarding these three as one,
let us assert that that may most properly be held to determine the
qualities of the mixture, and that because that is good the mixture itself has
become so. Is it then pleasure or intelligence that is more akin to the highest
good? If we examine each of our three forms, beauty-truth-measuredness,
separately in relation to pleasure and reason, we will find that reason is the
more akin to truth. The first possession is secured for everlasting tenure
somewhere in the region of measure–of what is measured or appropriate, or whatever
term may be deemed to denote that kind of quality. The second lies int the
region of what is proportioned and beautiful, and what is perfect and
satisfying–whatever terms denote that kind of quality. If we put reason and
intelligence third, you won't be very wide of the truth. Nor again, if beside
these three you put as fourth what we have recognized as belonging to the soul
itself, sciences and arts and what we called right opinions, inasmuch as these
are more akin than pleasure to the good. And as fifth, the pleasures which we
recognize and discriminate as painless, calling them pure pleasures of the soul
iself–some attaching to knowledge, others to sensation. Reason has been found
ever so much nearer and more aking than pleasure to the character of the
victor, and pleasure will take fifth place. An not
first place, no, not even if all the oxen and horses and every other animal
that exists tells us so by their pursuit of pleasure. It is the animals on
which the multitudes rely, just as deviners rely on birds, when they decide
that pleasures are of the first importance to our living a good life, and
supposed that animals' desires are authoritative evidence, rather than those
desires that are known to reasoned argument, divining the truth of this and that
by the power of the Muse of philosophy.[50]
2.8.6. One who is to be an intelligent judge of any
representation, whether in drawing, in music,or in any
other branch or art, must have three qualifications. He must understand, first,
what the object reproduced is, next, how correctly, and third and last, how
well a given representation has been effected, in
point of language, melody, or rhythm. Now we must not omit the full explanation
of the difficulty of music. There is much talk about musical imagery than about
any other kind, and this is the very reason why such imagery demands more
cautious scrutiny than any other. It is here that error is at once more
dangerous, as it encourages morally bad dispositions, and most difficult to detect,
because our poets are not altogether on the level of the Muses themselves. They
would never make a pretended presentation of a single theme out of a medley of
human voices, animal cries, and noises of machinery. Whereas our mere human
poets tend to be only too fond of provoking the contempt of those of us who, in
the phrase of Orpheus, are 'ripe for delight', by this kind of senseless and
complicated confusion. In fact, not only do we see confusion of this kind, but
our poets go still further. They divorce rhythm and figure from melody, by
giving metrical form to bare discourse, and melody and rhythm from words, by
their employment of cithara and flute without vocal accompaniment, though it si
the hardest of tasks to discover what such wordless rhythm and tune signify, or
what model worth considering they represent. Nay, we are driven to the
conclusion that all this so popular employment of cithara or flute, not
subordinated to the control of dance or song for the display of speed and
virtuosity, and the reproduction of the cries of animals, is in the worst of
bad taste; the use of either as an independent instrument is no better than
unmusical legerdemain. So much for the theory of the thing. But, after all, the
question for ourselves is what kind of music our citizens are to practice, not
what they are to avoid. The general public are simply ridiculous in their
belief that men are adequate judges of what is good or otherwise in melody and
rhythm, if they have merely been drilled into singing the flute and marching in
step, though it never occurs to them that they do the acts without
understanding anything about hem. Whereas, of course, any tune is correct if it
has the proper constituents, incorrect if it has unsuitable ones. [51]
2.8.7. One type of physician treats us, when we call
him in, in one way, and a second in another–but let us remind ourselves of the
difference between the two methods. There are physicians, and again there are
physicians' assistants, whom we also speak of as physicians. All bear the name,
whether free men or slaves who gain their professional knowledge by watching
their masters and obeying their directions in empirical fashion, not in the
scientific way in which free men learn their art and teach it to their pupils.
You have observed that as there are slaves as well as free men among the
patients of our communities, the slaves, to speak generally, are treated by
slaves, who pay them a hurried visit, or receive them in dispensaries. A
physician of this kind never gives a servant any account of his complaint, nor
asks him for any; he gives him some empirical injunction with an air of
finished knowledge, in the brusque fashion of a dictator, and then is off in
hot haste to the next ailing servant–that is how he lightens his master's
medical labors for him. The free practitioner, who, for the most part attends
free men, treats their diseases by going into them thoroughly from the
beginning in a scientific way, and takes the patient and his family into his confidence.
Thus the learns something from the sufferers, and at
the same time instructs the invalid to the best of his powers. He does not give
his prescriptions until he has won the patient's support, and when he has done
so, he steadily aims at producing complete restoration to health by persuading
the sufferer into compliance. [cf. participation-implementation]. Now, which of
the two methods is that of the better physician or director of bodily regimen?
That which effects the same result by a twofold process or that which employs a
single process, the worse of the two, and exasperates its subject?[52]
2.8.8. That was no unhappy simile by which we liken
all existing legislation to the treatment of unfree patients by unfree
physicians. You may be sure that were one of these empirical practitioners of
the healing art, so innocent of the theory of it, to discover a free physician
conversing with his free patient, to hear him talking almost like a
philosopher, tracing the disorder to its source, reviewing the whole system
[SYSTEM] of human physiology, his merriment would be instantaneous and loud.
His language would be no other than that which comes so pat from the lips of
our so-styled physicians. This is not to treat the patient, fool, but to
educate him–as though he wanted to be made a medical man, not to recover its
health! The speaker might be in the right of it,if
only he also understood that any man who treats of law in the atyle we are now
adopting, means to educate his fellow citizens rather than to lay down the law
to them. We are fortunate in our present position, because we are under no
obligation to lay down the law. We are free to pursue our own reflections on
all points of political theory, to ask either what would be the ideally best
legislation, or what is indispensably requisite as a minimum. We are not in the
position of the stateman driven by the stress of some dire necessity to produce
his laws on the instant, because tomorrow will be too late. Our case, is more
like that of a stonemason os some such workers at the beginning of their
operations. We are free to collect our materials in the mass before we proceed
to select those which will suit the future construction, and we can make the
selection itself at our leisure. So we will take
ourselves to be erecting or present edifice, not under pressure, but with
undiminished leisure to lay up some of our material for future employment while
we work the rest into our fabric. Thus we may rightly
think of our body of law as composed partly of statutes actually imposed,
partly of material for statutes. At all events, our digest of law will be more
scientific, and we will give serious attention to the compositions of others.[53]
2.8.9. If one slay a free man
by one's own act but the deed be done in passion, there are, first, two
cases to be distinguished. It is an act of passion when a man is done away with
on the impulse of the moment [IMPROVISATION], by blows or the like, suddenly
and without any previous purpose to kill, and remorse instantly follows on the
act. It is also an act of passion when a man is roused by insult in words or
dishonoring gestures, pursues his revenge, and ends by taking a life with
purpose to slay and without subsequent remorse for the deed. I take it we
cannot treat these as two distinct forms of homicide; both may afirly be said
to be due to passion and to be partially involuntary [cf. WILL]. Not but what
each of them has a resemblance to one extreme. The man who nurses his passion
and takes his revenge not at the moment and on the spot ,
but afterwards and of set purpose, bears a resemblance to the deliberate
manslayer. He who does not bottle up his wrath but expends it all at once, on
the spot, without premeditation, is like the involuntary homicide; still we
cannot say that even he is altogether an involuntary agent, though he is like
one. Hence the difficulty of deciding whether homicides of passion should be
treated in law as intentional or, in some sense, unintentional. However the best and soundest procedure is to class each
sort with that which it resembles, discriminating the one from the other by the
presence or absence of premeditation, and legally visiting the slaughter where
there is premeditation as well as angry feeling with a severer, that which is
committed on the spur of the moment and without purpose aforethought with a
milder, sentence. That which is like the graver crime should receive the graver
punishment, that which resembles the lighter, a lighter.[54]
2.8.10. No law or ordinance whatever has the right to
sovereignty over true knowledge. 'Tis is a sin that understanding should be any
creature's subject or servant; its place is to be ruler of all, if only it is
indeed, as it ought to be, genuine and free. But, as things are, such insight
is nowhere to be met with, except in faint vestiges, ans so we have to choose
the second bes, ordinance and law. Now they can consider most cases and provide
for them, but not all, and this is why I have said what I have. You and I are
about to fix the penalty of fine to be inflicted on him who wounds another or
does him a hurt. Now it is, of course, a proper and obvious comment to make at
this point, to say, Wounds? Yes, but wounds whom, and where and how and when?
The different cases are countless and their circumstances are widely unlike. So it is equally impossible to leave everything to the
discretion of the courts and to leave nothing. One issue, indeed, we cannot
avoid leaving to their discretion in all cases, that of occurrence or
nonoccurrence of the alleged event. In a state where the courts of law are
poor-spirited and inarticulate, where their members keep their convictions to
themselves and reach their verdict by a secret vote, where, worst of all, they
do not even listen to the case in silence, the legislator is compelled to
restrict the court's discretion and to do most the work himself by express
statute. But in a community where the constitution of the courts is thoroughly
sound, it will be entirely right and fitting that they should be allowed a wide
discretion in assessing the fines or other penalties of offenders, but an
outline of the law with samples of penalties should be set before the judges as
a model to keep them from any infringement of the bounds of right.[55]
2.8.11. In our inquiry on how to get wisdom it eludes
us altogether as soon as we turn to any of the branches of understanding that
make up the so-called arts, forms of understanding, or other such fancied
sciences. The production of barley and wheat and the making of food from them
will never make a man wholly wise. It is not so much from science as from a
native instinct implanted by God that we all seem to have taken the soil in
hand. We may say so much of building in its various forms, and the manufacture
of all sorts of furniture, smithwork, carpentry, pottery, weaving, and equally
of the provision of tools of every sort; all this is serviceable enough, but
its is not imputed as virtue. It is true, again, of the chase in all its forms.
The art of the prophet or his interpreter, again, fails us, he knows only what
his oracle says–whether it is true is more than he can tell. Now since our
necessities are provided by art, but by arts none of which can make a man wise,
all that is left over is play, imitative play for the most part, but of no
serious worth. For imitation is effected by a great
variety of instruments, and likewise of attitudes and those none too dignified,
of the body itself in declamation and the different forms of music and all the
offshoots of the art in drawing with the numerous variegated patterns they
produce in fluid or solid mediums, but none of these branches of imitation
makes the practitioner in the least wise, no matter how earnestly he labors.
When all is done, what is left on our hands proves to be defense, of a host of
clients by a host of means. Its most highly considered and most comprenhensive
form, the science of war stands highest in repute for its usefulness, but is most
dependent on good fortune, and, from the nature of the case, is assigned rather
to courage than to wisdom. As for what is known as the art of medicine, it is
also a form of defense. But none of their devices can bestow reputation for the
truest wisdom; they are at sea on an ocean of fanciful conjecture, without
reduction to rule. We may also give the name to defender to sea captains, but
none of them know of the fury or kindness of the winds, and that is the
knowledge coveted by every navigator. Nor yet can we give the title to those
who profess to defend us by their eloquence in the law courts, and devote
themselves to a study of human character based on memories and empirical
fancies, while they are far astray from true comprehension of genuine rights.
We have still left one claimant to the title of wisdom–a curious capacity which
would commonly be spoken rather as native endowment than as wisdom–that seen in
the man who learns whatever he studies with facility, has a capacious and
trustworthy memory, recalls the relevant and appropriate steps in every
situation, and does do without delay. All this will be ascribed by some to a
native endowment, by others to wisdom, by others to natural sagacity, but no
right-judging man will ever consent to call a person wise on the strength of
any of these gifts. And yet there must be some knowledge or other, the
possession whereof will bestow wisdom which is wisdom. Then, we must begin for
preference, if only we can find a single name for it, by stating what wisdom this
is which we hold to be wisdom indeed. As a second best
course, if the other prove quite impossible, we must say what and how many are
the forms of wisdom by gaining which a man will be wise by our account of the
matter. The next, we can raise no objection if our legislator goes on to an
imaginative presentation of the gods nobler and better thant hose which have
been given in the past. He may make the adoration of them, so to say, a noble
pasttime, and so pass his own life in worshipping them.[56]
2.8.12.1. The consideration of music in resolving
conflicts recalls the late interest for bricolage, play and improvisation, not
the least musical improvisation in jazz, or in dance, as a sort of theorizing
in IT and design. What this text in its shortness shows is the possibility of a
different, deeper theorizing that the one which has been present in IT, in the
sense that the emphasis on music appears as an alternative to the emphasis on
architecture which has been common in IT, and Plato doe not show in this
context of musical "aesthetics" his usual diffidence towards
imitative aesthetics. At the same time, however, "improvisation" has
not a self-evident legitimate place in this context as is often claimed in the
jazz improvisation adduced in IT, while play has its legitimate place, but as
in the sense of playing music, not of playing games[57]- Improvisation is indeed outright banned insofar it be equated to
"innovation". The text suggests further a necessary differentiation
between more superficial "fun" and legitimate aesthetic appreciation
as in the differentiation between two different types of love.
2.8.12.2. What appears here is the well-knows priority
established by Platon for mathematics, geometry and astronomy, and the
religious soul over the body and other empirical knowledge, as well as the
diffidence towards aesthetics as represented by the so-called imitative arts.
Such a statement will sharpen the possible understanding and evaluation of the
Kantian and post-Kantian romantic or postmodern conceptions of aesthetics and
their further applications to the relation to science in general, and IT in
particular. The diffidence towards ad-hoc empirical knowledge or so-called silent
knowledge can still stand today when the ambitions of such forms of knowledge
are extended to cover what Plato thought of as wisdom.
2.9.1. There are works of intelligence and things
which some into being through necessity, for the creation of this world is the
combined work och necessity and mind. Mind, the ruling power, persuaded
necessity to bring the greater part of created things to perfection, and thus
this universe was created through necessity made subject to reason. But if a
person will truly tell of the way in which the work was accomplished, he must
include the variable cause as well, and explain its influence[58].
2.9.2. If mind and true opinion are two distinct
classes, then I say that there are self-existent ideas unperceived by sense,
and apprehended only by the mind; if, however, as some say, true opinion
differs in no respect from mind, then everything that we perceive through the
body is to be regarded as most real and certain. But we must affirm them to be
distinct, for they have a distinct origin and are of a different nature. The
one is implanted in us by instruction, the other by persuasion; the one is
always accompanied by true reason, the other is without reason. the one cannot
be overcome by persuasion, but the other can. And lastly, every man may be said
to share in true opinion, but mind is the attribute of the gods and of very few
men. Wherefore also we must acknowledge that one kind of being is the form
which is always the same, uncreated and indestructible, never receiving
anything into itself from without, not itself going out to any other, but
invisible and imperceptible by any sense, and of which the contemplation is
granted to intelligence only. Ant there is another nature of the same name with
it, and like to it, perceived by sense, created, always in motion, becoming in
place and again vanishing out of place, which is apprehended by opinion jointly
with sense. And there is a third nature, which is space and is eternal, and
admits not of destruction and provides a home for all created things, and is
apprenhended, when all sense is absent, by a kind of spurious reason[59].
2.9.3.1. Design as works of intelligence in terms of
mind and necessity epitomizes the decision-theoretical approach with its
distinction between controllable and non-controllable environmental variables.
Creative man was created at the image of God. The theological implications have
been noted in the context of bases of design theory as a difference between God
in Thomas of Aquinas and Plato's Demiurge who is is limited by what he finds by
way of formal possibilities and material medium. Cf. what today is called ideal
design and the problems of implementation where play, bricolage, improvisation
in a sort of evolutionary process have been substituted for prayer and grace
within a Christian framework of ethical action. See further the reference to
Aubenque {, 1993 #2376} in Ivanov {, 1997 #2408}.
2.9.3.2. The reference to self-existent ideas
unperceived by sense, and apprehended only by the mind, gives some
philosophical basis for what elsewhere, without such a basis, has been called figures
of thought. Jungian inborn archetypes dwell in a an
unconscious realm and are seen as original formal structures to be filled in by
instruction and experience. Plato offers an alternative conception requiring
only instruction. Learning theories espoused in Western educational
applications of IT with their emphasis on learning and persuasion in place of
teaching and proof, refer often to democratic advantage of discussion and
debate which work for persuasion rather than authoritarian instruction.
2.9.3.3. The rest of the details of the argument point
to possiblity that the present infatuation with "change" is
conditioned by a disregard for the stable realm of (right and good) ideas and
the consequent dependence upon what is "always in motion, becoming in
place and again vanishing out of place, which is apprenhended by opinion
jointly with sense".
2.10.1. Therefore, when the rhetorician is more
convincing than the doctor, the ignorant is more convincing among the ignorant
than the expert. Is not the position of the rhetorician and of rhetoric is the
same with respect to other arts also? It has no need to know the truth about
things but merely to discover a technique of persuasion, so as to appear among
the ignorant to have more knowledge than the expert? Must the prospective pupil
in rhetoric bring with him knowledge of what is right or wrong. And if he is
ignorant will his teacher of rhetoric teach him these things, or will he be
utterly unable to teach him rhetoric if he does not beforehand know the truth
about these matters? Now the rhetorician must necessarily be just, and the man
must wish to do just actions, but it has been said that we should not blame our
trainers. If a boxer practices his art in a wrongful manner and does injury,
and so too if a rhetorician makes wrongful use of his rhetoric, we should not
censure or banish his instructor but rather the guilty man who wrongly employs
rhetoric. And in our earlier discussion it was stated that rhetoric is
concerned with words that deal, not with the odd and even, but with right and wrong.
Now, at the time when this was stated, I considered that rhetoric could never
be a thing of evil, since its discourse is always concerned with justice. But
when a little later it was said that the rhetorician might actually make an
evil use of rhetoric, I was surprised, and considered that what was said was
inconsistent, and thought that it was of value to be refuted.[60]
2.10.2. Just as wisdom when it governs our
psychological impulses turns them to advantage, and folly turns them to harm,
so the mind by its rights use and control of the material assets like wealth
and health makes them profitable, and by wrong use renders them harmful. And
the right user is the mind of the wise man, the wrong user the mind of the
foolish.[61]
2.10.3. A thing would give no benefit, if we only had
it but did not use it. But that is not enough to make a man happy, to possess
and use good things. He must use them aright. It is, indeed, more harmful if
one uses anything wrongly and if one leaves it alone–the firs is bad; the
second is neither bac nor good. It is knowledge that produces right use of
equipment, and it is knowledge that is the guide which directs action. Then
knowledge provides not only good fortune, but also good doing. No benefit comes
from possessions, without intelligence and wisdom. A man would not benefit from
possessing plenty and doing much, if he had no sense. He would benefit more by
doing little with sense. If he did less he would make fewer mistakes, and would
do less badly, and be less miserable. And a poor, weak, coward or idle man
would be likely to do less. To sum it up, the truth is that all those things
that to begin with seem good, the question is not how they are in themselves
good, but the point is the following. If ignorance leads them, they are greater
evils than their opposites, inasmuch as they are more able to serve the leader
which is evil; but if intelligence leads, and wisdom, they are greater goods,
while in themselves neither kind is worth anything at all. It then follows from
what has been said that none of the things is either good or bad, except these
two, and of these wisdom if good, and ignorance is bad.[62]It seems that there is no benefit in any other knowledge, of business,
or of physics for example, or anything elsewhich knows how to make something
but not how to use what it makes. Then we need such a knowledgeas combines both
how to make something and how to use what is made.[63]
2.10.4. The one who is to determine whether the proper
form is given to the shuttle is not the carpenter who makes, but rather the
weaver who uses it. And the one who will be best able to direct the legislator in
his work of giving names, will also be the user, and this is who knows to ask
and answer questions, and him we would call a dialectician.[64]
2.10.5. There are some three arts concerned with
everything, the user's art, the maker's, and the imitator's.
Now, the excellence, the beauty, the rightness of every implement, living
thing, and action, refer solely to the use for which each is made or by nature
adpated. It quite necessarily follows, then that the user of anything is the one
who knows most of it by experience, and that he reports to the maker the good
or bad effects in use of the thing he uses. As, for example, the flute player
reports to the flute maker which flutes respond and serve rightly in flute
playing, and will order thekind that must be made, and the other will obey and
serve him. The one, then, possessing knowledge, reports about the goodness or
the badness of the flutes, and the other, believing, will make them. Then in
respect of the same implement,the makerwill have right
belief about its excellence and defects from association with the man who knows
and being compelled to listen to him, but the user will have true knowledge.
And the imitator will neither know nor opine rightly concerning the beauty or
the badness of his imitations, but, as it seems, the thing he will imitate will
be the thing that appears beautiful to the ignorant multitude.[65]
2.10.6. We were unconscious victims of a mistake
universal to manking. Men are perpetually fancying they have discovered some
splendid creation which might have worked wonders if only someone had known the
proper way–whatever it may be– to use it. When anyone sees something big,
strong, and powerful, he feels at once that if the owner of such a marvelous
thing knew how to use it, he could effect wonders with
it, and so achieve felicity. There is a certain desire, which is universal in
all men, that events shallfall out in accord with the bidding of a man's own
soul, all of them, if possible, but if not, at least those which depend on
human agency. But the object of a man's prayers and endeavors should not be
that the universal course of events should conform to his own wishes, unless
his wishes further conform to his sober judgment. It is the possession of
intelligence that should be the mark of prayer and aspiration for the community
and every individual of us alike.[66]
2.11.1. A true sheperd does herd his sheep in his
quality of sheperd with regard to what is best for the sheep. Every form of
rule in so far as it is a rule considers what is best for nothing else than
that which is governed and cared for by it., alike in political and private
rule. No one chooses of his own will to hold office of rule. men demand pay,
which implies that not to them will the benefit accrue from their holding
office but to those whom they rule. No art or office provides what is
beneficial for itself–but it provides and enjoins what is beneficial what it beneficial
to its subject, considering the advantage of that, the weaker, and not the
advantage of the stronger. That is why no one of his own will chooses to hold
rule and office and take other people's troubles in hand to straighten them
out, but everybody expects pay for that, because he who is to exercise the art
rightly never does what is best for himself but what is best for the subject.
That is the reason why pay must be provided for those who are to consent to
rule, either in the form of money or honor or a penalty if they refuse. To be
covetous of honor and of money is said to be and is a reproach. That is why the
good are not willing to rule wither for the sake of money or of honor. They do
not wish to collect pay openly for their service of rule and be styled
hirelings, nor to take it by stealth from their office and be called thieves,
nor yet for the sake of honor, for they are not covetous of honor. So there must be imposed some compulsion and penalty to
constrain them to rule if they are to consent to hold office. That is perhaps
why to seek office oneself and not await compulsion is thought disgraceful. But
the chief penalty is to be governed by someone worse if a man will not himself
hold office and rule. It is from fear of this that the better sort hold office
when they do, and then they go to it not in the expectation of enjoyment nor as
to a good thing, but as to a necessary evil and because they are unable to turn
it over to better men than themselves or to their like.[67]And the rulers of the state must be careful of the its interests. But
one would be most likely to be careful of that which is loved. And again, one
would most likely to love that whose interests he supposed to coincide with his
own,and thought that when it prospers he too would
prosper and if not, the contrary.[68]
2.11.2. It is true of every seed and growth, whether
vegetable or animal, that the more vigorous it is the more it falls short of
its proper perfection when deprived of the food, the season, the place that
suits it. For evil is more opposed to the good than to the not-good. So, it is
natural that the best nature should fare worse than the inferior under
conditions unsuited to it. The best endowed souls become worse that the others
under a bad education. Or do you suppose that great crimes and unmixed
wickedness spring from a slight nature and not from a vigorous one corrupted by
its nurture, while a weak nature will never be the cause of anything great,
either good or evil?[69]
2.11.3.1. This is not an apology for managers or heads
of university departments who are eager to return to their doing research, but
rather a problematization fo the terms care, hospitality, and cultivation that
because of some reason have entered the theorizing in IT during the last years
of the 1990s. If it is a question of care and hospitality, and it is not to be
equated with friendship, say, in the Aristotelian, then caring tends to be the
same as administration as this term has been discussed in so-called
administration and organization theory during the 20th century. If hospitality
is being used as a term of an attitude of a-priori positive, optimistic
acceptance of the offer of new technology, the discussion above has the merit
of advancing the importance of payment. The general rule today in the context
of acceptance of new IT is, on the contrary, that the ruled institution,and
ultimately those who are supposed to rule or to be served by the institution
should pay for the experiment or pilot project, instead of being paid for it.
The net effect of much talk about care, hospitality, and cultivation is to
forget what has been previously discussed under the labels of "sheperd-administration",
management and politics while at the same time ignoring ethical discussion as
presumed in the use of other well established terms
like friendship and charity.
2.11.3.2. The other statements remind us that all
reference to cultivation presupposes a standpoint on the issue of nature vs.
nurture, and an ethical standpoint on what is to be considered a good nature to
be fostered by an appropriate nurture. The issue of "hospitality"
follows from such considerations inasmuch it can be meaningfully defined, if
not as outright Christian "love thy neighbour", as the supply of
appropriate nurture. One implication for IT is that the power inherent in
technology should be supplied to an organization only after making sure that it
has a good nature, whereafter the issue will focus on the latter. If the matter
is framed instead in terms of the advantages of "trust" it will not
become more simple, reverting ultimately to the same
questions of ethics[70]. What does not seem to be justified in the context of IT-design is to
talk superficially about cultivation, care or hospitality without anchoring
these terms in some definitions that relate them to their historical
correspondents or antecedents.
2.12.1. The wise man should exert diligence not for
the sake of speaking to and dealing with his fellow men, but that he may be
able to speak what is pleasing to the gods, and in all his dealings, to do
their pleasure to the best of his ability. For you see, what we are told by
those wiser than ourselves is true, that a man of sense ought never to study
the gratification of his fellow slaves save as a minor consideration, but that
of his most excellent masters. When a man sets his hand to something good, it
is good that he should take what comes to him.[71]
2.13.1. First of all, men of Syracuse, accept such
laws as you see clearly will not turn your thoughts and desires to
money-getting and riches. There are three things, soul, body, and money. Put in
the place of the highest honor the excellence of the soul; put next, that of
the body, subject, however, to that of the soul; and in the third and last
place put the honor paid to money, making it a slave to the body and to the
soul. That these words of exhortation from me are true you will know by
experience if you put to the test what I have just said about laws. Experience
seems to be the surest touchstone for everything.[72]
2.14.1. The imitator [VR] will have neither knowledge
from experience of whether the thing is or is not beautiful and right, nor will
he have right opinion from compulsory association with the user who knows.
[CONSULTANT] Then the imitator will neither know nor opine rightly concerning
the beauty or the badness of his imitations, but the thing he will imitate will
be the thing that appears beautiful to the ignorant multitude. His imitation
will be a form of play, not to be taken seriously.[73]
2.14.2. There is no disgrace in taking money for
giving advice,about building, for instance, and the
other arts. But when it is a question of how one may become as good as possible
and best administer his own home or city, it is considered disgraceful to
refuse giving advice unless one is paid for it. The reason obviosuly is that
this is the only kind of service which makes its recipient eager to make a like
return, so that it is thought to be a good sign when one who has rendered such
a kindness receives a like return; but if he does not receive such a return, it
is not considered to be a good sign. [74]
3.1.1. Let the soul be likened to the union of powers
in a team of winged steeds and their winged charioteer. With us men, it is a
pair of steeds that the charioteer controls; one of them is noble and good, and
of good stock, while the other has the opposite character, and his stock is
opposite. Hence the task of our charioteer is difficult and troublesome. We
divide then each soul into three parts, two like steeds and the third like a
charioteer. The good steed that is on the more honorable side is upright and
clean-limbed, carrying his neck high, with something of a hooked nose; in color
he is white, with back eyes; a lover of glory, but with temperance and modesty;
one that consorts with genuine renownm and needs no whip, being driven by the
word of command alone. The other is crooked of frame, a massive jumble of a
creature, with thick short neck, snub nose,back skin,
and gray eyes; hot-blooded, consorting with wantonness and vainglory; shaggy of
ear, deaf, and hard to control with whip and goad. Now when the driver beholds
the person of the beloved,and causes a sensation of
warmth to suffuse the whole soul, he begins to experience a tickling or
pricking of desire, and the obedient steed constrained now as always by
modesty, refrains from leaping upon the beloved. But his fellow, heeding no
more the driver's goad or whip, leaps and dashes on, sorely troubling his
companion and his driver, and forcing them to to approach the loved one and
remind him of the delights of love's commerce. For a while they struggle,
indignant that he should force them to a monstrous and forbidden act, but at
last, finding no end to their evil plight, they yield and agree to do his
bidding. And so he draws them on, and now they are
quite close and behold the spectacle of the beloved flashing upon them. At that
sight the driver's memory goes back to that form of beauty, and he sees her
once again enthroned by the side of temperance upon her holy seat; then in awe
and reverence he falls upon his back, and therewith is compelled to pull the
reins so violently, that he brings both steeds down on their haunches, the good
one willing and unresistant, but the wanton sore against his will. And so it happens time and again, until the evil steed casts off
his wantonness; humbled in the end, he obeys the counsel of his driver, and
when he sees the fair beloved is like to die of fear. Wherefore at long last
the soul of the lover follows after the beloved with reverence and awe. Thus the loved one receives all manner of service, as peer
of the gods, from a lover that is no pretender but loves in all sincerity; of
his own nature too, he is kindly disposed to him who pays such service. As time
goes on ripening age and the ordinance of destiny together lead him do welcome
the other's society.[75]
3.1.2. The same forms and qualities are to be found in
each one of us that are in the state. They could not get there from any other
source. It would absurd to suppose that the element of high spirit was not
derived in states from the private citizens who are reputed to have this
quality, as the populations of the Thracian and Scythian land and generally of
northern regions, or the quality of love of knowledge, which would chiefly be
attributed to the region where we Greeks dwell, or the love of money which we
might say is not least likely to be found in Phoenicians and the population of
Egypt. But the matter begins to be difficult when you ask whether we do all
these things with the same thing or whether there are three things and we do
one thing with one and one with another–learn with one part of ourselves, feel
anger with another, and with yet a third desire the pleasures of nutrition and
generation and their kind, or whether it is with the entire soul that we
function in each case when we one begin. That is what is really hard to
determine properly. In defining the boundary and deciding whether they are
identical with one another, it is obvious that the same thing will never do or
suffer opposites in the same respect in relation to the same thing and at the
same time, so that even if we find contradictions in the functions of the mind
we shall know that it wa not the same thing functioning but a plurality. It
belongs to the rational part to rule, being wise and exercising forethought in
behalf of the entire soul, and to the principle of high spirit [WILL-COURAGE]to
be subject to this and be its ally. And these two ,
thus reared and having learned and been educated to do their own work in the
true sense of the phrase, will preside over the appetitive part which is the
mass of the soul in each of us and the most insatiate by nature of wealth. They
will keep watch upon it, lest, by being filled and infected with the so-called
pleasures associated with the body and so waxing big and strong, it may not
keep to its own work but may underatke to enslave and rule over the classes
with it is not fitting that it should, and so overrun the entire life of all.
These two, then, would best keep guard against enemies from without also in
behalf of the entire soul and body, the one taking counsel, the other giving
battle, attending upon the ruler, and by itscourage executing the ruler's
designs. Brave, too, then, I take it, we call each individual by virtue of this
part in him, when, namely, his high spirit preserves in the midst of pains and
pleasures the rule handed down by reason as to waht is or is not to be feared.
But wise by the small part that ruled in him and handed down these commands, by
its possession in turn within it of the knowledge of what is beneficial for
each and for the whole, the community composed of the three.[PSYCHOLOGICAL
SYSTEM-FREUD/JUNG][76]
3.1.3. There are two entities. One of them is
sovereign over the intelligible order and region, and the other over the world
of the eyeball. They are the two types of the visible and the intelligible. As
the visible stands to the intelligible so stand the two sections of the visible
to each other, objects to their images, and the two sections of the
intelligible to each other, the knowledge of truth and the opinions of
dialectic. The latter section of the intelligible reason itself lays hold of by
the power of dialectic, treating its assumptions not as absolute beginnings but
literally as hypotheses, underpinnings, footing, and springboards so to speak,
to enable it to rise to that which requires no assumptions and is the starting
point of it all, and after attaining to that again taking hold of the first
dependencies from it, so to proceed downward to the conclusion, making no use whatever
of any object of sense but only of pure ideas moving on through ideas to ideas
and ending with ideas. I distinguish the aspect of reality and the
intelligible, which is contemplated by the power of dialectic as something
truer and more exact that the object of the so-called arts and sciences whose
assumptions are arbitrary starting points. And though it is true that those who
contemplate them are compelled to use their understanding and not their senses,
yet because they do not go back to the beginning in the study of them but start
from assumptions I do not think they possess true intelligence about them
although the things themselves are intelligible when apprenhended in
conjunction with a first principle. And I call the mental habit of geometers and
their like mind or understanding and not reason because you regard
understanding as something intermediate between opinion and reason. And so, we
assume that for the four entities or subsections there are four affections
occurring in the soul–intellection or reason for the highest, understanding for
the second, belief for the third, and for the last, picture thinking or
conjecture–and arrange them in a proportion, considering that they participate
in clearness and precision in the same degree as their objects partake of truth
and reality.[77]
3.1.4. The creator constructed the universe. Now of
the divine, he himself was the creator, but the creation of the mortal he
committed to his offspring. And they, imitating him, received from him the
immortal principle of the soul, and around this they proceeded to fashion a
mortal body, and made it to be the vehicle of the soul, and constructed within
the body a soul of another nature which was mortal, subject to terrible and
irresistible affections – first of all pleasure, the greatest incitament to
evil, then pain,which deters from good; also rashness and fear, two foolish
counselors, anger hard to be appeased, and hopeeasily lead astray – these they
mingled with irrational sense and with all-daring love according to necessary
laws, and so framed man. In the thorax they incased the mortal soul. That part
of the inferior soul which is endowed with courage and passion and loves
contention, they settled nearer the head, midway between the midriff and the
neck, in order that being obedient to the rule of reason it might join with it
in controlling and restraining desires when they are no longer willing of their
own accord to obey the word of command issuing from the citadel. –– The heart
was set in place of guard, that, when the might of passion was roused by reason
making proclamation of any wrong assailing all the limbs from without or being
perpetrated by the desires within, quickly the whole power of feeling in the
body, perceiving these commands and threats, might obey and follow through
every turn and alley, and thus allow the principle of the best to have the
command in all of them. The part of the soul which desires meats and drinks and
the other things of which it has need by reason of the bodily nature,they placed between the midriff and the boundary of
the navel, contriving in all this region a sort of manger for the food of the
body, and there they bound it down like a wild animal which was chained up with
man,and must be nourished if man was to exist. And knowing that this lower
principle in man would not comprehend reason, and even if attaining to some
degree of perception would never naturally care for rational notions, but that
it would be especially led by phantoms and visions, planning to make this very
weakness serve a purpose,God combined it with the liver, in order that the
power of thought, with proceeds from the mind, might be reflected as in a
mirror, and so might strike terror into the desires, or render the portion of
the soul which resides about the liver happy and joyful, enabling it to pass
the night in peace, and to practice divination in sleep, inasnuch as it has no
share in mind and reason. For the authors of our being, remembering the command
of their father when he bade them create the human race as good as they could,
that they might correct our inferior parts and make them to attain a measure of
truth, placed in the liver the seat of divination. And herein is a proof that
God has given the art of divination not to wisdom, but to the foolishness of
man. No man,when in his wits, attains prophetic truth
and inspiration, but when he receives the inspired word, wither his
intelligence is enthralled in sleep or he is demented by some distemper or
possession. And for this reason it is customary to
appoint interpreters to be judges of the true inspiration.[78]
3.1.5. Riches are for for the service of the body, as
the body itself for the service of the soul. Since, then, thereare goods to which
wealth is but a means, it must hold a third place,after
goodness of body and sould. From this doctrine, we should learn that the aim of
him who would be happy must be not to get riches, but to get such riches as
rectitude and self-command will permit.[79]
3.2.1. Do you consider that men will what on any
occasion they are doing, or rather for the sake of which they act as they do?
For example, do you consider that those who drink medicine at the doctor's
orders will what they are doing, namely the drinking of medicine with all its
unpleasantness, or the healt for the sake of which they drink?.
Obsiously, the health, and so too with those who sail the seas and engage in
money-making in general. And this is a general truth. If a man acts with some
purpose, he does not will the act, but the purpose of the act. Men perform also
indifferent actions for the sake of the good.[80]
3.2.2. What it your attitude to knowledge? Do you
share the common view about that? Most people think, in general terms, that it
is nothing strong, no leading or ruling element. The hold that it is not the
knowledge that a man possesses which governs him, but something else–now
passion, now pleasure, now pain, sometimes love, and frequently fear. They just
think of knowledge like a slave, pushed around aby all other affections. Is
this your view too, or would you rather say that knowledge is a fine thing
quite capable of ruling a man, and that if he can distinguish good from evil,
nothing will force him to act otherwise than as knowledge dictates, since
wisdom is all the reinforcement he needs? Most people, however, maintain that
there are many who recognize the best but are unwilling to act on it. It may be
open to them, but they do otherwise. Whenever I ask what can be the reason for
this, they answer that those who act in this way are overcome by pleasure or
pain or some other things. Then come with me and try to convince them, and show
what happens when they speak of being overcome by pleasure and therefore,
though recognizing what is best, failing to do it. If we simply declare, 'You
are wrong, and what you say is false,' they will ask us, 'If it is not being
overcome by pleasure, what can it be?[81]
3.2.3. The phrase 'master of himself' is an absurdity,
is it not? For he who is master of himself would also be subject to himself,
and he who is subject to himself would be the master. For the same person is
spoken of in all these expressions. But the intended meaning of this way of
speaking appears to me to be that the soul of a man within him has a better
part and a worse part, and the expression self-mastery means the control of the
worse by the naturally better part. It is, at any rate, a term of praise. But
when, becasue of bad breeding or some association, the better part, which is
the smaller, is dominated by the multitude of the worse, I think that our
speech censures this as a reproach, and calls the man in this plight
unself-controlled and licentious.[82]
3.2.4. There are three classes of error, one of these
has a principal source of which we speak as passion and fear. The second has
its origin in pleasures and cupidities, and the third, which is of a very
different kind, in the loss of sound anticipations [cf. PLANNING VS BRICOLAGE]
and convictions about the good. Since the last can be subdivided into three, we
get a total of five classes, and for all five we have to make distinct laws
under two principal heads. Under one head fall all cases of deeds of open
violence; under the other, those of dark and crafty contrivance. Concerning the
last source of misconduct above, ignorance, which can be subdivided into three
we can say the following. You should note that the legislator will do well to
make two kind of it, ignorance pure and simple, which he will regard as a cause
of venial offences, and the more complicated condition in which a man's folly
means that he is suffering not from ignorance alone, but also from a conceit of
his own wisdom, and supposes himself to know all about matters of which he
knows nothing whatsoever. When such ignorance is accompanied by exceptional
capacity or power the lawgiver will regard the combination as a source of grave
and monstrous crime; when it is conjoined with impotence, since the consequent
misconduct is puerile or senile, he will treat it as an offense, indeed, and
make laws against its perpetrator as an offender, but whose laws will be the
mildest and most indulgent of the whole code. Now we all talk of one man as the
master of his pleasures or his passion, of another as a slave to them, but we
have never heard it said that som-and-so is the master of his ignorance or a
slave to it. And yet we speak of all three as frequently impelling a man in one
direction at the very time his own will is urging him in the opposite. Now at
last we are in a position to explain precisely what it meant by right and
wrong. Wrong is the name given to the domination of the soul by passion,
fear, pleasure or pain, envy or cupidity,alike in all
cases, whether damage is the consequence or not. But where there is the
conviction that a course is best–wherever a society or private individuals may
take that best to lie–where that conviction prevails in the soul and governs a
man's conduct, even if unfortunate consequences should arise, all that is done
from such a principle, and all obedience of individuals to it, must be
pronounced right and for the highest good of human life, though detriment thus
caused is popularly taken to be involuntary wrong. Our business at present is
not to contend about words, but, in the first place, to get a surermeantal
grasp of the three classes of error.[83]
3.3.1. The name of a thing is an instrument as the
shuttle is an instrument. The shuttle is a weaving instrument, and when we
weave we separate or disengage the warp from the woof. When we name we give
information [cf. INFORMATION] to one another, and distinguish things according
to their natures. Then a name is an instrument of teaching, and of
distinguishing natures, as the shuttle is of distinguishing the threads of the
web. The shuttle is the instrument of the weaver, who will use it well, as the
name is the instrument of the teacher who will use it well. And when the weaver
uses the shuttle, he will use well the work of the skilled carpenter, as the
teacher, when he gives us a name, uses the work of the skilled legislator. When
the carpenter makes the shuttle he will look to that
which is naturally fitted to act as a shuttle. He will look to the form
according to which he made previous shuttles, which might be justly called the
true or ideal shuttle. And whatever shuttles are wanted, for the manufacture of
garments, thin or thick, of flaxen, woolen, or other material, the form that
the maker produces in each case ought to be the form best adpated to each kind
of work. And the same holds of other instruments. When a man has discovered the
instrument which is naturally adpated to each work,he
must express this natural form, and not others which he fancies, in the
material, whatever it may be, which he employs. Several forms of shuttles
naturally answer to the several kinds of webs, and this is true of instruments
in general. Then, as to names, our legislator also ought to know how to put the
true natural name of each thing into sounds and syllabes, and to make and give
all names with a view to the ideal name. And we must remember that different
legislators will not use the same syllabes. The one who is to determine whether
the proper form is given to the shuttle is not the carpenter who makes, but
rather the weaver who uses it. And the one who will be best able to direct the
legislator in his work of giving names, will also be the user, and this is who
knows to ask and answer questions, and him we would call a dialectician.
Things, then, have names by nature, and not every man is an artificer of names,
but he only who looks to the name which each thing by nature has, and is able
to express the true forms of things in letters and syllabes.[84]
3.3.2. We have unconsciously embroiled ourselves with
a portentous theory, one which is held to be the last word of wisdom. We are
told that everything whatever which comes, has come, or will come into
existence is a product either of nature, or of art, or of chance. Evidently, so
they say, all the grandest and fairest of things are products of nature and
chance, and only the more insignificant of art. Art takes over the grand
primary works from the hands of nature, already formed, and then models and
fashions the more insignificant, and this is the very reason why we all call
them artificial. As the primary elements are then the soulless agents in the
production of the bodies of the next rank, the earth, sun, moon, and stars.
They drifted casually, each in virtue of their several tendecies. As they came
together in certain fitting and convenient dispositions, and so on in all the inevitable
casual combinations with arise from the blending of contraries, they gave birth
to the whole heavens and all their contents, and, in due course, to all animals
and plants, not, so they say, by the agency of mind, or any god, or art, but by
nature and chance. Art, the subsequent late-born product of these causes,
herself as perishable as her creators, has since given birth to certain toys
with little real substance in them, simulacra as shadowy as the arts
themselves, such as those which spring from painting, music, and the other
fellow crafts. Or if there are arts which really produce anything of genuine
worth, they are those which lend their aid to nature, like medicine, husbandry
[cf. cultivation], gymnastics. Statesmanship in especial, they say, is a thing
which has a little in common with nature, but is mainly a business of art [cf.
design of social systems]; legislation, likewise, is altogether an affair not
of nature, but of art, and its positions are unreal. This party asserts that
gods have no real and natural, but only an artificial being, in virtue of legal
conventions, as they call them, and thus there are different gods for different
places [cf. pluralism and relativism], conformably to the conventions made by
each group among themselves when they drew up the legislation. Them they
actually declare that the really and naturally laudable is one thing and the
conventionally laudable quite another, while as for right, there is absolutely
no such thing as a real and natural right, that mankind are eternally disputing
about rights and altering them [cf. pluralism and change], and that every
change thus made, once made, is from that moment valid, though it owes its
being to artifice and legislation, not to anything you call nature. –– All
these views, my friends, come from men who impress the young as wise, prose
writers and poets who profess that indefeasible right means whatever a man can
carry with the high hand. Hence our epidemics of youthful irreligion, and hence
the factions created by those who seek, on such grounds, to attract men to the
"really and naturally right life", that is, the life of real
domination over others [cf. action], not of conventional service to them.This
is the awful creed, for the general corruption of the young people of whole
cities and private households.[85]
3.3.3.1. Cf. history of ideas vs. art-technology and
design of the artificial. Cf. paradox of "bricolage and marginal
cultivation of the logic of the situation"
3.4.1. We admit, I suppose, that there is a such a
thing as equality nad that we know what it is–not the equality of stick to
stick and stone to stone, and so on, but something beyond all that and distinct
from it–absolute equality. We got out knowledge from particular examples. Was
it not from seeing equal sticks or stones or other equal objects that we got
the notion of equality, although it is something quite distinct from them? Is
it not true that equal stones and sticks sometimes, without changing in themselves,appear equal to one person and unequal to
another. Well now have you ever thought that things which were absolutely equal
were unequal, or that equality was inequality? No. never. Then these equal things
are not the same as absolute equality.[86]
3.4.2. Only the soul that had beheld truth may enter
into this our human form–seeing that man must needs understand the language of
forms, passing from a plurality of perceptions to a unity gathered together by
reasoning–and such understanding is a recollection of those things which our
souls beheld aforetime as they journeyed with their god, looking down upon the
things which now we suppose to be, and gazing up to that which truly is.[87]
3.4.3. In respect of the just and unjust, the good and
the bad, and all the ideas and forms,the same
statement holds, that in itself each is one, but that by virtue of their
communion with actions and bodies and with one another they present themselves
everywhere,each as a multiplicity of aspects. I set apart the lovers of
spectacles and the arts, and men of action, and separate from them again those
with whom our arguments are concerned and who alone deserve the appellation of
philosophers or lovers of wisdom. The lovers of sounds and sights, delight in
beautiful tones and colors and shapes and in everything that art fashions out
of these, but their thought is incapable of apprehending and taking delight in
the nature of the beautiful itself. He, then, who believes in beautiful things,
but neither believes in beauty itself nor is able to follow when someone tries
to guide him to the knowledge of it, his life is a dream, whether the man is
asleep or awake, mistaking resemblance for identity. The opposite case, the man
who recognizes beauty in itself, and is able to distinguish that self-beautiful
and the things that participate in it, and neither supposes the participants to
be it nor it the participant, his life is a waking state. We can then call the
mental state of the one as knowledge, and that of the other as opinion.[88] Philosophers are those who are
capable of apprehending that which is eternal and unchanging, while those who
are incapable of this, but lose themselves and wander amid the multiplicities
of multifarious things, are not philosophers.[89] When the soul is firmly fixed on the domain where truth and reality
shine resplendent it apprehends and knows them and appears to possess reason,
but when it inclines to that region which is mingled with darkness, the world
of becoming and passing away, it opines only and its edge is blunted, and it
shifts opinions hither and thither, and again seems as if it lacked reason.
This reality, then, that gives their truth to the obejcts of knowledge and the
power of knowing to the knower, is the idea of good, and you must conceive it
as being the cause of knowledge and truth. The objects of knowledge not only
receive from the presence of the good their being known, but their very
existence and essence is derived to them from it, though the good itself is not
essence but still transcends essence in dignity and surpassing power.[90]
3.4.4. If what every man believes as a result of
perception is indeed to be true for him; if just as no one is better judge of
what another experiences, so no one is better entitled to consider whether what
another thinks is true of false, and, as we have said more than once, every man
is to have his own beliefs for himself alone and they are all right and true –
then, my friend, where is the wisdom of Protagoras, to justify his setting up
to teach others and to be handsomely paid for it, and where is our comparative
ignorance or the need for us to go and sit at his feet, when each of us is
himself the measure of his own wisdom? Must we not suppose that Protagoras
speaks in this way to flatter the ears of the public?[91]
3.4.5. Protagoras would say that each one of us is a
measure of what it and of what is not, but there is alla the difference in the
world between one man and another just in the very fact that what is and
appears to one is different what what is and appears to the other. And as for
wisdom, and the wise man, Protagoras would be very far from saying they do not
exist. Be a wise man he would mean precisely a man who can change any one of
us, when what is bad appears and is to him, and make what is good appear and be
to him. To the sick man his food appears sour and is so; to the healthy man it
is and appears the opposite. Now there is no call to represent either of the
two as wiser. What is wanted is a change to the opposite condition, because the
other state is better [for...?]. And so too in education a change has to be effected from the worse condition to the better; only,
whereas the physician produces a change by means of drugs, the Sophis does it
by discourse. It is not that a man makes someone who previously thought what is
false think what is true, for it is not possible to think anything but what one
experiences, and all experiences are true. Rather, when someone by reason of a
depraved condition of mind has thoughts of a like character, one make him, by
reason of a sound condition, think other and sound thoughts,w
hich some people ignorantly call true, whereas one should say that one set of
thoughts is better than the other, but not in any way truer. And as for the
wise, he would call them, when they have to do with the body, physicians,and when they have to do with plants,
husbandsmen. For when plants are sickly and have depraved sensations,husbandmen
substitute for these sensations that are sound and healthy, as wise and honest
public speakers substitute in the community sound for unsound views of what is
right. For whatever practices seem right and laudable to any particular state
are so, for that state, so long as it holds to them. In this way it is true
both that some men are wiser than others and that no one thinkgs falsely. The further
question whether knowledge is, or is not the same thing as perception, should
be considered as a consequence of these principles.[92]
3.4.6. The followers of Heraclitus, faithful to their
own treatises,are literally in perpetual motion, their
capacity for staying still to attend to an argument or question or for a quiet
interchange of question and answer amounts to less than nothing, or rather even
a minus quantity is too strong an expression for the absence of the least modicum
of repose in these gentry. When you put a question, they pluck from their
quiver little oracular aphorisms to let fly at you,and
if you try to obtain some account of their meaning, you will be instantly
transfixed by another, barbed with some newly forged metaphor. You will never
get anywhere with any one of them; for that matter they cannot get anywhere
with one another, but they take very good care to leave nothing settled either
in discourse or in their own minds. I suppose they think that would be something
stationary–a thing they will fight against to the last and do their utmost to
banish from the universe. There is no such thing as a master or pupil among
them; they spring up like mushrooms. Each one gets his inspiration wherever he
can, and not one of them thinks that another understands anything.[93]
3.4.7. In the case of objects one does not know and
has never perceived, there is, it seems, no possibility of error orfalse judgment,
but it is precisely in the field of objects both known and perceived that
judgment turns and twists about and proves false or true–true when it brings
impressions straight from their proper imprints, false when it misdirects them
crosswise to the wrong imprint.[cf. MEMORY RECALL
PERCEPTION]. The difference between true and wrong judgment is said to arise in
the following way. When a man hsin his mind a good thick slab of wax, smooth
and kneaded to the right consistency, and the impressions that come through the
senses are stamped on these tables of the "heart"–Homer's word hints
at the mind's likeness to wax–then the imprints are clear and deep enough to
last a long time. Such people are quick to learn and also have good memories,
and besides they do not interchange the imprints of their perceptions but think
truly. These imprints being distinct and well spaced are quickly assigned to
their several stamps–the 'real things' as they are called–and such men are
siaid to be clever. When a person has what the poet's wisdom commends as a
'shaggy heart', or when the block is muddy or made of impure wax, or oversoft
or hard, the people with soft wax are quick to learn, but forgetful, those with
hard wax the reverse. Where it is shaggy or rough, a gritty kind of stuff
containing a lot of earth or dirt, the impressions obtained are indistinct; so
are they when the stuff is hard, for they have no depth. Impressions in soft
wax also are indistinct, becasue they melt together and soon become blurred.
And if, besides this, they overlap through being crowded together into some
wretched little narrow mind, they are still more indistinct. All these types,
then are likely to judge falsely. When they see or hear or think of something,
they cannot quickly assign things to their several imprints. Because they are
so slow and sort things into the wrong places, they constantly see and hear and
think amiss, andwe say they are mistaken about things and stupid. We must,
however, account for false judgments in some other way than as the misfitting
ot thought and perception, and we must describe what knowing is like, and what
knowledge is.[94]
3.4.8. In our disobedience to Parmenides we have
trespassed far beyond the limits of his prohibition. We have shown him results
in a field which he forbade us to explore. He said 'Never shall this be proved,
that things that are not, are, but keep back thy thought from this way of
inquiry.' Whereas we have not merely shown that things that are not, are, but
we have brought to light the real character of 'not being'. We have shown that
the nature of the different has existence and is parceled out over the whole
field of existent things with reference to one another, and of every part of
that is set in contrast to 'that which is' we have dared to say that precisely
that is really 'that which is not'. Then let no one say that it is the
contrary of the existent that we mean by 'what is not', when we make bold to
say that 'what is not' exits. Existence, having part in difference, will be
different from them all, it is not any one of them nor yet all others
put together, but it is only itself, with the consequence that existence is
not myriads upon myriads of things, and that all the other kinds in the
same way, in many respects are, and in many respects are not.
There is nothing clever in quibbling about these apparent contradictions, but
what is hard and worth the pains it to be able to follow our statements step by
step and, in criticizing the assertion that a different thing is the same, or
the same thing is different in a certain sense, to take account of the precise
sense and the precise respect in which they are said to be one or the other.
Merely to show that in some uspecified way the same is different or the different
is the same, the tall short, the like unlike, and to take pleasure in
perpetually parading such contradictions in argument–that is not genuine
criticism, but may be recognized as the callow offspring of a too recent
contact with reality. And the attempt to separate every thing from every other
thing not only strikes a discordant note but amounts to a crude defiance of the
philosophical Muse. This isolation of everything from everything else means a
complete abolition of all discourse, for any discourse we can have owes its
existence to the weaving together of forms. We have next to consider whether
'not being' blends with thinking and discourse. If it does not blend with them,
everything must be true, but if it does, we shall have false thinking and discourse,
and if falsity exists, deception is possible. And once deception exists, images
and likenesses and appearance will be everywhere rampant.[95]
3.4.9. Consider the common statement that all pleasant
things are good. What, then is the identical element present alike in the bad
pleasures and in the good that makes you use the term "good" in
reference to them all? Likewise, knowledge, taken in its entirety will seem to
be a plurality. We get this identity of the one and the many cropping up
everywhere as the result of the sentences we utter. As soon as a young man gets
wind of it, he is delighted as if he had discovered an intellectual gold mine;
he is beside himself with delight, and loves to try every move in the game.
There is, however, an attractive method or instrument, quite easy to indicate
but very far from easy to employ, through which every discovery ever made in
the sphere of the arts and sciences has been brought to light. [SCIENTIFIC
METHOD] All things, that are ever said to be consist of a one and a many,and have in their nature a conjunction of limit and
unlimitedness. This being the ordering of things we ought, whatever it be that
we are dealing with, to assume a single form and search for it, for we shall it
there contained.; then, if we have laid hold of that, we must go on from one
form to look for two, if the case admits of there being two,otherwise
of three or some other number of forms. And we must do the same again ith each
of the "ones" thus reached, until we come to see not merely that the
one that we started with is a one and unlimited many, but also just how many it
is. But we are not to apply the character of unlimitedness to out plurality
until we have discerned the totalnumber of forms the thing is question has
intermediate between its one and its unlimited number. It is only then,when we have done that,that we may let each one of all
these intermediate forms pass away into the unilimited and cease bothering
about them. But your clever modern man, while making his one–or his many, as
the case may be–more quickly or more slowly than is proper,when
he has got his one proceeds to his unlimited number straightaway, allowing the
intermediates to escape him,whereas it is the recognition of those
intermediates that makes all the difference between a philosophical anda
contentious discussion. This is clear in the case of the alphabet and the
letters illustrating it. The sound that proceeds through our mouths is one,and also an unlimited variety. And we have no real
understanding if we stop short at knowing it either simply as an unlimited
variety, or simply as one. What makes a man "lettered" is knowing the
number and the kinds of sounds. And it is just the same sort of thing that
makes a man musical.[96]
3.4.10. And thus the theory
which declines to separate the pleasant from the just, or the good from the
honrable, if it has no other merits, is at least a persuasive to a just and
religious life. Hence from the legislator's point of view any theory which
denies these positions is highly disgraceful and dangerous, since no one, if he
can help it, will let himself be persuaded into following a course not attended
bu a surplus of pleasure over pain [cf. SIN] It is distance which causes
confusion of vision in all of us, and particularly in children, unless the
lawgiver will effect a reversal of our judgments and dissipate our darkness,
persuading us, as best as he can, by institutions, eulogies, and arguments that
right and wrong are like puzzle pictures, wrong-appearing, in the opposite
perspective to right, pleasant when viewed from the standpoint of one who is
himself unjust and evil, and right most unpleasant, but everything the precise
contranry, on both sides, from the point of view of the righteous. And the
verdict of the better soul has the more valid claim to be true. Then it is
consequently certain that an unjust life if not merely more dishonorable and
despicable, but actually more truly umpleasant than a just and religious.[97]
3.4.11. For everything that exists there are three
classes of objects through which knowledge about it must come; the knowledge
itself is a fourth, and we must put as a fifth entity the actual object of
knowledge which is true reality. We have then, (1) a name, (2) a description
composed of nouns and verbal expressions like in a definition, (3) an image,
and (4) a knowledge and understanding and correct opinion of the object. There
is something for instance called a circle, the name of which is the very word I
just now uttered. In the second place there is a description of it which is
composed of nouns and verbal expressions. For example
the description of that which is named round and circumference and circle would
run as follows: the thing which has everywhere equal distances between its
extremities and its center. In the third place there is a class of object which
is drawn and erased and turned on the lathe and destroyed - processes which do
not affect the real circle to which all these other circles are all related,
because it is different from them. In the fourth place there are knowledge and
understanding and correct opinion concerning them, all of which we must set
down as one thing more that is found not in sounds nor in shapes of bodies, but
in minds, whereby it evidently differs in its nature from the real circle and
the aforementioned three. Of all these four, understanding approaches nearest
in affinity and likeness to the fifth entity, while the others are more remote
from it. The same doctrine holds good in regard to shapes and surfaces, in
regard to the good and the beautiful and the just, in regard to all bodies
artificial and natural, in regard to every animal and in regard to every
quality of character, and in respect to all states active and passive. For if
in the case of any of these a man does not somehow or other get hold of the
first four, he will never gain a complete understanding of the fifth. Furthermore these four [names, descriptions, bodily forms,
concepts] do as much to illustrate the particular quality of any object as they
do to illustrate its essential reality because of the inadequacy of language.
Hence no intelligent man will ever be so bold as to put into language those
things which his reason has contemplated, espcially not into a form that is
unalterable. The important thing is that there are two things, the essential
reality and the particular quality, and when the mind is in the quest not of
the particular but of the essential, each of the four confronts the mind with
the unsought particular, whether in verbal or in bodily form. Each of the four
makes the reality that is expressed in words, or illustrated in objects liable
to easy refutation by the evidence of the senses. The result of this is to make
practically every man a prey to complete perplexity and uncertainty.
3.4.12. Now in cases where as a result of bad training
we are not even accustomed to look for the real essence of anything but are
satisfied to accept what confronts us in the phenomenal presentations, we are
not rendered by each other–the examined by the examiners who have the ability
to handle the four with dexterity and to subject them to examinations. In those
cases, however, where we demand answers and proofs in regard to the fifth
entity, anyone who pleases among those who have the skill of confutation gains
the victory and makes most of the audience think that the man who was first to
speak of write or answer has no acquaintance with the matters of which he attempts
to write or speak. Sometimes they are unaware what it is not the mind of the
writer or speaker that fails in the test, but rather the character of the
four–since that is naturally defective. Natural intelligence and a good memory
are equally powerless to aid the man who has not an inborn affinity with the
subject. The study of virtue and vice must be accompanied by an inquiry into
what is false and true of existence in general and must be carried on by
constant practice throughout a long period. Hardly after practicing detailed
comparisons of names and definitions and visual and other sense perceptions,
after scrutinizing them in benevolent disputation by the use of question and
answer without jealousy, at last in a flash[98] understanding blazes up, and the mind, as it exerts all its powers
to the limit of human capacity, is flooded with light. For this reason no serious man will ever think of writing about
serious realities for the general public so as to make them a prey to envy and
perplexity.[99]
3.5.1. Some reports of our perceptions do not provoke
thought to reconsideration because the judgment of them by sensation seems
adequate, while others always invite the intellect to reflection because the
sensation yields nothing that can be trusted. The experiences that not not
provoke thought are those that do not at the same time issue in a contradictory
percpetion [cf. "breakdown"]. Some things are provocative of thought
and some not, and we define as provocative things that impinge upon the senses
together with their opposites, while those that do not are said that do not
tend to awaken reflection. Visual perception especially involves this. For we
see the same thing at once as one and as an indefinite plurality.[100]
3.5.2. The same magnitude, I presume, viewed from near
and from deos not appear equal. And the same things appear bent and straight to
those who view them in water and out, or concave and convex, owing to similar
errors of vision about colors, and there is obviously every confusion of this
sort in souls. And so scene painting in its
exploitation of this weakness of our nature falls nothing short of witchcraft,
and so jugglery and many other such contrivances. And have not measuring and
numbering and weighing proved to be most gracious aids to prevent the
domination of our soul of the apparently greater and less or more or heavier,
and to give the control to that which has reckoned and numbered or even
weighed? But this surely would be the function of the part of the soul that
reasons and calculates. And often when this has measured and declares that
certain things are larger or that some are smaller than the others or equal,there is at the same time an appearance of the
contrary. But it is impossible for the same thing at one time to hold
contradictory opinions about the same thing. The part of the soul, then that
opines in contradiction of measurement could not be the same with that which
conforms to it. But, further, that which pts its trust in measurement and
reckoning must be the best part of the soul. Then that which opposes it must
belong to the inferior elements of the soul. Then, in general the mimetic art
produces a product that is far removed from truth in the accomplishment of its
task, and associates with the part in us that is remote from intelligence, and
is its companion and friend for no sound and true purpose.[101]
3.6.1. There are two distinct disturbances of the
eyes, arising from two causes, according as the shift is from light to darkness
or from darkness to light, and, believing that the same thing happens to the
soul too,whenever man saw a soul perturbed and unable
to discern something, he would not laugh unthinkingly. Then, education is not
in reality what some people proclaim it to be. They aver that they can put true
knowledge into a soul that does not possess it, as if they were inserting
vision into blind eyes. But the true analogy for this indwelling power in the
soul and the instrument whereby each of us apprehends is that of an eye that
could not be converted to the light from the darkness except by turning the
whole body. Even so this organ of knowledge must be turned around from the
world of becoming together with the entire sould, like the scene-shifting
periacus in the theater, until the soul is able to endure the contemplation of
the essence and the brightest region of being. And this, we say, is the good.. There might be an art, an art of the speediest and
most effective shifting or conversion of the soul, not an art of producing
vision in it, but on the assumption that it possesses vision, but does not
rightly direct it and does not look where it should, an art of bringing this
about. Then the other so-called virtues of the soul do seem akin to those of
the body. For it is true that where they do not pre-exist, they are afterward
created by habit and practice. But the excellence of thought, it seems, is
certainly of a more divine quality, a thing that never loses its potency, but,
according to the direction of its conversion, becomes useful and beneficent,
or, again, useless and harmful. Have you never observed in those who are
popularly spoken as bad, but smart men how keen is the vision of the little
soul, how quick it is to discern the things that interest it,a proof that it is
not a poor vision which it has, but one forcibly enlisted in the service of
evil, so that the sharper its sight the more mischief it accomplishes?[102]
3.7.1. There is an art of speaking such that one can
make the same thing appear to the audience like and unlike, or one and many, or
again at rest and in motion. So contending with words
is a practice found not only in lawsuits and public harangues but wherever men
speak we find this single art, if indeed is an art, which enables pople make
out everything to be like everything else, within the limits of possible
comparison, and to expose the corresponding attempts of others who disguise
what they are doing. We are indeed misled shen the difference between two
things is narrow rather than wide. Well then, if you shift your ground little
by little you are more likely to pass undetected from so-and-do to its
opposites than if you do so at one bound. If follows that anyone who intends to
mislead another without being himself, must discern precisely the degree of
resemblance and dissimilarity between this and that. Then if he does not know
the truth about a given thing he is not going to discern the degree of
resemblance between that unknown and other things.[103]
3.7.2. There are some words about which we all agree,
and others about which we are at variance. When someone utters the words 'iron'
or 'silver', we all have the same object before our minds. But what about the
words 'just' and 'good'? Don't we diverge, and dispute not only with one
another but with our own selves? Now, we are more apt to be misled in the case
where we fluctuate. Then the intending student of the art of rhetoric ought, in
the first place, to make a systematic division of words, and namely in the use
of which the multitude are bound to fluctuate, and those in which they are not.
And secondly, when he comes across a particular word he must realize what it is , and be swift to perceive which of the two kinds of
words the thing he proposes to discuss really belongs to.[104]
3.7.3. The followers of Heraclitus, faithful to their
own treatises,are literally in perpetual motion, their
capacity for staying still to attend to an argument or question or for a quiet
interchange of question and answer amounts to less than nothing, or rather even
a minus quantity is too strong an expression for the absence of the least
modicum of repose in these gentry. When you put a question, they pluck from
their quiver little oracular aphorisms to let fly at you,and
if you try to obtain some account of their meaning, you will be instantly
transfixed by another, barbed with some newly forged metaphor.[105]
3.7.4. We must admit that refutation is the greatest
and chiefest of purifications and he who has not been refuted is in an awful
state of impurity. He is uninstructed and deformed in those things in which he
who would be truly blessed ought to be fairest and purest. I shrink from
calling them Sophists for fear of ascribing to them too high a function. And
yet the description has some resemblance to them. But so
has the dog to the wolf–the fiercest of animals to the tamest. But a cautious
man should above all be on his guard against resemblances; they are a very
slippery sort of thing.[106]
3.8.1. The way to reflect about the nature of anything
is as follows: first to decide whether the object in respect of which we desire
to have scientific knowledge, and to be able to impart it to others, is simple
or complex; secondly, if it is simple, to inquire what natural capacity it has
of acting upon another thing, and through what means; or, if it is complex, to
enumerate its parts and observe in respect of each what we observe in the case
of the simple object, to wit what its natural capacity, active or passive,
consists in.[107]
3.8.2. The multitude get their notion of probability
as the result of a likeness to truth [METAPHOR] and these likenesses can always
be best discovered by one who knows the truth. And unless the aspirant to
oratory can on the one hand list the various things into their kinds and
embrace each individual being under a single form, he will never attain such
success as is within the grasp of mankind. Yet he will assuredly never acquire
such competence without considerable diligence, which the wise man should exert
not for the sake of speaking to and dealing with his fellow men, but that he
may able to speak what is pleasing to the gods, and in all his dealings to do
their pleasure to the best of his ability. [ETHICS][108]
3.8.3. But what of science? Science, which is just
that, is of knowledge which is just that, or is of whatsoever we must assume
the correlate of science to be. But a particular science of a particular kind
is of some particular thing of a particular kind. I mean something like this.
As there was a science of making a house it differed from other sciences so as
to be named architecture. This was by reason of its being of a certain kind
such as no other of all the rest. And it was because it was of something of a
certain kind that it itself became a certain kind of science. And similarly of
the other arts and sciences. This is what I mean by the statement that of all
things that are such as to be of something, those that are just themselves only
are of things just themselves only, but things of a certain kind are of things
of a kind. And I don't mean that htey are of the same kind as the things of
which they are, so that we are to suppose that the science of health and
disease is a healthy and diseased science and taht of evil and good, evil and
good. I only mean that as science became the science not of just the thing of
which science is but of some particular kind of thing, namely of health and
disease, the result was that itself became some kind of science and this caused
it to be no longer called simply science but, with the addition of the particular
kind, medical science.[INFORMATION SCIENCE - INFORMATICS].[109]
3.8.4. What is then, the nature of the faculty of
dialectic, and into what divisions does it fall? No one will maintain in
dispute against us that there is any other way of inquiry that attempts
systematically and in all cases to determine what each
thing really is. But all the other arts have for their object the opinions and
desires of men or are wholly concerned with generation and composition or with
the service and tendance of the things that grow and are put together, while
the remnant which we said did in some sort lay hold of reality–geometry and the
studies that accompany it–are, as we see it, dreaming about being, but the
clear vision of it is impossible for them as long as they leave hte assumptions
which they employ undisturbed [cf. ALTERNATE GEOMETRIES & FORMAL SCIENCES]
and cannot give any account of them. For where the starting point is something
that the reasoner does not know [cf. DESCARTES] and the conclusion and all that
intervenes is a tissue of things not really known, what possibility is there
that assent in such cases can ever be converted into true knowledge or science?
Dialectic, then, is the only process of inquiry that advances in this manner,
doing away with hypotheses, up to the first principle itself in order to find
confirmation there. And it is literally true that when the eye of the soul is
sunk in the barbaric slough of the Orphic myth, dialectic gently draws it forth
and leads it up [ENLIGHTENMENT], employing as helpers and co-operators in thsi
conversion the studies and sciences which we enumerated, which we called
sciences often from habit, though they really need some other designation,
connoting more clearness than opinion,and more
obscurity than science. 'Understanding', I believe, was the term we employed.
But I presume we shall not dispute abou the name when things of such moment lie
before us for consideration. We call, then the first division of dialectics
science, the second understanding, the third belief, and the fourth conjecture
or picture thought–and the last two collectively opinion, and the first two
intellection, opinion dealing with generation, and intellection with
essences,and this relation being expressed in the proportion: as essence is to
generation, so is intellection to opinion, and as intellection is to opinion,
so is science to belief, and understanding to image thinking or surmise. But
the relation between their objective correlates and the divison into two parts
of these, the opinable, namely, and the intelligible, let us dismiss, lest it
involve us in a too long discussion.[110]
3.8.5. We conclude that neither perception, nor true
belief, nor the addition of an 'account' [DEFINITION] to true belief can be
knowledge. [INFORMATION] Then supposing you should ever henceforth try to
conceive afresh, if you succeed, your embryo thoughts will be the better as a
consequence of today's scrutiny, and if you remain barren [cf. vs. CREATIVITY]
you will be gentler and more agreeable to your companions, having the good
sense not to fancy you know what you do not know. [POPPER-FALSIFICATION] For
that, and no more, is all that my art can effect; nor
have I any of that knowledge possessed by all the great and admirable men of
our own day or of the past. But this midwife's art is a gift from heaven; my
mother had it for women, and I for young men of a generous spirit and for all
in whom beauty dwells.[111]
3.8.6. After finding the Sophist, the task we now have
to fce is to search out the statesman. He too must be classified as one of
those who possess some kind of expert knowledge. We must then distinguish the
forms of knowledge. We must dinstinguish the way of the statesman from all the
rest by setting upon it the special sign of its distinctive form. All roads
divergent from it we must mark out also as one common class. Thus
we must bring our minds to conceive of all forms of knowledge as falling under
one or the other of theses two slasses–satecraft and knowledge other than
statecraft. Then consider the science of number and certain other sciences
closely akin to it. Are they not unconcerned with any form of practical
activity, yielding us pure knowledge only? But it is quite otherwise with
carpentry and manufacture in general. These possess science embodied as it were
in a practical actitivity and inseparable from it. Their products do not exist
befroe the arts come into operation and their operation is an integral part of
the emergence of the products from its unworked state [cf. DESIGN]. We must use
this distinction to divide the totality of sciences into two classes. Name one
'applied', the other 'pure'. Are we then to regard the statesman, the kind, the
slavemaster, and the master of a household as essentially one though we use all
these names for them, or shall we say that four distinct sciences exist, each
of them corresponding to one of the four titles? Or suppose we find a medical
man who is not himself practicing as a public medical officer but who
nevertheless is competent to advise [cf. CONSULTANT] a doctor actually serving
in that capacity? Must not the expert knowledge the adviser possesses be
described by the same title as that of the functionary whom he is advising?
Well then, consider a man who, though himself a private citizen is capable of
giving expert advice to the ruler of a country. Shall we not say that he
possesses the same science as the ruler himself possesses–or, rather ought to
have possessed? The science possessed by the true kind is the science of
kingship. The possessor of this science, then, whether he is in fact in power
or has only the status of a private citizen, will properly be called a
'statesman' since his knowledge of the art qualifies him for the title whatever
his circumstances. Then, consider a further point. The slavemaster and the
master of a household are identical. Furthermore, there is no much difference
between a large housefhold organization and a small-sized city, so far as the
exercise of authority over it is concerned. Well then, one science covers all
these several spheres and we will not quarrel with a man who prefers any one of
the particular names for it; he can call it royal science, or science of
household management. Now comes another point. What a king can do to maintain
his rule by using his hands or his bodily faculties as a whole is very slight
in comparison with what he can do by mental power and force of personality [cf.
E.HALL The SILENT DIMENSION]. So
a king's art is closer to theoretical knowledge than to manual work or indeed
to practical work in general. Let us go on to the next state and seen if we can
proceed to a divison of the kinds of theoretical knowledge. We must look
attentively and see if we cannot discover a natural cleavage within such
knowledge. There is an art of counting, that belongs to the class of
theoretical sciences. Now when the art of counting has ascertained a numerical
difference we do not assign it any further task save that of pronouncing on
what has been ascertained. Now consider a master builder. No master builder is
a manual worker–he directs the work of others. He provides the knowledge but
not the manual labor. So he might fairly be said to
possess one of the theoretical forms of science. But it is characteristic of
him that when he has delivered a verdict on the facts he has not ended his task
in the way the calulator has. The master builder must give the appropriate
directions to each of the workmen and see that they complete the work assigned.
[IMPLEMENTATION] Therefore all this class of sciences ar quite as 'theoretical'
as calculation and its kindred sciences are, but the two groups differ from one
another in that the latter are content to give a verdict, but the former issue a
command for performance of further actions [cf. INFORMATION]. Well, then, we
may claim that it is a sound division to split the whole of theoretical science
into two parts and to call one critical and the other directive, and it is much
to be desired that those sharing a task should be of one mind. Then the king
should not be placed in the critical class–as though he were a mere spectator
of truth, but rather in the directive class, as implied by his position in
control of men. We must now look further a t the directive class and see if we
find a cleavage in it somewhere. There is a difference between kings and
heralds analogous to [METAPHOR]the difference between the art of the
producer-salesman and that of the retailer. Retailers take over what someone else
has made and then sell a second time what was first sold to them
[DATABASE-COMMUNICATION INFORMATION-SIGNAL THEORY]. Similarly, heralds receive
commands which have been thought out and issued by someone else; then they
issue them at second hand to others. We are not going to confound the science
of kingship with the science of the interpreter, the coxswain, the prophet, or
the herald, simply because all of them are concerned, as admittedly they are,
with issuing orders. Cannot we think out a name as well, seeing that
unfortunately there is no normal descritpion of the general class of 'givers of
firsthand orders'? We will make the cleavage at this point and name a
'predirective' class into which we will put the race of kings. Well then, the
king's group has been distinguished from the others, the decisive factor being
that it issues its own commands, while the other group merely passes commands
on. Now we must subdivide the kingly group if we find it susceptible of a
division. We must beware lest we break off one small fragment of a class and
then contrast it with all important sections left behind. We must only divide
where ther is a real cleavage between specific forms. The section must always
possess a specific form. It is splendid if one really can divide off the class
sought for inneidately from all the rest–that is, if the structure of reality
authroizes such immediate division |cf. SUBSYSTEMS]. But it is dangerous to
chop reality up into small portions. It is always safer to go down the middle
to make our cuts. The real cleavages among the forms are more likely to be
found thus, and the whole art of these definitions consists in finding these
cleavages. The principle is that a portion and a subdivision of a class are not
identical. Where a true subdivision of a wider class is made, this subdivision
must necessarily also be a protion of the total class of which it is declared a
subdivision. But the converse is not true, since a portion is not necessarily a
true subdivision. Let us avoid making divisions in a desperate hurry and with
out attention fixed only on the whole class. Only thus shall we reach the
statesman in good time. 'More haste' in our work of correct division means
'less speed' for us.[112]
3.8.7. It is difficult to demonstrate anything of real
importance without the use of examples. Every one of us is like a man who sees
things in a dream and thinks that he knows them perfectly and then wakes up, as
it were, to find that he knows nothing. Example has been found to require an
example. We have gathered enough information to show how the method of example
proceeds. [cf. EXAMPLE] It operates then a factor indentical with a factor in a
less-known object is rightly believed to exist in some other better
known object in quite another sphere of life. This common factor in each
object, when it has been made the basis of a parallel examination of them both,
makes it possible for us to achieve a single true judgment about each of them
as forming one of a pair. We would not be surprised to find out own mind
reacting in the same way to the letters with which the universe is spelled out.
[METAPHOR] Truth sometimes guides the mind to a comprehension of every member
of some groups of things and yet the same mind a moment later is hopelessly
adrift in its attempt to cope with the members that make up another group.
Somehow or other it makes a right judgment of a particular combination of
elements but when it sees the same elements transferred to the long and very
difficult syllabs of everyday existence, it fails to recognize again the very
elements it discerned a moment before.[113]
3.8.8. We divide the art of measurement into a section
concerned with the relative greatness or smallness of objects and another
section concerned with their size in relation to the fixed norm to which they
must approximate if they are to exist at all. It is the standard of due measure
which marks off good men from bad in human society. We must not assert that the
only standard possible is that of relative comparison. Such standard will
remain, but we must acknowledge a second standard, which is a standard of
comparison with the due measure. If a man refuses to admit the possibility of a
'greater' except in relation to a 'lesser' he will rule out all possibility of
relating to a due measure. We are not prepared to for the consequences of such
a refulsal, the abolition of the arts and all their products, since such arts
guard against exceeding the due measure or falling short of it. It is precisely
by this effort they make to maintain the due measure that they achieve
effectiveness and beauty [cf. DESIGN] in all that they produce. Measurement is
involved in all that is brought into being.[114]
3.8.9. Though a person holding any opinion at all must
hold it in fact,[PHENOMENOLOGICAL POSTMODERN
FACT-JUNG] yet it might sometimes have reference tow hat was not a fact, either
of the present, the past, or the future. And there aly the source of our false
opinion, of our holding opinions falsely.[115]
3.8.10. We may divide the knowledge involved in our
studies into technical knowledge, and that concerned with education and
culture. Then taking the technical knowledge employed in handicraft, let us
consider whether one division is more closely concerned with knowledge, and the
other less so. We should then mark off the superior types of knowledge in the
several crafts. If, for instance, from any craft you substract the element of
numbering, measuring, and weighing, the remainder will be almost negligible.
For after doing so, what you would have left would be be guesswork and the
exercise of your senses on a basis of experience and rule of thumb, involving
the use of that ability to make lucky shots which is commonly accorded the
title of art or craft, when it has consolidated its position by dint of
industrious practice. We find plenty of it, to take one instance, in music,
medicine, agriculture, navigation, and military science. Building, however,
makes a considerable use of measures and instruments,and
the remarkable exactness thus attained makes it more scientific that most sorts
of knowledge. Let us then divide the arts and crafts so called into two
classes, those akin to music in their activities and those akin to carpentry,
the two classes being marked by a lesser and a greater degree of exactness,
respectively. We find fixity, purity, truth, and what we have called perfect
clarity in those things that are always, unchanged, unaltered, and free from
all admixture, or in what is most akin to them. Everything else must be called
inferior and of secondary importance. The names of reason and intelligence,
that command the greatest respect can be properly established in usage as
precisely appropriate to thought whose object is true being. [116]
3.8.11.1. Cf. the empirical trap, ≈ action research,
loss of time to prevent thinking ≈ Plato's warnings of running after
self-illuded change
3.9.1. I compare our nature in respect to education
and its lack to such an experience as this. Picture men dwelling in a sort of
subterranean cavern with a long entrance open to the light on its entire width.
Conceive them as having their legs and necks fettered from childhood, so that
they remain in the same spot, able to look forward only into the cavern,and prevented by the fetters to turn their heads.
Picture further the light from a fire burning higher up and at a distance
behind them, and between the fire and the prisoners and above them a road along
which a low wall has been built, as the exhibitors of puppet shows have
partitions before the men themselves, above which they show the puppets. See
also, then, men carrying past the wall implements of all kinds that rise above
the wall, and human images and shapes of animals as well, wrought in stone and
wood and every material, some of these bearers presumably speaking and others
silent. These men would never have seen anything of themselves or of one
another, or of the objects carried past them, except the shadows cast from the
fire on the wall of the cave that fronted them. They would suppose that in
naming the things that they saw they were naming the passing objects. And if
their prison had an echo from the wall opposite them,when
one of the passer-by uttered a sound, they would suppose that the passing
shadow to be the speaker. In every way such prisoners would deem reality to be
nothing else than the shadows of the artificial obejcts. Consider, then, what
would be the manner of the release and healing from these bonds and this folly
if in the course of nature one of them was freed from his fetters and compelled
to stand up suddenly and turn his head around and walk and to lift up his eyes
to the light, and in doing all this felt pain and, because of the dazzle and
the glitter of the light, was unable to discern the objects whose shadows he
formerly saw. If someone then told him that what he had seen before was all a
cheat and illusion, but that now, being nearer to reality and turned toward
more real things, he saw more truly, and pointed out to him each of the passing
objects and constrained him by questions to say what it is, do you not think
that he would be at loss and that he would regard what he formerly saw as more
real than the things now pointed out to him? And there would be need of
habituation to the light of the sun to enable him to see the things higher up,
and in due time to see that it presides over all things in the visible region
and is in some sort the cause of all these things that he had seen. And if he
should be required to contend with the perpetual prisoners in 'evaluating' the
shadows while his vision was still dimand before his eyes were accustomed to
the dark–and this time required for habituation would not be very short–would
he not provoke laughter,and would it not be said of him that he had returned
from his journey with his eyes ruined and that it was not worth whileeven to
attempt the ascent? And if it were possible to kill the man who tried to
release them and lead them up, would they not kill him? This image then we must
apply as a whole to all that has been said, likening the region revealed
through sight to the habitation of the prison, and the light of the fire in it
to the power of the sun. My surmise is that the ascent and the contemplation of
the things above is the soul's ascension to the intelligible region. Only God
knows whether it is true, but, at any rate, my dream as itappears to me is that
in the region of the known the last thing to be seen and hardly seen is the
idea of good, and that when seen it must needs point us to the conclusion that
this is indeed the cause of all things of all that is right and beautiful, giving
birth in the visible world to light, and the author of light and itself in the
intelligible world being the authentic source of truth and reason, and that
anyone who is to act wisely in private or public must have caught sight of
this.[117]
3.9.2. I am unable to suppose that any other study
turns the soul's gaze upward than that which deals with being and the
invisible. But if anyone tries to learn about the things of sense, whether
gaping up or blinking down, I would never say that he really learns–for nothing
of the kind admits of true knowledge–nor would I say that his sould looks up,
but down,even though he study floating on his back on
sea or land. Astronomy ought to be taught contrary to the present fashion if it
is to be larned in a way conducive to our purpose. These sparks that paint
thesky as the fairest and most exact of material things, but we must recognize
that they fall far short of the truth, the movements, namely, of real speed and
real slowness in true number and in all true figures both in relation to one
another and as vehicles of the things they carry and contain. These can be
apprenhended only by reason and thought, but not by sight. Then, we must use
the blazonry of the heavens as patterns to aid in the study of those realities,
just as one would do who chanced upon diagrams drawn with special care and
elaboration by Daedalus or some other craftsman or painter. For anyone
acquainted with geomtry who saw such designs [cf. DESIGN-REENGINEERING] would
admit the beauty of the workmanship, but would think it absurd to examine them
seriously in the expectation of finding in them the absolute truth with regard
to equals or double or any other ratio. The one who was an astronomer would
feel in the same way whenhe turned his eyes upon the movements of the stars. He
will be willing to concede that the artisans of heaven fashioned it in the best
possible manner for such a fabric. But when it comes to the proportions of day
and night, and of their relation to the month, and that of the month to the
year, and of the other stars to these and one another he will regard as a very
strange fellow the man who believes that these things go on forever without
change or the least deviation–though they possess bodies and are visible
objects–and that his unremitting quest is the realities of these things. It is
by means of problems,then, as in the study of
geometry,that we will pursue astronomy too, andwe will let be the things in
heaven, if we are to have a part in the true science of astronomy and so
convert to right use from uselessness that natural indwelling intelligence of
the soul; useful, say I, for the investigation of the beautiful and the good,
but it otherwise, useless. And if the investigation of all these studies goes far
enough to bring out their community and kinship with one another, and to infer
their affinities, then to busy ourselves with them contributes to our desired
end, and the labor taken is not lost, but otherwise it is vain.[118]
3.9.3. The very law which dialectic recites, of which,
though it belongs to the intelligible, we may see as an imitation in the
progress of the faculty of vision. What it the nature of this faculty of
dialectic? Into what divisions does it fall? I call the first division science,
the second understanding, the third belief, and the fourth conjecture or
picture thought–and the last two collectively opinion, and the first two
intellection, opinion dealing with generation, and intellection with
essences,and this relation being expressed in the proportion: as essence is to
generation, so is intellection to opinion, and as intellection is to opinion,
so is science to belief, and understanding to image thinking or surmise. But
the relation between their objective correlates and the divison into two parts
of these, the opinable, namely, and the intelligible, let us dismiss, lest it
involve us in a too long discussion.[119]
3.9.4. I think that the likeness of a statesman has
not been perfectly drawn yet. [METAPHOR] Sculptors sometimes rush at their work
in ill-timed enthusiasm and then elaborate details of the work to such an
extent that they have to bring in extra material to complete it and this in the
end slows down their progress. [DESIGN-IMPLEMENTATION] Something like this
happened earlier in our discussion, when we wanted to make it immediately clear
where we were mistaken and to give a really impressive demonstration of the
point. Supposing that where a king was concerned only large-scale illustrations
could be suitable, we reared our massive myth and then had to use more myth
material than the occasion warranted; thus our
demonstration became too long and we did not give the myth a complete form
after all. Our definition, too, seems to me like a portrait which is as yet an
outline sketch and does not represent the original clearly becasue it has still
to be painted in colors properly balanced with one another. Remember,
however, that a definition couched in words is a better description of a living
creature than a drawing or any model can be–a better description, I mean, for
those capable of following such a definition; for those who cannot do so the
model or visible illustration is appropriate enough. [My italics] [120]
3.9.5. It is memory and perception that give raise to
opinion and to the attemptwe make to reach a judgment. I seems
that at such times our soul is like a book. The conjunction of memory with
sensation, together with the feelings consequent upon
memory and sensation, may be said as it were to write words in our souls. And
when this experience writes what is true, the result is that true opinion and
trueassertions spring ut in us. But there is an artist in our souls at such a
time, a painter, who comes after the writer and paints in the soul pictures of
these assertions that we make.[121]
3.10.1. Whatever is your aim let virtue be the
condition of the attainment of your aim, and know that without this all
possessions and pursuits are dishonorable and evil. For neither does wealth
bring honor to the owner if he be a coward. Nor do beauty and strength of body,
when dwelling in a base and cowardly man, appear comely, but the reverse of
comely, making the possessor more conspicuous, and manifesting forth his
cowardice. And all knowledge, when separated from justice and virtue, is seen
to be cunning and not wisdom.[122]
3.10.2. A good judge must not be a youth but an old
man, a late learner of the nature of injustice, one who has not become aware of
it as a property in his own soul, but one who has through the long years
trained himself to understand it as an alien thing in alien souls, and to
discern how great an evil it is by the instrument of mere knowledge, and not by
experience of his own. That is the noblest kind of judge, and a good one. For
he who has a good soul is good. But that cunning fellow quick to suspect evil,
and who has himself done many unjust acts and who thinks himself a smart
trickster, when he associates with this like does appear to be clever, being on
his guard and fixing his eyes on the patterns within himself. But when the time
comes for him to mingle with the good and his elders, then on the contrary he
appears stupid. He is unseasonably distrustful and he cannot recognize a sound
character because he has no such pattern in himself. But since he more often
meets with the bad than the good, he seems to himself and to others to be
rather wise than foolish. Such a one, then, must not be our ideal of the good
and wise judge, but the former. For while badness could never come to know both
virtue and itself, native virtue through education will at last acquire the science
of both itself and badness. [123]
3.10.3. Some virtues of the soul do seem akin to those
of the body. For it is true that where they do not pre-exist, they are
afterword created by habit and practice. But the excellence of thought, it
seems, is certainly of a more divine quality, a thing that never loses its
potency, but, according to the direction of its conversion, becomes useful and
beneficent, or, again, useless and harmful. Have you never observed in those
who are popularly spoken as bad, but smart men how keen is the vision of the
little soul, how quick it is to discern the things that interest it,a proof
that it is not a poor vision which it has, but one forcibly enlisted in the
service of evil, so that the sharper its sight the more mischief it
accomplishes?[124]
3.11.1. [Socrates utters in "Gorgias":] I
think that I am one of very few Athenian, not to say the only one, engaged in
the true political art, and that of the men of today I alone practice
statesmanship. Since therefore when I speak on any occasion it is not with a
view to winning a favor, but I aim at what is best, not what is most pleasant,
and since I am unwilling to engage in dainty devices, I shall have nothing to
say for myself in court. My trial will be like that of a doctor prosecuted by a
cook before a jury of children. Just consider what kind of defense such a man
could offer in such a predicament, if the plaintiff should accuse him in these
terms: Children of the jury, this fellow has done all of you abundant harm, and
the youngest among you he is ruining by surgery and cautery,and he bewilders
you by starving and choking you, giving you bitter draughts and compelling you
to hunger and thirst, whereas I used to feast you with plenty of sweetmeats of
every kind. What do you think a doctor could find to say in such a desperate
situation? If he spoke the truth and said, All this I
did, children, in the interests of health, what a shout do you think such a
jury would utter? Would it not be a loud one?[125]
3.11.2. So cruel is the condition of the better sort
in relation to the state that there is no single thing like it in nature. But
to find a likeness for it, and a defense for them, picture a shipmaster in
height end strength surpassing all others on the ship, but who is slightly deaf
and of similarly impaired vision, and whose knowledge of navigation is on apar
with his sight and hearing. Conceive the sailors to be wrangling with one
another for control of the helm, each claiming that it is his right to steer
though he has never learned the art. And what is more, they affirm that it
cannot be taught at all, but they are ready to make mincemeat of anyone who
says that it can be taught, and meanwhile they are always clustered about the
shipmaster importuning him and sticking at nothing to induce him to turn over
the helm to them. And they take command of the ship, consume its stores and,
drinking and feasting, they praise and celebrate as a navigator, a pilot, a
master of shipcraft, the man who is most cunning to lend a hand in persuading
or constraining the shipmaster to let them rule, while the man wholacks this
craft they censure as useless. They have no suspicion that the true pilot must
give his attention to the time of the year, the seasons, the sky, the winds,
the stars, andall that pertains to his art if he is to be a true ruler of the
ship,and that he does not believe that there is any art or science of seizing
the helm with or without the consent of others, or any possibility of mastering
this alleged art at the same time with the science of navigation. With such
goings on aboard the ship do you not think that the real pilot would in very
deed be called a stargazer, an idle babbler, a useless fellow, by the sailors
in ships managed after this fashion? To begin, then, teach this parable to the
man who is surprised that philosophers are not honored in our cities, and tell
him that he is right in affirming that the finest spirits among the
philosophers are of no service to the multitude. But bid the blame for this
uselessness those who do not know how to make use of them. For it is not the
natural course of things that the pilot should beg the sailors to be ruled by
him or that the wise men should go to the doors of the rich. But the true
nature of things is that the sick man be rich or poor he must needs to be
governed to the door of the physician,and everyone who
needs to be governed to the door of the man whoknows how to govern. But you
will make no mistake in likening our present political rulers to the sort of
sailors we were just describing, and those whom these call useless and
stargazing ideologists to the true pilots.[126]
3.11.3. Can the multitude possibly tolerate or believe
in the reality of the beautiful in itself as opposed to the multiplicity of
beautiful things, or can they believe in anything conceived in its essence as
opposed to the many particulars? It is inevitable that those who philosophize
should be censured by them, and so likewise by those laymen who, associating
with the mob, desire to curry favor with it. From this point of view, do you
see any salvation that will suffer the born philosopher to abide in the pursuit
and persevere to the end? Even as a boy among boys such a one will take the
lead in all things, especially if the nature of his body matches the soul. His
kinsmen and fellow citizens, then, will desire, I presume, to make use of him
when he is older for their own affairs. They will fawn upon him with petitions
and honors, anticipating and flattering the power that will be his. How, then,
do you think such a youth will behave in such conditions? Will his soul not be
filled with unbound ambitious hopes, and will he not think himself of managing
the affairs of both Greeks and barbarians, and thereupon exalt himself, haughty
of mien, and stuffed with empty pride and void of sense? And if to a man in
this state of mind someone gently comes and tells him what is the truth, that
he has no sense and sorely needs it, and that the only way to get it is to work
like a slave to win it, do you think it will be easy for him to lend and ear to
the quiet voice in the midst of and in spite of these evil surroundings? Such,
my good friend, is the destruction and corruption of the most excellent nature,
which is rare enough in any case. And it is from men of this kind that those
spring who do the greatest harm to communities and individuals, and the
greatest good when the stream is channeled into that channel, while a small
nature never does anything great to a man or a city. Those, then, to whom
philosophy properly belongs, thus falling away and leaving her [cf. the
university] forlorn and unwed, themselves live and unreal and alien life, while
other unworthy wooers rush in and defile her as an orphan bereft of her kin,
and attach to her such reproaches as her revilers taunt her with, delclaring
that some of her consorts are of no account and the many accountable for many
evils. And, plausibly, other manikins, observing that the place is unoccupied
and full of fine terms and pretensions, just as men escape from prison to take
sanctuary in the temples, so these gentlemen joyously bound away from the
mechanical arts to philosophy [or the other way round,
cf. IT], those that are most cunning in their little craft. For in comparison
with the other arts the prestige of philosophy even in her present low estate
retains a superior dignity, and this is the ambition and aspiration of that
multitude of pretenders unfit by nature. Is not the picture they present,
precisely that of a little bald-headed tinker who has made money,and just freed
from bonds and had a bath and is wearing a new garment and has got himself up
like a bridegroom and is about to marry his master's daughter who has fallen
into poverty and abandonment?[127] The disesteem that has fallen upon philosophy is caused by the
unfitness of her associates and wooers.[128]
3.11.4. A maid servant exercised her wit at the
expense of Thales, when he was looking up to study the stars and tumbled down a
well. She scoffed at him for being so eager to know what was happening in the
sky that he could not see what lay at his feet. Anyone who gives his life to
philosophy is open to such mockery. And so, on a public occasion or in private
company, in a law court or anywhere else, when he is forced to talk about what
lies at his feet or is before his eyes, the whole rabble will join the
maidsevants in laughing at him, as from inexperience he walks and stumbles into
every pitfall. His terrible clumsiness makes him seem so stupid. He cannot
engage in an exchange of abuse, for, never having made a study of anyone's
peculiar weaknesses, he has no personal scandals to bring up; so in his helplessness he looks a fool. When people vaunt
their own or other men's merits, his unaffected laughter makes him conspicuous
and they think he is frivolous. In all such matters the world has the laugh of
the philosopher, partly because he seems arrogant, partly becasue of his
helpless ignorance in matters of daily life. On the other hand, when the
philosopher drags the other upward to a height at which he may consent to drop
the question 'What justice have I done to you or you to me', and to think about
justice and injustice in themselves, what each is, and how they differ from one
another and from anything else, or to stop quoting poetry about the happiness
of kings or of men with gold in store and think about the meaning of kingship
and the whole question of human happiness and misery, what their nature is, and
how humanity can gain the one and escape the other–in all this field, when the
small, shrewd, legal mind has to render an account, then the situation is
reversed. Now it is he who is dizzy from hanging at such an unaccustomed height
and looking down from mid-air. Lost and dismayed and stammering, he will be
laughed at, not by maidservants or the uneducated–they will not see what is
happening–but by everyone whose breeding has been the anthithesis of a slave's.[129]
3.12.1. The way to reflect about the nature of
anything is as follows: first to decide whether the object in respect of which
we desire to have scientific knowledge, and to be able to impart it to others,
is simple or complex; secondly, if it is simple, to inquire what natural
capacity it has of acting upon another thing, and through what means; or, if it
is complex, to enumerate its parts and observe in respect of each what we
observe in the case of the simple object, to wit what its natural capacity,
active or passive, consists in.[130]
3.12.2. Let us create a city from the beginning, in
our theory. Its real creator, as it appears, will be our needs: food, housing,
raiment, etc. One man is naturally fitted for one task, and another for
another. If one lets slip the right season, the favorable moment in any task,
the work is spoiled. The result, then is that more things are produced, and
better and more easily shen one man performs one task according to his nature
at the right moment, and at leisure from other occupations. [SYSTEM][131]
3.12.3. A thing, then, that in its contribution to the
excellence of a state vies with and rivals its wisdom, its soberness, its
bravery, is the principle of everyone in it doing his own task. The having and
doing of one's own and what belongs to oneself would admittedly be justice.[132]
3.12.4. The object on which we fixed our eyes in the
establishment of our state was not the exceptional happiness of any one class
but the greatest possible happiness of the city as a whole. For we thought that
in a state so constituted we should be most likely to discover justice as we
should injustice in the worst governed state. Our first task, then, we take it,
is to mold the model of a happy state–we are not isolating a small class in it
and postulating their happiness, but that of a city as a whole. But the
opposite type of state we will consider presently. Is is as if we were
[METAPHOR] coloring a statue and someone approached and censured us, saying
that we did not apply the most beautiful pigments to the most beautiful parts
of the image, since the eyes, which are the most beautiful part, have not been
painted with purple but with black. We should think it a reasonable
justification to reply, Don't expect us quaint friend,
to paint the eyes so fine that they will not be like eyes at all,
[LIKENESS-MIRROR-CORRESPONDENCE] nor other parts, but observe whether by
assigning what is proper to each we render the whole beautiful. And so in the present case you must not require us to attach to
the guardians of the laws of the state a happiness that will make them anything
but guardians. For in like manner we could clothe the farmers in robes of state
and deck them with gold and bid them cultivate the soil at their pleasure, and
we could make the potters recline on couches from left to right before the fire
drinking toasts and feasting with their wheel alongside to potter with when
they are so disposed, and we can make all the others happy in the same fashion,
so that thus the entire city may be happy. But urge us not to this, since, if
we yield, the farmer will not be a farmer nor the potter a potter, nor will any
other of the types that consititute a state keep its form. HOwever, for the
others it matters less. For cobblers who deteriorate and are spoiled and
pretend to be the workmen that they are not are no great danger to a state. But
guardians of laws and of the city who are not what they pretend to be, but only
seem, destroy utterly, I would have you note, the entire state, and on the
other hand they alone are decisive for its good government and happiness.
Consider, then, whether our aim in establishing the guardians is the greatest
possible happiness among them ro whether that is something we must look to see
develop in the city as a whole, but these herpers and guardians are to be
constrained and pesuaded to do what will make them the best craftsmen in their
own work, and similarly all the rest. And so, as the entire city develops and
is ordered well, each class is to be left to the share of happiness that its
nature comports.[133]
3.12.5. Is there any science in the city just founded
by us residing in any of its citizens which does not take counsel about some
particular thing in the city but about the city as a whole [WHOLE] and the
betterment of its relations with itself and other states? Yes, it is the
science of guardianship or government and it is to be found in those rulers to
whom we give the name of guardians in the full sense of the word. These rulers
would be the smallest of all the groups of those who possess special knowledge
and receive distinctive appellations. Then it is by virtue of its smallest
class and minutest part of itself, and the wisdom that resides therein, in the
part which takes the lead and rules, that a city established on principles of
nature would be wise as a whole. And as it appears these are by nature the
fewest, the class to which it pertains to partake of the knowledge which alone
of all forms of knowledge deserves the name of wisdom.[134]
3.12.6. If unity is adequately seen by itself or apprehended
by some other sensation, it would not tend to draw the mind to the apprehension
of essence. But is some contradiction is always seens concidentally with it, so
that it no more appears to be one than the opposite, there would forthwith be
need of something to judge between them, and it would compel the soul to be at
a loss and to inquire, by arousing thought in itself, and to ask, whatever then
is the one as such, and thus the study of unity will be one of the studies that
guide and convert the soul to the contemplation of true being.[BREAKDOWN][135]
3.12.7. The youngsters who are given preference to
become rulers will receive greater honors than the others, and they will be
required to gather the studies which they disconnectedly pursued as children in
their former education into a comprehensive survey of their affinities with one
another and with the nature of things. It is the chief test of the dialectic
nature and its opposites. For he who can view things in their connection is a
dialectician; he who cannot is not. When they have passed the thiritieth year
the task will be to promote them, by a second selection to still greater
honors, and to prove them by the power of dialectic to see which of them is
able to disregard the eyes and the other senses and go on to being itself in
company with truth.[136]
3.12.8. We are willing to admit that there exists an
art of higher order also concerned with the process of acquiring special skills.
This second art is the one whose province is to decide whether or not we ought
to learn any particular art, and is to have controlof the art which actually
teaches us the skill. The province of the really kingly art is not to act for
itself but rather to control the work of the arts which instruct us in the
methods of action. It is concerned with the laws and with all that belongs to
the life of the community [cf. cyber-coomunities]. It weaves all into its
unified fabric with perfect skill. It is a universal art and so we call it by a
name of universal scope, "statesmanship". When all classes of arts
active in the government of the state have been distinguished, we shall go on
to scrutinize statesmanshipand base our scrutiny of it on the art of weaving
which provides our example for it. The usual kind of statement is that all
several parts of goodness are in mutual accord, but we must consider instances
drawn from all levels of existence of things which we regard as excellent and
yet classify as mutually opposed, for instance, swiftness-speed and
gentleness-quietness. Men react to situations in one way of the other according
to the affinities of their own dispositions. They favor some forms of action as
being akin to their own character,and they recoil from
acts arising from opposite tendencies as being foreign to themselves. Thus men come into violent conflictwith one another on many
issues. Considered as a conflict of temperament, this is a mere trifle, but
when the conflict arises over matters of high public importance it becomes the
most inimical of all the plagues with can threaten the life of a community. We
find that important parts of goodness are at variance with one another and that
they set at variance the men in whom they predominate, even if no art which
works by combining materials deliberately chooses to make any of its products,
even the least important of them, out of a combination of good material with
bad. Every art rejects bad material as far as possible
and uses what is good and serviceable. The materials may be alike or
dissimilar, but surely it is desirable that they should be sound, so that the
art may combine them to form one product and fashion [cf. design] them to a
structure proper to their specific function. The statesman will take all those
who, under the training process, do achieve sufficient nobility of character to
stand up the royal weaving process and yet submit to it while it combines them
all scientifically into a unity. He sets about his task of combining and
weaving together groups exhibiting mutually opposed characters.He
first unites that element in their souls which is supernatural by a divine
bond, since this element in them is akin to the divine. When arises in the soul
of men a right opinionconcerning what is good, just, and profitable, and what
is the opposite of these–an opinion based on absolute truth and settled as an
unshakeable conviction–I declare that such a conviction is a manifestation of
the divine. After this supernatural link will come the natural bond, human ties
to supplement the divine ones. There is no difficulty in forging the human
bonds if the divine bond has been forged first. That bond is a conviction about
values and standards shared by all types of good characters.[137]
3.12.9. Each of the present days' framers of codes of
legislation frames any additional paragraph he finds necessary–one a section on
estates and their heiresses, another one on assult and battery, others, others
of the same kind, in indefinite number. But we contend that the right procedure
for the framer of a legislation[ORGANIZATION] is to
make a beginning with supreme virtue and virtue as a whole, not one fragment of
it.[138]
3.12.10. To the man who pursues his studies in the
proper way, all geometric constructions, all systems of numbers, all duly
constituted melodic progressions, the single ordered scheme of all celestial
revolutions, should disclose themselves, and disclose themselves they will, if
a man pursues his studie aright with his mind's eye fixed on their single end.
As such a man reflects, he will receive the revelation of asingle bond of
natural interconnection between all these problems. And piety itself forbids us
to disregard the gods, now that the glad news of them all has been duly
revealed. Him who has mastered all these lessons I account in truth as wisest;
when death has put the end to his allotted term, if he may be said to endure
beyond death, he will no longer be subject, as he is now, to a multitude of
perceptions; he will have but one allotted potion, even as he has reduced the
manifold within himself to unity, and in it will be happy, wise, blessed, all
in one.[139]
3.12.11.1. Cf. Design and Corinth letter.
4.2.1. A flight or pursuit has so often gone
unrecorded, and will in the future; this shows that we cannot regard victory or
defeat in the field as more than a very dubious test of the laudability of a
practice. No, we must leave victories and defeats out of court for the present,
and discuss the various social practices on their own merits, in the hope of
convincing ourselves that some are laudable and others the reverse. It is
highly improper to undertake to condemn or approve such a practice out of hand,
on the bare mention of its name. This is as though one who had heard wheat, for
instance, as a wholesome article of diet should denounce it out of hand,
without any inquiry into its effects, of the matter of its administration–I
mean, how it is administered, and to whom, or with what accompaniments, in what
form it is to be served, and to persons in what state of health.[140]
4.2.2. If you follow up the story we have just set
before ourselves for consideration, you will directly discover that the cause
of the ruin of the three kings and their whole design was no cowardice and no
military ignorance on the part of commanders or commanded; what ruined them was
their abundant vices of other kinds, and, above all, their folly in the supreme
concerns of man.[141]
4.2.3. But the end of an enterprise is never reached
by the mere performance of the act, acquisition of the possession, or
establishement of the foundation; we must never take ourselves to have done all
there was to do until we have provided a complete and permanent guarantee tof
the preservation of our work. Until then we should regard our whole achievement
as unfinished.[142]
4.2.4. You must bear in mind on both sides of the
controversy and keep recalling how many times, first in one camp then in the
other, you have had great expectations and have supposed again and again that
now only some little thing stood between you and complete success. Above all be
mindful that in each case that little thing turns out to be a source of woes
unnumbered; no goal is ever reached, but to the supposed end of the old is
linked again and again the budding of a fresh beginning–a vicious circle that
threatens to involve both parties, that of the tyrant and that of the people,
in total destruction.[143]
4.3.1. Among the various arts there are some that
consist for the most part of action and have little need of words, and some in
fact have no need, but their function can be achieved in silence, as for
instance painting and sculpture and many others. I fancy it is with such arts
that rhetorics is said to have no concern. But there are other arts that secure
their result entirely through words and have practically no need, or very
little need of action–arithmetic for instance, and calculation and geometry and
the game of draughts and many other arts, some of which involve almost as many
words as actions, and many of them far more, their whole achievement and effect
in general being due to words. It is to this kind of art, I believe that
rhetoric is assigned. Rhetoric then is one of those arts that for the most part
employ words, and there are other such arts also. Should one call arithmetic
rhetoric?[144]
4.3.2. A pattern, was what we wanted when we were
inquiring into the nature of ideal justice and asking what would be the
character of the perfectly just man, supposing him to exist, and, likewise, in
regard to injustice and completely unjust man. We wished to fix our eyes upon
them as types [TYPES] and models, so that whatever we discerned in them of happiness
or the reverse would necessarily apply to ourselves in the sense that whosoever
is likest them will have the allotment most like theirs. Our purpose was not to
demonstrate the possibility of the realization of these ideals. Do you think,
that he would be any the less a good painter, who, after portraying a pattern
of the ideally beautiful man and omitting no touch required for the perfection
of the picture, should not be able to prove that it is actually possible for
such a man to exist? [ART-AETHETICS-VIRTUAL REALITY VR-IDEAL PLANNING Then we
trying to create in words the pattern of a good state and our words are not any
the less well spoken if we find ourselves unable to prove that it is possible
for a state to be governed in accordance with out words. But if we must do our
best to show how most probably and in what respect these things would be most
nearly realized it must be granted that action partakes of exact truth less
than speech, even if some deny it. Then don't insist that I must exhibit as realized
in action precisely what we expounded in words. But if we can discover how a
state might be constituted most nearly answering to out description, you must
say that we have discovered the required possibility of realization. We must
try to discover and point out what it is that is now badly managed in our
cities, and that prevents them from being so governed, and what is the smallest
change that would bring a state to this manner of government, preferably a
change in one thing, if no, then in two, and failing that, the fewest possible
in number and the slightest in potency. There is one change, then, which I
think we can show would bring about the desired transformation. It is not a
slight or an easy one but it is possible. I am on the very verge of what we
likened to the greatest wave of paradox. But say it I will, even if, to keep
the figure, it is likely to wash us away on billows of laughter and scorn.
Unless either philosophers become kings in our states or those whom we now call
our kings and rulers take to the pursuit of philosophy seriously and
adequately, and there is a conjunction of these two things, political power and
philosophical intelligence [PHILOSOPHICAL PRAGMATISM], while the motly horde of
the natures who at present pursue either apart from the other are compulsorily
excluded, there can be no cessation of troubles. But this is the thing that has
made me so long shrink from speaking out, because I saw that it would be a very
paradoxical saying. For it is not easy to see that there i no other way of
happiness either for private or public life.[145]
4.3.3. There might be an art, an art of the speediest
and most effective shifting or conversion of the soul, not the art of producing
vision in it, but on the assumption that it possesses vision but does not
rightly direct it and does not look where it should, an art of bringing this
about. The other so-called virtues of the soul do seem akin to those of the
body. For it is true that were they do not pre-exist, they are afterward
created by habit and practice. But the excellence of thought is certainly of a
more divine quality, a thing that never loses its potency, but, according to
the direction of its conversion becomes useful and benficent, or useless and
hamful. Have you never observed in those who are popularly spoken of as bad,
but smart men how keen is the vision of the little soul, how quick it is to
discern the things that interest it, a proof that it is not a poor vision which
it has, but one forcibly enlisted in the service of evil, so that the sharper
its sight the more mischief it accomplishes?[146]
4.3.4. The greater and more advanced part of geometry
and and calculation tends to facilitate the apprehension of the idea of good.
That tendency is to be found in all studies that force the soul to turn its
vision round to the region where dwells the most blessed part of reality. Then
if it compels the soul to contemplate essence, it is suitable: if genesis, it
is not. The science of geometry is in direct contradiction with the language
employed by its adepts. Their language is most ludicrous, though they cannot
help it, for they speak as if they were doing something and as if all their
words were directed toward action. For all their talk is of squaring and
applying and adding and the like, whereas in fact the real object of the entire
study is pure knowledge, that which always is, and not something which at some
time comes into being and passes away, for geometry is the knowledge of the
eternally existent. Then, it would tend to draw the soul to truth, and would be
productive of a philosophical attitude of mind, directing upward the faculties
that now wrongly are turned earthward. Even the byproducts of this study are
not slight, as its uses in war. Then we can lay this down as a branch of study
for our lads, and astronomy. The quickness of perception about the seasons and
the course of the months and the years is serviceable not only to agriculture
and navigation, but still more to the military art, but the mention of this
discloses an apparent fear lest the multitude may suppose us to be recommending
useless studies. It is indeed no trifling task, but very difficult to realize
that there is in every soul an organ or instrument of knowledge that is
purified and kindled afresh by such studies when it has been destroyed and
blinded by our ordinary pursuits, a faculty whose preservation outweighs ten
thousand eyes.[147]
4.3.5. The man who professes to be able, by a single
form of skill, to produce all things, that when he creates with his pencil
representations bearing the same name as real things [VR-METAPHORS], he will be
able to deceive the innocent minds of children, if he shows them his drawings
at a distance, into thinking that is is capable of creating, in full reality,
anything he chooses to make. Then we must expect to find a corresponding form
of skill in the region of discourse, making it possible to impose upon the
young who are still removed from the reality of things, by means of words that
cheat the ear, exhibiting images of all things in a shadow play of discourse,
so as to make them believe that they are hearing the truth. Is it not
inevitable that, after a long enough time, as these young hearers advance in
age and, coming into closer touch with realities, are forced by experience to
apprenhend things clearly as they are, most of them should abandon those former
beliefs, so that what seemed important will now appear trifling and what seemed
easy, difficult, and all the illusions created in discourse will be completely
overturned by the realities which encounter them in the actual conduct of life?
That is why all of us here must try, as we are in fact trying, to bring you as
close as possible to the realities and spare you the experience. [148]
4.3.6. I take it to always the most equitable course
in dealing with a plan for the future that he who exhibits the model on which
and undertaking should be fashioned should abate nothing of perfect excellence
and absolute truth, while one who finds it impossible to compass some point of
this perfection should decline to put it into practice, and contrive the
realization of the remaining possibility which approximates most nearly to what
ought to be done, and is most akin to it in character. But he should allow the
legislator to perfect the delineation of his heart's desire; only when that has
been done should he begin to discuss with him which of his legislative
proposals are expedient and which involve difficulties. For self-consistency,
you know, must be aimed at in everything, even by the artificer [DESIGNER] of
the paltriest object, if he is to be of any account.[149]
4.4.1. Too many of our modern philosophers in their
search after the nature of things, are always getting dizzy from constantly
going round and round, and then they imagine that the
world is going round and round and moving in all directions. And this
appearance, which arises out of their own internal condition, they suppose to
be a reality of nature; they think that there is nothing stable or permanent,
but only flux and motion, and that the world is always full of every sort of
motion and change.[150]
4.4.2. The nobler and clearer way to learn things is
not to learn of the images, but to learn of the truth. How real existence is to
be studied or discovered is, we suspect, beyond us, but we admit so much, that
the knowledge of things is not to be derived from names. They must be
investigated in themselves. Let us not be imposed upon by the appearance of a
multitude of names given under the mistaken opinion of the idea that all things
are in motion and flux. Having fallen into a kind of whirlpool themselves, the
givers of names are carried round and want to drag us in after them. Then let
us seek the true beauty, not asking whether a face is fair, or anything of that
sort, for all such things appear to be in flux, but let us ask whether the true
beauty is not always beautiful.[151]
4.4.3. Although we speak of an individual as being the
same so long as he continues to exist in the same form, and therefore we assume
that a man is the same person in his dotage as in his infancy, yet, for all we
hall him the same, every bit of him is different, and every day he is becoming
a new man, while the old man is ceasing to exist, as you can see from his hair,
his flesh, his bones, his blood, and all the rest of his body. And not only his
body, for the same thing happens to his soul. And neither his manners, nor his
disposition, nor his toughts, nor his desires, nor his pleasures, nor his
sufferings, not his fears are the same throughout his life, for some of them
grow, while others disappear. And the application of this principle to human
knowledge is even more remarkable, for not only do some things we know
increase, while some of them are lost, so that even in our knowledge we are not
always the same, but the principle applies as well to every single branch of
knowlledge. When we say we are studying, we really mean that our knowledge is
ebbing away. We forget, because our knowledge disappears, and we have to study
so as to replace what we are losing, so that the state of our knowledge may
seem, at any rate, to be the same as it was before.[152]
4.4.4. We proposed as sufficient mark of real things
the presence in a thing of the power of being acted upon or of acting in
relation to however insignificant a thing. To that some reply that a power of
acting and being acted upon belongs to becoming, but neither of these powers is
compatible with real being. But they acknowledge that the soul knows and the real
being is known. They would say that if knowing is to be acting on something, it
follows that what is known bust be acted upon by it, and so, reality when it is
being known by the act of knowledge must, in so far as it is known, be changed
owing to being so acted upon–ant that, we say, cannot happen to the changeless.
But we cannot be so easily convinced that change, life, soul, understanding
have no place in that which is perfectly real–that it has neither life nor
thought, but stands immutable in solemn aloofness, devoid of intelligence. But
if it has intelligence it has life, and then it has soul. But then, if it has
intelligence, life, and soul, then we cannot say that a living thing remains at
rest in complete changelessness, and we must admit that what changes and change
itself are real things. From this, however, follows, first, that if all things
are unchangeable, not intelligence can really exist anywhere in anything with
regard to any object. And, on the other hand, if we allow that all things are moving
and changing, on that view equally we shall be excluding intelligence from the
class of real things. Then, all the force of reasoning must be enlisted to
oppose anyone who tries to maintain any assertion about anything at the same
time that he suppresses knowledge or understanding or intelligence.[153]
4.4.5. In all cases of multifarious minor details, it
is inevitable that the legislator should make omissions for which those who
have regular yearly experience of them should learn by practice to provide by
regulations and annual amendments until a sufficient rule for such observances
and customs is felt to have been reached. So a
moderate but definite time to allow for the experiment to cover each and all of
the details would be a ten-years' cicle, within which the various
magistracies–acting in concert with the original legislator, if he is still
alive, or alone if he is deceased–may report omissions in their several
departments to the curators of laws, and attempt amendments until the various
regulations are felt to have been brought to perfection. They should then
declare them incapable of modification and thereafter enforce them with the
rest of the laws originally established by the legislator's imposition. On
these statutes they must in no case make any willful innovation, but if they
should ever judge themselves under the stress of absolute necessity, they are
to consult the advice of all magistrates, the whole popular assembly, and all
the oracles, and make such modifications as are unanimously approved by all
these authorities, but no other changes whatever.[154]
4.4.6. As I considered these matters, as well the sort
of men who were active in politics, and the laws and the customs, the more I
examined them and the more I advanced in years, the harder it appeared to me to
administer the government correctly. For one thing, nothing could be done
without friends and loyal companions, and such men were not easy to find ready
at hand, since our city was no longer administered according to the standards
and practices of our fathers. Neither could such men be created afresh. Furthermore the written law and the customs were being
corrupted at an astounding rate. The result was that I, who had at first been
full of eagerness for a public career, as I gazed upon the whirlpool of public
life and saw an incessant movement of shifting currents, at last felt dizzy,
and, while I did not cease to consider means of improving this particular
situation and indeed reforming the whole constitution, yet, in regard to
action, I kept waiting for favorable moments, and finally saw clearly in regard
to all states now existing that without exception their system of government is
bad. Their constitution are almost beyond redemption
except through some miraculous plan accompanied by good luck. Hence I was
forced to say in praise of the correct philosophy that it affords a vantage
point from which we can discern in all cases what is just for communities and
for individuals, and that accordingly the human race will not see better days
until either the stock of those who rightly and genuinely follow philosophy
acquire political authority, or else the class who have political control be
led by some dispensation of providence to become real philosophers.[155]
5.1.1. Anyone who is close to Socrates and enters into
conversation with him is liable to be drawn into an argument, and whatever
subject he may start,he will be continually carried
round and round by him, until at last he finds that he has to give an account
of his present and past life, and when he is once entangled, Socrates will not
let him go until he has completely sifted him. I think that there is no harm in
being reminded of any wrong think which we are, or have been, doing; he who
does not fly from reproof will be sure to take more heed of his afterlife.[156]
5.1.2. I have a way, when anybody else says anything,
of giving close attention to him, especially if the speaker appears to me to be
a wise man. Having a desire to understand, I question him, and I examine and
analyze and put together what he says, in order that I may understand, but it
the speaker appears to me to be a poor hand, I do not interrogate him, or
trouble myself about him. I am very attentive and ask questions of him, in
order that I may learn and be improved by him.[157]
5.1.3. I do not speak with any pretense to knowledge,
but I am searching along with you, and so if there appars to be anything in
what my opponent say, I shall be the first to yield to
him. But I say this only if you think that the debate shoudl be carried through
to the end. If you do not wish it, let us drop and take our departure.[158]
5.1.4. If I were confident that I was speaking with
knowledge, it would be an excellent encouragement. For there are both safety
and boldness in speaking the truth with knowledge about our greatest and
dearest concerns to those who are both wise and dear. But to speak when one
doubts himself and is seeking while he talks, as I am doing, is a fearful and
slippery venture. The fear is not to be laughed at, for that is childish, but,
lest, missing the truth. I fall down and drag my friends with me in matters
where it most imports not to stumble. For, indeed, I believe that involuntary
homicide is a lesser fault than to mislead opinion about the honorable, the
good, and the just. This is a risk that is better to run with enemies than with
friends,so that your encouragement is none.[159]
5.3.1. [Meno:] ''Socrates, even before I met you they
told me that in plain truth you are a perplexed man yourself and reduce the
others to perplexity. At this moment I feel you are exercising magic and
witchcraft upon me and poisitively laying me under your spell until I am just a
mass of helplessness. In several respects you are exactly like the flat sting
ray that one meets in the sea. Wheneveranyone comes into contact with it, it
numbs him,and that is the sort of thing that you seem
to be doingto me now. My mind and my lips are literally numb, and I have nothing
to reply to you.' [Socrates:] 'If the sting paralyzes others only through being
paralized itself, then the comparison is just, but not otherwise. It isn't
that, knowing the answers myself, I perpels other people. The truth is rather
that I infect them also with the perplexity I feel myself.'[160]
5.3.2. Thus the soul, since it is immortal and has
been born many times, and has seem all things both here and in the other world,has learned everything that is. So
we need not be surprised if it can recall the knowledge of virtue or anything
else which, as we see, it once possessed. All nature is akin,and the soul has
learned everything, so that when a man has recalled a single piece of
knowledge–learned it, in ordinary language–there is no reason why he
should not find out all the rest, if hekeeps a stout heart and does not grow
weary of the search, for seeking and learning are in fact nothing but
recollection.[161]
5.3.3. So a man who does not
know has in himself true opinions on a subject without having knowledge [cf.
PERSONAL SILENT KNOWLEDGE]. At present these opinions, being newly aroused,
have a dreamlike quality. But if the same questions are put to him on many
occasions and in different ways, you can see that in the end he will have a
knowledge on the subject as accurate as anybody's. This knowledge will not come
from teaching but from questioning. He will recover it for himself.[162]
5.3.4. You must learn, first of all, the right use of
words. People use the the word learn in two senses–first when one has no
knowledge at the beginning of something, and then afterward gets the knowledge,
and second, when one already having knowledge uses this knowledge to examine
this same thing done or spoken. The second is called understanding, rather than
learning, but sometimes is also called learning. [163]
5.3.5. Although we speak of an individual as being the
same so long as he continues to exist in the same form, and therefore we assume
that a man is the same person in his dotage as in his infancy, yet, for all we
hall him the same, every bit of him is different, and every day he is becoming
a new man, while the old man is ceasing to exist, as you can see from his hair,
his flesh, his bones, his blood, and all the rest of his body. And not only his
body, for the same thing happens to his soul. And neither his manners, nor his
disposition, nor his toughts, nor his desires, nor his pleasures, nor his
sufferings, not his fears are the same throughout his life, for some of them
grow, while others disappear. And the application of this principle to human
knowledge is even more remarkable, for not only do some things we know
increase, while some of them are lost, so that even in our knowledge we are not
always the same, but the principle applies as well to every single branch of
knowlledge. When we say we are studying, we really mean that our knowledge is ebbing
away. We forget, because our knowledge disappears, and we have to study so as
to replace what we are losing, so that the state of our knowledge may seem, at
any rate, to be the same as it was before.[164]
5.3.6. Concerning the manner in which a state that
occupies itself with philosophy can escape destruction: at present those who
take it up are youths, just out of boyhood, who in the interval before they
engage in business and money-making approach the most difficult part of it –
that is, discussion. These are regarded forsooth as the best exemplars of
philosophy. In later life they think they have done much if, when invited, they
deign to listen to the philosophical discussion of others. That sort of thing
they think should be bywork. And toward old age, with few exceptions, their
light is quenched completely. What they should do is instead the reverse. While
they are lads they should occupy themselves with and education and culture
suitable to youth, and while their bodies are growing to manhood take right
good care of them, thus securing a basis and support for the intellectual life.
But with the advance of age, when the soul begins to attain its maturity, they
should make its exercises more severe, and when the bodily strength declines
and they are past the age of political and military service, then at last they
should be given free range of the pasture and do nothing but philosophize.[165]
5.3.7. The greatest thing to learn is the idea of good
by reference to which just things and all the rest become useful and
beneficial.[166]
5.3.8. 'Having' seems to me different from
'possessing'. If a man has bought a coat and owns it, but is not wearing it, we
should say he possesses it without having it about him. Now consider whether
knowledge is a thing you can possess in that way without having it about you,
like a man who has caught some wild birds–pigeons or whatnot–and keeps them in
an aviary he has made for them at home. In a sense, of course, we might say
that he 'has' them all the time inasmuch as he possesses them. But in another
sense he 'has' none of them,though he has got control
[cf. CONTROL] of them, now that he has made them captive in an enclosure of his
own; he can take and have hold of them whenever he likes by catching any bird
he chooses, and let them go again, and it is open to him to do that as often as
he pleases. [cf. HEIDEGGER READY-AT-HAND]. Let us suppose that every mind
contains a kind of aviary stocked with birds of every sort, some in flocks
apart from the rest, some in small groups, and some solitary, flying in any
direction among them all. When we are babies we must suppose this receptacle
empty, and take the birds to stand for pieces of knowledge. Whenever a person
acquires any piece of knowledge and shuts it up in his enclosure, we must say
he has learned or discovered [cf. vs. CONSTRUCT] the thing of which this is the
knowledge, and that is what"knowing" means. When a man has in his control
pieces of knowledge and hands them over, we call it ''teaching', and when the
other takes them from him, that is 'learning', and when he has them in the
sense of possessing them in thaat aviary of his, that is 'knowing'. Our
illustration from hunting pigeons ang getting possession of them will enable us
to explain that the hunting occurs in two ways–first, before you possess your
pigeon in order to have possession of it‚ secondly, after getting possession of
it, in order to catch and hold in your hand what you have already possessed for
some time. In the same way, if you have already possessed pieces of knowledge
about things you have learned and know, it is still possible to get to know the
same things again, but the process of recovering the knowledge of some particular
thing and getting hold of it. It is knowledge you have possessed for some time,
but you had not got it handy in your mind. Having drawn a distinction between
possessing knowledge and having it, we avoid the result that a man should not
know what he does know, but we say that it is possible for him to get hold
[make] a false judgment about it. For he may not have about him the knowledge
of that thing, but a different piece of knowledge instead of it. In this way
both true and false judgments can exist.[167]
5.3.9. A division of ignorance into two halves will
certainly imply that the art of instruction is also twofold, answering to the
two divisons of ignorance. I do seem to myself to see one very large and bad
sort of ignorance, which is quite separate, and may be weighed in the scale
against all other sorts of ignorance put together. It is when a person supposes
that he knows, and does not know; this appears to be the great source of all
the errors of the intellect. And this is the kind of ignorance which specially
earns the title of stupidity. The sort of instruction which gets rid of this is
not the teaching of handicraft arts, but what, thanks to us, has been termed
education in this part of the world. Of education,one
method appears to be rougher, and the other smoother. There is a time-honored
mode with our fathers commonly practiced toward their sons, and which is still
adopted by many–either of reproving their errors, or of gently advising
them–which varieties may be correctly included under the general term of
admonition. But whereas some appear to have arrived at the conclusion that all
ignorance is involuntary, and that no one who thinks himself wise is willing to
learn any of those things in which he is conscious of his own cleverness, and
that the admonition sort of education gives much trouble and does little good,
accordingly, they set to work to eradicate the spirit of conceit in another
way. They cross-examine a man's words, when he thinks that he is saying something
and is really saying nothing, and easily convict him of inconsistencies in his
opinions; these they then collect by the dialectic process,and
placing them side by side, show that they contradict one another about the same
things, in relation to the same things,and in the same respect. He, seeing
this, is angry with himself, and grows gentle toward others, and thus is
entirely delivered from great prejudices and harsh notions, in a way which is
most amusing to the hearer, and produces the most lasting good effect on the
person who is the subject of the operation. The purifier of the soul is
conscious that his patient will receive no benefit from the application of
knowledge until he is refuted, and from refutation learns modesty; he must be
purged of his prejudices first and made to think that he knows only what he
knows, and no more.[168]
5.3.10. But are we willing to admit that there exists
an art of a higher order also concerned with the process of acquiring special
skills? This second art is the one whose province is to decide whether or not
we ought to learn any particular art.[169]
5.3.11. He who is to be good at anything as a man must
practice that thing from early childhood, in play as well as in earnest, with
all theattendant circumstances of the action. We would seek to use games as a
means of directing children's tastes and inclinations toward the station they
are themselves to fill when adult. So we may say, in
fact, that the sum and substance of education if the right training which
effectually leads the sould of the child at play on to the love of the calling
in which he will have to be perfect, after its kind, when he is a man. Let ut
further guard against leaving our account of what education is too
indeterminate. When we are to express approval or censure of a man's training,
we correctly speak of one of ourselves as educated and another as
uneducated–and the reference is sometimes to the business of a huckster or a
supercargo–and of other such fellows of mighty fine education. But our present
discourse is in place only of the lips of one who holds that education is none
of these things, but rather that schooling from boyhood in goodness which
inspires the recipient with passionate and ardent desire to become a perfect
citizen, knowing both how to wield and how to submit to righteous rule. Our
argument would isolate this training from others and confine the name education
exclusively to it; any training which has as its end wealth, or perhaps bodily
strength or some other accomplishment unattended by intelligence and
righteousness, it counts vulgar, illiberal, and wholly unworthy to be called
education.[170]
5.3.12. The act of learning is attended by a kind of gusto,
but it is the truth of what is learned which gives it its rightness and
utility, its goodness and nobility.[171]
5.3.13. For everything that exists there are three
classes of objects through which knowledge about it must come; the knowledge
itself is a fourth, and we must put as a fifth entity the actual object of
knowledge which is true reality. We have then, (1) a name, (2) a description
composed of nouns and verbal expressions like in a definition, (3) an image,
and (4) a knowledge and understanding and correct opinion of the object. There
is something for instance called a circle, the name of which is the very word I
just now uttered. In the second place there is a description of it which is
composed of nouns and verbal expressions. For example
the description of that which is named round and circumference and circle would
run as follows: the thing which has everywhere equal distances between its
extremities and its center. In the third place there is a class of object which
is drawn and erased and turned on the lathe and destroyed - processes which do
not affect the real circle to which all these other circles are all related,
because it is different from them. In the fourth place there are knowledge and
understanding and correct opinion concerning them, all of which we must set
down as one thing more that is found not in sounds nor in shapes of bodies, but
in minds, whereby it evidently differs in its nature from the real circle and
the aforementioned three. Of all these four, understanding approaches nearest
in affinity and likeness to the fifth entity, while the others are more remote
from it. The same doctrine holds good in regard to shapes and surfaces, in
regard to the good and the beautiful and the just, in regard to all bodies
artificial and natural, in regard to every animal and in regard to every
quality of character, and in respect to all states active and passive. For if
in the case of any of these a man does not somehow or other get hold of the
first four, he will never gain a complete understanding of the fifth. Furthermore these four [names, descriptions, bodily forms,
concepts] do as much to illustrate the particular quality of any object as they
do to illustrate its essential reality because of the inadequacy of language.
Hence no intelligent man will ever be so bold as to put into language those
things which his reason has contemplated, espcially not into a form that is
unalterable. The important thing is that there are two things, the essential
reality and the particular quality, and when the mind is in the quest not of
the particular but of the essential, each of the four confronts the mind with
the unsought particular, whether in verbal or in bodily form. Each of the four
makes the reality that is expressed in words, or illustrated in objects liable
to easy refutation by the evidence of the senses. The result of this is to make
practically every man a prey to complete perplexity and uncertainty.
5.3.14. Now in cases where as a result of bad training
we are not even accustomed to look for the real essence of anything but are
satisfied to accept what confronts us in the phenomenal presentations, we are
not rendered by each other–the examined by the examiners who have the ability
to handle the four with dexterity and to subject them to examinations. In those
cases, however, where we demand answers and proofs in regard to the fifth
entity, anyone who pleases among those who have the skill of confutation gains
the victory and makes most of the audience think that the man who was first to
speak of write or answer has no acquaintance with the matters of which he
attempts to write or speak. Sometimes they are unaware what it is not the mind
of the writer or speaker that fails in the test, but rather the character of the
four–since that is naturally defective. Natural intelligence and a good memory
are equally powerless to aid the man who has not an inborn affinity with the
subject. The study of virtue and vice must be accompanied by an inquiry into
what is false and true of existence in general and must be carried on by
constant practice throughout a long period. Hardly after practicing detailed
comparisons of names and definitions and visual and other sense perceptions,
after scrutinizing them in benevolent disputation by the use of question and
answer without jealousy, at last in a flash[172] understanding blazes up, and the mind, as it exerts all its powers to
the limit of human capacity, is flooded with light. For this reason
no serious man will ever think of writing about serious realities for the
general public so as to make them a prey to envy and perplexity.[173]
5.4.1. The god Theuth had invented number and
calculation, geometry and astronomy, not to speak of draughts and dice, and
above all writing. Now the Egyptian king Thamus asked what was the use of thema
all, and praised what he thought the good. On each art Thamus had plenty of
views for and against. But when it came to writing Theut said, 'Here, O king,
is a branch of learning what will make the people of Egypt wiser and improve
their memories; my discovery provides a recipe for memory and wisdom.' But the
king answered and said, 'O man full of arts, to one it is given to create the
things of art, and to another to judge what measure of harm and of profit they
have for those that shall employ them. And so it is
that you, by reason of your tender regard for the writing that is your
offspring, have declared the very opposite of its true effect. If men learn
this, it will implant forgetfulness in their souls; they willl cease to
exercise memory because they rely on that which is written, calling things to
remembrance no longer from within themselves, but by means of external marks.
What you have discovered is a recipe not for memory, but for reminder. And it
is no true wisdom that you offer your disciples, but only its semblance, for by
telling them of many things without teaching them you will make them seem to
know much, while for the most part they know nothing, and as men filled, not of
wisdom, but with the conceit of wisdom, they will be a burden to their
fellows.' Then, anyone who leaves behind him a written manual, and likewise
anyone who takes it over from him, on the supposition that such writing will
provide something reliable and permanent, must be exceedingly simple-minded,
imagining that written words can do anything more than remind one who knows
that which the writing is concerned with. That's the strange thing with
writing, which makes it truly analogous to painting. The painter's products
stand before us as though they were alive, but if you question them. They
maintain a most majestic silence. It is the same with written words; they seem
to talk to you as though they were intelligent, but if you ask them anything
about what they say, from a desire to be instructed, they go on telling you the
same thing forever. And once a thing is put in writing, the composition,
whatever it may be, drifts all over the place, getting into the hands not only
of those who understand it, but equally of those who have no business with it;
it doesn't know how to address the right people, and not address the wrong. And
when it is ill-treated and unfairly abused it always needs its parent to come
to its help, being unable to defend or help itself. But the living speech,
brother to the written speech, goes together with knowledge, and is written in
the soul of the learner, and can defend itself, and knows to whom it should
speak and to whom it should say nothing. It is the living speech, the original
of which the written discourse may be fairly called a kind of image.[174]
5.4.2. One statement at any rate I can make in regard
to all who have wirtten of who may write with a claim to knowledge of the
subjects to which I devote myself–no matter how they pretend to have acquired
it, whether from my instruction of from others or by their own discovery. Such
writers can in my opinion have no real acquaitance with the subject. I
certainly have composed no work in regard to it, nor shall I ever do so in the
future, for there is no way of putting it in words like other studies.
Acquaintance with it must come rather after a long period of attendance on
instruction in the subject itself and of close companionship, when, suddenly,
like a blaze kndled by a leaping spark, it is generated in the soul and at once
becomes self-sustaining. If there were to be a treatise or a lecture on this
subject, I could do it best. I do not, however, think the attempt to tell
mankind of these matters a good thing, except in the case of some few who are
capable of discovering the truth for themselves with a little guidance. In the
case of the rest to do so would excite in some an unjustified contempt in a
thoroughly offensive fashion, in others certain loftly and vain hopes, as if
they had acquired some awesome lore. No serious man will ever think of writing
about serious realities for the general public so as to make them a prey to
envy ad perplexity. In a word, it is an inveitable conclusion that when anyone
sees anywhere the written word of anyone, the subject treated cannot have been
his most serious concern–that is, if he is himself a serious man. His most
serious interests have their abode somewhere in the noblest region of the field
of his activity. If, however, he really was seriously concerned with these
matters and put them in writing, 'then surely' not the gods, but mortals 'have
utterly blasted his wits.'[175]
[1]{ Lindbom, T. (1999). Västerlandets framväxt och kris. Skellefteå: Norma., pp. 22-55, 127-138}
[2]{Fichte, 1794/1994 #2465, pp.
133-140}
[3]Phaedo 91a
[4]Rep. 498b-c
[5]Gorg 453a, 454b, 456e-465e.
[6]Protag. 312c-
[7]Rep. 595b-598c
[8]Soph. 232a, 233f-234d
[9]Soph. 235d-237a
[10]Soph. 243d, 246a, 247d-248b
[11]Crat. 388a-391a
[12]Crat. 432a-433b
[13]Crat. 439a-d
[14] Churchman, C. W. (1971). The design of inquiring systems: Basic
principles of systems and organization. New York: Basic Books. Out of print,
kap. 7-8
[15]Churchman, C. W. (1971). The design
of inquiring systems: Basic principles of systems and organization. New York:
Basic Books. Out of print, kap. 5
[16]Churchman, C. W. (1971). The design of inquiring systems: Basic
principles of systems and organization. New York: Basic Books. Out of print, kap. 9
[17]Rep. 369c
[18]Rep. 372e-373b
[19]Laws IX 875a-876a
[20]Tim 69a ff.
[21]Cf. social technical systems design
as exemplified in modern weapon systems. In:The missile threat: Rockets overhead. The
Economist (July 31st), 17-19}
[22]Rep. III 401a-402a
[23]Rep. IX 581c-582e
[24]Theaet. 185e-187b. Please note that
as sometimes is the case, Socrates leaves the issue open, and he also changes
progressively his position in the course of the dialogue.
[25]Theaet. 194a-196d
[26]Soph. 263e-
[27]Phil. 40c-
[28]Laws I 644c-645c
[29]Laws 667b-e
[30]Laws 667e-669b
[31]Laws IV 719c-d
[32]Such claims for IT-applications are
seldom motivated with reference to Kantian aesthetics {
Kant, I.
(1790/1987). Critique of judgement. Indianapolis/Cambridge: Hackett, e.g. §329-330} where misreadings which equate art and science can lead
to "postmodernist" twists in theorizing about design and virtual
reality.
[33]{ Ferré, F. (1973). Design argument. In P. P. Wiener
(Ed.), Dictionary of the History of Ideas. Vol 1, pp. 670-677. New York:
Charles Scribner's Sons, (p. 676}. The most sophisticated
defense of such an attitude relates to the Kantian "purposive forms" Kant, I. (1790/1987). Critique of
judgement. Indianapolis/Cambridge: Hackett,
§326, which because of its obscure complexity is an invitation to, again,
postmodern relativistic misreadings.
[34] Ivanov, K. (1997). Strategies and design for information technology:
Eastern or neo-romantic wholes, and the return to Western
systems. Umeå: Umeå University, Dept. of
Informatics.
initiates a struggle with this issue.
[35]Rep. VII-527d-e
[36]Rep. X 595b-598c
[37]Rep. X 601a
[38]Rep. 601d-602c
[39]Rep. 602c-e
[40]Soph. 258c-260a
[41]Hipp.maj. 293e-
[42] Ferry, L. (1990). Homo aestheticus: L'invention du goût á l'age
démocratique. Paris: Grasset.
; Ivanov, K., & Ciborra, C. U. (1998). East and West of IS. In W. R.
J. Baets (Ed.), Proc. of the Sixth European Conference on
Information
Systems ECIS'98, University of Aix-Marseille III, Aix-en-Provence, June 4-6,
1998. Vol. IV (pp.
1740-1748). Granada &
Aix-en-Provence:
Euro-Arab Management School & Institut d'Administration des Enterprises
IAE.
[43]There are, however, suggestion about
how measuring could be introduced in computer applications, Ivanov, K. (1993). Hypersystems: A
base
for specification of computer-supported self-learning social systems. In C. M.
Reigeluth, B. H. Banathy, & J. R. Olson (Eds.),
Comprehensive
systems design: A new educational technology (pp. 381-407). New York: Springer-Verlag; Ivanov, K.
(1992).
Computer-human
interaction as continuous system reconstruction. In K. Ivanov (Ed.), Proceedings
of the 14th IRIS: Rev. papers of
the
14th information systems res. sem. in Scandinavia. Umeå-Lövånger, 11-14 August
1991 (pp. 85-98)..
[44]Cf. a critical appreciation of a
virtual, supposedly ideally planned version – Karlskrona 2 – of the Swedish
Karlskrona city. Allerholm,
M.
(1999).
Virtuella Karlskrona. Om ett offentligt konstprojekt på nätet: Konsten
åt folket! DN (August 8th), B3.
, in
Swedish: "Karlskrona 2" ska vara ett "frirum" i bemärkelsen
att den digitala versionen av staden inte behöver lyda de lagar och sociala
regler som gäller i den fysiska staden. Lite elakt kunde man säga att deras
projektbeskrivningar bitvis påminner om den sorts nybyggaranda som ofta dyker
upp i diskussioner om Internet, där just ord som "frizon" och
"nytt demokratiskt verktyg" florerar flitigt. Dessa euforiska
ordsvall brukar ignorera det faktum att den digitala världen knappast har någon
självständig existens utanför den vanliga världen, utan i högsta grad är
beroende av befintliga ekonomiska och politiska strukturer. Such criticism is usually dismissed by claiming that the purpose of such
projects is to foster citizens' "discussions about the (im)possibility of
form" and "confrontation with question on regulations, legislation
and ethics". The rather childish naiveté of such an urban design in the
context of the "Republic" is evidenced empirically by accounts of
modern urban problems {Anonym, 1999 #2458} as well as by analyses of Internet's
economy. Anonymous.
(1999). Urban sprawl. The Economist (July 17-August 21.
[45]Rep. 586a-b
[46]Symp. 186e-187e
[47]Rep. III 382e-386a (note missing
paragraphs)
[48]Rep IV 424b-c
[49]Statesm. 286c-
[50]Phil. 55d-64b-67b
[51]Laws II 669a-670c
[52]Laws IV 720a-e
[53]Laws IX 857c-858d
[54]Laws IX 866d-867c
[55]Laws IX 875c-876e
[56]Epin. 974b-980b
[57]Plato return to such a
problematization of music and play in Laws VII 802a-804b, as, of course, in the
classical and for "improvisation" critical quotation in Rep IV 424b-c
[58]Tim. 47e.
[59]Tim. 51d-52b
[60]Gorg. 459b-
[61]Meno 88d-
[62]Euthyd. 280c
[63]Euthyd. 289a
[64]Crat. 390b
[65]Rep X 601d-602d
[66]Laws 686c-688a
[67]Rep. 345c-347d
[68]Rep. 412c-d
[69]Rep. VI 491d
[70]Huemer, L. (1998) Trust in Business Relations. Umeå: Boreå.
[71]Phaedr. 273e-274b
[72]Epis. VIII 355b-c
[73]Rep. 602a-c
[74]Gorg. 520d-e
[75]Phaedr. 246a-c, 253c-255b
[76]Rep. 435e-442c
[77]Rep. VI 509d-511e
[78]Tim. 69c-72a
[79]Laws IX 870b-c
[80]Gorg. 467c-468a
[81]Protag. 352a-353a
[82]Rep. 430e-431b
[83]Laws IX 863c-864c
[84]Crat. 388a-390e
[85]Laws X 888d-890b
[86]Phaedo 74a
[87]Phaedr. 249c
[88]Rep. 476a-d
[89]Rep. 484b
[90]Rep. VI 508d-519b
[91]Theaet. 161d-e
[92]Theaet. 166d-168b. Socrates,
speaking for the absent Protagoras, introduces sophistic arguments that resemble
simpler variants of modern pragmatism, and explain the rush for politically
motivated "change", as well as the close collaboration between
philosophy or science, and politics or economics.
[93]Theaet. 179e-180c
[94]Theaet. 194a-196d
[95]Soph. 258c-260a. Cf. also Statesm.
284b
[96]Phil.13a-17b. Cf. the concept of
"information" in so-called information or signal transmission theory.
[97]Laws II 663a- Cf. the Swedish
translation of a difficult passage in these statements (Platons Skrifter,
trans. Claes
Lindskog, 1921-1941, vol. 5, p. 235. Stockholm: Hugo Gebers.): "Men
lagstiftaren får här skingra dunkelheten och ge oss en uppfattning om det rätta
förhållandet; han skall på det ena eller andra viset, genom sedvänjor, beröm
och läror, övertyga oss om, att rätt och orätt ha något av skuggors väsen: om
orätten står på motsatta sidan mot den rättrådige mannen och betraktas från
ståndpunkten av sin egen orättrådighet och ondska, så är den angenäm, men
rätten ytterst oangenäm. Betraktas allt åter från den rättrådiges ståndpunkt,
så blir det ett motsatt resultat i fråga om dem bägge."
[98]Cf. the well
established reference to "intuition", and the more recent
"flow" where, however, the integration of the four dimensions of
knowledge is not considered.
[99]Epis. VII 342a-344c-
[100]Rep. VII 523b-525a
[101]Rep. X 602c-
[102]Rep. X 518a-519a
[103]Phaedr. 261d-262a
[104]Phaedr. 263a-c
[105]Theaet. 179e-180a
[106]Soph. 230e-231a
[107]Phaedr. 270d
[108]Phaedr. 272d-e
[109]Rep. 438c-
[110]Rep.VII 532e-534b
[111]Theaet. 210a-c
[112]Statesm. 258b-264b
[113]Statesm.277d-278c
[114]Statesm. 283d-
[115]Phil. 40c-d
[116]Phil. 55d-59d
[117]Rep.VII 514a-517c
[118]Rep. VII 529b-531d
[119]Rep.VII 532a-534b
[120]Statesm. 277a-c
[121]Phil. 38b
[122]Menex. 246d-247a
[123]Rep. III 409b-d
[124]Rep. VII 518d-519a
[125]Gorg. 521d-522a. Compare the text
above with the common statement today that a test of good and
"aesthetic" design knowledge is that it must be fun, possibly with
the remarkable argument of Greek philosophy's convergence of the true, the
good, and the beautiful. Cf. Rep. VI 494d "And if to a man in this state
of mind someone gently comes and tells him what is the truth,that he has no
sense and sorely needs it,and that the only way to get it it to work like a
slave and win it,do you think it will be easy for him to lend an ear to the
quiet voice in the midst of and in spite of these evil surroundings?"
[126]Rep VI 488a-489c
[127]Rep. 493e-495e
[128]Rep 535c-
[129]Theaet. 174a-175d
[130]Phaedr. 270d
[131]Rep. 369c
[132]Rep. IV 433d-
[133]Rep. IV 420b-421c
[134]Rep. IV 428c-429a
[135]Rep. VII 524d-525a
[136]Rep. 537b--d. Cf. also Rep. 531c-d
[137]Statesm. 304b-310e
[138]Laws 630c-631a
[139]Epin. 991e-992b
[140]Laws I 638a-c
[141]Laws III 688c-d
[142]Laws 960b
[143]Epis. VIII 353c-d. Cf. Ivanov,
K. (1991). Computer-supported
human science or humanistic computing science? Steps toward the evaluation of a
humanistic computing science (UMADP-WPIPCS-41.91:3), chap. on Cooperative work:
Examples of problems, pp. 55-76}
[144]Gorg. 450c-451b
[145]Rep. V 472c-473e
[146]Rep. VII 518d-519a
[147]Rep. VII 526d-527. Nelson,
G. (1957). The enlargement of
vision. In G. Nelson (Ed.), Problems of design (Vol. 10). New York:
Whitney, as referenced by Buchanan, R. (1995). Rhetoric, humanism, and
design. In R. Buchanan & V. Margolin (Eds.), Discovering design:
Explorations in design studies (pp. 23-66). Chicago: The Univ. of Chicago
Press, argues that the design process is integrated in the
principle of appropriateness, and he grounds this principle in the model
provided by God and natural order [law?]... The
spiritual feature of Nelson's work is sometimes neglected by design critics and
historians who interpret "function" in a narrow, mechanistic way,
rather than as a connection between human beings, products, and the broader
system of nature and the universe [cf. Singer functional, morphological,
teleological classes]. ...For example, he offers harsh criticism of excessively
narrow concepts of "functional" design; so
called "good" design, as judged by aesthetic standards such as those
once promoted by Edgar Kaufman, Jr. at the New York Museum of Modern Art; the
pretensions of design for design's own sake; and equally the pretentious idea
of the designer as creator and purveyor of social meanings. Yet, he argues for
a vision of design as communication and of the designer as artist. The only
explanation is that he regards the designer as an artist in the Platonic sense,
as enlightened practitioner seeking unity and harmony among disparate elements
of every product. Indeed he argues that products which
internally achieve harmony and balance serve the ethical life of human
beings...The elements of Hellenism and Hebraicism [Greek Hebrew] which are
balanced in Nelson's work -- a concern for right thinking and for right acting,
consciousness and conscience -- are echoed whenever the origins of design are
traced to the creation of the universe. The principle lies in spiritual life
and the natural order [law]. Unfortunately, scholars have exercised little
ingenuity in exploring the rich, complex theory of design provided by Plato in
the TIMAEUS and the REPUBLIC, or in rethinking the Christian tradition
represented, for example, by St. Augustine (The Republic II 369c ff.; On
Christian Doctrine, New York: Bobbs-Merrill, 1958, 9-10).
[148]Soph. 234b-e
[149]Laws V 746b-
[150]Crat. 411b-c
[151]Crat. 439a-d
[152]Symp. 207-d
[153]Soph.248c-249c
[154]Laws VI 772a-
[155]Epis. VI 325c-326c
[156]Laches 187e-188a
[157]Hipp.min. 369d
[158]Gorg. 506a
[159]Rep. V 450d-e
[160]Meno 79e-80c, piece of dialogue
between Meno and Socrates.
[161]Meno 81c-d
[162]Meno 85c-d
[163]Euthyd. 277e-278a
[164]Symp. 207-d
[165]Rep. 497d-498c
[166]Rep. VI 505a
[167]Theaet. 197c-199c.Please note that
the argument continues and qualifies the quoted statements, as it is usual in
Plato's texts.
[168]Soph. 229b-230d
[169]Statesm. 304b
[170]Laws I 643b-644a
[171]Laws II 667c
[172]Cf. the well
established reference to "intuition", and the more recent
"flow" where, however, the integration of the four dimensions of
knowledge is not considered.
[173]Epis. VII 342a-344c-
[174]Phaedr. 274c-276a
[175]Epis. 341b-344d