Class #4 Review & Reminders

I thought we had another productive dialectic today, and I'm sure it will make it easier to understand Schwab's lecture on Monday, and the rest of this year's Humanities Core. BUT, I need you to help me with something. Don't let me talk about the Symposium, or Trees vs. Treeness, or Platonism-in-general, etc. on Monday. Like actually raise your hand and tell me to stop! On Monday we need to talk about Paper #1, which means analyzing the Eryximachus speech.

SOME FURTHER EXPLANATION:

Since I can't talk about this Monday, I'll talk about it now. Christine, Ivan, Hannah and I had a nice little symposium in office hours today and they have helped me identify two major areas of confusion that arise from the weirdness of us having to think our way backwards into an ancient Greek mindset.

1) The ancient Greeks do not believe that sexual desire is bad or dirty. The main cultural source of that idea in the modern West is our religious traditions, specifically as they were developed during the middles ages in Europe. Actually, let me take things a step further. The Greeks do not believe ANYTHING is good or bad, in the sense that the good thing is holy and nice and the bad thing is wrong and dirty and evil. They believe that SOME THINGS ARE GOODER THAN OTHERS. Diotima's speech about the "staircase" of desiring the good is not a heterodox, anti-traditional idea. It's actually a pretty good expression of what all Greeks thought. (Well, except for the part about young men being better sex than women.) When Socrates was sentenced to death for corrupting the youth of Athens by making them question traditional religion and values, his defense was that all he was trying to do was SAVE the traditions from the sophists (rhetoricians) who were saying that there was no gooder or worser and that everything was equal. That anything you could convincingly argue for was true. (cf. marketing, "truthiness"). The jury didn't buy this defense, but, at least here, he could plausibly make that defense. The lesson of the Symposium is YOU ARE WHAT YOU EAT (or screw, or think about.) There isn't such a thing as non-desire, because that would mean a human was a god. All humans desire, it's just a question of what. In the end they all desire "the good," but the smarter ones realize that the lower desires are only confused or worser ways of getting it. (So from now on in class let's say gooder and worser instead of good and bad. I'm being entirely serious.)

2) The Greeks are not aware of modern science! It's actually Aristotle who gets the whole ball rolling on that, but it's not until much, much later that a way of doing science as we would recognize it emerges. (We'll read Descartes later in the quarter; he's one of the earliest of the moderns.) The premise of Plato's philosophy is that the evidence of our senses is unreliable; think about how your ears and eyes can play tricks on you, or how every physical object in the world moves and changes. Since concepts are, like "gods," perfectly satisfied/stable/complete, then using our unreliable senses to describe changing objects like this tree or that tree is not a good way to find truth. A better way would be to use dialectic to generalize toward stable concepts like treeness. Towards categories, that is. Now Shae might say, that makes these categories human inventions, just like she said the gods were human inventions. No, it doesn't. Not if you're Plato. Those concepts, those objects of knowledge, those philosophical "gods" (treeness = the god of trees, you might say)... they are what you are trying to KNOW. You're not inventing them. They're real. You can't see them or touch them, yet they must be real because otherwise how could there be actual, physical trees? Actual, physical trees come from treeness. This tree dies, that tree gets cut down. But treeness endures, and without treeness there are no trees. (If treeness sounds dumb, think of a concept we still use, like gravity.) Plato will actually go on to say that the things you can see and touch are therefore NOT REAL. Or not fully real. They're real like xerox copies or real, or the circle I drew on the board is real. They're imperfect, and only perfect things are really real. Now the modern scientific objection is this... even if there were perfectly real abstractions, how could I possibly KNOW them except through my imperfect senses? Modern science says EVEN THOUGH our senses are imperfect and EVEN THOUGH the objects in the world are not concepts, not perfect circles, that this is the ONLY way to accumulate knowledge. By gathering as much imperfect data as possible and comparing it together. Better to look through a foggy window than try to look through a wall, says modern science. Plato thinks you can look through that wall, using your mind. (Come to office hours and ask me for the Long Explanation of Why Platonism is Wrong. This blog would explode if I tried to type that here.)

WEEKEND HOMEWORK:

-Familiarize yourself with the Paper #1 prompt and bring any questions about it.
-Do the Ideas Draft #1 assignment. Turn in one copy to the dropbox and print out a copy to bring to class on Monday (for your own reference during class). I also put the handout itself in the dropbox because I think someone missed class. (Dropbox->Trailerology->CourseFiles) More notes on this in my next post.
-Read Easy Writer 182-189 and do exercises 23.1-24.4 in the little workbook. This is not busywork; these are skills that relate directly to the Paper #1 assignment, specifically how to paraphrase and how to grammatically integrate quotations.
-Think about all of the wonderful times you had with the tree. Because you're going to miss it when it's not there on Monday.