“for wonder is the feeling of a philosopher, and philosophy begins in wonder”
Plato’s “Theaetetus”
Reading Plato’s dialogues (and trying to make sense of them) is a delightful and frustrating endeavor. Trying to figure out how wonder fits into his understanding of philosophy and aesthetics is even more challenging. I think that Plato’s Socrates appreciates the power of language and beauty to overwhelm and even allows himself to be overcome. In fact, I think that Socrates deliberately seeks out the feeling of being overwhelmed, which I link closely with wonder. These moments of wonder occur when Socrates encounters lovely rhetoric, beautiful young men (physically or otherwise), or surprising philosophical moves. Socrates also puts wonder to use, by charming his listeners with his pretty language, his sophisticated arguments, and his sudden turns of inquiry. At the same time, however, he mocks rhetoricians for amazing their audiences with pretty words that in turn stultify their ability to find truth. Thus, while he appreciates and generates wonder, Socrates (and Plato by extension) believes that wonder is only a starting point for inquiry.
The very form and methods of the dialogues have wonder at their center. Many of the dialogues—particularly the early ones—end in aporia, in which the argument creates doubt about itself. Often, this aporia is even more extreme, which modern deconstructionists would describe as a moment of final impasse in which claims undermine or confound themselves. Such aporia itself inspires wonder; readers are delighted and charmed as the argument overwhelms itself. But it is a kind of wonder that directs us to look beyond the charm and to continue inquiring about the issues raised in the dialogue. This strategy uses wonder to propel philosophy. We also see this at work in Socrates’s use of paradox and irony. Further, the Socratic method—elenchus and dialectic—force us to rigorously examine established beliefs through what Schlovsky might call defamiliarization, making the known new. This recourse to surprise and newness is also something that I identify with wonder. Further, the dialogues are—or at least they profess to be—a search for truth, rather than a treatise about what is already known. In a sense, then, they are about awe experienced in encountering the unknown and in approaching truth, rather than controlled and collected reflection on the known.
Interestingly, it seems to me (and there are many debates about this by people who know far more about Plato than I do) that the later dialogues become increasingly skeptical. The early ones tend to be completely unresolved; the earlier middle ones begin to tentatively advance a few claims (like wisdom=goodness and the theory of Forms); but the mid- to later-dialogues begin to interrogate and revise more rigorously those claims. If this observation is at all accurate (and for fun, let’s pretend it is), then I wonder, does wonder explored lead to skepticism?
I also need to think more about how Plato’s mysticism fits in. Socrates always claims he is subject to mystical visions, prophetic insights. Like everything else in Plato, it’s hard to tell how much of this is ironic, especially since Socrates himself talks about the limits of vision, inspiration, and prophecy. It does seem that Socrates approaches the mystical in the same way that he approaches wonder—they are genuine and exhilarating and can lead to philosophical insight, but they can also stun and stultify inquiry. He uses words like charm and amaze to show his concern about the ability of wondrous things, like mystical events, to concretize thought. Like wonder, then, mysticism must be tempered with rational thought.
We can see this at work in “Ion,” when Socrates teases the rhapsodes for their divinely inspired riffs on Homer and the poets. He acknowledges their power, yet at the same time recognizes their limits. Plato and Socrates thus link mystical, divine inspiration with poetry, language, and imagination. Socrates warns us, “Imagination is often at war with reason and fact. The concentration of the mind on a single object, or on a single aspect of human nature, overpowers the orderly perception of the whole.” Wonder, too, is an all-encompassing experience wonder that can distract from understanding the whole Truth because it limits understanding to one part. Inspiration, imagination, and wonder are all lumped together in this dialogue, and all three are negative if they do not move us toward knowledge.
Timaeus’s wild creation story also demonstrates the limits of this triad. The creator placed the faculty of wonder and inspiration not in the mind, but in the foolish part of the body: “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 the 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, either his intelligence is enthralled in sleep, or he is demented by some distemper or possession.”
In “Phaedrus,” Plato adds love to the list of wonders that can either inspire or interfere with inquiry. This is my favorite dialogue. It is sexy and sensual and—forgive the intended double entendre—delightfully impenetrable. In this dialogue, Socrates links love, rhetoric, imagination, and madness. Poetry and love are both divinely inspired, and as such, they are a sort of mystical madness endorsed by the gods. At the same time, these forms of wondrous madness demonstrate how man can only perceive reality “as through a glass dimly.” When lovers encounter beauty, their souls experience physiological awe—they become hot and sweaty. Keep in mind that this is drawn from a really interesting analogy in which the soul is a charioteer leading two horses, one good horse drawn towards heavenly things and one bad one drawn toward earthly ones (Freud, anyone?). The only way the soul can come close to apprehending true Beauty is if the charioteer can tame the bad horse with some masochistic bit tugging: “and with a still more violent wrench drags the bit out of the teeth of the wild steed and covers his abusive tongue and jaws with blood, and forces his legs and haunches to the ground and punishes him sorely.” So, once again, we see beauty, wonder, poetry, rhetoric, love, all of these lumped together as potential spurs or blockades to knowledge that must be tempered by something in order to reach ideal knowledge or truth. Indeed, Socrates’s speech about why lovers are better than non-lovers (which immediately follows a speech that argues the opposite) is very sexy and itself charms and awes Phaedrus. Immediately after, however, Socrates picks apart the rhetorical flaws of his own lovely speech, explaining that its beauty is insufficient. In transforming the rhetorical force of his speech into philosophical analysis, Socrates enacts his own theory of wonder. Indeed, the dialogue ends with “and now as the heat is abated let us depart.”
Particularly relevant dialogues to those interested in rhetoric, aesthetics, or wonder: Ion, Phaedrus, Charmides, Protagoras, Symposium, Theaetetus, Cratylus, Timaeus, Gorgias
Other fun things to think about:
• What’s with all the desire to lay people bare, stripping, and nakedness?
• The myth of Atlantis and the wild creation story in “Timaeus”
• The intellectual midwife metaphor in “Theaetetus,” coupled with philosophy as the desire for immortality through conception, generation, and parturition metaphors in “Symposium” told to Socrates by a wise woman named Diotima
So, who wants to help me work through this?
It's really fascinating how you've discovered, or perhaps re-discovered, this common thread of wonder and delight in the unknown running through Plato's dialogues. I think many of us are so accustomed to thinking of Plato as a philosopher of known, stable ideas, since we tend to use the "Platonic Forms" or "Platonic Ideas" as the paradigm of fixed and stable knowledge. And it's certainly true that many later thinkers use his philosophy as a justification for focusing on certainty and absolute truth.
ReplyDeleteEven if Plato would have endorsed such a focus, though--and it's hard for us to be sure 2500 years later--it's still good to remind ourselves that Plato developed this concern for certain knowledge only after growing up in a time in which many traditional forms of knowledge were being questioned by the Sophists, by philosophers such as Zeno, and even by the Athenian dramatists, who freely adapted and rewrote ancient myths to explore contemporary questions. And even if we assume that the traditional interpretation of Plato is correct--that he intended his dialogues to put readers on the path toward certainty and Truth--it's still the case that if we focus on the wonder and inquiry that they inspire, then as your original post suggests, it seems as if they undermine whatever claims they make. That makes them much more challenging and dynamic as texts, not to mention more interesting.
Okay, now for an exam-style question inspired by some very recent writing on chapter 2 of my own dissertation: Near the end of the Phaedrus (section 275), Socrates makes some pretty notorious comments about the negative effects of writing, including the following: "The painter's products stand before us as though they were alive; but if you question them, they maintain a solemn silence. So too, with written words: you might think they spoke as though they made sense, but if you ask them anything about what they are saying, if you wish an explanation, they go on telling you the same thing, over and over forever."
ReplyDeleteThis reminds me very much of what Socrates says in the Protagoras, at section 329A, drawing an explicit analogy between long-winded orators and books: "suppose you put a question to one of the [public speakers]--they are just like books, incapable of either answering you or putting a question of their own."
So what are we to make of such comments, when they appear in a written dialogue? Does Plato intend us to recognize some irony in what Socrates is "saying" (in writing) about books and writing? And if, as Socrates suggests, the written text is inherently resistant to questioning, what does that say about the sort of wonder or aporia that some written texts (such as Plato's own dialogues) can produce?
Man, Jody, you're tough. Glad you're not on my committee :) But I'll try.
ReplyDeleteFirst, I think Plato is always ironic to some extent, and I think that might because irony forces reflection and probing. So when he denigrates paintings and texts for being "silent," I think it is not wholly forthright. That said, IS making an important point about the nature of written texts and their relationship to dialectic. Dialectic presupposes poly-vocality and resistance. A written text cannot do this as well by itself as, say, two competent debaters (which, as an aside, we rarely get in the very one-sided "dialogues"). So this makes the aporia even more central to the kind of inquiry that Plato wishes to generate/endorse. The written text must be inconclusive in a way that oral dialogues may not because it demands the reader to pick up the reins and do battle with the idea, to serve as the second voice of the argument. That these comments are in written texts spurs attentive readers (like you!) to take this challenge, to not read passively. It also adds to the fun and irony that I see operating in the dialogues if Plato can make fun of his own medium. Indeed, he's making us take up the challenge as a result of it!
One more quick note, if I have this right, the dialogues were not meant to be a finished, polished tract. They are more like collected lecture notes, right? And they have a sort of dubious textual transmission history, I think. So that might even further complicate what's going on here...
Lyotard's comment on the unresolvable paradox of the Kantian aesthetic might come in handy here, too. Hetalks about how beauty requires a universal communicability that will never be established, which leads to a sort of finality. Except, that it doesn't.
ReplyDelete• “A consensus will never be established on the basis of communicable reasons and proofs that would enable one to declare the dispute resolved. Thus, unable to be resolved, the debate about the beautiful lives on…the debate lives on because a ‘higher’ finality, of which neither of the interlocutors is aware, ‘inhabits,’ so to speak, the object of the debate and haunts the debate itself. Here I evoke the enigmatic instance, which from above and beyond, ceaselessly calls for the communication of aesthetic feeling and consequently for the discussion of this feeling."
This "enigmatic instance" reminds me of Plato's use of aporia in written texts. Like the enigmatic instance (is it the same thing?), aporia ceaseless calls for the communication of the Idea and consequently for the discussion of this feeling.
Good answers! That's how it's done. See, I gave you a tough one because I knew you could handle it. ;) Anyway, yes, the question of what a written text can and cannot do is a central concern for both Plato and Aristotle. The idea that a written text cannot fully incorporate what Bakhtin would call the dialogic nature of real conversation is the basis of one of the primary criticisms that Plato and Aristotle make of the Sophists' writings. (Or I guess I should say Plato has Socrates make the criticism, whereas Aristotle is more blunt in actually posing the criticism directly himself.) And the nature of fifth- and fourth-century BCE Greek texts (the degree to which they are collected lecture notes, or transcripts of actual speech/conversation, or something else) is an important consideration as well. It's interesting that Bakhtin himself actually says that the Socratic dialogues (by which I think he mainly means Plato's, although other people like Xenophon wrote Socratic dialogues too) are "novelistic" in including this kind of polyvocality. I have to wonder, though, whether all writing might have a tendency to produce some degree of this aporia, at least if you read it as a deconstructionist would, looking for gaps and contradictions in meaning. In other words, perhaps Plato's dialogues simply make more obvious the irony and complications that are inherent in all writing.
ReplyDelete