Not the Same Plato: An Appreciation

Two re-translations of Plato by Kvond strike me as definitely worth reproducing here. One of them deals with an aim toward showing (calls to)ontologies of difference to be inadequate. Another deals with Truth and Heidegger’s endemic butchering of the word alatheia.

Give me Water

Plato often referred to myths in order to bolster his own deductions or to account for those ultimate truths which are beyond his own capacity to demonstrate. The Orphic myth was certainly a favored source for Plato.

 In Orphism, the initiate journeys (guided?) through desert into the land of the dead, and comes to the plain of Oblivion so that his soul can be reincarnated. At arrival, the initiate is severely in need of drink, and has been instructed to drink not from the river of Lethe (forgetting) but from the cold, refreshing river of Ameleta to retain his cares.

If Plato’s theory of Truth is based on this Orphic myth, then we (according to Kvond) can take alatheia to mean “the not un-caring”. “Quite to the contrary of Heidegger’s lexical reversion which will eventually make a “cloaking” out of human Dasein engagment with the pragmata (affairs, things of concern), the very nature of aletheia is that of retaining concerns and care.”

Heidegger applies alatheia to external “objects” where as in the Orphic/Platonic in it taken to be concerned with the well-being of one’s own body, of one’s thirst. If we take Heidegger’s misappropriation of this Greek conception of truth and run with it we end up with intentionality.

“It seems to me that as Heidegger turned to Aristotlean notions of truth, categorizing them widely as Greek, and adopted a primarly optical metaphor for qualifications of Being, he did so in a way quite friendly to the pre-existing Idealist dyad of self/world. In this fashion, in his foreclosure to the immanent capacities of “care” in the Greek mind, he obscured the very third leg of the triangle, others, which would otherwise show how “care” in all things, including things “non-human” is actively involved in our mutual construction of the world, in degrees of ontological freedom. Because “aletheia” was for Idealist Heidegger primarily an EYE/OBJECT relation (that metaphor), the constitutive movment from “lethe” (dissipative oblivion) to “a-leth-eia” (condensed internal relations of expressive care) was robbed of the very depth of the dimensionality of others. More Augustine, more Achilles was needed.”

The Even Field of Experience

Many have felt the need to found an ontology in difference as opposed to Platonic Sameness. This move is founded in order so that females, blacks, homosexuals, those that aren’t in the majority, can have an adequate claim to being. (Irigary, who wants to replace the flat platonic mirror, that reflects man back to himself, with a speculum suited the contours of the female body, is an interesting case.) The Same is shifted from the Political hegemonic to the hegemonic Ontological category. It is not necessary to make this shift, and this is not to say the ontological is cut off from the political.

According to Plato’s conception of experience, we must have known the Same before we could recognize any equality. This is often taken to be, as Kvond points out, reductionist. How can our experiences be less real than something else? How can our experiences of difference in particular be merely derivative of the Same? But looking back into the text, perhaps we need to re-discover this idea of the Same as it is found in Plato for what it really is:

“But, thinking on what it would mean for Sameness to be the origin, the great basin for Differences, I went back to Plato’s text, and looked at the word for “same” or “equal” (as it is translated). It is Ison, from which we get our words like isometric or isomorphic. What is immediately conjured up is mathematical equality, and this is generally the purity of Same towards which this binary heads. But contingently the LSJ dictionary had among any of its easily recognizable uses, one use which contained a subtle difference. It not only meant “equal” but “even”, as in can describe ground as “even or flat”, or the cadence of an army as marching in iso. As always is the case with the Greek, as much as we would really like to rationalize them into a near mathematical purity (given the tradition of their depiction), there is always a depth, a material depth to their conceptions that we miss. There is not a great difference between ison as “equal” and ison as “even”, but it a difference that opens up what Same is, not only for the Greeks, but for us as well.”

The Same is not an identity but an experience of the evenness. The ekg is evoked (also a mountain lion, but I won’t attempt to retell that story). The Same should be taken as equilibrium, and ‘new’ information (disturbances in equilibrium), arise from the relations and NOT ‘objects’. What we percieve should not be taken to be ‘objects’, for we can only see anything because everything is interrelated to the entire ‘up and down’ equilibrium. Identity need not be taken as Sameness. Internal differences can be recognized though, only if we have a conception of the terrain.

Definitely read the posts. Here and here.

Good for Something

I rented Andrei Rublev from the university library last night. The film lived up up to my (extremely high) expectations and then some. It is very nice to have access to all of the materials in the libraries here. The only let down being that with books, there is no use putting notes in the margins, underlining sentences, or otherwise marking the pages.

Why did you get sick? Spinoza and the (non-) Political Subject

 

 

I have come to the loose end of a certain unsatisfactory conclusion in my reading of Spinoza, as aided by various posts and comments from Kvond at Frames/Sing. My dissatisfaction led me to Todd Hayne’s SAFE. The film is about a woman (Carol White) with “environmental illness.” Carol White reacts severely to chemicals that pervade the suburban Southern California environment in which she lives. So she moves to Wrenwood which is chemical free and for people in her condition, a condition that may perhaps be called (as it is suggested in the film) being “allergic to the 20th century.” Wrenwood is more than just a retreat, it is a new age community, (spiritually) led by a kind of new age priest Peter Dunning. Peter Dunning says that the cause and cure are inextricably related to each other, and in turn to the negative feelings the sufferers project toward society.

 As Kvond puts it in this very helpful post, Spinoza wants for us to understand that “Blaming (and overly praising) things external to us is largely a mistake.” Contiguous, in my mind, is this point: “Everything outside of us has an explanation (causes), but an explanation which we can never be completely clear about.” Also relevant, but slightly less so; “When we’re wrong, we’re only partially wrong”).

 

Could you imply from these that blaming things internal to us is largely a correct thing to do? If these go wrong, and we feel pain, should we ask ourselves, “Am I doing this to myself?, what am I doing wrong?” These are the questions that Carol White comes to ask, who ends up isolated (even from the chemically safe environment of the retreat) in a kind of igloo, looking at her reflection in the mirror chanting, “I love you, I love you, I love you.”

 

NOTE: We should clarify, however, what “external” and “internal” mean in Spinoza. Ultimately, these terms could only every be used confusedly, because things are only separated from each other by the imagination. “External,” for Spinoza, means that which we take to be independent of the mind, or more precisely, what we imagine as outside of our illusory unified ego.)

Spinoza does ask us to look inward, but not to assign blame. He would like for us to focus on our understanding, to build a clearer conception of our material reality, in so doing freeing ourselves to act. However, I would say that in assuming that our thoughts about what we initially take to be the cause of our sadness is wrong, and that our very thoughts are what causes the passions in the first place, we are practicing a kind of self-blame.

Todd Hayne’s SAFE is a film about what Spinoza would call the “vacillations of the spirit.” Carol persuaded to situate herself on precarious balancing beam with self-love on one side and self-blame on the other. In one scene there is a small gathering around a circle. Peter Dunning (the new age spirit leader) is asking for testimonies from everyone. “Why did they get sick?” He gets around to Nell, who’s husband had just died from the illness, “Why did you get sick?” She evades the question.

 He asks, “How did you feel?”

 “I just wanted to get a gun, and blow off the heads of everyone who got me like this.”

 “Now, nobody out there made you sick, you know that. The only person that can make you get sick is you. Right? Whatever the sickness. If our immune system is damaged its because we have allowed it to be through exactly the kind of anger that your showing us now. Does that make sense?”

 At this point many of the people in the gathering are crying, or extending comfort each other. Joining hands with his neighbor, Peter goes on to say, “Sometimes all I see is the hatred and frailty. People’s cruelty to one another, cruelty to themselves, and I realize how lucky I am. How blessed.”

 

Spinoza cannot (to my mind) be read simply as advocating sustained analysis of the causes of our sadness and happiness as opposed to acting out on our initial impulse. This would be all fine and good, but there is something more that Spinoza is up to.

Spinoza says that loving and hating are results of our pains and our pleasures connected with external causes. According to Spinoza, we should detach the power our affections give us from the external things we attribute them to, and reattach them in the pursuit of an ever clearer and more adequate conception of the world. This is a process in which we come to have more adequate ideas about the causes of our passions. Part five of Espinoza’s Ethics deals, apropos to my concern, with attaining human freedom. In book V p. II, Spinoza says, “If we remove a disturbance of the spirit, or emotion, from the thought of an external cause, and unite it to other thoughts, then will the love or hatred towards that external cause, and also the vacillations of spirit which arise from these emotions, be destroyed.” But with the removal of the idea of the external cause of sadness, with the implied movement inwards focusing on internal causes, the external cause of sadness is still there. Nothing is solved, the true causes of pain aren’t made clearer but are obfuscated. Oh, all that out there (society), that’s just nature, and you can’t hate it. Look within, love your own thought process and free yourself from the chaos of the outside.

 Haynes: “The reason new age thought is so big among AIDS and cancer patients is because it creates a feeling of comprehension, a way to control the sense of meaninglessness that grips the lives of the terminally ill. But within that control these doctrines of inner health assign to their sufferers the ultimate responsibility both for becoming ill and for regaining their health. And since the potential for all illness and all wellness lies within the individual, society gets off scott free.”

 Addendum: Hopefully, I will come to see a different picture of Spinoza. I still haven’t read some things which Kvond suggested I read about Spinoza and the affects, and Spinoza and politics. But I can’t seem to shake the idea of the proximity of new age thought to that of Spinoza, and how it enforces the idea of the in-curability of self and society.

Another addendum: Please read ensuing comments if you have any similar reservations about Spinoza’s political possibilities.