The Perfect is the Enemy of the Good
This is not only the title of today’s lecture, but it is the title of the course. So I think this is a very important lecture. In fact, I have written a song. Where is my other accoutrement. I’ve got a musical accoutrement today.
[Harmonica riff, applause]
Give it up. Here we go guys. Now I got the song mostly written. I started writing on a piano, and actually realized I should write it on a guitar. So I wrote it on a guitar, and here’s how it goes:
Perfectly good hour, perfectly good day,
Searching for truth in the gutter,
Some people prefer things that way.
Searchin’ all day for something to find,
Rolling back the cobwebs in the corners of my mind.
Stockpiling memories and provisions for food,
Perfect is the enemy of the good.
But hungry man wait long time before cook goose fall on empty plate,
I could get a new app to improve the chances of my fate,
But I don’t have that long to wait.
The Grim Reaper reaps as he should,
Perfect is the enemy of the good.
Perfectly narrow, perfectly strong,
We can restructure the genome, it won’t take that long.
Perfectly punctual, perfectly wrong,
Perfect illusions of a perfect mind
In the political economy.
Advanced directives, you better make up your mind.
The world keeps time, there’s no looking behind.
Would, should, could, should, could or would;
The perfect is the enemy of the good.
Destiny is an individually mapped-out fate.
You’re looking for eternity, but it can wait.
Give the Devil his due, he stands at your gate.
He promises you tomorrow but now it’s too late.
Political correctness is just another form of hate.
And angels scorn man if from the narrow path he should deviate.
Paterno said, “Maybe I didn’t do as much as I could.”
The perfect is the enemy of the good.
How about that, guys? Yeah. Poetry, live poetry, original and fresh, because I just wrote the thing. I was working on it a while to get it right, tinker those rhymes.
We should be sufficiently present to begin today’s lecture. What are we going to look for? Let me give you a preview of what’s coming. We are going to zoom in today, we are going to use the timeline as a tool. We are going to look at the transformation of the idea of the good from the philosophy of Socrates through to Plato and through to Aristotle. That is the terrain that we are going to cover today and attempt to face. The title of today’s lecture is “The Perfect is the Enemy of the Good.” My goal is to look at the manner in which the term “good” was concretely grasped and understood during the anthropological and systematic periods of ancient Greece from Socrates to Aristotle.
Now, I will use the chalkboard here. We have the three periods of philosophy according to Windelband of ancient Greek philosophy. Cosmological 600-450 BC. Anthropological (and this is where we will be zooming in today in the systematic). This is a briefer period, 450-400 BC characterized by the rise of Socrates, the Sophists and Socrates. And the Systematic Period (Plato and Aristotle) 400 to the death of Aristotle 322 BC. I will leave time today for questions, so if you do have questions, we will have a question-and-answer session after the lecture. Windelband also gives us Democritus in that period, but we won’t be talking about Democritus.
Today we will discover that something unique occurred in the 4th and 5th centuries BC in Athens in Greece, something very unique. At the core of this stands the philosophical trinity, if you will: Socrates, Plato and Aristotle. The philosophical trinity, if you will. Or if you prefer a term, to borrow a phrase from horse racing, the trifecta. I don’t think you can cite another power punch quite as equal to it throughout history. There are a few others that might be close, where you see the greatness of teaching and the elevation of thought as it existed in this brief period as Socrates teaches Plato and as Plato teaches Aristotle, in that direct succession. Aristotle never met Socrates, but he was able to study with Plato who certainly had studied quite a long time and absorbed a lot of the thoughts and techniques and the methods of the master, Socrates.
Now, who is Socrates? If you want to know, you used to see the bracelets “WWJD – What would Jesus do?, which is a wonderful question. But I like to say for philosophers, “WWSD - What would Socrates do?” If you want to know what philosophy is, look to Socrates. If you want to know what philosophy is, look to Socrates.
Now let me site another couple of parallels that just came to my mind of similar moments of brilliant teacher-student relationship that may be parallel. But I don’t think you could talk to Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, although there may be one I am not aware of. But I’m thinking of Franklin and Jefferson as being another unique node or moment in history where you have this kind of powerful synergy of minds. St. Paul and the disciples. Can you imagine what it was like the day that St. Paul met St. Peter? What an amazing day that must have been. Paul actually had to sit at the feet of Peter. The unlearned fisherman. Paul was the most learned man of his time, but he sat at the feet of Peter. You’ve got another example, maybe Lennon and McCartney. Right, there’s a synergy, there’s a magic. Something happens between two or three people. Socrates/Plato/Aristotle, Lennon/McCartney, Franklin/Jefferson, Lenin/Trotsky, for good or woe.
Now we have already noted in the opening lectures, and, indeed, I’ll say lectures, and in last week the lecture called “Going for the One.” We have noted the very same dynamics of human understanding are enacted and brought to life whenever there is an awareness of one’s own self-understanding and that when this occurs, it is miraculous and is referred to as a fusion of horizons. Here is a modern 20th century expression, a fusion of horizons, that comes from Gordimer. Authentic understanding is achieved, which obliterates temporal and spatial alienation. All that distance is gone. We have seen that as I have read these passage from Plato. The time is gone. The spatial difference is gone. We have a fusion of horizons. We have a uniquely concretely, actually-grasped experience of understanding. Here and now.
This authentic understanding is being achieved even now, as we speak, for those to have ears to allow it to be. And it obliterates the temporal and spatial alienation of any other form of cultural alienation such that real thinking, real thinking, breathes life into these ancient philosophers’ quest for truth. Recall that the miracle of understanding is more on our side than on their side. Reflect upon that. That is our treasure. Therein lies our treasure. The miracle of understanding is more on our side than on their side. Paradox perhaps. Ironically, no matter how feeble our efforts may be as beginning philosophers, beginning in this quest; no matter how feeble, nonetheless, as long as I stand and draw breath, I am head and shoulders beyond any social and political philosopher who is dead by merit of the fact that I’m still standing and that their mouths are stopped with dust, as unfortunate as that may be. It’s part of that.
Real game. Only one during the game. The real ball, carrying the ball, the quarterback today. It’s real time. Or in the recording studio. The light is on. You are recording. It’s taping. That’s us. All of those who have gone before us, save one, their mouths are now stopped with dust. It’s a cause for self-esteem. So even how feeble our attempts may be, still we are the ones who carry the torch in this generation.
The reason for this seeming paradox is that – here it is – thought is a living thing. Thought is not a dead thing, cannot be dead, cannot be reduced to materialistic substrates of death. Inert, static – no. Thought, true thought, real thought, thinking, is this, going with life. Dead thought is an oxymoron. Two terms that don’t suit together well like a tiny elephant or a huge mouse or a sober wedding. Misnomer, bad epithet.
Thinking is for those who live, not for those who have fallen to six feel under. The full measure and profundity of this realization is enormous, and it should be taken as the single most significant research of our time. It should be. But as we have seen and I have touched on, our times do not lend themselves to authentic thinking of philosophy. It doesn’t mean we aren’t being engaged in it; it is just our times aren’t helping us very much. Or maybe they are. Maybe the very desert quality of thinking and true thought and real beauty and authenticity of our time, the desert that exists here in this culture. Maybe that is the real treasure and wake-up call for philosophy. It has always been a rare thing. It’s like the yeast. Just a tiny, little bit, and it helps the whole loaf to be cooked full.
But we live in a period of so-called artificial intelligence – dead thought. Silicon is not living. We live in a period of dead, artificial intelligence, global warfare, hypermaterialistic global expansion of capital markets, and an almost perfect forgetfulness of anything and everything sacred. Welcome to the times we live in, the 21st century. Almost a complete and total forgetfulness – almost even more than that. Not only a forgetfulness but denial of anything sacred.
Now, we’re not really interested in Socrates, Plato or Aristotle just because they are historical names or for their authority of who they were. We are not interested in their philosophy for that reason. We’re interested in their thought and philosophy insofar as it assists us in gaining the truth. That’s why we study philosophy. Not to enshrine dead philosophers, but it is rather to see that it is that they help us, assist us on our most important trajectory of our own authentic and real, living thought here today. Because we want to think along. We discovered what maybe their thought may reveal. It jump-starts us. It gets us thinking. It’s the catalyst. We are already potentially engaged in the truth, and this jump-starts it. It catalyzes it and gets us full-blown into the actualization of thought. Hence, this course.
We acknowledge that this quest is the single most important undertaking a human being may embark upon. There is no more important. It is not becoming a CEO. It is not becoming a general in the Army or the governor of New Jersey. This, indeed, is the most important task.
Now let’s zoom in, having made these preliminary remarks. Let’s zoom in and take a detailed look at the philosophical trinity. We open up our philosophical tool kit, and we’re going to pull out our philosophical timeline. Here we see the three periods of ancient Greek philosophy according to Windelband, the cosmological, anthropological and systemic. And I think we should have a minimal sense of it. Now you see it is just so difficult. There is so much material that could be presented in a lecture. My difficulty, the difficulty for me is to choose what can I select in this very, very brief period that we have together, 16 weeks.
Now we are going to go in for a detailed look at the figure of Socrates. Cicero, in The Tusculan Disputations, tells us that “Socrates was the first to call philosophy down from the heavens and set her in the cities of men and bring her also in the houses and compel her to ask questions about life and morality and things good and evil.” Just note that there was just a wonderful quote there from Cicero stating that Socrates drew down philosophy from the heavens. What is he referring to? The cosmological philosophers. He is saying the tendency to look to cosmology, which preoccupied the first Athenian philosophers and Greek philosophers here and Ionian philosophers, was by Socrates brought from the heavens. You will hear the same, almost identical quote from the native Ben Franklin.
Socrates studies with a cosmological philosopher from this period called Anaxagoras, who referred to the word mind and thinking, that this was the fundamental substratum. Remember that all of these cosmological philosophers were kind of asking a question, the pre-Socratic question; the question, “How is it that something comes to be, stands there, and passes away?” The question of the phenomenon. And guess what? All is phenomenon, all-thing phenomenon, table phenomenon, snowflake phenomenon, quasar phenomenon, ocean phenomenon, fish phenomenon, moon phenomenon, human phenomenon. All being comes in the form of phenomenal being manifested, that is coming to be, standing there and passing away. So how does it come to be that all of this cosmos comes to be? Anaxagoras says, “All mind.” Remember Thales says water, but Anaxagoras – and this looks like an improvement – mind looks like, wait, mind; yeah, this sort of makes sense. This seems like an improvement over water or fire. And that’s what Socrates thought. Here’s what Socrates said: “Once I heard someone read as he said a book from Anaxagoras and saying that mind organizes and is the cause of everything, I was delighted to hear this.” This is the young Socrates. So, sure enough, he signs up to study with Anaxagoras, very excited about it. But as he got to know Anaxagoras a little bit better, he found out that his philosophy, the mind had been reduced to a materialistic, elemental framework. And it wasn’t the idea of the mind that actually Socrates was looking for. In this next passage that I’ll read, he will tell you why he was disappointed and what it was that he was looking for.
“I thought,” said Socrates, “if Anaxagoras’s theory was right and the organized mind organized everything and arranged each thing, that it would be in the best possible condition.” So if someone wanted to discover the cause of anything and what way it comes into being or perishes or is – notice the phenomenon comes into being, or perishes or is – it would be necessary to discover this namely in what way it’s best for it to be or do or suffer anything. On the basis of this argument, it is appropriate for a human being, when investigating anything, to investigate nothing other than what is excellent or best, what is excellent or best. And we’re really going to see how this word plays itself out in the thinking of Socrates and Plate and Aristotle and emerges and transforms itself. This is the Greek word artay, the key term. A couple of key terms today in our lexicon, certainly artay, excellence. They actually also mean function. And we come back to this word telos.
So Socrates hoped that Anaxagoras’s theory of mind would show how all things should be ordained and arranged by the mind for the best. For human affairs, we see it in nature to a great extent. We can kind of see how things are arranged for the best. Except when there are things like tsunamis and comets hit the planet, things like that. What is for the best? But we kind of also see the captain at the head of a government or at the head of a ship thinking, “What is this activity of this leader for?” Well it’s to bring things to the best, to bring things to the best. That’s why we purportedly should have government or anything like that. What is best. But he did not find this in Anaxagoras, so he was very disappointed. He left behind then this philosophy, and in that move of leaving behind this philosophy, in a sense that is why Windelband finds this next period. There is something that he brings, and the quote, too, from Cicero, that he brought philosophy down from heaven, and he brought it down to looking at the home economy, what’s good for the city-state, what is virtue.
Artay. Artay means excellence. Artay means function. Artay means virtue. See, Greek is a richer language, so it’s term has a much broader reach than our term. English is a language that was made for businessmen. That’s what they told me in Belgium. That English is probably the worst possible language to philosophize in. Greek is the best. Greek and German, that was Heidegger’s idea. We can philosophize in English, but we just have to “ar, ar, ar, ar;” it’s a brutal language. English is a businessman’s language.
We’re looking for subtle, refined things – beauty, discussions of subtleties, nuances, right. Hypersensitive estheticism, esthetics. Not an American thing. And the British were just ruthless.
Philosophy changes when you change the language. We’re going to see what happens when you take Greek thought and put it into the Roman mind. It gets static, cut off. The word phenomena turns into the word nature. Nature is a kind of a flat word. The Greek idea would be “the coming to be of the snow, this is amazing.” “Look at nature.” Notice the difference when I say, “Look at nature.” It’s almost dead. There is no nature. There is the coming to be and passing away and standing there of all things. This isn’t nature. This is just a wonderful hemlock tree, and this and the snow. And this is far more than I can ever mention. And we take one word and try to poke it all together and say that’s nature. That’s pathetic. Or the environment, that’s even worse. Life itself is the coming to be and passing away. The frogs and the worms and everything, including ourselves. Thank goodness we’re here to cap it off. We are the cappers-off of nature. We are the ones who finish the job through our perception of it and grasping of it. We finish the job.
Here are the most salient biographical details that have come down to us about this man Socrates. Born to be a citizen of Athens 470 AD. Some people say 469. He later married Xanthippe. I want to make a trilogy in Hollywood, big blockbuster. Start out with the trinity, Socrates; but really focus on Xanthippe. Nobody would have ever thought of that, right? The wife of Socrates. And who would I cast as her? Jennifer Aniston. I’m not sure about Socrates. I’m thinking Richard Dreyfus. You think about it. If you wanted to cast somebody, who would you put in there, in this great film. Why didn’t they make a film like this already. They’re making all these films. Come on, Plato, Aristotle. Come on, these are blockbusters. Huh? He had three children. I wonder what they were like. Did they become philosophical? I don’t know. I have never seen any historical record of that. He was described as a thick and burly man with a snub nose. He did not necessarily, wasn’t the most handsome guy in the world. They said that when he spoke to you, it had the impact of being stung by a jellyfish or a stingray. Some people say it’s like that with me before I get my cup of tea in the morning. You just got stung. He undertook a study of philosophy as a young man with the cosmological philosopher Anaxagoras, yet Socrates became disenchanted with the study of mind when it did not connote what he thought mind would be, for the best. It turned out that he was talking about mind. I don’t know. Maybe we could say that Anaxagoras was a proto-neuroscientist. He was saying the mind, what I mean is breaking it down into neurons and some sort of elemental materialistic component of how the brain works. That’s no good. Socrates says, “Wait a second. That’s not going to help us.” Taking the mind and simplifying it into elements is not what we’re after. The mind, what we’re after, is how it might be for the better, for the good, for the excellent. He turned his gaze down upon the reality of human existence. He practiced philosophical anthropology. And hence, we have this term anthropological. Anthropology, the study of the human being. Socrates initiates the study of philosophical anthropology. The subject matter is no longer cosmology, but the subject matter becomes the human being himself, herself.
Philosophical anthropology may be defined as the quest for the truth concerning man as man. Don’t tell me. I ask you, “What’s the truth about man?” Oh, man is made up of a cellular entity. No, wrong. What is the truth about man? Man is evolved from an ape. Wrong. What’s the truth about man? You see, these reductionists’ tendencies – no, we want to know the truth about man as man. Human being qua human being. Not man as spirit or divinity. And certainly not man as material or biological artifact. But man qua man. This question, incidentally, is of the utmost significance to all of the social and political philosophy which we shall be looking at and excavating in this course. And it remains for us the most important matter to be thought, even today. Especially today.
Who shall speak on behalf of man. The technologists? God forbid. The economists? God forbid. Medical doctors? God forbid. Who speaks on behalf of man. Politicians, communists? What about the philosophers? Aristotle also tells us that in the time of Socrates, this concern with essence and definition grew, but investigation into nature stopped, and philosophers turned to a study of practical virtue and politics. So this is really our charter. This is our beginning point, the anthropological period for studying this phenomenon. Turning philosophy to the study of practical virtue and politics.
Now that the stage has been set, let’s consider step-by-step how the inquiry concerning man and the good for man – notice the transformation there, the insinuation the study of man and the good for man. You want to know what the study of man is? When we asked the question, we were stuck. Remember I said all these potential candidates – the technologists, the politicians – all want to speak on behalf of man. But the correct question is a question of virtue. What is best, a question of artay, a question of telos. And we’ll be getting to this. What is man for? What is the good for man? So let’s consider the step-by-step inquiry concerning the good for man, developed and changed within the philosophies of Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle. A crucial term is added to our lexicon, and that is virtue, artay, excellence, function.
Socrates seems to be the first philosopher who sought after definitions of moral virtue. This is the crux of the anthropological turn during the period 450-400 BC. Socrates seems to be the first philosopher who sought for a definition of moral virtue. This indeed is the crux of the anthropological turn which occurred during the period of 450-400 BC. Socrates employed and refined a method of investigation called the Socratic method. What’s the real push there, the crux? The Socratic method aims at producing the best, optimal or true definition of a moral virtue such as prudence or justice or courage.
Let’s take a term that is simple to define. A hat. A hat may be defined as what covers a head. A woolen covering for the head. But this would not apply to a helmet or paper hat. Just think of the many ways a hat may be – the cap, the polo cap. And hence find inclusion in the adequate definition. We’re trying to find the adequate definition, the true definition, the best and optimal of hat which would therefore accurately identify any member of that class, any member of that group, what would count as a hat. Good, honest and true definition. Is a crown a hat? So the Socratic method, you begin with a definition. And you can begin sort of proximally by saying let’s just start with a simple thing like the hat. I’m using that as an example to kind of get us into this way of looking at things. Now, we find, as I stated there, there are anomalies. There are points that, if I were to define it too narrowly, I would rule out things that counted as hat. If I were to define it too broadly, I would not be able to identify hat from other functions of other things in definition. So we need to get that definition right. The Socratic method starts by bringing in a dialog, a discussion – Let’s talk about it. He may say, “Let’s talk about what you think the hat is.” Then he is going to come up and, “You say a hat must be a covering from the head that could be woolen.” Well, he says, “Wait, I’ll find problems with that.” This is the Socratic method. We search for definition. We take candidates, taken from the vernacular from ordinary, every-day speech, and then we go through them and winnow them out and tweak them until we find a proper definition. This is the Socratic method. And I’ve really boiled it down to it’s very simple core. What about a yamulke or skull cap? You see, we could go on step by step, methodically investigating the definition of a thing such as hat and tweak and refine this definition. What we’re going to see is that this process that Socrates began is going to be enriched and transformed through Plato until it is brought full-blown into Aristotle’s philosophy. This is the seed that grows into this majestic thing which is Aristotle’s taxonomy of genus and species, which really lays the foundation for the thinking of the next several millennia. This is really where you see some form of scientific thinking that is classification. This taxonomy.
But first of all, in Socrates, it just begins as a kind of quotidian thing, nothing written down, no books. Just talking on the street, trying to find. Do you really think that this is going to be the best approach to running our government today? What do you mean by best? Well, let’s try to define what we mean by best. And then we start winnowing out and tweaking and clarifying and trying to get to a more adequate definition. This is the Socratic method, in short. But by the time the seed of the Socratic method, the searching for definition, by the time it gets developed by the philosophical trinity and it comes into the systematic period, especially coming through Plato, the brilliant teacher and artist, to Aristotle, then we have the full-grown plant. Aristotle’s taxonomy of genus and species, penetration of all entities that can be perceived and named within the cosmos. Note that the kind of systematic inquiry into classifying all sorts of phenomena which Aristotle’s philosophy presents – and you’ll see an example of that Politics Book 2– notice there, he says, “Well, let’s start and look at all the particular constitutions that have already been out there.” The existing constitutions. Now let’s classify them. We’ll say some of them look to be oligarchic, some look to be democratic, and some look to be tyrannical. He’s classifying them. And he does that with everything. He does it with a starfish and the platypus. And he does this with the leaves of grass and the birds and the taxonomies. We’re still doing that. So, in Politics Book 2, Aristotle classifies, investigates these different types of political constitutions in an attempt to classify them, this kind of effort, which is Aristotle’s dialectic – another million dollar word, but I’m going to hold off on defining it yet because it transforms. It means one thing in the philosophy. Dialectic means something different in every single philosopher we undertake, we look at. It certainly means something different in Plato than it did in Socrates. And it certainly means something different in Aristotle than it did in Plato. It is a term that will have great significance in the 19th century, will be resurrected again and have enormous consequences in social and political philosophy, as we will see. The dialectic. Mostly through Hegel. Karl Marx, the philosophy of Communism. The modus operandi, how you get Communism done. Dialectical materialism. Another approach, I’ve seen this usage currently in describing crises. How modern day politicians will use crises to bring a thesis to its opposition so they can bring forth a solution. You want to get to the solution of an invasion of a certain county, but you can’t just come out and say, “We’re going to do that. We’re just going to invade that country.” So we need a proximal cause. This will be called the antithesis. We start with a thesis. We negate it, and here comes our synthesis. This is a very rough way of describing it for now, but let that be. We will refine it as we go.
We can see the seed of Socratic method grown in full and mature in Aristotle’s systematic philosophy. Aristotle states in his Politics, and I’m quoting from page 43 that’s in Volkmann:
“Observation shows us
[and after I’ve read this little passage here, I would like to go back and look at Plato and look at the different style in which The Republic was written for which Politics was written and look at the style of Socrates’ writing, which there wasn’t any because he didn’t write anything. No, no written documents. But we’ll touch on that in a minute. Aristotle states in his Politics; notice where he begins – observation. Direct, immediate, experiential observation. The same as us.]
first that every city is a species of association;
[Notice he uses the word species there, too. He is already classifying taxonomically. The word taxonomy I haven’t written up here yet. It’s the system of classifications. Politics Chapter 2]
a particular manifestation, a species, a particular individual manifestation of association. Secondly, that all associations come into the being for the sake of some good. For all men do all their acts
[women, too]
with a view to achieving something which is in their view a good.”
[This is the word telos.]
What I said about artay, it has the meaning of the word. It also means end of goal. Telos good and goal. Translated back, ”For all men do all their acts with a view toward achieving something which is, in their view, a good.” Socrates, had he been living, would have been rejoicing because he would have known that what Aristotle describes there was the kind of good that was referred to he was looking for. When Socrates said that “I was one to discover what may be best for the thing.” Not to analyze it and tell me that it’s made up of molecules or quanta. That doesn’t help me at all. Thanks a lot, all you scientific departments. Your stuff is great. You’re spending trillions of dollars. But, sorry, you just can’t touch this question. What is the good for man? Is some sort of science going to tell us that? Is some sort of artificial thing, technological going to tell us that? Is something coming up in the future going to finally reveal to us what man is for, so we can just wait for that glorious day?
Aristotle helps us out a lot by saying, “Hey, we don’t have to refer to these alien discourses. This good is something that is already embedded and self-evident in a quite simple way.” He talks about it in his ethics, Aristotle does. The telos. I’ll give you another example, something simpler. Here’s another meaning of telos – function. What’s a good harmonica? It’s one that plays well. There’s your telos. The good is our function. What’s the function of a good flute? It plays well. What’s the function of a pencil? If the pencil’s freaking broken, it’s not a good pencil. What’s the function of a flute? Well, it plays well. What’s the function of a good guitar? It plays well. What’s the function of a good car? It drives, it functions well. Okay. Million dollar question – what is the function of a human being? So to ask the question what a thing is and what its good is and what its telos is is to look to this question. What is the good? Aristotle refines this question and says, “What is the telos?” What is the good, what is the telos and what is the telos of man? That’s what Socrates was looking for that he didn’t find. And Anaxagoras, this is the real marrow of what we’re looking for in terms of philosophical. What is the telos of man? What is man for – and woman? What is the phenomenon aimed at. There is another meaning of telos – aim and goal, function. For Aristotle, all those words mean good. What is the good? It is the end, aim or function. Just as a car is a good car because it drives well. Just as a good harmonica is because it plays well. What is that for man? We have the quest to determine and to cut things short, Aristotle is going to conclude, he is going to show us that the thing that makes us really human being and the thing that is really the end and good for us is what we’re engaged in right now. It’s what we are literally engaged in with our understanding. It’s his act of understanding that is uniquely human that cannot be sub-delegated to any machines. No, not in this century or any other century. No, you can’t. You can destroy the human being. You could kill me, but he cannot take away the fundamental function of the human being – that act of understanding. Therein lies our freedom and our political charter and everything else that is valuable.
So Socrates was rightly disgusted with the pre-Socratic philosophy and said, “This doesn’t help me at all.” And I look around today and say it is all pre-Socratic. We got a bunch of cosmologists out there today, trying to tell us about big bang and things they don’t know anything about. Astrophysics, cosmology. You tell me what human beings are good for before we blow up the planet and destroy ourselves. Could we try to figure out what the good for man is? That could be the subtext of the whole course, Social and Political Philosophy. Could we please stop a minute with all this racing ahead economy and that, and try to just for a second ponder what would be good for us.
If I play a golf shot, I do no less. When I play a golf shot, I say, “What would a good shot be?” Yeah, I say a good shot would be one that gets me to the pin, and I plan and do so. Show me someone who knows what’s good for man. That’s the problem that Aristotle addresses in his ethics. Is it pleasure? Is it lust? Having an orgy? Getting really ripped? How about having everything coated with gold? Being so rich and wealthy? How about being famous in entertainment? Being some sort of star in Hollywood? They said, “Dr. Wolf, we love your harmonica. We want you on the show.” So I go out to Hollywood. The next thing you know, there is a phenomenon on your hands. They say, “You write songs, too?” Sure I do, you know. “We’re going to make you famous, entertainment, rich, too. It’ll be good for you.” I’m pretty happy as I am. My own little frugal life and little rabbits, my wife. We all live in Greenwood and come down here and teach at Penn State. I’m pretty good with that. The perfect is the enemy of the good.
Let’s go back to Plato for a second. We kind of jumped from Socrates to Aristotle. We kind of skipped over Plato. Now, one thing I want to state here is that there was an amazing transformation in writing down philosophy. The means of communication. And thanks to that, we are able to even talk about Plato. Socrates, let’s look at this this way. The pre-Socratics – that is the cosmologists – what we possess of their writings, fragmentary, just fragments.
How about Socrates. I already said, he didn’t write anything down. But neither did Jesus. Finally one piece of thing that Jesus wrote, He wrote in the sand one time with a stick. Go find out what He wrote. It was washed away. The disciples wrote it down. That’s why we have it. Plato decides to enshrine Socrates as his interlocutor and hero for 33 out of 36 dialogues. Plato writes 36 dialogues; 33 out of 36 Socrates is the main hero. It’s called the interlocutor. Plato’s works are called dialogues. Aristotle did write dialogues evidently, but they were lost to us in history. The library at Alexandria was destroyed. I think all the work in it was destroyed. What we have thought, the innovation – and you already heard it when I read the quote; I’m going to read two quotes, one from Plato and one from Aristotle, and you’ll hear the difference. He wrote treatises. They were sometimes based on students’ notes. The case of the ethics. Treatises. This Aristotelian way of writing is what you’re more familiar with. When you read a text book today in the university, it’s written as a prosaic, univocal direct style. Notice when we read The Republic, what did he do in The Republic? He starts telling the Gyges ring. He starts using metaphors. He embodies justice, Socrates does, and he does this by way of analogy. So the fundamental method of demonstrating here is analogy in the platonic corpus of writings. And here would we call it prose, a direct naming of things, which is really this kind of way of thinking, you will see that as soon as you come to Aristotle, you have a feeling of “He’s a contemporary.” This is the way our scientific treatises are written today as well. It’s the same sort of thing. How did it come about? All at once, in the mind of Aristotle.
So we’re looking here at writing genres, types of written things. Fragments, nothing (for Socrates), dialogues which are dramatic. Let’s go back and look at an excerpt from The Republic, different passages that were not in your book. “Yes, my friend.” [Notice the dialogue. They’re talking back and forth. You asked me a questions. There’s always a question that leads up to it. And then Socrates says,] “Can we live together most of the time in pure air? Yes, my friend. For the truth is that you can have a well-governed society only if you discover for further rulers a better way of life than being in office.” Remember I said earlier about going to Hollywood, and they made all those offers to me to come to Nashville, New York City, London? “Discover for future people a better way of life.” But here he just says that. I’m interpolating. “Discover for your future rulers a better way of life than being in office. Then only will power be in the hands of men who are rich, not in gold, but in wealth that brings happiness.” The rabbit farm, my wife, my humble life as a teacher. Happiness. Maybe in Pennsylvania. Good enough. I don’t need to see the Alps. I’ve been there, done that.
Wealth that brings happiness, a good and a wise life. Practice philosophy, no other way, no other way. All goes wrong when starved for lack of anything good in their lives. They got wealth, but they’re starved for good. That is wisdom, that is philosophy. They’ve got fame, but they’re starved for good. They have power, but they’re starved for good. That is philosophy. So they set about fighting for power, and they think that they will be able to snatch it politically and then they will be able to gain happiness. “I’ll get happy once I get to rule. Then I can rule, and I’ll be happy.” All goes wrong when starved for lack of anything good in their own life, men turn to public affairs, hoping to snatch from thence the happiness they hunger for. They set about fighting for power, and this internecine conflict ruins them and their country. The life of true philosophy is the only one that looks down upon the offices of state. The only one who looks down on the offices of state is the humble philosopher. Access to power must be confined to men who are not in love with it, or women who are not in love with it. You have never seen a deeper greater love for power then you have seen in the candidates last year in the presidential election. Absolutely, unadulterated lust for power for those offices. To be the one. I need to be somebody important in this administration. I’m not happy with myself. I can’t be happy because I’m just a decent human being who has the treasure and gift of my understanding. I need to have a lot of other stuff, too. See that’s a big mistake, big mistake.
So whom else can you compel to undertake the guardianship of the commonwealth. If not those who besides understanding best the principles of government, enjoy a nobler life than the politicians and look for rewards of a different kind. There is indeed no other choice. We’ve got to change our way of thinking. We need to change our way of thinking. Start looking at things in a new way. We have been highly deceived but only if we let ourselves be deceived. It is difficult not to be because you are being bombarded by all kinds of propaganda 24/7. We can turn it off. Socrates also says that really what philosophers are looking for in the world of knowledge, the last thing to be perceived, and only with great difficulty, is the essential form of goodness. Without having had this vision of this form, no one can act with wisdom, either in his own life or in matters of state. So in addition to looking at these transformation which I cannot account for, I just present to you as some sort of fundamental huge mystery, all the great things in history are mysterious. We hear people talk about Franklin as if they knew him, as if they were there. You weren’t there. You don’t know anything. We just got these records that sort of make us feel that we’re secure, that we know something about the past. You don’t even know what happened yesterday. And if you did. For example, Cornel West. That was just a relatively not a huge crisis. Well, you got some records of it. I saw a photograph, and I read you some quotes. What about the richness of the being there, the presence, the understanding of all that was given. Never been captured. It’s never been captured in any histories. It’s impoverished. So in addition to these transformation through this period of the philosophical trinity, with its concomitant different uses of philosophy, some people argue that Plato – remember when we looked at The Seventh Letter, we said he was so disgusted because Socrates was the most beautiful, decent, honorable man that he had ever seen. Plato was probably the most competent, qualified to lead but with disgust gave it up, said forget it.
So what did he do? He started this new genre. He started this new, absolutely new, out of the blue. You’ve seen it in The Republic. That way of writing. That way of transformed Socrates into an interlocutor in his dialogue and something magical happened. Something magic for our understanding occurs with this dialogue. Dialogue, by the way, is the root, and the key word it’s related to is dialectic. So we talk about Plato’s dialectic, we look to the dialogues, we look to that back and forth, question and answer Socratic method. Are you sure? Does it count as justice if the majority of the people are given what they deserve distributively? Or are you going to winnow it, tweak it and try to find it? This dialectical process is really the whole substance of what philosophy was about. That was what philosophy counted for. That’s what Socrates gave us. But notice Socrates gets enshrined in the dialogues of Plato, and it allows him to – we’re still talking about him, we’re still talking about Socrates.
Stanley Rosen said, “Philosophy in its essence is revolutionary.” Any time we approach real philosophy, we’re approaching revolution. And in the dialect, it gets even refined further in Aristotle and becomes basically a prosaic treatise, and these taxonomies which I said you would be familiar with because in the university, we are still kind of speaking in that genre, in that trope, in that way of thinking.
I’ll take one more. We’ve got this nice little parallel here. It helps using the chalkboard. This is all analogy. The analog. It helps us to understand somewhat. Using these three, I am not going to discuss these, but the trinity of Socrates, Plato and Aristotle. What is the good? For Socrates? He’s going to go about by asking questions, defining moral virtue. Show me in all the particular instances of it, how can we find a fundamental, authentically good grasp of it? What is the good for Plato? We saw here that this amazing excerpt, the final and last thing to be perceived, and only with great difficulty, in the world of knowledge is the essential form of goodness. Some people might say he’s talking about God. Get the good and get rid of one of those Os. Then Aristotle gives us the good as telos, his fundamental critique of his master. I’m a friend of Plato, but I am more a friend of truth. The telos, what’s it good for? That gives us a very concrete tool to investigate the good.
Now, here we have hit pay dirt and we may now go about pulling in our oars on this lecture’s inquiry and coast a while. Now, did I leave time for questions? No. Thursday, please read the passage on Aristotle, and I’ll email you in the ensuing time with a little bit of a focal point for that assignment. That way we can do it together on Thursday. Be well. Thank you.
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