Yes, pissing into the wind is not an effective strategy.

I recently completed Elizabeth Gaskell's Wives and Daughters. It works through many of the social devices presented by Jane Austen but shows how different versions of ego mania produce different outcomes. Gaskell's account reveals there is no significant difference between genders and class in the experience of self-interest. We pursue what is best for us. The difference of outcomes come about from slight gains or losses of self-awareness in each person. And nobody gets to check the scorecard since it involves life beyond one's view.

What is bizarre from one point of view may be 'normative' in another. The problem with saying the 'bias' is doing the talking is that it dispenses with other peoples' views a priori.

Therefore, it is a useless argument in political discourse. Noting that condition is far from denying that bias does exist in many forms of feeling and expression.

Also a different kind of arrogance and a different kind of divine retribution. — Vera Mont

Yes. I think those two elements are intertwined.

The witches in Macbeth do play an important part of why he thought he was invincible. In the midst of complaining about how boring he found his success; he suddenly learns he misunderstood the original message.

Lear's arrogance is believing he knows what true love looks like when he does not. In one sense, his realization of the truth is more brutal than the one Macbeth experienced.

King Lear is not a voice for moral nihilism because it is recognized that through her death, Cordelia was the faithful one through her refusal to approve Lear's proposal. That is certainly the groundwork of many a tale. All of Jane Austen can be viewed through this telescope.

I enter your discussion as a curmudgeon who resists the generality of Aristotle's accounts. The differences between King Lear and Macbeth involve different kinds of ignorance. They follow a similar pattern of revelation but do not concern just one problem.

Rivas makes good points. Hubris is an important part of the action. There is the relief of not experiencing the bad luck as pointed out by Moliere quoting Lucretius upthread.

But there are elements that are meant to leave the audience with some discomfort. The theme of blindness and fear of the future started when baby Oedipus is left to die on a hillside. Prophecy is supposed to pierce the invisibility of fate but becomes an instrument of fate in some points of crisis.

Macbeth demonstrates that quality in a direct way. Oedipus, however, is entangled in decisions of his parents. The terrain becomes murkier. I leave the play less certain of where I live. Maybe I am the one who is blind.

I wasn’t talking about ‘injecting’ souls into other bodies: I was talking about the essence of a thing. — Bob Ross

How does an essence come into being in the language of Aristotle?

Sophocles' Oedipus the King is worthy of notice in this regard. Oedipus unwittingly accelerates his demise by uncovering the attempts of his parents to avoid their prophesied fates.

He goes from the arrogance of the king to the blindness of the seer who brought him down.

I can see the pleasure in being able to view a process that one cannot perform upon oneself. But I cannot imagine witnesses of that play going home afterwards thinking they had purified something.

Your hypothetical does not take into account the way Aristotle views human life in relation to the life of other animals. An excellent overview of this is given by Edward Clayton:

First, Aristotle claims that it is not correct from a biological point of view to divide animals into the categories of "tame" and " wild " as some before him have done:

"For in a manner of speaking everything that is tame is also wild, e.g. human beings, horses, cattle . . . ." [PA 643b4]

For each of these kinds of animal, some members are tame while others are wild and even those that are tame do not start out that way. Unless they are tamed by human beings, all animals remain in their wild condition—and even human beings are born wild. In a surprisingly little noticed passage in the History of Animals, Aristotle says that:

" in children, though one can see as it were traces and seeds of the dispositions that they will have later, yet their soul at this period has practically no difference from that of wild animals. " [HA 588a-588]

Of course it is education that will shape those beginning dispositions and provide the char-
acter and characteristics that children will have later in life, and Aristotle believes that it is the job of politics and the city through laws and training to provide that education. — Aesop, Aristotle, and Animals: The Role of Fables in Human Life, Edward Clayton

The need for nurture to become what is our 'special' nature is integral to our place between the beast and the divine. We need each other to become who we are. The hypothetical you propose suggests "natures" can be arbitrarily injected into life forms. Aristotle rejected that possibility in De Anima:

These people, however, merely undertake to say what sort of thing the soul is, but about the sort of body that is receptive of it they determine nothing further, as if it were possible, as in the Pythagorean stories, for any random soul to be inserted into any random body, whereas it seems that in fact each body has its own special form and shape.96 But what they say is somewhat like saying that the craft of carpentry could be inserted into flutes, whereas in fact the craft must use its instruments, and the soul its body. — Aristotle, De Anima, 407b20, translated by C.D.C. Reeve

How we came into being is inseparable from what you call, "fitting into the ecosystem of nature."

And there's nothing wrong with that, although it does deviate from the previous topic of the butterfly effect, chaos theory, and the "tending of the big garden." You said that the big garden is not being tended. Should it be? — Leontiskos

According to one particular story, we were kicked out of a tended garden and forced to struggle hard for our survival. There is still an order to the world that favors the good in many ways but they are faced with the harshness of nature and the effects of wicked people.

It comes from different stories about the beginning, but Aristotle underlined the uncertainty of outcomes because the order prevalent to make life possible and more tolerable did not determine what ate what or who killed who on any given day. Plato's Timaeus also approached a boundary of the undetermined.

You mentioned Plotinus' god. In a number of ways, he defended the "creator" for the hardships we experience by putting forth a particular vision of immortality. Maybe I should make an OP about that.

In any case, what is seen as the horizon of what is possible for human beings is the world or absence of one that is imagined for it.

If the object for which a thing exists, its end, is its chief good, it follows that if its end is evil, that is its chief good. — NOS4A2

Who are these people who seek what is good for themselves at the expense of the good itself?

In Phaedrus, Socrates demands to see the scroll Phaedrus is quoting from. The argument about the limits of the written word in that dialogue would be absurd if they were put in Socrates' mouth while Plato knew he was illiterate.

It would also render absurd the jokes made in Cratylus about etymology and the structure of written words if it concerned something Socrates had no actual part in.

Written words weren't required for thinking through and solving problems, and it seems most writing began as ledger keeping and literacy as we understand it had little to do with a successful life. — isomorph

It seems you are applying a general idea to a specific time. The dramas and comedies Socrates (and Plato) were aware of were compositions written to be scripted performances. The talk of many authors of that time was directed toward regarding some as better than others. A performance of Oedipus Rex could be better than others. Just as we witness different attempts at Shakespeare.

I did not mean to contradict your reference to the Cathars. In looking at more ancient sources, the desire for purification finds expression in the personal, the civic, and the religious register that does not resolve simply into the categories I just used to speak about it.

Tyranny coalesces resistance along significant points of divergence. But a coalition of divergence is not a convergence of opinions regarding the good. That is why the value of the secular extends beyond what is held (or not) in common but involves the way purposes can be shared by very different ideas of the "pure."

Otherwise, it is just your theology up against mine.

The word goes further back than that. It invokes different ideas of purification important to the Greeks, in their great variance of opinion.

Agreed, not a new argument.

Coincidence requires the absence of a pattern. There is a pattern.

It will be interesting to hear what the appeal process will bring forward.

I understand and try to practice a version of reducing harm by changing what is in my power while knowing that it is hopefully a kind of subtraction of bad from consequences I will never learn about. That is how I hear Hillel saying: "do not do unto others what you would not have done to you." The criteria are immediately available.

I recognize your interest in saying Christian experience is different than others. I am not going to try and address that here. The view of history of what has been lost is clear to you and a question for me. My participation in theology does not make that sort of thing necessary. In any case, my energy is in other thoughts right now so I will not defend my statement today. I need to get back to Plotinus and Aristotle that the recent discussions have caused me to dive back into again. I have a tiny mind.

As a parting shot, chaos theory is trying to bring into a Logos what Aristotle had written off. There is something about emergence which is more "universal" than our previous models imagined. But that observation is stupid if Aristotle was not actually interested in what happens in the "physical" world.

I am the hysterical side of the partnership. The one who has to be talked down from quitting out of anger, getting into needless conflicts, or arrested. Still a work in progress. No complaints here.

Thank you for the article. The play of tragic and comedic elements is important in Plato's work and life. I will try to address that later as I need to do chores soon. But I will say something quickly about the interesting idea of a denial of self-expression that Fraser brings forward.

The absence of Plato in the dialogues amongst people he lived with has a weird narrative effect. He is present throughout but hiding at the same time. In the Phaedo, the device is performed in front of us like a magic act. It is as if I handed you a photo album of my life events and you discover that I have used scissors to remove my image whenever I am in the shot.

Nostalgia must be involved but it does not give the Proustian vibe of 'remembrance of things past'.

Now to chores. My wife is asking for a greater display of practical reason over the theoretical for the coming week.

Wow. Or maybe whoa. A true believer emerges. I will leave you to your own devices.

Nor are your comparisons. I was employing sarcastic irony.

Justice Thomas wrote a separate bit in the recent immunity decision aimed at Special Counsels and Cannon received the lateral pass and ran with it.

She is very open to new ideas.

A shot in the crowd of a Capitol invasion and you hit a member of a militia group.

More to chew upon.

I am just glad the shooter did not have a bump stock that the Supreme Court just gave the thumbs up for. There is a model that fits the AR-15 used at the rally.

Kierkegaard because he seems to demote, if not knock out (always hard to tell because of the pseudonyms) theoretical reason from this part of the equation but keeps the other half. — Count Timothy von Icarus

It is hard to tell. I read him as demarking a difference in kind that is expressed as the limit of psychology in Concept of Anxiety. Psychology is not thereby condemned.

That is parallel to him saying in Philosophical Fragments that the 'recollection' in Plato is a truth inherent in each person whereas the condition to experience the greater truth comes from beyond oneself.

That sort of messes with the distinction between theoretical and practical reason.

Perhaps the piercing of the ear so close to the brain will cause the man to awaken from his monomaniacal dream and see life the way Andrei did in War and Peace.

I wonder what words he used so that you felt his nostalgia? — Amity

That is an interesting question. It is easy when pointing at large mythological elements. I will have to think about it as related to more subtle themes. I am not trying to argue for that against other readings of the text.

Paine - relates to the question raised in the thread on Gerson/Aristotle. — Wayfarer

I have not participated in this discussion. I recognize that you think that I need further education in these matters. I don't see how saying that advances your primary thesis.

Yes, the externalized cost model pays penalties as the price of doing business rather than changing behavior to avoid them.

Another side of accidents that touches upon consequences well beyond our view is reflected in Aristotle saying there could be no science of them. That is oddly echoed in Chaos theory and the delicate efficacy of the butterfly effect. The big garden is not being tended.

Indeed he is not, which is why it was not relevant to the question I raised, which was about that relationship. — Wayfarer

I get that you connect your view of the 'theological' with a renunciation of the 'material' It is the trick of your pony, as you admitted upthread. You would find Plotinus good company in this regard. I suggest you read him. I am weary of being the only one in this conversation that actually quotes him. I will wait until another thread emerges before doing it again. I have worn out my welcome here and now I am wearing out my goodbye. I will take my last word here in the hope it will clarify future discussion during other OPs:

Your years long effort to see a 'theology' in Plato that others would take away from him is a fight over an undefended territory. Plato writes of his contemporaries and predecessors in a fashion where he argues for and against particular views of the divine in particular contexts and leaves it to the student to find their own way. Quite the contrast with Plotinus coming back from a visit with the One and taking questions on how others can do it.

Therefore, to find a rebuttal of Plotinus' view of political virtues, we need to find a contrast to a vision of a soul re-gaining its virtue as it separates from its body. I am reminded of an observation I made last year

The discussion of cowardice reminds me of the following from Cratylus:

What remains to consider after justice? I think we have not yet discussed courage. [413e] It is plain enough that injustice (ἀδικία) is really a mere hindrance of that which passes through (τοῦ διαϊόντος, but the word ἀδρεία (courage) implies that courage got its name in battle, and if the universe is flowing, a battle in the universe can be nothing else than an opposite current or flow (ῥοή). Now if we remove the delta from the word ἀνδρεία, the word ἀνρεία signifies exactly that activity. Of course it is clear that not the current opposed to every current is courage, but only that opposed to the current which is contrary to justice; — Plato, Cratylus, 413

Socrates is using the vocabulary of Heraclitus and connects "manliness" to the willingness to leap into battle against a 'current' that needs to be opposed. — me

Till next time in another place.

Strauss does make distinctions between Greek thought and 'revealed' religion that I know you would disagree with.

Strauss acknowledges that Heidegger brought the differences between our time and that of Classical Greek thought to our attention. But he opposes Heidegger in essential ways. One thing the guy saying stuff got right is:

Heidegger, in the twentieth-century, depreciates scientific knowledge in the name of historicity. — This guy saying stuff

Strauss strongly opposed that kind of historicity in Natural Right and History through his attack upon Nietzsche as the master of the practice.

I will leave it there. I need to get back to reading Plotinus.

Plotinus is not talking about the relationship between knower and known but the experience of being a soul descended into a body which is not its natural home:

1. Often I have woken up out of the body to my self and have entered into myself, going out from all other things; I have seen a beauty wonderfully great and felt assurance that then most of all I belonged to the better part; I have actually lived the best life and come to identity with the divine; and set firm in it I have come to that supreme actuality, setting myself above all else in the realm of Intellect. Then after that rest in the divine, when I have come down from Intellect to discursive reasoning, I am puzzled how I ever came down, and how my soul has come to be in the body when it is what it has shown itself to be by itself, even when it is in the body.
............

For this reason Plato says that our soul as well, if it comes to be with that perfect soul, is perfected itself and “walks on high and directs the whole universe”2; when it departs to be no longer within bodies and not to belong to any of them, then it also like the Soul of the All will share with ease in the direction of the All, since it is not evil in every way for soul to give body the ability to flourish and to exist, because not every kind of provident care for the inferior deprives the being exercising it of its ability to remain in the highest. For there are two kinds of care of everything, the general, by the inactive command of one setting it in order with royal authority, and the particular, which involves actually doing something oneself and by contact with what is being done infects the doer with the nature of what is being done. Now, since the divine soul is always said to direct the whole heaven in the first way, transcendent in its higher part but sending its last and lowest power into the interior of the world, God could not still be blamed for making the soul of the All exist in something worse, and the soul would not be deprived of its natural due, which it has from eternity and will have for ever, which cannot be against its nature in that it belongs to it continually and without beginning. — Plotinus, Ennead 4.8.1, translated by Armstrong

This is beyond saying that there is more than civic (political) virtue. It stands at cross purposes to the Philosopher returning to the cave to care for his fellow citizens.

It replaces the uncertainty expressed in the Phaedo with a map and a theodicy.

Not all discussion of religion involves the same things. And if you want to argue for some element of that, I support your effort.

But I object to this sort of tagging the donkey where simply reading what the person says makes the claim meaningless.

As this does not involve the Gerson thesis, I feel it is okay for me to push back upon this reading. The same article says:

Heidegger, in the twentieth-century, depreciates scientific knowledge in the name of historicity. While many philosophers (including Heidegger) have understood Heidegger’s philosophy as breaking with modern rationalism, Strauss views Heidegger’s philosophy as a logical outcome of that same rationalism. — This guy saying stuff

No reader of Natural Right and History would think that is what just got said.

I am missing Socrates.
Unfortunately, I can't read as much as I would like and can't see me ever enjoying again the previous discussions we had - following Socrates. Nostalgic, huh? — Amity

I am also nostalgic for both. I enjoyed our conversation.

I recently re-read the Sophist and was struck at how Plato expressed a kind of nostalgia in his writing of the dialogue. The literary device of the Stranger is a reflective view of previous work in many ways. I said something about that here. Another way it is shown is through comparison of Theaetetus and the Sophist. The same Theaetetus is being sharply tested in the first and gradually persuaded by the Stranger in the second. The dialogues also share very similar wording in some places that suggest a dialogue between the dialogues.

It is the current state of political affairs that most concerns me. Does being a 'Socratic philosopher' help? — Amity

The allegory of the cave requires a region outside of it to work. This gives rise to many problems of how greater knowledge of the real relates to the making of images inside the cave. Parmenides pointed out several of them to the actual young Socrates long before the action of the Republic. (Plato screwing with our heads yet again). In any case, there is tension that comes with using the allegory that is greater than any particular explanation it provides.

The philosopher who returns to the cave does it to help the people living there. That connects to how Socrates said Athens was his city and he refused to leave it unless he could return to it. The Republic happened out of town. The theme of estrangement is woven into countless backgrounds in the Dialogues.

My personal interpretation of the 'city in words' is that it is not a plan or a constitution but a deed to Socrates' city. His claim to try and change it. And he did not leave it when he could have because that would have meant giving up his claim.

I hope I have not left chew marks on your ear lobes.

Plato is tricky on the issue of 'reverence for the past' as a political form of life. In the Statesman, Chronos is shown running the course of the universe backwards in order to restore its virtue and then run forward again under the guidance of gods to maintain order. Nostalgia does not get much better than that.

But the rule of men means the party is over:

Str: 275B And it was for these reasons we included the myth, in order to point out not only that when it comes to herd nurture, everyone nowadays disputes over that title with the person we are looking for, but also to discern more clearly, based upon the example of shepherds and neatherds, the one person whom it is appropriate, in view of his care for the nurture of humanity, to deem worthy of this title alone.

Y Soc: Rightly so.

Str: And yet, Socrates, I really think that this figure of the divine herdsman is even greater than that of a king, 275C while the statesmen of the present day have natures much more like those whom they rule over, and they share in an education and nurture, closer to their subjects. — Plato, Statesman, 275a

That is close to the thinking of Rousseau invoking the Noble Savage.

On the other hand, Socrates is seen pulling the beards of powerful men, challenging the force of tradition until tradition served him a hemlock cocktail.

I wish that there was an equivalent to Horan's translations of Plato's Dialogues available to present what Plotinus wrote. Then it would be easier to link to a source with a beginning quote and let the reader see for themselves what has been said. The source I pointed to before is weird and makes pretty plainly spoken Greek sound strange. Those words are the same that other authors use to say different things.

This OP is an orphan, abandoned by its author. I made my pitch that Plotinus is the man behind the curtain in this particular wizard of oz. I sense I have worn out my welcome.

I will try to answer your question in another place and time.

I think I understand what that passage is saying - again it has parallels in Eastern philosophy, for instance in the contrast between the 'upright man' represented by Confucius and civic virtue, and the 'true man of the Way' represented by the taoist sage who 'returns to the source' and often appears as a vagabond or vagrant. It is a passage about the essential and total 'otherness' of the One, beyond all conditioned distinctions and human notions of virtue. It is a recognisable principle in various forms of the perennial philosophy. — Wayfarer

I understand the passage as demonstrating the vast difference between Plato and Plotinus when they speak of the philosopher's return to the cave. The role of politics, central to the argument of the Republic, has been superseded by the process of becoming a "different kind of being". Would you not accept there is a difference between the philosopher who rules a city and the Daoist sage who laughs at rulers? Plotinus is silent on that score.

As for the "materiality' of the soul, I have been arguing for years that Plotinus' understanding is very different from Aristotle's. I point to some of those in my recent comment on De Anima.

There are also differences between Aristotle and Plato.
Here is a discussion of what "matter" means that introduces Sallis's reading of the Timaeus.

Because of these different views, I don't see the value of the broad generalities offered by Gerson, Perl, Fraser, and the like.

Edit to add: Please take the last word, if you wish. I think we are at an impasse.

Given the importance to how matter plays an important role in the present thinking, can you accept that Plotinus was talking about something else?

What "matter" means in the different texts is not an agreed upon point of departure but what seems to require the most argument.

So what? Well, the "objects" of the intellect are immaterial, and as we're able to perceive them, we too possess an immaterial aspect - what used to be called the soul. We're not simply mechanisms or organisms. Of course, all Socrates' arguments for the reality of the soul in Phaedo can be and are called into question by his interlocutors but they ring true to me. — Wayfarer

I apologize for the dismissive manner I dealt with this upthread. What I am trying to underline in the discussion is the particular way Plotinus offers a solution to your thesis:

For instance, he will not make self-control consist in that former observance of measure and limit, but will altogether separate himself, as far as possible, from his lower nature and will not live the life of the good man which civic virtue requires. He will leave that behind, and choose another, the life of the gods: for it is to them, not to good men, that we are to be made like. Likeness to good men is the likeness of two pictures of the same subject to each other; but likeness to the gods is likeness to the model, a being of a different kind to ourselves. — Ennead 1.2. 30, translated by Armstrong

There are other ways of reading Plato.

I would simply wonder if Gerson is doing two different things simultaneously. — Leontiskos

If Gerson is absorbing all of Platonism into his understanding of Plotinus, he does not need the Ur-Platonism for his own purposes. The 'via negativa' is for persuading others that the only philosophy is his understanding of Plato and that anything that differs from it is not philosophy. That excludes a lot of philosophy.

I know that you don't find any of my objections to be persuasive. I don't find your counter arguments for Gerson's position to be compelling or benefit me in the comparison of different views. It is no help in distinguishing the difference between Klein and Burnyeat. That is more important to me than rooting out miscreants from my City. I gave Gerson a college try over several years. I am done.

Let us agree to disagree. Have the last word if you wish.

Seconded.