In Praise of Timelines

Speaking of orienting oneself in time, I’ve become quite fond of well-constructed timelines, certainly reading them—but above all in the value of “rolling your own.” Making a timeline makes you keenly aware of how things are related and in the linear fashion. And the very activity tends to force a look at the context in which a particular subject evolves.

I’ll give a brief example here of a Greek timeline of a mere 146 years. It embraces the best known core of Greek philosophical work—but seen in its own context.

469	Socrates is born
460	Thucydides is born.
446	Aristophanes (the playwright) is born.
431	Peloponnesian War breaks out, in effect Athens (and allies) against Sparta (and allies). It will lasts for 27 years. In the Greek context it is a kind of World War in two phases.
427	Plato is born.
399	Socrates dies.
395	Corinthian War (Sparta against coalition of Thebes, Athens, Corinth, and Argos) breaks out, the second half of the Peloponnesian.
387	Corinthian War ends when Persia enters on Sparta’s side and saves its hide.
386	Aristophanes dies.
404	Peloponnesian War ends, largely because the Sparta’s ally, Persia, provides decisive aid. Persia is the Big Power in that time and region.
400	Thucydides dies.
387	Plato founds the Academy at his prime, aged 40.
384	Aristotle is born.
360	Philip becomes king of Macedon, and the expansion of that realm begins.
356	Alexander (later the Great) is born; he is the son of Philip.
357	Outbreak of the Social War, a conflict between Athens and parts of its alliance—Chios, Rhodes, Kos, and Byzantion—provoked by Athens’ demanding ways.
355	Social War ends. Athens is forced to give the rebels their independence, in part due to Persian pressures.
343	Aristotle becomes Alexander’s tutor and does the job for three years.
347	Plato dies at 82.
338	Athens loses its independence as Macedon extends its sway and comes to control all of Greece.
336	Philip of Macedon is assassinated. Alexander becomes king at 20, but he is already a genuine veteran of the wars of Macedonian expansion.
322	Aristotle dies at 62.
334	Alexander invades Persia (turn-around is fair play) by crossing the Hellespont (read Dardanelles) and the conquest of Persia is on.
323	Alexander dies in Babylon (make that Iraq, where else?) and the Hellenistic age begins.

As I’ve noted in an earlier post, this sort of thing is oddly informative. Reading Thucydides is like reading a modern author. The view point, the realism, the whole approach is modern. So are the conflicts that give this period its defining framework. The first date is that of Socrates’ birth, representing a kind of maturation of another age and time. Aristotle dies toward the end, himself a perfectly modern sort of thinker. And the last figure to pass is the man who produced the environment of an earlier modernity—the Hellenistic age.

Since of late I’ve been concerned with mathematics, I would here note where Pythagoras fits into this timeline. He came before Socrates, born 570 BC and died 495. That should please mathematicians—who like to think themselves foundational.

A Ring to Rule Them All

Herewith a story:

According to the tradition, Gyges was a shepherd in the service of the king of Lydia; there was a great storm, and an earthquake made an opening in the earth at the place where he was feeding his flock. Amazed at the sight, he descended into the opening, where, among other marvels, he beheld a hollow brazen horse, having doors, at which he stooping and looking in saw a dead body of stature, as appeared to him, more than human, and having nothing on but a gold ring; this he took from the finger of the dead and reascended.

Now the shepherds met together, according to custom, that they might send their monthly report about the flocks to the king; into their assembly he came having the ring on his finger, and as he was sitting among them he chanced to turn the collet of the ring inside his hand, when instantly he became invisible to the rest of the company and they began to speak of him as if he were no longer present. He was astonished at this, and again touching the ring he turned the collet outwards and reappeared; he made several trials of the ring, and always with the same result—when he turned the collet inwards he became invisible, when outwards he reappeared.

Whereupon he contrived to be chosen one of the messengers who were sent to the court; where as soon as he arrived he seduced the queen, and with her help conspired against the king and slew him, and took the kingdom.

Suppose now that there were two such magic rings, and the just put on one of them and the unjust the other; no man can be imagined to be of such an iron nature that he would stand fast in justice. No man would keep his hands off what was not his own when he could safely take what he liked out of the market, or go into houses and lie with any one at his pleasure, or kill or release from prison whom he would, and in all respects be like a God among men. Then the actions of the just would be as the actions of the unjust; they would both come at last to the same point.

And this we may truly affirm to be a great proof that a man is just, not willingly or because he thinks that justice is any good to him individually, but of necessity, for wherever any one thinks that he can safely be unjust, there he is unjust. For all men believe in their hearts that injustice is far more profitable to the individual than justice, and he who argues as I have been supposing, will say that they are right. If you could imagine any one obtaining this power of becoming invisible, and never doing any wrong or touching what was another’s, he would be thought by the lookers-on to be a most wretched idiot, although they would praise him to one another’s faces, and keep up appearances with one another from a fear that they too might suffer injustice. Enough of this. [Glaucon speaking, in Book II of Plato’s The Republic, Benjamin Jowett’s translation]

A collet is a flange that holds the precious stone on the ring. I found this quote thanks to Brandon at Siris who, in this post, made me aware that hidden in Plato is one of the earliest suggestions of cyclic civilization, moving from timarchy (rule by honor, by the best), to oligarchy, democracy, and then to chaos—by very arrangement suggesting a down-ward spiral. I was too young and ignorant in college when last I looked at the Republic and read only selected parts of it as part of a survey course. At the same time I am fairly certain that J.R.R. Tolkien, certainly a scholar, must have read the whole of it. If I had read it, I would certainly have remembered it.

Picking up a Chronometer

One of the most striking features of Thucydides’ The Peloponnesian War is how modern that account sounds to our ears. That war—I think of it as akin to our own world war—took place 431-404 BC, and Thucidides wrote his history in the waning years of the fourth century BC. He died in 400 at age of 60. Now unless one’s college studies are still as fresh as a daisy—and assuming that one actually had a course on Greek history detailed enough to look at this period closely, the clash between Athens and Sparta is one thing, and philosophy quite another; the ordinary modern mind does not link the two. We have pictures of Socrates surrounded by disciples suspended in a kind of philosophical fairy land; and there is Aristotle filling thick volumes. The linkage between history and philosophy is a little vague in most minds except those of experts. To make some links, I thought I’d take a look.

The Peloponnesian war had been underway two years when a woman called Perictione gave birth to a little baby boy (427). She and her husband, Ariston, named him Plato—and you can be sure they discussed it and agreed, because this was a decidedly upper class family. Ariston traced his lines of descent back to two kings; and Perictione traced hers back to the famed lawyer and poet Solon. At this time the man who would later become little Plato’s teacher, a man called Socrates, had just turned 40. That war took quite a while to end; it lasted 27 years. Plato was a young man of 25 when it finally wound down. And Thucydides was 56. It was twenty years after this—and another war, the Corinthian, was still raging—when Aristotle first cried out as a baby after being born in 384 BC. Plato was then 45; baby Aristotle had become a man of 37 when Plato died at the ripe old age of 82 in 347 BC. And in that year a major future political and military figure, Alexander, later dubbed The Great, was just a boy of nine. Aristotle would soon be engaged to be his teacher.

Sometimes it is worth consciously pondering that all these famous people were once babies and had to have their nappies changed.

I link these people chronologically here by way of underlining that the philosophical works we place at the core of Western civilization emerged in a political, technological, and militarily advanced stage of Greek civilization, as documented in Thucydides' work. And this age had a tendency, a direction—thus toward the expansive, the materialistic. It was a culturally modern time, the transition between what is called the classical period in Greece and the Hellenistic—the latter an overflow of Greek culture to a much wider region, the consequence of Alexander’s conquests. The classical period followed a deeply religious age from which very few “great names” survive. Why? Because we only value figures who’re like us. If we were drawing parallels to our own stage of culture, we’d be looking at a period extending roughly from the late nineteenth century to the end of World War II, call that classical, and the period of global Americanization that followed and is our own time now; call it Hellenistic. What I’m after is the feel of things, and this, I think, properly captures that feel.

Why did I do this? I tried to answer a question. And it was this: How could it come about that a person brought up in a Catholic tradition and exposed to philosophy by the Jesuits, thus to a philosophy firmly centered on Thomism, would have developed a great distaste for the Aristotelian view of reality? The fault is largely mine, of course. It is true, of course, that Thomas Aquinas was a staunch, loyal, persistent Aristotelian, but he Christianized that philosophy by brilliant innovations. My fault—because what stuck to me was the Aristotelian foundation. Something in me clashed with it—and therefore I never did manage to advance to the brilliant innovations. I had problems with the base.

It has always seemed to me that Aristotle’s natural leanings were materialistic—and I was born into an age where—almost undetectable although it is—the spiritual focus is once more increasing; and it is this new, faint something that attracts me. Thus, in later times, I felt much more drawn to Aristotle’s predecessors, thus the Platonic, and what emerged later from it, the neo-platonic and mystical schools that developed from it across the board as the Graeco-Roman world slowly decayed. And this foray into chronology took place by way of getting a better feel for the times, the tempora. And, I would submit, the times then match the times now. And that explains my drawing back from the Aristotelian, however modified. I’m more poet than thinker; the content is less important to me than the smell.

Notice the interesting “materialization” of philosophy in this chronology. Socrates, a deeply spiritual figure, is the teacher of Plato, a metaphysician who taught by dialogue; he is the teacher of Aristotle, the logician and physicist, who, most significantly, rejects Plato’s eternal forms; and Aristotle is the teacher of a warrior and conqueror whose world was decidedly the here and now.
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I try always to promote this great edition of The Peloponnesian War: The Landmark Thucydides.

The Soul Aloft

As Harriet followed Miss Lydgate across the lawn, she was visited by an enormous nostalgia. If only one could come back to this quiet place, where only intellectual achievement counted; if one could work here steadily and obscurely at some close-knit piece of reasoning, undistracted and uncorrupted by agents, contracts, publishers, blurb-writers, interviewers, fan-mail, autograph-hunters, notoriety-hunters, and competitors; abolishing personal contacts, personal spites, personal jealousies; getting one’s teeth into something dull and durable; maturing into solidity like the Shrewsbury beeches—then, one might be able to forget the wreck and chaos of the past, or see it, at any rate, in a truer proportion. Because, in a sense, it was not important. The fact that one had loved and sinned and suffered and escaped death was of far less ultimate moment than a single footnote in a dim academic journal establishing the priority of a manuscript or restoring a lost iota subscript. It was the hand-to-had struggle with the insistent personalities of other people, all pushing for a place in the limelight, that made the accidents of one’s own personal adventure bulk so large in the scheme of things. [Dorothy L. Sayers, Gaudy Night]

Harriet Vane, the heroine of this novel, is herself a writer of detective novels. This brief quotation records her thought as she returns to her old college and the ambiance of the place comes to surround her in a conversation with an old teacher. I marked this passage a long time ago. Oddly enough it came to mind when I read recently this passage in Plato’s Phaedo. The voice is that Socrates:

     And were we not saying long ago that the soul when using the body as an instrument of perception, that is to say, when using the sense of sight or hearing or some other sense (for the meaning of perceiving through the body is perceiving through the senses)—were we not saying that the soul too is dragged by the body into the region of the changeable, and wanders and is confused; the world spins round her, and she is like a drunkard, when she touches change?
     Very true.
     But when returning into herself she reflects, then she passes into the other world, the region of purity, and eternity, and immortality, and unchangeableness, which are her kindred, and with them she ever lives, when she is by herself and is not let or hindered; then she ceases from her erring ways, and being in communion with the unchanging is unchanging. And this state of the soul is called wisdom.

Mirrors of Projection

It was in C.G. Jung’s writings that I first encountered the rather useful concept of projection. Jung held that the collective unconscious holds permanent energetic structures he labeled archetypes (“primal patterns”)—an old, old concept with a hoary history… Plato’s ideal, eternal forms were of this category existing somewhere in a transcendental space, the very model and source of all things visible; in scholastic times they were transferred to the mind of God; during the Enlightenment Locke, for instance, brought them back to earth and suggested that archetypes were simply things out in the world that our minds turn into patterns. What goes around, comes around. In the transitional twentieth century, the archetypes go back into our chests, and if we seek to trace them further, we find them in that quasi-divine collective unconscious which was Jung’s reinvention of divinity. They reside there in Platonic silence, energize us, and we project them out into the world. There you have the root of this conception. The archetype of “father” is projected onto leaders, of “mother” on the nanny state, of “evil” onto capitalism, socialism, the red menace, or Muslim terrorism. Jung wisely suggested that people should withdraw their projections in order to mature.

Let’s walk hand-in-hand for a moment with this archetype of the Wise Old Man. Jung thought that the mirrors of our projection take on the energy of the archetype itself, and that, by projection, we thus form god-like entities that rule us in our turn. Not bad when you think about it. The rational way, Locke’s way, is much less exiting. Without the psychic energies that reflect malignly from so many structures of reality, CNN’s coverage of news would become—as it already is for the aware—a crashing bore. If we genuinely saw the reality behind today’s bogey-man, Al Qaida, we wouldn’t get very exited—much as in McCarthy’s day careers and reputations would not have been destroyed had we really looked at communism as it really was. When we don’t see reality, it turns into a mirror. It reflects back what we are.

Okay. But what is your solution, Mr. Darnay? And what does science say about this subject? A solution? I don’t have one. One of our more interesting projections is that the world arrays itself in a series of problem-solution sets, and if we can just get enough people behind us, we can get the problem solved. If this state of affairs troubles you, look for a solution within. Turn off CNN, for instance, or decline to participate in polls. Now as for science… Or should I have capitalized that word?

Abstraction and Experience

In college I did rather poorly in required science courses, owing perhaps to the disconnect I felt between an abstract and an experiential level of knowledge. In these courses the two were separated and acquired side by side—if at all. We got the conceptual material in lectures, the experience in lab work. Try as I might, I couldn’t connect the two, especially not in chemistry.

In the sciences generally, as taught at universities (at least in my day—perhaps the methods have improved), the actual experience of discovery is too much compressed. The messy lab experiments did not, for me, actually illustrate the elegant formulae of chemical transformation that I’d jotted down in notes. The lab time was too short; the stuff I dribbled from jars into tubes was alien and messy; things never seemed to work out; the smells, the fumes…. Those who had originally discovered all the formulae had spent months and years in what must have been a fascinating process. We were supposed to absorb all that in two-hour stints—without training or time enough to hone the many skills involved. It didn’t work out for me.

Passing grades could be achieved by memorizing formulae and abstract tokens in chemistry and Latin names for species and body parts in biology. Rubber stamp on forehead. Passed required course. Keep the line moving.

Later on I really did learn a good deal about chemistry by working in industry. There I saw problems in a brand new and active context. I had to understand what really transpired and why. I got my knowledge by interaction with lots of people and spending time looking at things in refineries and chemical plants. The formulae became a language by which to talk about the bigger, the real thing. In college the lab was an interlude of chaos. In working life it was the center of events, the real thing, Kant’s Ding an Sich—even if not in the way Kant meant it. Behind the abstract thought now loomed this vast, real, imposing and concrete reality. The thought was thin, the thing was thick.

Yet later—decades later—I learned a lot about biology as well. Surprisingly my greatest help in comprehending that mysterious world came from years of experience I’d had of human institutions and technology. That gave me what amounted to an almost reflexive recognition of the Hermetic slogan: As above, so below. Human experience in its complexity mirrors the arrangements of organic nature at another level, enlarges it to ordinary view. The parallel reaches way down, down to the behavior, characteristics, and arrangements of sub-cellular organelles and their constituents in turn.

I came to believe, as a consequence of this experience, that education should be inverted. First, after high school, let us say, should come ten to twenty-five years of work in the world’s economy. Then college! Only fractions of effort would be required and would then yield ten times the benefit that would have been available to the same person at eighteen or nineteen. Education could thus be seen as completing the human, not to prepare him or her for work. Real preparation could still be provided by apprenticeship programs under patient masters.

Now, to be sure, I had more native inclination in my youth to understand literature, history, and philosophy—the humanities generally—than the sciences. But the same rules, it seems to me, also apply to these fields. Experience is the real teacher. Before we learn the names we ought to have experience of das Ding an Sich. If high schools were properly organized—and here and there they are—they would suffice for minimal preparation, not least in ethics and philosophy. At higher levels these subjects really require a rich experience of life before the problems they deal with even fully surface in human life and, therefore, the raw materials for understanding become available.

My own experience is that the really educated are self-taught—yes, even if, nominally, they already have advanced degrees when this real learning begins. It is thought based on experience that educates. By thought I don’t mean simple musing—not merely the storing of knowledge into cubicles provided by a classification system ready-made by public opinion. I mean genuine, ordered reflection.

Here, perhaps, it may be well to reflect for a moment on that word itself—reflection. It rests on abstractions, concepts, immaterial memories, phantasms, but it carries the richer connotation of the inner life that I’m seeking to portray here. Abstraction is a technical sort of word—not something we experience. What we experience is reflection. And it is a rich sort of thing, not the dry, shrunken head of something that once lived—rather something still vital and alive but on another level…

Plato has Socrates say that “the life which is unexamined is not worth living” (in Apology, the text is here). The statement is odd. The person who fails in examining his life wouldn’t know, would he, having never looked; thus the opinion is that of a third party. The phrasing is poor, but the meaning is clear enough. It signals that experience, as such, however valuable and indispensible it is to genuine knowledge, does not really reach the authentically human level until we view it separated from itself, thus in reflection. The experience, needless to say, may be mental, emotional, or spiritual. It doesn’t have to be sensory. But it should have been perceived.

At the same time, reflection without experience, which seems so common in many philosophical contexts, is next to useless. It reminds me of a ping-pong game without a ball. Such a game would feature many wild gestures at two ends of a table, many loud outcries no doubt, many loud arguments about who just scored a point, with denials and passionate affirmations—but really nothing there to prove the facts one way or the other.