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Nets, Walls, Categories of Philosophy

If by 'the logic of language' we mean 'rules of grammar', are the rules that affect philosophy rules of syntax or rules of meaning? If no distinction is made between words with meaning and words without meaning, then becomes of philosophy? In my jargon, using Wittgenstein's phrase, how the distinction between sense and nonsense is made when discussing philosophy is called "logic of language", and the methods Wittgenstein used to make that distinction I have called "Wittgenstein's logic of language".

Topics on this page ...

• Concept not Substance ("The Good")
• Plato's Gorgias - Further comments
  • Partaking in Forms
  • Ethics in the Gorgias and Sophist
    • "I say I know, but I think I know better" (Rational wrong-doing)
      • An irrefutable proposition
  • Can you take a philosopher's work further than he did himself? (Or do you just go some place else?)
    • Ethics, tautologies, grammar
    • Answerable to Categorical ethics (This is the mistake)
  • "Argument by Analogy"
    • "Argument by analogy" (Jastrow)

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Concept not Substance

Query: what does philosophy say to always question?

If philosophy has anything to do with Socrates, then whether we know what we think we know or not, whether we think ourselves wise when we are not. (Socrates as everyman and What to question everyday.)

Query: two broad categories of philosophy. What is not part of the speculative category?

What is the antithesis of 'speculative'? There is 'what is known' (because knowable) and there is 'what is conjectured about' (because unknowable, as reality is in itself). But is anything in philosophy knowable once and for all time? And if the antithesis of 'speculative' is 'practical', meaning 'directing the way we live our life', then metaphysical speculation may be practical (as a view of death may be, because we believe that we shall die one day), as may aesthetics (what is art and therefore what shall be collected for a gallery, what not). And so I am at a loss as to what "two board categories" might be, if one category is to be {speculative}. Both logic and ethics may be speculative as well as practical in some respects.

Whichever categories we use, the walls between the parts of philosophy are put there by us for our use. They are categories we ourselves have invented -- concept, not substance, meaning that they can be moved about, removed (as the Stoic categories were different from Aristotle's, clearly with regard to logic), or not put up at all (Plato).

The limit of metaphor

Query: Aristotle's major branches of philosophy. Philosophy is a tree whose trunk is metaphysics, epistemology and axiology.

A tree has one trunk, not three. And philosophy's trunk cannot be one thing for Aristotle, another thing for a different philosopher, not if the trunk is meant to symbolize the essence of philosophy. (If philosophy is compared to a tree, is it clear in what way it is being compared? A metaphor has limits; it is not identity. Philosophy may be is like a tree because both have branches, but unlike because both do not have trunks, leaves, or drink water. That is the logic of comparison)

Query: philosopher's net.

The various categories or ways of dividing philosophy into parts are nets cast over philosophy: a net determines what can be caught. Or better in this context: what can be seen at all ("percepts with concepts" versus "percepts without concepts").

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Plato's Gorgias - Further comments

Note: the following remarks belonged originally to the page titled "Plato's Gorgias - Selections - Comments".

Partaking in Forms

[As to this "general notion", all] similar phenomena, he says, are to be conceived of as varying copies of an original -- to express which he uses the word 'idea' ['Form', 'Pattern', 'Archetype']. In trees there is to be seen the idea of tree ["tree-hood" or "tree-ness"] ... The idea does not come to us, as we are inclined to think, by our abstracting from trees the idea of tree ... [Instead, it] originates, not in our experience of the empirical world but in the recollection which our soul brought with it from the supra-sensuous, pure world of ideas, when it began its existence in a body [after its existence outside the body]. In the same way we have brought with us the idea of the Good. (Albert Schweitzer, Civilization and Ethics, tr. Campion, 2nd ed. (1929), p. 40-41)

Plato's picture of reality, which of course can't be compared with what claims to be a picture of, namely of a reality not perceptible to the senses, is not found in the Gorgias. It is speculative metaphysics not appropriate to a Socratic dialog where the subject is the discussion of "no small matter, but how to live". And, indeed, it is difficult to imagine what can be done with Plato's picture of the Good (absolute goodness), and why Plato did not see about the concept 'good' what he came to see about the concept 'knowledge', namely the question "How can knowledge be one thing, always the same, when there are many branches of knowledge, some of which are unalike or even opposite to one another?" (Philebus 13e-14a), which Xenophon's short Socratic dialog about "The good is the useful or beneficial" (Memorabilia iv, 6, 7-8) seems to show, for how can the same thing partake of goodness in one case when it would partake of badness in another? If an object is a sword, then so long as it exists it is a sword always and everywhere, but the same sword may be a good sword if it is sharp whereas if it is allowed to dull it is a bad sword. ("I see a good sword, but I do not see goodness," maybe Diogenes could have objected to Plato.)

Plato as a philosopher. In the late dialog, the Sophist, the "stranger" (i.e. visitor from Elea) requests that whomever he questions be "tractable and give no trouble" (217d), but in the Gorgias, as also clearly in the Protagoras, I think, Plato wants the reader to think the questions through with him: "I do not speak with any pretense to knowledge, but am searching along with you" (Gorgias 506a), to agree to or refute what is said. So, apart from when it withdraws from experience, the Gorgias is Socratic in its spirit and method, I think.

Platonic Rationalism is not Socratic rationalism (further comments)

"... withdraws from experience". That was my criticism earlier: (1) that there are two tests in Socratic philosophy, namely reason and experience, that reason alone is Platonic, not Socratic, and so (2) Plato's proposition about the effect of punishment on the human beings: this question surely is not for reason alone, because it is experience that shows that punishment may benefit or it may hurt the soul: it may make the man who is punished better, or it may make him worse -- as judged by this criterion: does he amend his life to end this particular wrong-doing, or does he continue in evil, maybe even falling into worse evil as a result (effect) of being punished.

The proposition 'It is just that wrong-doing be punished' belongs to a discussion of ethics that is subject to reason alone, but the proposition 'Punishment is beneficial to the wrong-doer' requires an empirical not a rational answer; the first is a proposition of ethics, the second a proposition of fact. Unless in Gorgias 480a-b -- ("But if he or anyone of those for whom he cares has done wrong, he ought to go of his own accord where he will most speedily be punished, to the judge as though to a doctor, in his eagerness to prevent the distemper of evil from becoming ingrained and producing a festering and incurable ulcer in his soul" (tr. Woodhead)) -- Plato is not talking about the effect of punishment on the soul while it is in the body but (somehow, I don't know how, for it seems very strange even if, as Plato believed, the essence of man is his soul) for the whole of its existence.

"Concepts without percepts are empty," Kant says (This proposition is too broad of course, as tautologies ('The good man harms no one'), for example, are concepts without percepts, if we use the word 'concept' as carelessly as we normally do), and Plato's 'the Good' (or 'absolute goodness') is such a concept (as indeed Plato says of the Forms, in Parmenides 133c, that they are such concepts). Is it a concept that is merely a reflection (A reflection has no more reality than a shadow (Sophist 266b-c)) of Plato's mind?

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Ethics in the Gorgias and Sophist

"I say I know, but I think I know better" (Rational wrong-doing)

Note: this topic is further discussed in "Will and Knowledge: If I know what is right, I will not do what is wrong (Socrates). But then why do I so often do what I say is wrong?"

If moral virtue is knowledge, and if knowledge can be taught -- i.e. if man can be instructed to knowledge in ethics, not only persuaded to belief (Gorgias 454e: "there are two forms of persuasion, the one producing belief without knowledge, the other knowledge" (tr. Woodhead), for persuasion to belief may fail to persuade, whereas knowledge once persuaded to is inescapable), then why can't -- if it can't -- virtue be taught?

If moral virtue is knowledge, is it knowledge having the same compulsion as my belief that fire will burn me? I won't thrust my hand in a fire for anything (PI §§ 466, 474; cf. not even Rogozhin in The Idiot will). But is 'I know that fire will burn me, but I will now put my hand in the fire anyway' nonsense?

Will the sun rise?

About fire, is this an instance of belief or of knowledge? Is a prediction based on induction knowledge? In some cases -- which? -- would we call it 'knowledge', in others not? What did Wittgenstein mean by the word 'know' in the TLP 6.36311: Do we only believe that the sun will rise tomorrow? Well, if the word 'knowledge' is a tool -- what work do we do with it (PI §§ 421, 360)? We speak of 'sufficient grounds'. What do we -- [because unlike in the case of the concept 'belief', knowledge is a question of "we", if by 'knowledge' we mean objective propositions] -- count as sufficient grounds in this case? And why don't you know the answer to that basic question?

The limit of the particular case, Plato says in Euthyphro 6d-7d, is the absence of a standard of judgment to use in all circumstances (as a yardstick may be used to measure any distance). And so knowledge is often also absent: it is not always so clear as in the case of fire what should or should not be done. But that wasn't the question I asked. Does anyone seriously think he shouldn't expect the sun to rise tomorrow? We all take it for granted that it will, just as we take for granted that fire will burn us, even though it is "only in the past" (PI §§ 472, 481) that fire has burned us and the sun has risen today.

Of course, not all cases are this way, and there are many cases where we must act in the absence of knowledge, cases where we are ignorant of what the good is -- but those cases are not what I am discussing here.

Nonetheless, it is important to note that it is not the body alone -- i.e. the base instincts and appetite for pleasure of man's half-animal nature -- that is the source of wrong-doing. Virtue can only be knowledge where there is knowledge.

Plato says that it is foolish to "escape punishment for wrong-doing" (Gorgias 482b) ... but if wrong-doing is ignorance, shouldn't the wrong-doer be instructed to knowledge of the good rather than be punished for his ignorance? Epictetus thought this (cf. Plato, Sophist 230a-d: admonishment, not punishment).

Paradoxical grammar

Of course, not putting your hand in the fire is not a moral virtue. Patience is a moral virtue, and being impatient is wrong-doing and, Plato says, wrong-doing harms the soul of the wrong-doer (The two kinds of virtue). No rational man willingly does harm to his soul, his inner self, the rationally-ethical part of himself (Epictetus: "It was a poor thing and cost me little, but it cost the one who stole it from me dearly, for the price he paid for it was of making himself a thief" (Discourses i, 29); making oneself a thief, if thieving is wrong-doing, is acting contrary to rational moral virtue, which, if the good for man is life in accord with the excellence that is proper to him, namely rational moral virtue, is not the good for man).

And so there arises the strange grammar of such propositions as 'I know impatience is wrong, but I am willingly impatient'. Strange, I say, because such propositions seem to have the logical form 'A is good, but not-A is better', meaning that I think not-A is good rather than A, for they can't both be good -- patience and impatience, justice and injustice, piety and impiety, bravery and cowardice. And so I protest, "No, I don't mean that! A is good, not not-A."

It seems that I say I know x is best, but I think I know not-x is better (Moore's paradox). And 'know better' means: 'as my actions show'.

"Weakness of the will"

Intemperance = not imposing self-control over instincts and appetites. Is there such a thing as being "willingly intemperant" ... What I really want to ask is whether the notion "weakness of the will" is of any use to the philosophical understanding -- because it is certainly of no use for amending one's life by replacing wrong-doing with right-doing, which is the aim and point of ethics. "Weakness ... of any use" even to a description of our moral life. "Temptation got the better of me" (Tolstoy, The Two Old Men) -- what does that form of expression make clearer?

'I chose to do what is wrong' -- why is that proposition not a self-contradiction = nonsense, if virtue is knowledge?

How is wrong-doing cured? (Plato, Sophist)

Curing the soul of its evil (wrong-doing) is effected by punishment, Plato says in Gorgias 477a-b, 478d. But in Sophist 230a-d, Plato contrasts the ineffectiveness of admonishment (except on small children) with the effectiveness of refutation: the way to cure the soul is not through physical chastisement but through education, i.e. instruction to knowledge: the way to cure a man of evil is through the use of his reason.

The view (if that's what it is: a way of looking at things) that virtue is knowledge seems to be found in some common expressions: 'They do that because they don't know any better' and 'They do wrong because they are ignorant that they do wrong' (Luke 23.34).

If we say that the view in the Sophist is that "Moral virtue, i.e. piety towards God and justice towards man [Gorgias 507b], courage and temperance, is knowledge (i.e. the man who knows what is right will do what is right)", then what is the view of virtue in the Gorgias? Is it that moral virtue is knowledge?

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Is it possible to take a philosopher's work further than he did himself?

Plato is feeling his way beyond the simple "virtue is knowledge" of the Socratic dialogues, to which no one but Socrates could aspire, towards a deeper psychology with something approaching a recognition of the role of the will. (W.K.C. Guthrie, Plato: the man and his dialogues: earlier period (1975), p. 300-301)

Do you extend a philosopher's work as if you were doing the work that he himself would have done had he time, inclination and insight? Or do you only develop a notion suggested to you by his work in your own way? Which does Plato do with Socratic ethics?

Can you take a philosopher's work beyond where he did, or can you only take it elsewhere? "No one can think my thoughts for me" (CV p. 2), or can they? "It is a logical extension" means only that it is a possible extension.

Philosophy is logic, not psychological states

Well, then if Guthrie is correct, it is not true that Plato is "going beyond" Socrates but that Plato is simply going someplace else, in my opinion to the wrong place, to "psychology" and away from reason. I don't see anything "deep" about the notion of "the will" -- (The word 'will' is another word that philosophers have taken "on holiday" (PI § 38), i.e. divorced from its normal use in the language).

In any case, and this is important, I want to focus on the proposition 'Virtue is knowledge', because it is very different from the categorical view of ethics, namely that the principles of ethics are necessarily groundless and irrationally absolute, as well as the view that doing what is right is a question of "will power" rather than of knowing what is right (knowledge that isn't mere mouth honor).

... that Archelaus [the tyrant, king of Macedonia (413-399 B.C.), "who does the greatest wrong and indulges in the greatest injustice and yet contrives to escape admonition, correction, or punishment" (478e-479a)] or any other man who escapes punishment for his misdeeds must be miserable far beyond all other men, and that invariably the doer of wrong is more wretched than his victim ... (Gorgias 479e)

Plato says "wretched", and perhaps from the point of view ethics, i.e. of one who knows what is good and what evil, the wrongdoer is wretched. But what if the wrong-doer is ignorant of his wretchedness? Is it possible to be miserable without knowing that one is miserable, unhappy without knowing that one is unhappy? According to Plato, in the case of unhappiness, yes, (472c ff.), for if we speak of 'philosophical happiness', meaning 'life in accord with the good', then the man who does evil is necessarily unhappy.

But is that the way we normally use the words 'miserable' and 'unhappy', or, as we would normally say, can the tyrant be miserable without feeling miserable? But on the other hand, Plato might say: if the tyrant did but know the condition of his own soul, he would feel miserable, but, regardless, the condition of his soul is correctly described as miserable or unhappy, despite his ignorance. We do, even normally, use the words 'miserable' and 'unhappy' equivocally: emotional state (subjective) versus circumstances in life (objective). (Their use is not simple as is e.g. the use of the psychological-word 'pain' where it is nonsense to say that someone is in pain but does not know it.)

Ethics, tautologies, grammar

Plato's ethical tautologies are not idle. But is this a question of conceptual or factual investigations, for how can mere rules of grammar answer the question of "how to live our life"? Are the tautologies of ethics mere statements of grammar? Well, statements of grammar, they may well be, but "mere" many certainly are not, not if we have not thought out the interconnections of our concepts. For example, Plato's proposition 'The good man does harm to no one, not even to those who harm him, for if the good man does harm, then what does the bad man do?' is rhetorical; it is simply a grammatical reminder, but it is not a trivial one.)

Our recent admissions show, do they not, that a man must take every precaution not to do wrong, since he will thereby suffer great harm?... if his guilty deeds be worthy of flogging, [he should submit] to the lash ... if of exile, to exile; if of death, to death. He should be the first to accuse himself and his kinsmen ["parents or friends or children, or his country when guilty" (480b-c)] ... (Gorgias 480a-d)

Is that not what Euthyphro has done in the case of denouncing his own murderous father? But that is not the subject of the Euthyphro, which is that surely Euthyphro would not have dared do this if he did not know that doing it was not impious. But, Socrates asks, does Euthyphro know that?

Plato believed in a "last judgment", whence good souls were sent to paradise and the souls of wrong-doers were condemned, as the myth in the Gorgias describes (522e-524b), and this was reason not to die with one's soul in a evil state. And Socrates also believed that one should neither die, much less live, with one's soul in an evil state. But about an afterlife Socrates was skeptical, i.e. he did not believe one way or the other (Apology 40c-41c).

The dialogues of Plato show him going beyond this primitive utilitarianism [of Socrates, as in Xenophon's Memorabilia iv, 6, 7-8: "Would you call anything good except what is useful?" -- "No."] and seeking a conception of the good which has been made something inward and aims at the well-being of the soul. (Civilization and Ethics, p. 33)

I don't know what Schweitzer means by "something inward" here. -- [In fact "the seas of language run very high here" (PI § 194), because we are trying to make explicit what we sense must be the interconnections among several concepts.] -- Socrates identifies the good with the useful. Nonetheless, Socrates is concerned with "the care of the soul" even in Xenophon (i, 2, 4), although there 'soul' = 'mind' or 'reason', which is not something "inward" [cf. Gorgias 493a].

For Socrates, as he uses that word in ethics, 'useful' contrasts not with 'useless', but instead with 'harmful'. Something for which one has no use -- i.e. which is of no benefit to oneself -- is not for that reason alone an evil thing.

(See how high the seas of language run here!) (PI § 194; and what will make "the waves subside" here?)

Answerable to Categorical ethics (This is the mistake)

Categorical ethics can be presented in a logical view: the principles (or, axioms) of ethics are rules, and there is no disputing rules; one simply accepts -- i.e. obeys -- them or one does not. And one doesn't even ask whether the imperatives are consistent with one another. Conscience needn't be rational.

In contrast, there is a rational ethics that also can be presented in a logical view. But it is not at all a case of "simply", because Plato's method of tautologies in ethics show the strange grammar those singular rules: that the antithesis of 'good' is 'evil' and that good and evil acts must be contrasted ("If the good man does this, then what does the evil man do?") is a logical -- i.e. meaning of language -- necessity.

You cannot lead people to what is good; you can only lead them to some place or other. The good is outside the space of facts. (CV p. 3)

Why is "conscience" (categorical ethics) not answerable to reason -- is it because those who give that account of ethics are going about this question, looking at ethics, in the wrong way? What is the good for man? Why shouldn't that be a question of reasoning, of knowledge? Why "must" foundational values ("absolute value") be axiomatic (logically arbitrary)? Shouldn't ethics -- which is about our life -- have its foundation in the facts of our life, in about what can be reasoned from those facts? Is that not the program or project that Socrates, the father of ethics, set out for ethics?

The pleasant and the good

What is the relation of the pleasant to the good? Question: but surely the goodness of the soul is pleasant (506c), and is that not why we want to soul to be good? Unless the goodness of the soul is desirable "in some sense" for itself.

Otherwise, it does seem that sometimes at least we do indeed do the good for the sake of the pleasant (e.g. we take exercise, which we may find unpleasant but which is good for the body, for the sake of bodily health, which is pleasant). What is excellent is pleasant. Or is it not? The concept 'pleasure' is so fluid that most anything can be characterized as 'pleasant' from some point of view or another.

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"Argument by Analogy"

Does not Socrates in Xenophon's Memorabilia i, 2, 37 -- although not here with Callicles in Gorgias 490b-491a -- use "the argument by analogy"? But is an analogy a proof of anything more than the possibility of making it, because anything may be compared to anything else in some way or another (That is the logic of comparison). But note that A is like B does not mean that A is B ('like' ≠ 'identical') -- and it entails as well that A is unlike B in some way or another. Is this correct, that although an analogy may persuade by plausibility, it cannot instruct to knowledge (other than to the possibility of its being justly made)? But on the other hand, may not the way an analogy is used determine whether or not it has a place in philosophy? e.g. as a reminder that A is unlike B in such-and-such ways? So we have -- rather than make general statements -- look and see the particular case.

In Gorgias 480a-b, Plato uses an argument by analogy, for he says that the judge of moral virtue is like a doctor: as a doctor cures the body of its disease, a judge cures the soul of its evil, and so a judge should be sought with the alacrity of seeking a doctor. But this is an analogy belonging to reason alone, unless both the judge and doctor are gods rather than men, for men are, as our life shows, only too fallible.

"Argument by analogy" (Jastrow)

Note: Apparently I have done what I so often do, namely hear a form of expression and assign a meaning to it, thinking I know how that expression is normally used -- although I do not. (Cf. PI § 194)

Jastrow defines 'argument by analogy' as 'the inference of a further degree of resemblance from an observed degree of resemblance' (p. 236), and he offers the following as "as an exemplar of the analogical argument in its purest and most developed form" --

... that because the Earth and Mars agree in the common possession of a solid crust, an atmosphere, presence of water, changes of season, the possibilities of rain and snow, and other observed qualities, they will also agree in the further respect of being inhabited. (Jastrow, "The Natural History of Analogy", i, in Fact and Fable in Psychology (1900), p. 237)

The Cambridge astronomer Arthur Eddington said apropos of the possibility of life on other planets: "Venus, so far as we know, would be well adapted for life similar to ours ... If transplanted to Venus we might perhaps continue to live without much derangement of habit --" (The Nature of the Physical World (1927), Chapter viii)

But when I try to find my own examples, it is not too easy, but it seems that the general form of "argument by analogy" is: because there is evidence that A and B are alike in way C, they must (i.e. this is an inference not justified by evidence) also be alike in way D (although there is no evidence that A and B are alike in way D).

Now, is the "fallacy of the artisans" (Plato, Apology 22d-e) an example of argument by analogy? That is, because A knows B, A must also know C (although C has no evident relationship to B): because the artisan is "wise" (in the Greek sense of sophia which is much broader than the English 'wisdom') in his art, he must also be wise in other things, and thus because he knows how to mend a kettle or pot, he must also know how man should live his life.

I think Jastrow would accept that as an example, because he writes after "... in its purest and most developed form" --

but in the survey of the varieties and distribution of this natural product of rationality, it will be necessary to include many forms of thought diverging more or less from, though always retaining, a recognizable relation to this type. The analogical inference, indeed, goes back to an inarticulate form, in which it merges into a feeling rather than an argument ... (p. 237)

An then maybe my remark about more instinct than second nature -- namely, "A piece of crumpled paper, forgotten to one side, suddenly begins to unfold; we immediately sense a soul as the source of the movement" -- would be an example of the "inarticulate form" of argument by analogy.

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