When do we have ethics first?
Some kind of collaboration process. The moment we started to need to work together, at least according to evolutionary theory.
It has something to do with the common awareness of what is expected from me as part of the common unit. Such an approach is more optimistic than the classical economic approach.
There is a tendency in social science to believe that human beings are guided according to maximising profit for one self, guided by self-interest.
People are sometimes prepared to do a lot for the common good, however, as long as they have the idea that everyone is doing their share. If there is a feeling that one is lonely in doing some enterprise, solidarity breaks down, and unitary action is discontinued.
Bottom-up regulation seems way better than state-control (not sure how this is related but sure).
People need to cooperate for their own and not because they are forced to.
In the beginning of cooperation, it happened against an out-group, an other.
If we want to overcome our problems now a days, we need to overcome our nationalistic boundaries.
We are going to be talking about Plato.
We have many good texts by him. He explains everything. The thundercocks of thundercocks.
Plato did everything.
One of the most prominent objects of ethics is the subject of one’s own. The subject of ethics is individuals who need to behave in a certain way. But what do we mean by an individual?
How do we understand ourselves?
Everyone is confident in their existance.
And so on there must be a boundary about what sort of things are involved in that self that is me, those things that encompass me. Where is the boundary between what belongs to me and what doesn’t.
What is the importance of those other things which do not belong to myself?
The boundaries have something do with space most likely, but we can also make those distinctions in time. There were periods wherein we were at a certain point and wherein there was a self, what kind of moments were there before and after the self? And furthermore, what kind of change comes in that time which changes. Traits change and we seem to no longer remain who we were before, at another point in time.
It is difficult to put a limit on our identity.
It is with our body that we represent something towards others. The habits we develop, from the way we were raised, and if we take these particular things into thought, the emotions come and go, and this shifting thing becomes difficult to say that it is me.
So what is more controllable is that instance of an I which is thinking and observing, but it lacks content itself, it is a pure witnesser, but not a witnessed with a body of content. Then we restrict that identity, and the question of whether or not that will remain after the body’s death becomes pertinent.
Once you make decisions about how much you will take what you do into account, there is an awareness of fragility. Once you say that you yourself (I) is the actor, you are doing this from the perspective of those others who perceive you (Me) as an actor. Suddenly you only exist in a pure relation to other consciousnesses.
And in relation to this the question of becoming a self becomes impertinent.
Ethics has something to do with some definite indestructible, universal, thing which cannot be corrupted; in the phaedo, the soul.
There has to be a kind of incantation for death, a kind of ritual that makes us less afraid of death itself. The Phaedo focuses on the question about whether the soul will still be there after death.
What happens to the self of Socrates?
According to exegesis, the notion of self is incredibly central in the dialogue. The dialogue starts with the idea that the speaker was present there, themselves. Socrates is not afraid of death, he has no trouble with the idea that he is about to die. There are two special guests at Socrates’ death party, who are presented as neo-pythagoreans (who defend non-pythagorean conceptions whilst Socrates actually defend pythagorean ideas).
In the middle of the dialogue, there is a crisis as the arguments become so good, that the friends are in a kind of panic and become confused (?). Socrates fixes it of course.
”Socrates please tell us a story, as they are told to children” to which Socrates answers they have to make these incantations against death every day, in order to become the friend of death.
There seems to be a moment in the life of many children, wherein they realise that people can die. And they become very busy with the fact of the problem that one may die, so they become anxious and cannot sleep and ask questions about this fact. They become afraid that the others, who give us our identiy, will vanish, and we become there, alone. The anxiety that our parents and brothers and those who make us real can die, becomes more real than the death of ourselves.
According to Socrates, philosophy can come up with the incantation against death. The platonic system does this by insisting that there is something indistructible within us, our pure intellect, which does not depend on our body, our desires and so on. It doesn’t depend on our image, or our self-creating-relation, no it is pure intellect. So, as we die, we are actually freed from those sinful parts of our body, and so come closer to our true self. Philosophy then is a kind of purification of ourselves, to get to our true selves.
We need to kill ourselves to get at the truth.
But we can’t because the polis rules us fuck.
But Socrates’ death is entirely related to eternal abstract ideas. It’s all about Socrates’, it’s individualistic, and everyone else has to make themselves of themselves when Socrates is gone.
What happens when we hear beautiful sound produced by a beautiful instrument?
The sounds remain as long as the instrument is there, but the sounds disappear as it is broken. Perhaps the person is the same?
But, for us to survive, we need to find what is indestructible in us, in order not to vanish (in a framework of individuality at least).
Neo-Pythagoreans, developed a kind of congregation of philosophers, who wanted to purify themselves by coming closer with the eternal ideas of math. ”Philosophy started as a kind of new-age movement. ” The idea of disciples and a master was inherently born in this kind of movement. Socrates, Pythagoras and Jesus were all like this.
The theory Pythagoras develops, relies on the distinction with higher and lower, and that by focusing on eternal ideas, we can reach our true self. This began in orphism, and returns during Jesus in the form of gnosticism. The idea exists as the finding of one’s true self by purifying oneself from the sinful and bad inherent in the person.
In the dialogues, we never have the voice of Plato himself. He develops these ideas, and plays with them, with people who are his play-figures. So it seems that it is more of a play, of how ideas interact with each other. He plays with a whole lot of possible reasonings, and it seems he himself didn’t have any kind of system. In Neo-platonism however they formalised it into a ”complete”-er system. The main idea is that if I am individual, and I can concentrate on eternal ideas, I can reach truth.
Instead of seraching in the environment, and thinking that we are the result of many things at once, it reduces complex ideas into the One instead.
If we imagine that our childhood was less serene than we now look back on it. As children we actually have a lot of anxieties and confusions, but now, having forgotten those parts of it, we believe that it was nice and wonderful. So we don’t remember how difficult it sometimes is. For the child there is a lot of anxiety for example when someone turns away, there is no sense of remanining. For Piaget, there is such a thing of object-permanence at a certain point in children’s development. Children love playing peek-a-boo for example. Object-permanence, the idea that things are still there, and that the world doesn’t shift in its entirety every time one closes their eyes. The ability to hold, is an early development of object-permanence, but it is a kind of transitional version of it. It is a mix between fantasy and reality. It helps the child to have some control on reality to eg. hug a blanket. These objects are transitional objects. The belief in the soul is much like this transitional object. The incantations of Socrates is much like the transitional objects which children place their trust in the remaining of reality into.
People can hold onto their philosophical idea, or their ideological vision, their conviction, their idee fixe. Which they embrace and hold and defend in order to have consistency in their lives. Ideas too are transitional objects, or can at least become them.
What happens in terms of dementia?
As long as you are part of a social system, and you play a particular role in it, in your relations and so on, in all the moments they believe that they represent something that is recognized, the problem of anxiety is moved away. What is meant is that in our daily lives, we have sufficient daily trust in such transitions. However, when this thing is attacked, it itself becomes forced to deal with death – the fact of its being argued against – and so in itself is confronted by anxiety. To hold us together, we seem to need these kind of ideas however, there is a kind of non-social identity, and this belief in itself builds up that fact as an existing object.
However, in the Homeric approach is entirely different. No one is busy with eternal ideas, rather it is about families, relations and friendship. It is all about body. It is completely opposite to the platonic approach. The typical greek approach is entirely non-platonic. In the Homeric literature, there is no distinction between soul and body. There is only a pure focus on body. There is no thinking as such. It is explain in regards to the body. If there are emotions, they are about the capacities of certain parts of the body. For us, it might seem like there is a psyche, and so on, but here it is purely about the breath that comes out of our body. There is no referens to spiritual entity, and to further show this, there is no word for a living body. The living body is only about its parts. There was no distinction between body and soul. They were the same. There was no opposed thing to the body, it was immediately body. The Platonic idea and the homeric position seems opposed.
Philosophy is always an expression which fits into the atmosphere of the time. If there is room for a certain discourse, it is because there is a society which is interested in that kind of undertaken. The fact of an institutionalised philosophy shows that there is interest. In the homeric times, this was not the case. What makes the homeric society different from the modern society?
Mary Douglas, anthropologist.
Douglas makes a distinction between the kind of grid there is in a culture. Grid: the way you make different categories in a culture, and the reification of them, the making of definitiveness. In a society with clear grid, then everything is very clear and cut. In a society with little grid, it can be quite fluid.
Furthermore there is group, if there is a lot of group pressure, then there is also a lot of interest for the society that the individual does things well. If one does things wrong they so on become bad. If there is little group, then there is a bit of indifference about what a person is doing. There is little appreciation about what you are doing. No one really cares what sort of thing you bring yourself to do.
If there is a lot of grid and a lot of group we get the homeric society, which seems hierarchical. There are definite categories of what one can and cannot do. If there is less grid and less group, there is a lot of freedom, one can do what they wish and with what they want, and no one will care much for this.
Then there is high group, low grid; the enclavistic society. There is no hierarchical distinction, but there is an incredibly clear distinction between the out and in-group. Then there is the isolated society; high grid, but low group, a kind of kafkaesque society.
During the evolution of Greek history, there is a development of counter-culture. The philosophers and the religious movements, like the orphic and dionysian movements, are in opposition to the state and the polis, and the rituals are done by women and slaves. They change the atmosphere of the culture, and make it more ”liberalistic”, individualistic, so to say. It is about individualistic search for redemption rather than the homeric society of heroic victory of other groups. The culture of Athens when Plato was writing, seems to no longer be a culture in which it is self-evident what one can do and with what and how. So these questions suddenly become relevant and non-evident.
In such a culture, philosophical reflection becomes necessary.
In the first 400 years of the univerity of KuLeuven, the focus was upon reading roman law texts, the society was hierarchical much in the same way as for the homeric people. The whole idea of finding self-redemption, was non-existent back then. And now it is once again something that has been put to the fore.
Indeed in the phaedo, there is no family or general social issues, there is only the destination of oneself. Which influnced neo-platonism and christianity. The contemplation of the eternal ideas of God ones more became the big thing to do.