Favorites Among Books That I Read in 2013

Karl Ove Knausgaard, My Struggle, Volumes I & II — These autobiographical books are just now being put out in English translation out of their original Norwegian, the first two volumes of a projected six volume project. I suspect they will not be to everyone’s taste but they rank with the best things I have ever read. Knausgaard can turn a long description of cleaning a bathroom into gripping reading — I kid you not! Sample quote: “For, while previously I saw time as a stretch of terrain that had to be covered, with the future as a distant prospect, hopefully a bright one, and never boring at any rate, now it is interwoven with our life here (more…)

Two Types of Opinion

Much of the time, we talk as though there is only knowledge and its absence with no in- between. But none of us has much experience with either pure ignorance (which would imply an absence of experience too at any rate) or pure knowledge. We spend most (if not all) of time in the hazy mental space between ignorance and knowledge, a space Plato calls doxa, which is usually translated as “opinion.” Doxa is an intermediate between ignorance and knowledge. From the side of greater knowledge it looks like ignorance and from the side of lesser ignorance it looks like knowledge. But to understand Plato’s notion of doxa, it is important to understand that it participates in both sides of the ignorance/knowledge distinction. To hold an opinion is to intend the truth, but to remain still in ignorance. Even “true belief” conceals ignorance; even false belief harbors truth.

Knowledge is only approached by way of doxa. At its most developed, doxa is dynamic, a movement (kinesis) from ignorance toward knowledge. At its least developed, doxa is static, “the residue that remains when thinking has stopped” (Joe Sachs). Plato calls the more developed, dynamic form dianoia, which I translate as “thinking.” He calls the less developed, static form pistis, which I translate as “belief.” Belief is opinion that holds itself against the questions that would undermine it. Thinking by contrast is opinion that focuses on its own defects as an avenue toward greater knowledge.

The type of opinion that is aware of itself as still participating in ignorance is thinking (dianoia). Thinking is thus necessarily bound up with self-knowledge. Every opinion should invite questions (or at least mild qualms) about itself. But these qualms are not focal components of the opinion itself, but are subsidiary components of the holder of the opinion. To bring a qualm out of the murky depths of preconscious irritation into the full radiance of a well-formed question requires an attentive self-consciousness.

Belief represses this awareness of ignorance, abstracts from it, reacts against it as threatening. Belief is an escape from the anxiety of ignorance; it is satisfying in contrast with the dissatisfactions of doubt. This is both a strength and a weakness. It’s strength is that it allows practical perseverance, since doubt and anxiety are in themselves paralyzing to action. Its weakness is that it tends to be allergic to any opinion or question that threatens to reintroduce the doubt from which it has escaped. Belief is deaf to the qualms and doubts that would unsettle it, that would goad it to self-transcend.

All of this makes it sound like we must dispense with belief and pursue dianoia. But we cannot live without belief. All perseverant action requires the steadiness of belief to push through the discouraging headwinds of doubt that oppose it. (In Plato, pistis is related analogically to the virtue of courage.) Even thinking (dianoia) contains a germ of belief at its core, since thinking intends knowledge that it does not yet know. Dianoia has at its heart an active abiding belief in knowledge. Without this pistis, this faith, dianoia devolves into a mere skepticism, self-contradictory and impotent in itself. In the Republic, Thrasymachus is the examplar of dianoia without pistis, whereas Glaucon is one who healthily combines the two, simultaneously critical of his own opinions but trusting of the guidance of Socrates.

Opinion is thus the intermediate between ignorance and knowledge, but dianoia is the intermediate between belief and knowledge and pistis is intermediate between ignorance and dianoia. (See the Divided Line at the end of Book VI of the Republic.)

Mencken and Socrates and St. Paul on Political Doxa

Mencken on American voters: “They like phrases which thunder like salvos of artillery.  Let that thunder sound, and they take all the rest on trust.  If a sentence begins furiously and then peters out into fatuity, they are still satisfied.  If a phrase has a punch in it, they do not ask that it also have a meaning.  If a word slides off the tongue like a ship going down the ways, they are content and applaud it and await the next.” – From page 43 of the 1996 Johns Hopkins University Press edition of H.L. Mencken’s 1956 collection, On Politics: A Carnival of Buncombe (more…)

Avoid News

News is the paradigm case of doxa. Obviously, one must approach it critically and carefully, dianoietically if at all. In a hyper-saturated media environment, we need to cultivate ascetic forms of response. I came across the following essay by Rolf Dobelli, entitled “Avoid news” that I think is quite thought provoking.

Incidentally, I am a fan of Dobelli’s book, The Art of Thinking Clearly.

Felt Absence and the Quest for Virtue

In Book II of the Republic, Socrates lays out a strategy for determining the meaning of dikaiosyne, a word translated almost universally in Plato translations as “justice,” and just as universally in New Testament translations as “righteousness”. His strategy is peculiar to say the least: let’s make the soul large to our view by creating a city in speech; let’s look for the three (other) virtues of wisdom, courage and moderation; whatever virtue is left over must be justice. How can we take this method of discovery seriously? Questions abound: (more…)

Provisional Aims of My Book Project

I intend to write a book about Plato’s Republic, particularly about his notion of doxa (opinion/seeming) as it relates to the quest for wisdom. My working title is “A Defective Reading of Plato’s Republic.” A truncated list of the theses I intend to defend in my book and to begin airing out in my blog:

1) That knowledge is something above (not reproducible to) doxa and yet the communication of knowledge must be mediated by opinion/doxa.
2) That opinion/doxa is defective in relation to knowledge and its defect must become focal in order to ascend to knowledge.
3) That desire/eros requires an awareness of defect joined to an anticipation of satisfying what is missing, what I am calling “felt absence.”
4) That the question arising from the defect in opinion/doxa, that shapes a search, is properly erotic.
5) That the Divided Line is the interpretive key to the Republic and that its function is to establish a form of erotic exhortation/protrepsis to overcome the intentional defects of the dialogue.
6) That the constructions of the “city in speech” in the Republic is a concrete illustration of the groping toward Form schematized in the Divide Line
7) That the Platonic educational program is one devoted to the liturgical shaping of philosophical desire.
8) That dialogic irony is a rhetorical form that attempts to avoid the premature satisfaction of scandalized belief.
9) That the conversion/periagoge which constitutes the end of education cannot be reduced to doxa.
10) That forms are heuristic anticipations of the overcoming of doxic defect produced by nonrivalrous forms of mediation.
11) That friendship/philia  is an essential component of true philosophical praxis.
12) That the Republic is intentionally defective and its true teaching is not given in the dialogue itself.

I realize that these theses are too truncated and thus incapable in themselves of communicating my interpretation of Plato’s thought. (This incapacity of direct speech to communicate vital truth is something that I believe Kierkegaard learned from Plato.) But one can point, direct attention and provoke thought in a particular direction. One of the ironies of my book is the attempt to say directly what cannot really be said directly. Wallace Stephens wrote that “The poem must resist the intelligence / Almost successfully.” I am worried that my book will be all too successful in this resistance!