Socrates/Plato to his pupil Phaedrus

"Nobler far is the serious pursuit of the dialectician, who, finding a congenial soul, by the help of science sows and plants therein words which are able to help themselves and him who planted them, and are not unfruitful, but have in them a seed which others brought up in different soils render immortal, making the possessors of it happy to the utmost extent of human happiness."

Socrates/Plato and Writing

Much is made of the irony that in “Phaedrus” Socrates condemns writing in his writing. He sums up his disdain of writing by comparing it to painting, that “the creations of the painter have the attitude of life, and yet if you ask them a question they preserve a solemn silence.” They cannot defend themselves. (Derrida takes up and reverses this argument in Plato’s Pharmacy.) As dialectic, however, the Socratic Dialogues are a series of speeches interspersed with questions that are often challenges to Socrates. The dialogues can be seen as Plato’s attempt to ask questions, to change the monologue model of oratory to a dialogic interchange. Successful or not? Benjamin Jowett argues that Socrates’s interlocutors in the dialogues represent  commonplaces that circulated around Athens at the time. His argument is entirely speculative. We might ask ourselves whether these challenges to Socrates have been sifted by Plato to allow Socrates to conveniently dispute them, or whether they represent real challenges. How we answer that question tells us whether the dialogues are imitations of discourse or the real things.

Pascal’s Pensées

Just finished listening to Pascal’s Pensées. What a painful experience. I knew little about Jansenism, the group Pascal adhered to after his conversion, but if Pascal’s writings are any indication, it was as fundamentalist as any Baptist church in the Bible Belt. In much of Pensées, Pascal works diligently to prove that Christianity is the one true religion. He demonstrates the one flaw in reasoning that anyone who seeks to prove Christianity, or any other religion, that proof is the antithesis of faith. Neither needs, nor wants, the other. 

I admit I was suckered in as I read the first three books which are intriguing. In those books Pascal makes a fascinating argument, that human beings are inherently gamblers. They have no real interest in the game they are playing, simply in the risk, whether as in games of chance, they risk a little to gain much, or in religion, they risk everything to gain nothing if they gamble wrong. Pascal’s argument that humans are inherently gamblers does much to make sense of Pascal’s Wager. What Pascal leaves out is why we are gamblers. Is this our nature, in which case we were created this way by God, or is this a result of sin. An interesting oversight.