Vulgar Speculations

I haven't posted to Quid Sit Deus? in many months. It's not for loss of interest in philosophy; in fact, I'm presently reading Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics and attending a weekly seminar in which we discuss the reading. Another of my interests, stock investing, has reached a new peak of intensity lately, as I've acquired new skills and tools for analysis. After many months of experimentation, I've taken a set of "positions" in some stocks, based for the first time solely on the quantitative methods with which I've been experimenting. (I'm making use of a combination of methods developed in past decades by various stock analysts and mathematicians.) After just three days, I'm still cautiously optimistic that I've improved my personal stock selection technique over the technique I was using in the previous nineteen months. I've started blogging about my successes and failures in a blog I've named Vulgar Speculations. So, I'm sorry to have to say that there's nothing new here at Quid Sit Deus?. However, my vulgar speculations are strictly a means to the end of my divine speculations.

Cogito

I think there is a sense in which the world began when we were born and will end when we are gone. I think the uttermost limit of what matters is what either matters or will matter, either to us or to those who matter to us. I think the good is always good for someone. I think the impossible is never good, but I acknowledge that the ideality of things must precede the reality of their good. I think that everyone sees what you appear to be, but few touch what you are. I think language allows the quasi-impossible. I think our actions are voluntary, but our will is not voluntary; we will our actions but we don't will our will. I think the chaos of the world is fully redeemed in the fact that it produced us when perhaps nothing but such chaos could have. I think that just this is divine: that there are gods, but no god. I think that the star-crossed lovers take their life from the fatal loins of two foes and through the weakness of the Prince. I think in a way the psyche creates the body and in a way the body creates the psyche. I think therefore that, in a way, the body creates the body and also that in a way the soul creates the soul. I think that in a way "the world" or "all things" are beyond being and beyond nothingness; I think that, in a way, nothingness has being.

The Separation of Powers

It seems that the greatest health permits the most intense exertion, and the most salvific anodyne produces the greatest convalescence, ending in the return to greatest health. But exertion imperils convalescence if that exertion drains the power of the anodyne. An anodyne is preserved and intensified by exertions that maintain and augment its anodynamic potency. And the working of an anodyne is itself an exertion and thus requires anodyne, convalescence, and renewed health. The convalescence an anodyne produces is inimical to any other exertion, including the exertions that would permit the convalescence, maintenance, and augmentation of the anodyne. Yet those exertions must be made; so they must be made by another, lest anodynamism, convalescence, and health perish utterly.

Stephen R. Donaldson, would you like to comment? I'd ask Aristotle and Nietzsche but, alas, in the end, there is no anodyne for one's own failing health, except the anodyne that reproduces that health in another, as if it were a birthright.

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"There Are Unknown Unknowns"

Quid sit deus, if a meteor or, worse, an "unknown unknown" can destroy the human race next week? Is "the unknown unknown" the answer? If so, then it seems what saves philosophers from being attempted deicides is the limitlessness of the unknown unknown.

And didn't the Secretary of War abundantly prove Socrates's point about the philosopher appearing as either sophist, statesman, or madman? I don't mean to suggest that the Secretary is a philosopher, but I do mean to hazard the suggestion that he has his philosophic moments. Is there anything more certain than, "There are unknown unknowns"? The ability of the Secretary of War to glimpse that truth and state it seems somehow connected to the remark attributed to former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger that the Secretary is the most ruthless man he has ever met.

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Power, Powers, Hunting, and Eluding

Power comes to light as this power or that power. Power is too indefinite to be a form. Hunting is too indefinite to be an techne. Rosen's commentary on the Sophist is an externally derived power of actuating the inward power to understand these things. Is eluding likewise too indefinite to be a techne? I think so. If the statesman weaves together courage and moderation, does he seek thereby the power to cloak himself and elude the citizens who would hunt him out of fear and envy? I think so.

With all thy hunting, hunt powers of epithymetic satisfaction.

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Channeling Machiavelli

To come to power by base means is held to be repugnant. Nonetheless, it is repugnant to be enslaved, and one who considers everything well will see that when you have delivered yourself from that enslavement into which you were born, you will have acquired that by which you will be able to extinguish the memory of past baseness through present benefits.

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The Price to Earnings Growth Ratio

Availability at an acceptable price is one of the features of beauty. The Eternal Bargain draws men on high. Rentb()ys and other sophistical apparitions, take note.

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I'd Like to Buy Some Leisure, Please

All I really want to do is read Plato, Aristotle, Machiavelli, Nietzsche, Strauss, and whomever else it occurs to me to read. I'd like to stop giving up so much of my week to the mere instrumentality of making a living.

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The Beautiful as Bait

A beautiful appearance is like a worm dangling before a fish. Is it a feast for the fish?

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Being as the Indefinite Other

I hit on a tentative, succinct definition of being yesterday, as "the indefinite other." Using the example, "Motion is," which had been discussed in the Sophist seminar only a few minutes earlier, I suggested that the assertion amounts to saying that motion is other than all of the other things, but that in saying that motion is, we don't specify the other things or the relations between motion and the other things. Someone pointed out, however, that it's possible to say that something is other without saying that it (really) is. Thus, "Unicorns are other than elephants" is consistent with "Unicorns are not." However, in the seminar on the Sophist, we've already agreed there's an extended sense of being that includes the being of nonbeing; that is, "Nonbeing is," and "Nonbeing is other than being."

Does Every Speculation Seek a Share in the Divine?

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Perception and Fertility

Jillian Searle, who was vacationing on the island of Phuket in Thailand when the tsunami hit, received a visit from the Midwife, who administered a severe test of Searle's cognitive abilities. As the wave flooded the resort in which Searle and her family were vacationing, she became certain she had to choose to hold on to one of her sons and to deliberately let go of the other one. "I knew I had to let go of one of them and I just thought I'd better let go of the one that's the oldest," she said.

In my role as an armchair expert in stochastic familial hydrodynamics, I decided that Searle should have let go of her two-year-old and held on to her five-year-old, perhaps reasoning that the five-year-old had a better chance of surviving with his mom's help than did the two-year-old. Now notice the danger to which Mrs. Searle and her sons were subject and the uncertainty of their future, both of which environmental features Socrates brings to light in his role as the Voice of the Midwife in the Theaetetus. In this case, the Midwife of natural selection spared the perception of the neediness of the toddler as being decisive, where she might have dealt less kindly with a perception of the superior chances of the kindergartner as being the decisive consideration. You see, in the event, the two-year-old boy and his mother survived the tsunami--and so did the five-year-old boy. His perception of something (a door) attached to a large, relatively sturdy object (a hotel) as something that might keep him from being swept away also survived the attentions of the Midwife.

More on the "Midwife" in the Theaetetus

In the Theaetetus, Socrates tells a man and a boy who don't know him that he knows nothing himself, yet he is a midwife of speeches, capable of eliciting a speech and then determining whether it's a fertile egg or an infertile "wind-egg." I've already noted that in the extended metaphor itself, the midwife never speaks and I've claimed (though not previously in these words) that the wind-egg's being carried away is its infertility. To apply an Aristotelianism (as Sachs translates the expression), the being-carried-away of the wind-egg is its "being what it must be in order to be at all." Likewise, the fertile egg's remaining is the same as its fertility. You understand that this is how things look to me mid-way through reading the Theaetetus.

But although I still cannot recall the midwife's ever speaking within the extended metaphor itself, Socrates's action as midwife of the speeches of Theaetetus and Theodorus is to bring the action of the midwife into speech. Consider: Theaetetus and Theodorus make speeches about speeches; Socrates tends to answer with speeches about the natural disposition of speeches. As one of his criticisms of the Truth of Protagoras (or perhaps Socrates's caricature of it) that what each person perceives is the truth, Socrates points out that in times of crisis, people aren't willing to rely on their own perception of right action as being the truth about right action; instead, they look for leadership from someone they think has better perception or knowledge than they do. Another of Socrates's critical tactics is to engage Theaetetus and Theodorus in looking along the temporal dimension; he gets them to agree that if two people make conflicting predictions about the future, then however true it may be that their speeches are true for each of them, they won't both turn out to be right in the event.

Socrates appears to be modeling in speech the mute midwifery of the deadly present and future, in which the perceptions, thoughts, and (spoken) speeches that survive are those of the humans who survive. I don't think Socrates really even tries to challenge what I take to have been the core of the Truth of Protagoras, which I think is expressed so well by Aristotle, that the being-at-work of the perceptible thing is the same as the being-at-work of the perceiver. However, Socrates does show the fragility of the Truth of Protagoras in time: Perspectivalism is a perspective that doesn't seem much favored by the midwifery of the dangerous future. Yet it does survive or re-emerge and, I mean, it does so as a speech that is quite persuasive when developed intelligently, as I think Plato and Aristotle intend it to be developed by their readers.

Perspectivalism must have value for life despite the dangerous tendency of its popular caricature to erode people's reliance on those who have better understanding and greater foresight. It also has some means of surviving the danger it faces, itself, the rejection of its popular caricature when people are faced with the evidence that they must find and rely on those who have (somehow) "better" understanding and "greater" foresight. I think improving one's understanding of perspectivalism (in regard to its value for human life and its own fitness to survive, so to speak, on "the battleground of ideas") depends on achieving a perspective on perspectivalism from which one can see a hierarchy of perspectives on perspectivalism. And in regard to politics, I think the best arrangement is one in which a "Higher Perspectivalism" is cultivated among a party of leaders, while the people at large are vigorously defended from the "Lower Perspectivalism."

Socrates as Mother Nature

I've started reading the Theaetetus and I'm keeping to the strategy that I first began trying out with Aristotle's De Anima: I'm trying to see how far I can go with the notion that the Socratics understood the theory of natural selection and believed it was decisive for determining the nature of mind and thought. The Theaetetus seems to invite me to think that Plato was an evolutionist. Socrates in his role as "midwife" models natural selection. One knows a wind-egg because the midwife carries it away; one knows a fertile egg because the midwife doesn't carry it away. As far as I know, in the context of the extended metaphor, no standard other than the midwife's selection is advanced for our knowing the viability of an egg.

The Protagoreans wish to maintain that knowledge and truth are perception and that all perceptions are true. At the same time, they want to maintain that they are wise and that, somehow, some opinions are better than others. What they appear to lack is a standard for the superiority of one truth of this kind over another such truth. The "midwife," natural selection, seems to be what makes the difference between good perceptions and bad perceptions.

I come around to Nietzsche again, as anyone who knows me ought to have predicted I would. I'm reminded of his assertion that he has his truth, while we have ours. He wasn't being democratic or polite; he was claiming that his understanding was superior to our own and that on that account, he had a profound interpretation that we couldn't understand. His truth couldn't be our truth, because we aren't smart enough. His perspectivalism wasn't egalitarian, just as the Protagorean perspectivalism as Socrates portrays it in the Theaetetus wasn't egalitarian.

A Point One Should Perhaps Not Make Too Much Of

I've looked for parallels or similarities between Nietzsche and Aristotle as I read the De Anima last semester and as I've reread Beyond Good and Evil this month. Some things have suggested themselves to me: the similarity between "potency" and "power," "energy" and "power," or "the nutritive" and "the will to power"; the similarity between Aristotle's point that the nutritive exists in potency in all of the other potencies of the soul and Nietzsche's point that one's sexuality extends throughout one's soul, even into one's highest spirituality; the similarity between Aristotle's speaking of the different potencies as different souls and Nietzsche's flat assertion that our soul is really many souls; and the similarity between Aristotle's point about the identity of the being-at-work of the perceiver and the being-at-work of the perceived thing and Nietzsche's assertion that the truth is his truth (not in a liberal, democratic sense, but in a kingly sense filled with the "pathos of distance" between the philosopher and the rest of us). Other suggestions have flitted in and out of my mind without my recording them; they won't come back to me until something stimulates the recollection, I'm sure. Just yesterday, though, it occurred to me that although of course Beyond Good and Evil is not the De Anima, the soul as it's described in the De Anima is beyond good and evil.

Quid sit deus?

My opinion, at this point, is that Aristotle's De Anima II.4 and Nietzsche's Beyond Good and Evil 36 assert much the same thing about the divine. Doesn't it seem to be much the same thing to "yearn" to have a share in what always is and is divine as it is to "have the will" to power? But what is the divine, anyway? What is power? What is being? What is "always"? What is will?