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?