There are various forms of questions. The question has its own structure. There are various forms, they have names. They have elements. And this is what we are getting, step by step. We are not looking for the conclusion. If you look for a conclusion, you make the wrong place to be at. Because the minute you come with a conclusion, it is my job, my holy sworn duty to destroy it, to destroy you if I have to, but just to destroy it. Let me tell you something that you might not have been aware of. If you were to take two people in history, within almost the same period, within the same historical period, one a philosopher and the other a political theorist, one Kant, the next Robespierre, they are the same. One went with the guillotine and the other went with the thought. Kantian thinking is equivalent to the French guillotine. It strikes and slashes and kills and attacks. And here it was by a professor who was so methodical that you could literally set your clock in Johannesburg, where he lived, by his movements. I went there. And the street that he walked down is called The Philosopher’s Walk.
When you read him he slashes...once you get behind the laboriousness of him, because he was also in a German university. Nietzsche split, he said fuck you, he split and went out into the woods. Started writing, started thinking, started screaming. That’s where it is at. Now this is a feeling, and the feeling becomes something that surpasses man. It comes from man and yet it transcends man himself. Like people will come up and they will come out with their problem. This is the world of empathy. But where is the empathy in philosophy? What empathy? You are not dealing with people. I’m not dealing with Kant, I’m not dealing with Plato, I’m not dealing with Aristotle. I’m dealing with their thoughts. I’m not interested in how Socrates talked to Tranthepe. I’m not interested in that. I’m not interested in the love letters that Plato might have had with somebody. I’m not interested in that, I’m interested in the thought. We are in love with thought. This is what this is about, it is thought that you deal with, you don’t give a shit what his eccentricities are. They are curious historically.
These philosophers are not the modern man. They are the transitional man, the imperialistic man. They are the man who was right with the stick. When you are look at Fidel Castro, he is modern man, the philosopher. He could expound on these same subjects, on the same speal. The guy is a philosopher. Don’t kid yourself, he could read Plato off the back of his hand. Plato and the Apology, and that genre of philosophers is one of his favourite subjects. The man has read philosophy. He has studied it and pondered thought. You don’t pull what he pulled off unless you understand what the fuck you are doing. He is not a puppet, the man is a brilliant man. He is the philosopher of modern times.
The people who introduced us to philosophy were of the same accord. They were revolutionaries. They were the same people. How much of a revolutionary do you want to think of Socrates as when the guy... we read, oh he got blasted with impiety and blasphemy, and we leave it at that. There were these crazy people there who hung him on a bum charge. Hold on a minute. These weren’t primitive people. They were highly civilised. They had 501 people on their juries. When they charged him they charged him the same as this society is charging all those they don’t like as communists. What a joke.
You see the position? This is the poetic end of philosophy. The actual functioning of it starts from metaphysics. Because it is attacking a metaphysical problem to begin with. So unless you first study metaphysics, there is no ingress into it, because you don’t know where it began. When you argue Being, in the back of your head because of the amount of times that you played with it, with comparisons between the preSocratic, Socratic and post Soctratic that you synthesised in argument, it becomes self-evident. It becomes intuitive. When the arguments of Being pop up, you have a concept of it, and above that, possibly an idea of it, the idea of Being.
The Oriental had to be interested in the metaphysical which was the relationship between him and that which is unknown, he had to be interested in that. But the argument of Being evolved differently in the Orient than the argument of Being evolved here. Because forever on, after the philosophy of the Greeks became developed in their hands, from then on it was constantly misinterpreted. And it was used to justify certain things what were taking place.
Had not Rome been there at that time, would Greek philosophy have risen to that point? The Romans needed it because they were administrating of a big part of the world that they had no familiarity with. So they needed historical theory, some way that they could handle and put together and develop translators and do a million things that an occupying empire needs to do. They were dealing with various peoples. They were dealing with MidEast people, Eastern people, they were dealing with Gauls, Northerners. So Rome had to put together a system that was Roman and yet dealt from here, because they had the man that has to give orders. They had to develop their language to abstractions, these were necessities. It wasn’t that they saw the Greek and they when Oh, Ah. They needed it.
Remember, you were born with the radio playing. But what was life like before the radio? What was life like before? The Greeks had opened a vast colonial area. How the Greeks did it, they went and they were Greek. So in order to get in there you had to become Greek. The English did that. You had to get into the racket club, the tennis club, the golf course. You had to be an Uncle Tom. Somehow or other you had to be English or become English. The Americans are like the Romans. Where ever they go the screw the population, start baseball games. The Romans would do that. They open up an amphitheater and invite everybody over to have a big barbecue.. that what they were doing, but not the Greeks. The Greeks excluded people a lot. They can’t come in unless you are Greek. Has to do a lot with how their philosophy is moving into these areas. The Greek’s philosophy appealed to the upper echelon. They are coming out with geometry, with rhetoric, with a lot of things people don’t know about. And they find out that by using all these things they can command it, they know how to do it, they can plan it. What Greeks gave Romans on a practical level was a new way to be able to plan things. Being able to set up a systematic plan.
By the time of Cicero it reaches a high point of development, where the Romans develop to a high degree the science of letter writing. If you have to write a letter and it took three months to get there, you make sure you didn’t forget anything. It had to convey a lot without a multitude of writing for the next 2 or 3 years campaign. They needed it.
Philosophy in certain periods of history is necessary. It is necessary now. You have reached a period where psychology is not necessary any more. It really isn’t. I mean, fuck you and your feelings. I’m not interested in in the world’s mental psychosis and neurosis. I’m not interested in that. The syndrome of the mass man.
We are not given any coherence here. We are pre-philosophy. Philosophy makes integration possible.
If you were look for a system, that would give an explanation. Something that would give some rationale, some cohesion as to what this is all about. You look at it metaphysically because it ties Being to the whole universe. This is the impulse of a person who is drowning. Who is drowning in the morass. In the morass of vacumness, the morass of nothingness, where nothing can become chaos, the void.
The Greek void was not empty, it was total, not empty or full, it was the void. This is the concept the astronomers came upon from classical philosophy, the black hole theory. They took the concept of the void and turned it into the big black hole theory, same as Newton took Pythagorean concepts and turned them into Newtonian concepts. It is so easy to snatch things, but nobody knows enough about philosophy to see plagiarism. Take it from here and put it there, and wow.
What are we looking for? We are looking to understand how relationships are put together, to be able to penetrate the arguments, some of the contradictions that these bastards have, some real huge contradictions. How can you consider this philosophy when it is so full of contradictions? Maybe that is what we are studying. Maybe this is what is important, to understand the structure of contradictions.
Isn’t this is what Marxism is about, to study the structure of contradiction? The marxists are so hooked on the study of contradiction that they stimulate it. They are not fomenting revolution, they are making contradiction evident. It is working, something is working. They put the light on the contradiction. How come you are so rich and these guys are so poor?
Marxism in China does not stem from its experience. Marxism in Russia does not stem from the Russian experience, it does not stem from the Russian metaphysics, if we might say. Our philosophy comes from our experience here in the USA. It comes because we don’t have any philosophy. That which is coming is coming. It is a positive aspect.
When you look at ethics, you look to natural law according to Kantian thinking. You are looking at natural law, this is the way things must be in order for them to happen. Either we treat ourselves as civilised men, and respect each other’s whatever civilised men have to respect of each other. And as long as we keep that in perfect harmony and perfect accord, the natural law has been fulfilled.
Kant is talking about Greek thought where it wasn’t as evident it was Greek thought, because remember, Socrates in the Apology, in Platonic thinking which is the first one to examine idea as a concept, Socrates created the argument of ethics. Not from the natural point, physis, but from the point of view of knowledgeable truth and attainable truth. Through the education of... you obtain the ethics. So there is an interruption there.
Epistemology. There is a certain point that the argument is on knowledge. This is what distinguished modern philosophy from antiquity and medieval philosophy, you have apriori and a posteriori. You have arguments concerning causation, causative philosophies that everything has a cause, every event has a cause. The question is, is it inherent within the object that we know it, is it something intuitive that comes from the object that we know it, or is it something apriori within us that knows it? These arguments are the arguments of epistemology, the arguments of knowledge. They are very detailed arguments. Once we look at the overview of it then we have to learn in detail the arguments.
I have to caution you on this, there is something here that is very difficult to do, that is take the position of a lecturer and also of a seminarian (seminar). In seminar you have to raise the position and then seminar. I’m caught between two things, I have to dictate what is to be understood, and I also have to take the part of a seminar. The problem is I don’t follow a coherency the same way you would in a lecture, but I jump from here and there the way you do in a seminar. I have to do two things at the same time, I have to pass the information across historically and philosophically to make the connection, and plus I have to do it in the seminar fashion in order to do that which makes it philosophy. In this respect one needs the help of the one listening. He guides his interest, that specific time, because all that happens then is I talk on a general survey of philosophy.
A survey of philosophy is necessary to give a view, a cleanup, of how things connect to each other, but the other points, the detailed points, the arguments are extremely detailed. They are like fine watches. These guys work on them for years. What we are trying to do is look at that fine watch, understand the gear structures of it, understand its mechanics so we can take that and compare it to another system in the same fashion. Then try to synthesise possibilities, paradoxes, coincidences, various things that we are looking for when we make the comparisons.
When you compare things, the elements, the tools you are using, the elements that you look for are different than when you are investigating something intrinsically. Intrinsic is within the parameters. Intrinsic comparisons between page to page. It is not just logical types, because the methodology is different. It has an inherent logic to it.
One does the following. In order to pull that off you have to be able to extrapolate the total system. And be able to synthesise what you have seen. If you look at a watch with a million parts to it, your synthesis and concept of it is watch. Now you say the watch maker knows about the gears. Never-the-less when you say watch, you are talking about time, you are talking about machinery, you are talking about dependency... You are talking about many things when you use the word watch. The part that we are using the word watch is the intrinsic mechanisms that make up the word watch, the machinery of it. Now when we are looking at the machinery of philosophy, you are looking at gears in relation to gears, the structure. Now the function leads to the extrapolation. What is the function of this system, what does it intend to do? You extrapolate that. Once you freeze that extrapolation, you move in to extrapolate this system and compare the two systems.What you are comparing now is its metaphysical aspects. Because you have gone to the usia, to the essence of the philosophy. What does it intend to do? And what you find every one of them are arguing is that which we are studying in the preSocratic philosophies. You almost have a tool to be able to elevate from, instead of sitting down and saying what the fuck does he mean? I can see this and I can see this, but where does it go?
Now I am teaching you this part. The detailed part is when we study the watch. When you go to State College what you study is the watch. I can teach you the watch but I’m not interested in the watch.
I have become very, very pedantic. You have no idea the pedanticism I can get involved in. It is how methodologies work.
The argument you must develop is to see that which is. To see just that which is in front of you. And not to go further. Learn to see that which is in front of you. Here. You have to learn that. What you do is you miss two or three steps. Remember what we said, description, proof, and convincing. Three essential things. In the description, describe to me what you are seeing. What it is that you are looking at? When I read the apology, what am I looking at?
Prove it. To describe it, to prove it, and then to convince it. More might not be necessary. It might not be necessary to prove it. You might not want to prove it. You have to conclude it in order to tie the thread off. We are using constantly from the Platonic school, constantly going frontwards and backwards. And in its frontwards and backwards ness is the same kind of things that happen in schools of modernity and antiquity. They keep going frontward and backward all the time. Like right now Reagan is talking about his identity...
Things move in harmonious order. This is what Heraclitus was trying to say, things move but it is in the unity they move, in order to motion. We shouldn’t let interruptions happen. We have to stop that from happening, either by abolishing it or allowing the self to do it, under penalty of death!
we still won’t budge! That is what Socrates said, I won’t budge my position even if you threaten to kill me. We don’t understand these things because we picture everything in the drama of Christ, that it has deluded our minds into another picture. I’m just wondering what influence Christianity had in the modern examination of it.
Earl changes the subject back to ethics and the relation to...
Remember ethics is an element in Platonic hands. It becomes an element. Socrates didn’t follow the naturalistic philosophy, his teacher Arxitos?. didn’t follow the line of reasoning that was set before. It becomes difficult to transmit this, we reach into another area. I’m going to try to give you a general picture of it.
The preSocratic philosophers were interested in first cause, causation. There is a reason for this that is here. They evoked questions concerning PHYSIS, the root word for physical and also goes to the concept of nature. The preSocratics asked, how will we construct a system to penetrate physis? I am superimposing a lot of this. They said why don’t we call it aletheia, that which strips away, that which unburdens it, that which uncovers it, that which makes it come to be. Why don’t we call it althea?
You say what difference does it make what name we call it? It’s because attachments start focalising onto a name. Feelings. When a student is learning, what he is taking is not the cognitive values only, the arithmetic of it, he’s taking that plus a feeling. An intuitive feeling. He can’t explain it anymore. It is like the love of music, like the love of poetry, like the love ..
This is important because the word philo which went on to philosophy had to do about feelings. They weren’t looking for the truth of things, they were looking for the feeling of philosophy. Then philosophy went through the process of becoming a public thing. So you have now a magistrate of ideas, the magistrate of thought. The philosopher becomes the magistrate of thought. He becomes the professional thinker. He is what society looks at, as opposed to the sooth-sayer, at the philsospher, the man who can grapple with thought and idea and put it into some form of coherency. But previous to this, previous to where he became a professional thinker, he was looking to strip away that which was cluttering up, which is the word aletheia, truth, in Greek. Altethos akirios, the Christian said. That totally uncovered Christ. When you uncover something for its illuminosity, even in religion you get that. When you uncover, Christ is portrayed as being uncovered totally of all that which was mortal. Since it was all totally uncovered, he became immortal, he became unmasked, he became illuminated. All you could see was the illuminosity of it. With either the physical eye, which in Christianity they saw the resurection, or the inner eye of inner perception which the mystics of the theologians talked about.
The theologians in Greek preSocratic times were moving towards monotheism. Monotheism is what physis is about. Physis is about monotheism, about nature becoming one. The concept of god, of theopete, moves into natural laws, which now becomes the father of physics. The father of physics is religion. This is what is hard for people to understand. People say oh physics is Descartes and Galileo, and.. We are not talking about the nuts and bolts of the clock, we are talking about philosophy. This is what philosophy is. It is the metaphysics of history.
So you can’t remember what the First World War was for, but that is not what history is about. History is to illuminate man himself. To show where man has been. So the preSocratics and the physicists of the 16th and 17th centuries are related. This is why Newton was a preSocratic, because the PreSocratics were philosophers dealing with physics. Plato wasn’t dealing with physics as all. He says it in the Apology. It is something that comes through rigour, discipline, through knowledge, through the theory of education. You rigorously train yourself.
Don’t forget there was no theory of public education previously. Philosophers studied with their disciples and they didn’t allow anybody in. They had a tool in their hands and they knew it. They had a tool of systematic thought. They had a tool of analysis, analytical thought being possible. They had something that became so dynamic that they could literally read your mind. They hadn’t developed any arguments for it.
Athens was a gossip place. It was a gay place, people ran around from all over the world. Athens stopped it because it went into decay. Philosophy hit Athens just as Athens was going under. The Athenians were high bourgeoisie, every one of them. They hated work. They hated work with a passion. There is a period in Classical history that is called the Age of the Lazy Ones. They were lazy, they didn’t want to work. We don’t know much about the philosophy of Sparta. All we know is the philosophy that took place there in Athens. And in the Ionian islands. We know that from chroniclers. We know that from various other sources. We know it from the various fragments.
Most of the work is codified in the various codexes as to the fragments, like Heraclitus’s fragments. So when we refer to the fragments we refer to them in their various codification, like the 40th fragment, the 42nd fragment. Same thing with the fragments of Anaxagoras, Anaximandus, Zenopadus. From the comparative studies of all these philosophers we start to realise certain crucial things. Like Heraclitus. Heraclitus was really blasting people. He was going to town on them. He called everybody lunatics. He spares one philosopher, he spares Anaximandus. That is the only philosopher he spares in his criticisms. The rest of them he decapitates. All philosophy previous to Heraclitus is a useless system, a system that is fixed. He attacks it.
Philosophy only grows when it has adversaries, whens somebody is attacking. It is not a passive discipline. It is a discipline that is always on the attack. To question is to question. Like I told you, they asked Aristotle what is matter? That which is matter. The discipline is to question. Of course questioning dethrones. One questions what right do you have to have the throne? What relationship? All they had to do is develop the relationships that had been argued. What made it so beautiful is they conceived by necessity of argument, different relationships.
You have to understand something philologically also, to understand Greek philosophy. Greek words are compound words. There are infinite possibilities of them. Like German is a language of compound words, that is why German is a beautiful language for philosophy also. Either you learn German or you learn Greek, one of the two. This is the only way you can really see that magic that takes place in compound words. You can’t grasp the total beauty of philosophy without studying that. Because you see the Greeks are saying proto, but then they can say aproto. Before proto, aproto raises an issue. Is there such a thing? Aproto, that which was before?
Listen carefully. Hypatius, the Greek historian, developed a concept of analytical films for history. And he used the following argument. We study the past from the present. In order to understand the past we have to understand the present. Because what errors we possess, applied to the past, create a present truth. When we look at the errors of the past, we feel the present has exposed an error which has exposed a truth. Let me to through that rigamarole again. This is a detailed argument that I am summarising for you. The issue was to study history. We study history from the present. But that which is lacking in the present is developed in the past as a error. But then when the present looks at the past and that uncovered error, it considers itself in the present as being true. The present becomes truth, because to discover an error means to establish a truth. It is a beautiful argument. The Greek historians knew they could reach into history and develop plasticity to history.
If you took one of the philosophies of Parmenides and applied it to the understanding of the past, we would come out with different conclusions than if we had studied the past by the Hericilitis' axioms. Which ever method you use to study the past, we’ll discover what truths we have today by establishing today what errors they had in the past. But the present is moving. This is considering that the present is fixed. But since the present is in a state of motion, that allowable difference between where you began studying the past and that point where you are at when the conclusion comes to you, is something that has to be investigated in modern times. It is a philosophical issue. There are no machines to check that out. You have to develop that through disputation, through description. Do you see the relationship?
That type of historical theory is being used a lot to demonstrate a nonexistent truth.