PERPLEXITY
AND
PLATONIC REALITY-DISCONNECTEDNESS
Jud Evans

Introduction.

The key to understanding Platonic perplexity is to realise that abstraction implies a many-to-one transformation from the many possible variants to a single invariant form. Consider the many types of love compared with the abstract noun love.

It is a truism that in spite of Socrates' persistent and adroit attempts to elicit the unelicitable and lead his interlocutors to a resolution of the problems raised by his repetitive: What is X?   questions, no acceptable cognitive closure is ever achieved.  Either in the early Euthyphro or the transitional Meno and later Phaedo. The dialogic investigations inevitably end in aditional non-resolutional perplexity.  Indeed, in most cases,  all that he acheives by his constant calls for a definition of this or that abstraction merely leads to trouble, complexity and confusion and occassional anger resulting from the needless extra perplexity generated on the part of his interlocutors.

Is then perplexity a valuable and desirable state for a philosopher? If so why? What part if any does the Socratic elenctic method, which is concerned with reconciling the many abstractive invariants as a single reificative invariant play in the generation of the perplexity it seeks to examine and neurtralise? Is there a deeper more fundamental reason which explains Socrates' state of perplexity?

For me such questions presuppose three main areas of enquiry, and I address the question in three parts:

My modest offering to an already existing and constantly burgeoning body of more expert antecedent and current opinion considers whether perplexity is a viable or desirable state for a philosopher and what part the elenchus plays in inducing this condition. Then I turn to what I consider to be the real, main, or underlying reason for his perplexity and try to illustrate some of the subjacent semantic and ontological antinomies in the dialogues.

It is in the early dialogues of Socrates that we first encounter the notion that philosophical perplexity is a state which can be thought of as preferable. As it is a state in which the average university student already finds himself, Socrates' novel admittance, represents a welcome and reassuring advance in the comportment towards philosophical enquiry, but for the student the question is posed:'Why strive towards a state of perplexity when it is a condition which I already enjoy?'

Socrates confesses to having no wisdom other than the perception of his own nescience and subjects his discussants to a harrowing cross-examinational process in order that they experience the aporiatic realisation that they do not actually know what they have been talking about, and finally apprehend that their various beliefs run afoul of and negate each other.

In spite of the illuminating revelatory rewards for the interlocutors that flow from the elenctic method, it might occur to the ungenerous of spirit or to those like me who are unsympathetic to Socrates' ideas, that the reason he persisted with this interrogatory, refutational and ultimately frustrating dialectical approach in spite of the obvious perplexity in which it ended and the annoyance it engendered was because he derived some private kudos from the refutational elenctic approach and relished some feeling of psychological superiority, ascendancy or satisfaction from the position of control and dominance the disputational system afforded.

Human perplexity is as old as humankind itself. What is new in Socrates' is his bland admittance that he was as ignorant as his interlocutor. What Socrates did in fact was to legitimise perplexity and make the condition philosophically acceptable, and change it from an experience that the wise pre-Socratics who preceded him and the contemporary Sophist philosophers would no doubt deny or be too embarrassed to acknowledge in themselves, and elevate it into a condition of which to be proud. There is no doubt that Socrates' interlocutors were not impressed with the adversarial relationship which characterised his dialectical method. Who can blame them for feeling ruffled at the thought of being viewed as his propositional puppets and dialectical dupes or playthings?

The generous of heart might decide that he had come to understand that conclusive answers to these definitional questions were out of cognitive reach, but perceived, as I do, that we should still go on asking them, and that the interrogation offers some glimmer of hope that understanding may begin to emerge?

A parallel but perhaps more bizarre example of this acknowledgement of human limitation can be seen in Diogenes, who on being asked by somebody:

For my part I am prepared to suspend my disbelieve that it was not some prurient desire for personal domination which motivated Socrates, but rather a commitment to epistemological enquiry in which Forms are seen as a key or portal to knowledge, and virtue, or a virtuous comportment with respect to knowledge, is in itself what knowing is, and therefore knowledge and virtue are different facets of the same human condition.

The tradition supposes that Socrates approaches those who pretend to have knowledge and then demeans and demolishes them. In this way, it is thought; his interlocutors enjoy a better state than before, even though they might not feel very good about it.

In Meno the question "what is virtue?" must have priority. Socrates declines to take-up the role of respondent and assumes, instead, his familiar stance of critique and inquisitor. Meno then asks whether Socrates thought that Gorgias knew what virtue was.

Answering Meno's question directly would have meant that Socrates put forward his own reasons for his rejection or acceptance of Gorgias' view of virtue. He quickly changes the subject from Gorgias back to Meno, and wangles Meno back into the role of answerer.

(C) A deeper more fundamental reason for Socrates' permanent perplexity?

I suggest that the motivation behind Socrates' conceptual analysis of piety and the other *X questions* with which he is engaged, is part of a deeper, broader and more profound flawed investigation into the whole notion of a metaphysical unity. Universal forms. X questions in the language of logicians may be expressed as: "Is there some x such the x = piety," or insert here: "justice," or "love" or any abstract noun or gerund you wish. The desire to access a unified hierarchical focus into which the compendium of like actions and behaviours could be defined and descriptionally regularised. At an early stage in the dialogue Socrates reminds Euthyphro to bear in mind that he is not so much interested in hearing an account of individual pious actions, but rather about the "idea itself," so that he may look upon it, and, use it as a model

"that any action of yours or another's that is of that kind is pious, and if it is not that it is not" [6e, G. M. A. Grube trans., Hackett, 1986].

Vlastos addressing if Socrates would claim that rationales determinable by elenctic argument in the agora would be universally true and would hold for: 'all moral agents, even if they are gods,' concludes:

"There is evidence in the Euthyphro that he would. He suggests that when Socrates asks:

"Is piety loved by the gods because it is piety? Or is it piety because the gods love it?"
(Euthyphro. lOa)

"He is pressing Euthyphro to agree that the essence of piety - its rationally discoverable nature - has no dependence on the fact that the gods happen to love it. 37 Gregory Vlastos. Socrates, Ironist and Moral Philosopher 157 - 78.

Socrates quest was to discover if piety [Gk. hosion] and virtue [Gk. aretÍ] exist as universals which obtain in forms of isolable, apprehensible reality as special metaphysical objects. His ideal was of an inclusive, universal transcendental concept of piety, different in its kind from individuate and isolate pious acts of worldly experiential happenstance. Again Socrates chides Euthyphro and Meno to concentrate on the definitional task at hand:

"So we must investigate again from the beginning what piety is, as I shall not willingly give up before I learn this." Euthyphro 15d

"We are having the same trouble again, Meno, though in another way; we have found many virtues while looking for one but we cannot find the one which covers all the others." Meno 74b

In my view the reason for the perplexity in the dialogues was because Socrates was barking up the wrong ontological tree. There is no universal idea of piety or virtue or any other abstraction, hence the nettlesome lack of theoretical specificity in Socrates and his constant rejoinders to his discussants to forget about real-world examples of the behaviour of their flesh and blood pious contemporaries and concentrate on his notion of a conceptual compendium which encapsulates all those disparate ideas and behaviours under one word - piety or whatever.

Sadly for us students of such matters, the scope of Socrates' admirable enthusiasm and over-riding, compulsive curiosity appears not to have extended to any serious examination of the actual existential nature of these supposed forms. He fails to essay an account of the specifics of their identification, mode of existence and how come, and in what unworldly realm or dimension they flourish to exhibit their existential difference and consolidate availability from those objects or events of spatial extension and temporal continuance. He seems reluctant to refer qualificationally and to differentiate physical entities from their actions, behaviours and beliefs. There is lack of semantic clarity in his ekmageion, [impressions] and his gerundial misapprehensions may flow from the absence of an appropriate grammar or syntax in ancient Greek and/or the lack of a formalised syntactical system to distinguish between verbs and various noun-types. It is the reified existential modalities, actions, thoughts, beliefs and behaviours of human entities which are mentioned as the subjects of sentence strings and employed as existential quasi-entitative predicates of unmentioned [hence presumably unimportant,] entitative subjects.

As Aristotle later observed:

If we compare the universalism or form of *piety* with another form such as *bigness* we begin to see Plato's theory of forms start to unravel.

Socrates in the Phaedo observes:

"Simmias is bigger than Socrates and thus has the property of bigness, yet he is smaller than Phaedo and thus he has the property of smallness at the same time. " When confronted with this anomaly the nonplussed Socrates glibly responds that: *Tallness is never willing to be tall and short at the same time." Phaedo 102d

We see immediately that Tallness' convenient lack of will and preparedness for supportive ontological collaboration is very accommodating of Socrates predicament in this tricky situation, and Tallness is felicitously confirmative of his odd notions. We can extrapolate this curious ontological system to piety or any other abstraction and say that Euthyphro is more pious than Socrates, and therefore possesses the property of greater piety, yet he is less pious and less zealous than the King Archon. It would then follow therefore that Euthyphro enjoys both opposite properties at the same time, for he possesses the property of an inferior form of piety as well as having at the same time a superior form of piety - a classic case of not having the cake of one's ontological property and eating it.

In addressing Socrates' insistence upon a definition of piety, Prof. A. E Taylor points out that:

Neither Socrates nor Plato could ever grasp this fact, but rather reified the semantic structures of these 'irreal objects' into quasi-entitative independent actualities.

Conclusion

In reiterating my original question, we now see that it was pregnant with clever entailment. Let us look again at the question.

'What (if any) value does the Socratic Method have - for a resolution of Socrates' questioning - his questioning aimed at resolving the question of universals and forms?'

My considered answer is that it is of enormous value in the sense that it perfectly demonstrates that it is a method that cannot deliver the answers to abstract problems, for that which is addressed is purely a fiction - a misapprehended hermeneutical happenstance of grammatical and syntactic sentential formulation - a gerundial ignis fatuus. At the outset I mentioned that it was my intention to examine the elenctic technique as being responsible for perplexity or if is there some other more fundamental reason for the lack of success - or both? My verdict is both elenchus and the reificational treatment that Socrates and Plato apply to abstract nouns and gerunds. And what is the legacy of the professionally perplexed one? His legacy entails that thanks to him we are just a little bit less perplexed than he was.

Many modern philosophers continue to suffer conceptual constipation caused  by their Platonic diet. The difficult-to-digest traditionalist mush of metaphysical generality is painfully voided as hard reificative nuggets of hypostasive coprolites. Thus whilst the conceptualisation of *Being* is an illegitimate heteron or wrongful ideational mirror image of the Greek instantiation to mae on
(that which is not) it is also the case that both *Being* and *Nothing.* as twinned concepts are particular modes of the human neurological system when it selects the words as mirrored nominals bereft of any denotatum.

It is an attempt to convey the idea of the presence or absence of some unspecified entity or entities. The cognitive speculums Being* and *Nothing.* are ALWAYS used as non-existent others, conceptual counterparts (heterons) for purposes of differentiating occupied rather than unoccupied space.

The problem is the assumption that the very process of employing these ontological devices neurologically instantiates them by the very fact that they appear to be the wrong-way-round mirrored opposites of each other.

As such is the case, no predication is possible in the case of the words  *Being* and *Nothing.* Any predication thought to be attributed to the words does not add to or provide any information about the concepts, because neither exist to be describe. Attempts to predicatively describe *Being* and *Nothing.*, even the valiant attempts of MichaelP merely adds to what can be said about the existential modality and neurological processes of he or she who thinks about and utters the concept *Being* and *Nothing.*

 For me  - There is no *mind* or *consciousness* no *mental* *data* to arrange - the incoming photons are meaningless until their significance has been moderated by the brain. In a computer too - the series of strings of 0 or 1 are meaningless until the human-programmed chip renders them into formulations which make sense to the human brains with which they interface. The waves of photons which shower upon the retina go no further - they do not tadvance inside the skull and penetrate to the brain to be *arranged* or de-codified, or to take part in any neuronal stage-re-management. Their *job* has been completed. The brain itself automatically [updates] reconfigures itself as it experiences and responds to  the encoded messages which stimulate it via the optic nerves and other sensorial inputs. In a similar way the particles carried by the sound waves to the ear become redundant - and like the photons remain extrinsically supernumerary.

That which stimulates the brain is the photonic bombardment of the retina, the vibrating air molecules against the aural tympanum, and whatever material touches the skin, or reacts chemically with the taste-buds, or affects the olefactory membrane. These purely physical impingements cause the brain to pass from one state or phase to another and modify the way it exists. The data doesn't exist. What exists are the molecules and photons, and the material of contiguous objects with which the human holism comes into contact, and the existing reflexive material of the reconfigurational neuronal network.

There is no higher-level metaphysical presence {*mind*] lurking unseen and undetectably active in attendence in the brain-meat, which participates in and interprets the

*results.* The RESULTS of new events are the way the brain exists after the physiological reactions and innate reflex changes in the neuronal net that enables it to focus on its new perception of that which exists, or that which has impinged upon it - the newly reconfigured brain IS THE RESULT. What exists is the *conscious human being* - not *consciousnmess.*

Ideational thoughts, abstract concepts, feelings, etc. are NOT ingredients of the cosmos.

What ACTUALLY EXIST are ideating, thinking, conceptualising, feeling HUMANS existing in modalities of ideating, thinking, conceptualising, and feeling. Their ideating, thinking, conceptualising, feeling no more exists than the dancing movements of dancers exist - what exists are the dancing dancers - the moving movers. *dancing* and

*movement* do not exist. The moving spaceship exists - but not its movement.

At the moment, as I type, I am in a state/modality of ideating, thinking, and conceptualising about the sort of ideating, thinking, and conceptualising that YOU will be engaged in when you will later read these words . As you read these words before you, YOU are again in a state/modality of re-ideating, re-thinking, and re-conceptualising about the sort of ideating, thinking, and conceptualising that I was when I was composing this message. I reject the metaphysical world. It is a fantastical world-view built from the caveman-times where, some people, in spite of the inclusions of every level of the epistemic enrichment of the 'human brain' with knowledge-organising abilities, and observational explanatory skills went through the millennia with the cognitive inability [disability] to make use of these advances, and missed out on them, and passed on their ignorance to their offspring.

It includes the caveman's awe at the phenomena of natural world and the superstitious errors obtained en route in a misconceived effort to explain it. And lots of the metaphysical soothing and smoothing and doctoral spin-doctoring in order to make the errors acceptable. [the escape hatch for priestly stupidity being *God works in mysterious ways) with model views of limited sophistication according to the juvenile horizon of bible/torah/koraninic contents.

I believe that *that which exists* [let's not call it *matter* or *energy* if you wish] - is capable of changing its nature or the manner or modality in the way it exists in order to fit the *entiative circumstances.* That would explain and put an end to all that rubbish about the *chaos theory.*

If that which exists was NOT capable of CHANGE - it would NOT EXIST and there would be no cosmos - it is as childishly simple as that! The fact that *that which exists* can exist at such small magnitudes [or minitudes] does NOT mean that it is not subject to the general laws that affect conglomerates of *that which exists* at greater magnitudes [like your wallet or my umbrella.]

Of course ALL of what I say above is mere speculation - I am not claiming I have a personal hotline to God ;-) In fact Paul, you could stick an imaginary *in my opinion* in front of every sentence that I write. But wait! You cannot - for an imaginary *in my opinion* doesn't exist. (In spite of what my friends Richard and Antonio believe.) What exists are humans who can exist in modes of linguistically casting it into language - but it is they that exist - not the act of lingualisation. What you actually could do is to exist in a modality of imagining that an imaginary *in my opinion* does exist in front of every sentence that I write - but that would be the way that YOU exist as you are imagining it, not the ACTUAL way that an imaginary *in my opinion* in front of every sentence that I write exists.

Bibliography:

Alcidamas on the Sophists trans by Larue van Hook, Classical Weekly, january 20, 1919
http://evans-experientialism.freewebspace.com/alcidamas.htm Nilsson.

Persson, M. Greek Piety - professor emeritus of classical archaeology university of Lund, Sweden. Trans by Herbert Jennings. Clarendon Press 1948use Ball 1908)
Laplace. Pierre-Simon. wikipedia. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki