Here or Nowhere

The title is from Horace's Epistulae (1.17). It is a contested poem - Fraenkel thought it entirely ought of character for Horace, calling it "upsetting". It is definitely jolting; perhaps it is better to avoid any final conclusions. What I will share here is my understanding of it in recent times.
There are so many things I like about this poem, not least how it begins by the offering of teaching from one who yet "has much to learn". I like how this can be seen to compliment Seneca's disendo discimus - and other approaches to pedagogy that I am writing about in my book.
What is so shocking about the poem is that Horace criticises Diogenes' refusal to interact with the rich as being a form of excess: showing Aristippus as superior, for he can wear rags, as does Diogenes, albeit if circumstance requires, but he can also wear fine garb and eat fine meals. So the poem can be seen to promote parasitism (dining at the expense of the rich) over genuine friendship as the nature of the relations in this poem that are advised are of a purely worldly nature.
Stephanie McCarter's very enjoyable Horace Between Freedom and Slavery suggests that Horace in some of these epistles is the concept of the Aristotelian golden mean, which she writes goes

back to Hesiod. Wilson defines the term as 'the area between too much and too little' and as the 'opposite of excess' ... Aristippus has captured both the adaptability and the moderation that ought to be exercised in every situation.

In 1.17, "Aristippus offers a way of accommodating one's longings for public life and friendship with the great without sacrificing one's independence or consistency of character." This reminds me of Evelyn Waugh's Brideshead Revisited, where the Flyte mother discusses how wealth is not incompatible with the sacred (112-113).

I will be discussing this passage and these citations in my book. But what I want to write about here is the tension between friendship with the great/all the people who one can find in the world and contemplative withdrawal (the critics who do not like 1.17 feel Horace's allegiance to lie exclusively in the latter). Is Horace being sarcastic in the second part of this epistle as some say? Attacking the pursuit of profit? Or is amicitia with great men a test of virtue and modesty?
These are questions that are most relatable, and may represent tension felt from adolescence onwards: does one have a sarcastic relation to the world made by les gens du monde - and so is it the life well-lived to withdraw entirely? Or is it not necessary, foremost for oneself, one's own well-being, to be part of this potentially superficial world? To enter it, it is suggested, is a test.
The phrase "here or nowhere", where it appears in the epistle, becomes a symbol of the acceptance of the validity of participation. Because of this, I use it as my chat app motto: it is the admission that an outer face - while exposed to intricate traps (that even Diogenes could fall into, with his performance art exaggerations performed publicly) - is necessary for the holistic life.
This corresponds with Emerson's thought in "Self Reliance": "It is easy in the world to live after the  world's opinion; it is easy in solitude to live after our own; but the great man is he who in the midst  of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude."
It can be seen that this tension is a timeless concern, but its implications and the shape of the trials associated with worldly life in this time in history are (as always) particular and do need especial thought and discernment (to say the least).
This is a tension that I have tried to bring forth (cf. maieutics) in my classes, in one way or another, over the years. Admission of whatever the topics of the moment are is integral to my courses, which are therefore always changing (they also change to attempt to cater to students' needs). But these aspects of the course are never the whole course, just a part of it.
And to that end, some of the links in this week's B/Logrolling section will likely end up being addressed in class (I am still finalising the syllabus).

B/Logrolling

A Letter From Hong Kong: I admit that from my distance, I did not immediately understand all of the angles of this situation, and this short piece is the best that I have seen. This passage in particular gives pause for thought:

Nor, sadly, can Hong Kong youth expect solidarity from the most militant of Western university students and faculty. They lost their taste for freedom years ago. Israel is apparently a bigger offense to their sensibilities than Communist China (or Iran). In all significant respects, these Westerners are the opposite of the young people I know. While Hong Kong students detest Communism, many of their Western counterparts embrace Marxism. While Western post-colonialists deride Western civilization, Hong Kongers wish they could have more of it. When Hong Kong students talk of a safe-space they mean a shelter from tear-gas and rubber bullets, not a refuge from offensive words. A trigger warning is not a professor’s presage of a painting by Goya; it is the sound of a revolver shot discharged skywards in the Causeway Bay night.

The site of Tim Wu, author of The Attention Merchants, with links to other articles he has written

Privacy is Power by Carissa Véliz (edited by Nigel Warburton - I am quickly becoming a fan, though have followed him for quite some time as he produces Philosophy Bytes, which has had quite a few good programs, some of which, back in the day, I used in my classes)

Who I'd like to have over at a dinner party (I have not introduced the concept for this section of B/Logrolling very well: what I mean to do here is to introduce 'content producers' [for lack of better name] whose sites are not on my static, standalone B/Logroll page):
Tim Hurst, host of WFMU's Techtonic podcast

Brush

Experiment

Once upon a time, someone said something to me I thought quite shocking: that one could benefit by experimenting in life, to gain a clearer idea of what helps one flourish. I have probably returned to this idea because in conducting the periodical internal housecleaning that it so necessary, I have uncovered quite a bit of lazy thinking - including some that is self-righteous adjacent. So, it would help to start to experiment to find ways to get out of these bad habits. I found some useful ideas in Rich Roll's latest podcast (though have yet to listen to the last half hour). One of the anecdotes recounted reminded me of one I heard a few days ago: the late Serbian Patriarch Pavle had been asked what he thought of Milosevic, and whether he blamed him, etc., to which he responded that such an approach was irrelevant as the true problem lay in each individual. If they were better, the situation would be better, he said.
I was not "better", last week. I recounted to a colleague a deviant statement made by a third colleague who had shared his understanding that university be akin to kindergarten for adults (his view rendering the essay redundant, laughable work). I realised afterwards just how wrong that was of me on so many levels. I recount the specifics here only to show an example of what I consider to provoke a self-righteous response. But here is another response: what if one understands that other people are always, in their minds, doing the best they can? It doesn't make sense to criticise their actions (outside of classrooms - though even correction of students can be done in multiple ways). The question is whether one can navigate around Scylla and Charybdis, accepting them in their present state (for who would want to be blocked the opportunity for later change? So why would one slap a judgement on someone else?) The question is whether we can try to help those around us grow, just as we see we need to grow, and also would like help ourselves. Is this not the pedagogical mission? And if we claim to be teachers/instructors/etc. and are not doing this, are we truly what we claim to be?
Another thing I have noticed is how much fear can build up inside that distorts vision. I am pretty sure that this fear has caused me to act in an uncalled for way from time to time, which is to say that I have caused my own problems.

Brush

Can I try to experiment to live without fear? To inhabit moment to moment and stop worrying?
Can I experiment to try to find my voice and what it is that I have felt for so long now that I need to write? Academic fear is very real: one knows that one's arguments can easily be refuted, that one can never have read all the relevant books... But the very beautiful pragmatic American approach says: cut your losses and begin. Begin to have any chance whatsoever at getting somewhere. And the time is nigh when you can start to riff from idea to idea and know what sources there are behind those ideas.
I will end this post on one idea I am thinking about. It has to do with some of the sources behind the idea that we should all be heard, which I hope this post makes clear that I respect. That said, some of the models for that approach quickly veer off into relativistic cacophony or willful ignorance. For example, one paper, quite prominent in the field of contrastive rhetoric, stresses how "classroom dialogue that underscores difference in rhetoric ... could perpetuate Othering, cultural stereotyping, and unequal relations of power." It is astonishing that it is assumed that equal relations of power is that simple. In fact, this entire post, written by someone who shirks at the idea of lording over others, demonstrates that despite such antipathies, self-righteous impulses can develop and be at once made manifest while remaining latent. What of those who are not self-critical? Does experience not teach that something is always in power, that hierarchy will exist in one way or another? Note that this does not mean to say that attempts at unity are futile; rather, the spirit in which one approaches unity is most pertinent.
This is why the pursuit of large words like truth and equality is to be stressed. Nowhere in Plato will you find a prescription for the achievement of such goals; in fact, Socrates says that he can only pursue truth and never possess it. It is not a complicated idea, this humility. But it is an unpopular one.
While children's books generally present truth and equality as virtues that can be achieved, I would like to point out that as adults, very few live by those precepts. How many adults forgive the person who stole their metaphorical lollipop? Or who confess, in the end, to stealing it in a moment of weakness? Or who live with an open heart?
Indeed, my colleague may have unwittingly been on to something when he equated university with kindergarten because it could truly be asked whether we would all pass the test we put to children. We ask of the child to temper its zeal and to be patient. Etc. Such growth of character is crucial to the prolonged existence of humanity. The experiment here is to find ways to retain the rudimentary lessons of childhood in order to fully be the adult. 

Brush

Meaning

The last post I wrote was ambiguous. I have been thinking about different "publics" and the problem of dialogue. Possibly because of my multicultural background (multi-culti being a word that can have as many negative as positive connotations), I am less interested in arguing and more interested in finding ways forwards for discussion.
My concern is that the devotion to dialogue is not universally shared.
I asked an expert on dialogue what to do if dialogue is not invited and, granted that the question could be construed as being out of place at a conference where the purpose of the paper was to extol the benefits of dialogue, I never got an answer. I am not an expert. And I am only beginning.
I just hope my beginning will not be my end.
Meaning: will I be afforded space in which to speak? Or will I be mowed down - the green, inexperienced grass that I am, immediately?
What is it that I want to say? That dialogue is a balsam, that it is possible to disagree without needing to destroy, that dialogue is like marriage: something for shared good, and because of this, is worth making some concessions to. One example of such would be the patience to listen to what the other side is saying. It can be difficult because sometimes we do not like the way that messages are packaged. But if we let the message wash over us, we may be left with talking points.
But sometimes I wonder if my ideal regarding dialogue is unrealistic.
For example, interacting with one who describes Plato as going off on "bizarre, loopy speculations" could make it difficult to have a conversation about Plato if one has a different understanding of the premise of life that one considers Plato to be exploring. Wondering about how one would come to such a statement (of the "bizarre, loopy") caused me to think that some texts function as a Rorschach test: this is an unformed idea as of yet, but what I mean is that for some, perhaps, interaction with Ideals/Ideas/Infinite (? - I need to figure out what I mean here, basically, deep abstraction) - where it ceases to engage becomes a Rorschach test. By ceasing to engage I mean entering into what I will call the hermeneutic suspension of disbelief. In other words, the entry into the meaning of the text, even where this will require difference from personal meaning.

Source: Old Hong Kong in Colour, Otto C. C. Lam, Chung Hwa Book Co. Profiled here.

While it is interesting how freely some use older works as inspiration for their own work, I am also concerned with the question of the work involved in getting as close to the original contextual meaning of a text as one can. But here is a fun exercise (by which I mean not so fun): try teaching a course in reading comprehension, and seeing how many (especially of the more intelligent!) students will take the time to write an accurate summary of an extract - when this is exactly what you ask for, after teaching strategies to check comprehension.
Maybe I should have highlighted that paragraph somehow, because I think it is actually central to my main point here.
It seems to me that some 'contemporary' work borrows more from the technique of the sophist: refusing to stop long enough at words and ideas to flesh them out, being more inclined to verbal gymnastics where words are in Heraclitian flux. But I mention Heraclitus, and I often wonder how equipped anyone not an expert in him and on pre-Socratics is to understand him. Still, the reason I bring him up is because I like how eloquently this popularizer of change being the only constant that seems to be the underlying component to much thought today also stressed the importance of wariness of opinion. Opinion is another 'problem area' that comes up in class.
Here is another 'fun' class exercise. Invite students to explore their 'opinions' with the qualification that merely stating it is not enough: asking that they support it, and then find a counterargument, and either refute or make a concession. The counterargument happens to be a feature of many business plans - which is to say that this should be a skill that is 'pragmatic enough' to warrant practise, but it is an exercise that is consistently met with resistance, despite how it is packaged.

Source: Old Hong Kong in Colour, Otto C. C. Lam, Chung Hwa Book Co. Profiled here.

On my blog, I have been wont to skirt around certain topics. In real life, because of the nature of my decisions and the early zeal I once demonstrated (ah, zeal, the trait of the puberty that some never grow out of), I am not so concealed. I feel sorry for the zeal, but know that I have been taking the path that I needed to take, that I am growing how I want to, given that this is the only life I am given and I only have a certain amount of time to pursue... I am going to say it... the truth. I find it fascinating how the acceptance of plurality that has emerged from cultural studies (in my opinion through the Boasian cultural relativism - though of course he is criticised for not being relativistic enough today) has come to mean complete denial of the validity of an attempt to pursue truth. I find it so necessary to do so much reading because this is one of those points where dialogue is shut down entirely. 'If you believe in the possibility of truth, you must be a bigot' the reasoning seems to go, 'how backwards you are and not aware of contemporary reality - you must be an enemy of progress.' But if applied to me, I would think such reasoning unfair. Among other things, I am quite a fan of the internet, and think it has renewed a Republic of Letters' type exchange.
I could be asked at this juncture why I care so much about dialogue. Why do I spend so much time reading "verbal gymnastics"? Firstly, I think there are many forms of communication and do not think that everything is to be read in the same way. Nietzsche, for example, may be viewed as a poet of provocation. One need not agree with everything he writes to see value in thought-provoking nuggets.

Source: Old Hong Kong in Colour, Otto C. C. Lam, Chung Hwa Book Co. Profiled here.

Further, as I only intimated yesterday, those of us who entered postgraduate work in recent times will likely demonstrate in the titles of our work - as Perloff noted in her PMLA address -  the markings of the effects of Theory in our work. Until I read that address, I had not fully realised the extent to which my approach is indeed something in between the before and the now. It is a fact that I was instructed to interact with Theory in my dissertation, though I was permitted to deviate. One thing I would like to point out is that while these older Theorists had the advantage of 'having' to read the works that I gave myself the task of reading (e.g. Plato), I do not see this as being the case today. I think pursuit of these texts is becoming a matter of personal choice.
So, this means that there is ever less potential for there being a 'shared language' of exchange. Some will immediately cry: good riddance! How oppressive to learn that Language! To which I would reply (taking a line of thought from Freire) that indeed it does take effort to learn, and time but (again calling on Freire) this does not mean having to deny your 'own langauge'; rather, it is to give you the chance to be bilingual.
My feeling is that while there may actually be a move to shut down bilingualism (whether explicit or not - Freire suggests that this is implicit and internalised, then reproduced), there is also a great need for it, for it is also understood - somewhere, and again, maybe not explicitly - that cross-fertilisation can be a great source of vital ideas that bear fruit.
I think it is very important to rid one's 'real life dialogue' of the banter of negative critique, because this quickly deteriorates into argument. The art is in taking the time to sort through the common areas, and consistently cultivate these.
I do not think I am ready to enter into public discourse fully, because I still need time to figure out where those areas are. All I know is that I do not want to be contributing to the argument: I'd rather give up ideas and tend to a literal garden before doing that.

Source: Old Hong Kong in Colour, Otto C. C. Lam, Chung Hwa Book Co. Profiled here.

Thinking Aloud In Public

This post has been updated: addendum added below.
A fusion of two texts I was reading in the same day gave me the idea that blogging might be considered as 'thinking aloud in public'.
The latter link takes you to an old Scientific American post by Bora Zivkovic, whose belief in the important place of the blog seems sadly idealistic almost ten years later, though noble. Like Tony of Renaissance Mathematicus lore, many of his posts explore the boundaries between science and journalism, like in this post with a wealth of ideas and links. Tony, however, remains an active blogger. My search for Bora's more recent work led me to his website page where he asks: what should I do next? "Blog some more," say I.
I continue to feel inclined to do my bit to fuel the idealism behind the web, which extends to its pedagogical promise, as outlined by the Revisiting the E-Quality in Networked Learning Manifesto. Incidentally, Bora's second post links to a visualisation of the Republic of Letters (as his blog posts gives his historical overview of the exchange of information) and is a wonderful illustration of the kinds of resources that the web makes possible. This in turn links to a 9-year-old Stanford digital humanities initiative which I mention because I found it to still contain some relevant kernels. Note though that many of these pages have changed their addresses and may need some extra googling to find.
But (after my extended absence from my own blog) it is occurring to me that it takes 'extra' work to keep this promise alive. Just like how the manifesto I linked to suggests that networked learning demands "greater professionalism in teaching and support for learning. Grafting on technological advances does nothing to mitigate this need for maturity in formal learning environments."
And I submit this as my reason why the promise of blogging has fallen short: it takes a lot of work - or, more specifically, time, which I seem to have less and less of (needing to read more and more: it just doesn't end). It is a luxury to be able to blog - which by extension leads to the interesting observation that hype rubs off on even bookish types.
But is blogging not a public necessity in some way? Sharing our thoughts in a somewhat visible way, to help each other sharpen our senses?
What I would like to sharpen my senses regarding concerns the question of whether it is possible to be bilingual in Theory and tradition. For many, that is already the wrong question to ask. To which I cite the ongoing popularity (in the public sense) of returning to dig into the classics, sans Theory, to get a taste of ancient Rome or a feel for Dante's Inferno. It is true that there may also be a fair share of inaccurate movies or misattributed quotes - but the introduction of such nonetheless tends to change the discourse, if momentarily and superficially.
Since the 1980's, it has not been required to do the requisite reading to claim some level of proficiency in both Theory and tradition. Among those studying the humanities, unless one has a very specialised field or focus, or attended a very particular college, I am inclined to agree with the statement that postmodernism is likely to be like the air we breathe: at least, bound to have permeated some approach we take. Or maybe this is only true of East Coasters and their equivalents. I am not married to these ideas...
Once upon a time, it was said during my career as an undergraduate, that one could forget about persisting in academe (to say nothing of progressing) if one were to openly pursue anything that smacks of a Christian line of thought. This is purely anecdotal and may or may not have anything to do with me. It does pertain to my question about bilingualism, though. It would hold - if the anecdote is true and assuming that higher ed instructors represent a range of types and also assuming that it is appropriate to equate this line of thought with tradition - that there would likely be some form of bilingualism extant, somewhere. 
When I was 20, I wrote: "[James] Clifford argues that 'a permanent and ironic play of similarities and differences, the foreign and the strange, the here and the elsewhere is ... characteristic of global modernity.' ... I agree with Clifford when he writes that 'Humanism ... still offers grounds for resistance to oppression and a necessary tolerance, compassion and mercy.' It is a noble goal, but so often the search for connectedness not only devolves into a search for similarities but also the eradication of aspects inherent to culture. Hybrids emerge."
It would seem that the answer is that bilingualism is not possible as it is transformative: to follow the line of hermeneutics, once there is an exchange, if it is a genuine exchange, both parties will be changed.
By way of conclusion: What if some texts and exchanges are in fact Rorschach inkblot texts? ADDENDUM: In my next post, I address why this blog was deliberately ambiguous. I am sorry for distressing certain readers.
ps. it is really funny how blogger's spellcheck indicates "blog" and "blogging" as incorrect.

Photo from: Old Hong Kong In Colour, Otto C. C. Lam, with an Introduction by Peter Cunich. 

For purchase at Chung Hwa Book Co.

Featured on HKFP Lens.

Baring

"Life itself, which is a membership in the living world, is already an abundance," Wendell Berry writes in a lecture printed in The Way of Ignorance.
So much can take away from this abundance, such as that terrible movie screen that is also crammed with the victimising, materialistic, and ego-fuelled junk that poisons our minds, seas, and water tables. Speaking of that which is "victimising" is trauma, which "violates aspects of the person's self and world". Trauma is contagious. Among the syndromes listed as defining organizational trauma, Pat Vivian and Shana Hormann is "stress and anxiety contagion" (emphasis added). The traumatised can be better versed at multiplying destructive negativity than their vital talents.
But as a degree-bearing philologist (one who loves words), I task myself to improve articulacy (the necessary joints) to relate from the confusing temporal appearance to the abundance that is essential, and life-giving.

We are all naked to begin with - and under whatever clothes we do our social posturing in. What is essential can be reached through "baring"; through uncovering to reach the core of something.
Want has the potential to strip away, and so does trauma - if one can bear it, and hold out like an 'initiate of life': if one takes the leap of faith into that which is life-bearing. The alternative is to believe in destruction as a terminal inevitability. In that context, consider this phrase: "a smile, an inheritance, and laughter is a gift."

Who has not felt the sweet release from the gerbil-wheel of depressive thought?  A single smile, help along the trail. Life is like a thru-hike. Or, an endurance run. What I'm trying to say is that we pick our destinations. In other words, whether we accept responsibility for it or not, our actions demonstrate which destination we serve. (Yes, I am referencing Aristotelian τέλος.)

Many times, because of the glut in which we live, if we are not facing hardship, we need to impose on ourselves some form of austerity to reach the essential. This is why people choose thru-hikes. Stripping away the bells and whistles that distract us, we can better appreciate that which is already abundant in this life, like just how beautiful it is to be warmed by the sun (...after a cold night out at camp). Read about a much more compelling experience of the same, along the Altiplano Traverse, here (by Ryan "Dirtmonger" Sylva; it's his quote about the smile, above).
But other times, sickness and injury strip us down to the same result (hear one such account here). Personally, I am coming out of a summer filled with myriad traumas, with two ongoing, and feel a great need to reconfirm the kind of destination I want to be headed towards. I discovered (again - it's funny how much amnesia can occur, for weeks even, until the nervous system calms down) that one can even feel abandoned in hard times. This isn't to say that abandonment is real. But...we can make it real, if we don't watch out. Anyone who doesn't know what I am talking about should count their blessings.

While I don't have the luxury to go where I will, I run long distance (my typical run is over half a marathon, so I can get to the forest and lift up my eyes - I reference the motto of my first boarding school, from Psalm 121). As much as I would love to quit my job (which gives me more and more work, and less and less pay), I will instead endure it a little longer, to gain better eyes for the abundance that life already is.
There is nothing like being told you will get help at work and instead being given a helper who not only lacks basic training (an assistant with a degree in politics who doesn't know what rhetoric is!) but who is also resistant to learning, and then going for a 26K jaunt in nature and being bathed by tree upon tree, casting their fiery shadows upon you, and forgetting your worries in that light show... The random willow in the little park just means so much more when it weeps for you.

Saint Nikolaj Zicki is said to have valued his days of imprisonment in Dachau above all else, for it is there where a simple ray of sunlight meant the most to him.
It is interesting how someone whose life was spiritually rich also benefitted from a baring: a release from 'things'; situation. 

I hunt for the golden stag.

You may smile my friends, but I pursue the vision that eludes me.

I run across hills and dales, I wander through nameless lands, because I am hunting for the golden stag. 

You come and buy in the market and go back to your homes laden with goods, but the spell of the homeless winds has touched me I know not when and where.

I have no care in my heart; all my belongings, I have left far behind me. 

(from Rabindranath Tagore, The Gardener, 69)

Image (of painting) source: Pier Fracesco Mola "Oriental Warrior" wikimediacommons.

To my adolescent imagination, when I first saw this painting in the Louvre, I thought, this is someone who's hunting for the golden stag. His eyes are lifted (Ps.121); at least, aimed for more distant goals.
He's always looked to me like a janissary, though it bewilders me (I now refer to the definition at that link) how someone who is kidnapped "willingly" does anything.

Your own people aren't always exactly your own people.

In the past month, in terms of the tough standards I set for myself, I failed at life (out of exhaustion over exponentially-increased teaching duties) in that I allowed myself to be surprised by certain human behaviour.
In one instance, this surprise morphed within me into the enemy of the human being, the feeling of injustice. Intellectually I know that righteous indignation is a dead-end street: called in some languages a "blind corner", which is exactly what I mean here. I don't know that I would be blogging about this quite in this way, had I not come across the sentence I used as the subject here: "Your own people aren't always exactly your own people." It is a fecund sentence for contemplation. One illustration could be of quondam parentals leaving children to choose their own adventure with absolutely no guidance after the first teen year, who later think they have a right to be critical of said children.
But there is another meaning of the quoted sentence that I have been musing over. Another could be related to patriotism. My family has members living all over the world; I have always taken it for granted that one can be both a patriot and a cosmopolite (who can be humble enough to learn from other cultures). To a certain degree (and to be not at all humble for a moment), I also thought that such a generous patriotism was easier for compatriots like myself than for people hailing from other countries (for historical reasons). Compatriots who reach cosmopolite status share a curiosity for esoteric aspects of other cultures and have the intellectual capacity for such appreciation (gaining, for example, expert knowledge of their antiques), and are crowned by a humility, in part stemming from a knowledge of the complexities of the history of their own country...

But today, this approach has come under fire. There is a new kind of patriotism defined in more narrow terms, as if, if one does not comply with these narrow qualifications, one does not love one's country. I can understand that somewhat - it is a kind of reactionism, not unlike my own of righteous indignation mentioned above. But on the other hand, such an approach would warrant if not a fail then a very low grade in not only my class on culture but also my composition class.
To begin with the (advanced) composition class, I set the intellectual exercise that opinions are not academically valid; what is valid is a thesis that has support and is able to articulate and respond to (through rebuttal or concession) viewpoints that challenge one's thesis. In other words, students are welcome to their 'opinions' so long as they can articulate them in terms of viewpoints that might challenge them (yes, this is derived from δόξα). Part of the course is built on cultivating an imagination that can articulate other viewpoints (which I - again not humbly - take to be part of the intellectual legacy of my native land). Similarly, my advanced class on culture demonstrates through examples that a single culture can be paradoxical, and is often comprised of myriad competing world views. This even came up in my intro class: through the example, for instance, of how not all former colonies immediately ratified the Articles of the Confederation. Unity does not necessarily mean unanimity.
How do we respond to scarcity of agreement?
For some, this means that it is no longer a time for the "college games" of dialectics; to them, it means war. Truth can come back another day.

So I ask myself: how do I talk to someone who from the get-go is approaching questions through their agenda? (The new orthodoxy of secularism, or of zealous liberalism, is no more tolerant or different than any religion.) Are you, readers, also wanting to ask me why it's a problem to approach life through an agenda? When I tried, with my interlocutors of late, to explain the complexities of statecraft and the importance of grappling - as contradictory as it may seem - with even abstract ideas like 'truth' in the practical business of statesmanship, if I dared call on Plato, my interlocutors' eyes would glaze over. Which I know from teaching means I need to change my approach. So, in answer to my question of how to talk with agenda-driven interlocutors, reason is not the way. Or, one must learn to package reason differently.
Since yesterday, every time I think about this, I am left with an anecdote from Rumer Godden's autobiography, A House With Four Rooms, with which I shall close this blog post. She writes of how back in the day, authors would often receive requests for an autograph and/or signed photograph. She explains that before she knew better to respond only to those who sent return postage, she would oblige at least the many signature requests though the postage was costly (obliging the photograph requests would have been far too costly). "I had a letter from America with the usual request, sent an autograph and a little later" she writes, "had a second letter; 'Thank you for your autograph. We have had your handwriting analysed. You are mean, petty, selfish and greedy.'"

Neither Catechism Nor Multiplication Table

The title is from A. E. Housman's "The Application of Thought to Textual Criticism", in which Housman explains that textual criticism is more like an art than a science. Where scientists or doctors can test their theories with experiments or by noting visible effects, "the discovery merely of better and older MSS. than were previously known to us is not equally decisive". He proceeds to give specific examples of the dangerously arbitrary categorisations that are made about the quality of manuscripts, explaining that were such generalisations to be stated in concrete terms, the arbitrariness would be spotted immediately, no less by butchers and grocers, who are comparatively more thoughtful than arbitrary textual critics - as they "depend on their brains for bread". His jokes aside, Housman suggests that the way out of this mess is to "collect and compare" individual readings, and "not to ride easily off on ... false and ridiculous generalisation[s]". In other words, thoughtful textual criticism essentially works on a text-by-text basis (though this feeds back into the bigger picture, to create a more accurate general understanding) [1]. Readers of this blog, or blogs like it, may already be thinking of how much this approach resembles Auerbach's, in Mimesis.
Thus, even once philology ceases to be primarily interested in manuscripts, and becomes concerned with different sorts of comparison - let us call it "the historical experience", a "true philological" approach may be defined as an art: involving both an appreciation of rules as well as the readiness to descend into the complexities of myriad particularities, collecting and comparing. Housman writes that a nascent flair for this art is desirable - and we may note that Auerbach was praised for possessing just such a gift. Also important, however, is the habit of thought, which, while no substitute for an aptitude for textual criticism, can minimise error, Housman writes.

This approach is not a science. To illustrate, Housman considers rules vs. examples, methodically arguing that it is the weight of what appear to be exceptions to rules, and not their number, that must, on a case-by-case basis, be "ascertained by classification and scrutiny". It cannot be a science, because its subject matter is the product of the fallible (not hard-and-fast) human being:

It deals with a matter not rigid and constant, like lines and numbers, but fluid and variable; namely the frailties and aberrations of the human mind, and of its insubordinate servants, the human fingers. It therefore is not susceptible of hard-and-fast rules. It would be much easier if it were; and that is why people try to pretend that it is, or at least behave as if they thought so. Of course you can have hard-and-fast rules if you like, but then you will have false rules, and they will lead you wrong; because their simplicity will render them inapplicable to problems which are not simple, but complicated by the play of personality.

This is the lesson of what the humanities, as opposed to the sciences, can share. We are to remember human fallibility, and appreciate that science is not the best tool for more accurate understandings of things human. Of course, this is not just the idea of the philologist - although it is fascinating to me that it is possibility the influence of the philologist (Auerbach) that shaped Gadamer's philosophical magnum opus Truth and Method, for making this very point (we remember, too, that he briefly opined in the book that he had not written it sooner to argue against false objectivism in a timely fashion). This idea of the trickiness and case-by-case discernment of the human experience is part of Plato's Socratic elenctic questioning, dialectics.

To shorthand a conclusion to this post, I will refer yet again to how Jowett describes Plato's Phaedrus as a "picture, not a system". What is more, he notes that Plato "works freely" in his writing, meaning, "which is the warp and which is the woof cannot always be determined". Science is not appropriate here: knowledge is reached through "many preparations and oppositions, both of the characters of men and aspects of truth, especially of the popular and philosophical aspect; and after many interruptions and detentions ... we arrive at ... knowledge. This is an aspect of truth which was always lost almost as soon as it was found, and yet has to be recovered by everyone for himself who would pass the limits of proverbial and popular philosophy," Jowett writes.
Finally, as an educator in today's world, I would like to point out the ubiquity of the popular - with its watered-down platitudes, laid down like (psuedo-) scientific law, like: do what it takes to get where you want, which is hardly an ideal civic ethics. In contrast to this, is Auerbach's retort to accusations that he was not methodical enough in Mimesis, and bogged down in too many particularities to be appropriately scientifically philological: "If it had been possible, I would have avoided all general terms and instead suggested ideas to the reader by the mere presentation of a sequence of passages".
Neither catechism nor multiplication table, textual analysis requires engagement of the individual in a case-by-case evaluative dialectics if one cares even the slightest about the truth of the matter (and has a flair for it: cf. can discernment be taught?)

Book in background: Boucher's 20,000 Years of Fashion. Brush: Ewansim via Deviantart.

[1] cf., "The MSS. are the material upon which we base our rule, and then, when we have got our rule, we turn round upon the MSS. and say that the rule, based upon them, convicts them of error. We are thus working in a circle, that is a fact which there is no denying; but, as Lachmann says, the task of the critic is just this, to tread that circle deftly and warily; and that is precisely what elevates the critic's business above mere mechanical labour."
Post Script: at some point, I will need to change the labels of these posts. In preparation of that, and to that end, for my convenience, I am linking here to all posts I was able to find that mention Gadamer's Truth and Method: experience-experiment; interiority-nonsense; facts-of-fiction; hands-of-tongue; beyond-myth.

Chameleons with Feelings

Part of the problem being that we cannot step outside of ourselves and see where we are going in life, to avert mistakes, or to hold the course to where the weather is clement. What is the way, one may be wont to ask, particularly if one has been, as Horace advised writers, hurried into the middle of things (festinat et in media res). Thomas Carlyle has invoked Horace's counsel, writing, "rush forward and fear nothing" - which rather brings to mind the message Nike hides in some of its running clothes: "run fast, live fearless." Except Carlyle meant action, not speed. "Be not too careful for a subject; take the one you feel most interest in", he writes to an essayist. And if we are, to some extent, the authors of our lives, perhaps affinity, with its filmish Fin implying boundaries between here and there, is a good place to start.
In the Tao Te Ching (1), we are advised to not have desires if we are to see the Way, yet to have desires to see its manifestations - which Legge translates as "its outer fringe."
I understand this to mean that there is no formula for a life, because life itself is beyond definition. In (32) we learn, in both Legge's and Lau's translations: "Only when it is cut are there names. As soon as there are names one ought to know that it is time to stop" so that one might be "free from all risk of failure and error".
I was thinking about that when I listened to social psychologist Ellen Langer, talking about the impossibility of breaking free from the names or labels people construct for each other, and how freeing it is when a single person puts into practice the platitude that there is more than one way of looking at things (and thereby people) and realises that one way of defining a person ruins the definer's view of said person: for example, a rigid person can instead be seen as a stable person. In other words, (in John Conley's description of Madeleine de Scudéry's views), prejudice can be mistaken for knowledge. Names are like photographs: accurate for one second, but not necessarily in terms of the larger picture.
 

Today as I was running, I could no longer listen to contemporary music and had been overjoyed when I discovered that I could take the France Musique programme I was listening to on the road: rather aptly called "Le Passage de Midi". The four-part programme on the kiss is exquisitely curated, and possibly not coincidentally brings to mind the heightened sensibility of the précieuses. I found myself listening to a description of Scudéry's novelistic "Carte de Tendre" or, "Map of the Country of Tenderness" as the prolific Victorian French and English literary critic George Saintsbury translates it: a map of the territory suitors traverse to find their way to love: routes leading through the villages of letters and trinkets, or through villages of patience and faithfulness - hopefully never straying into the Lake of Indifference. A metaphysical map! One thinks of Dante's voyage.
Scudéry wrote of this map in her novel Clélie, a roman à clef in which important personages of the day were disguised in classical roles, not quite as long as her other novel Artamène, with over 2 million words.
Scudéry, like Giambattista Vico later, expressed philosophical differences with Descartes for his overestimation of reason. She even wrote The History of Two Chameleons to disprove his theory that animals were soulless machines. John Conley, in his SEP article on her notes that her interpretation of the world was not only empirical but also "sympathetic" and "aesthetic": she attributes emotions to her chameleons and notes the beauty of their motions and skin.
What does she say in response to the Delphic maxim γνῶθι σεαυτόν? That the "noetic agent" can reach such knowledge only if it can reveal the need for moral conversion. One thinks back to the chameleon, and the changing names of the Way. Except this is no relativism: there is a map, and if not drawn exclusively according to Cartesian introspection, it does have borders delineated by virtue and vice.
To have desire and yet to relinquish it (as per Tao 1): rather like Scudéry's topography of the inclined suitor that can traverse villages, but is surrounded by the dangerous sea of passion, uncharted at the fringes, dipping off into the unknown. "The way is to the world as the River and Sea are to rivulets and streams." "Knowing when to stop one can be free from danger." (Tao 32)

Postscript: Saintsbury's commentary on Clélie is most charming. He writes in his History of the French Novel that he could expand the outline of that novel "(and the process would not be very painful to me) into an abstract as long as that of Cyrus; but 'It Cannot Be.'" He ends the section on the novel writing, "If I were sent to twelve months’ imprisonment of a mild description, and allowed to choose a library, I should include in it  … Clélie … By reading slowly and ‘savouring’ the process, I should imagine that, with one’s memories of other things, they might be able to last for a year. And it would be one of the best kind of fallows for the brain."
Affinities...
Scudéry herself writes, "We are born with the inclinations which heaven was pleased to give us, but we enter into the possession of praise or blame only at the moment we begin to act through reason. Up to this point, nothing is truly up to us; after that point, we are responsible for everything we do, whether good or evil. Therefore, it is up to us to see what inclinations we should follow and those we should change. Having known the true path of glory and virtue, we should walk in it despite all the repugnance we might find within ourselves."
Desire with detachment?

Brush: Misprinted type.

Getting to the Styx

"Finding one's way around" and "following one's own path does not come easily," Gadamer writes at the end of the Beginning of Philosophy. He is referring to finding one's way in the atmosphere that emerged with Heidegger, where metaphysics becomes one of the forgetfulness of being. This Being comes across in Heidegger's writings collected in Language, Poetry, and Thought as the ability to perceive higher-level metaphors, by which I mean those prompted by a feeling for mortality. He writes of the importance of such poetry to convey something other than usual, something extraordinary, alien, and that when art becomes familiar and a matter of connoisseurship, it has become business and reveals a lack of precision in the thought that meets it. When art is met by everyday language "it no longer responds to the call". Has Heidegger become familiar? At the end of Gadamer's Beginning, he concludes, "just as Plato was no Platonist, neither can Heidegger be held responsible for the Heideggerians." I have yet to be entirely sure of what Gadamer means by this, but as suggested in this paragraph, I wonder if he is not  addressing the difference of those who "respond to the call" and those who do not, though all ostensibly gathered around the same name (Plato, Heidegger).
We are urged to engage with texts, to think for ourselves, and what is more, as per Heidegger, to be venturesome, "more daring than life" and remove our nature from the realm of "procurement and production" i.e., "things that can be utilised and defended". To will more strongly than self-assertiveness - which thinks it is possible to channel the energies of physical nature to make man happy in all respects and brings a peace that is really "the undisturbed ... relentlessness of the fury of self-assertion". Self-assertive man lives by risking his nature in the vibration of money and currency of values, without knowing the true weight of things. Only "one who stands aside from actuality and  ... the collective" can see that man's dwelling is essentially and foremost poetic. Only those open to the widest orbit, to acknowledgement, to death, can reach the interior of uncustomary consciousness, beyond the arithmetic of calculation.

Speaking of calculation, Heidegger writes that measuring something unknown with rods confines this thing within a quantity and order that can always be determined. A more essential measuring is a sketch of something known indirectly only or a conflict of measure and unmeasure, illustrated by a disclosing that reveals what conceals, such as God appearing through the sky. This measure-taking gauges the in-between, which brings heaven and earth together; the rift, which carries opposites to the source of their unity due to their common ground. This is "inconvenient to the cheap omniscience of everyday opinion which likes to claim that it is the standard for all thinking".
This kind of measuring also comes up in Gadamer's Truth and Method. Similar to the "confinement" of a predetermined "order", he writes of the horizon of meaning of the statement being concealed by methodical exactness: "meaning thus reduced to what is stated is always distorted meaning". There is an aspect in "saying what one means" that is connected to "an infinity of what is not said in one unified meaning" which can be seen by comparing this to someone merely repeating what is said, or someone who takes down statements, who will invariably change the meaning of what is said, without consciously distorting it. He uses this as the premise for his argument that hermeneutics is necessary, drawing us into an event of truth. Like Heidegger, he proposes that man is first addressed before he speaks. 
Man learns to live in the speaking of language that presences through his speaking, that uses him to sound out silence, Heidegger writes. Man's home is in a disclosing that reveals what conceals it, a rift that carries opponents to the source of their unity, something alien in the sight of something familiar, a nothing that presences. Poetic projection comes from a nothing that nonetheless contains the withheld vocation of the historical man himself. Man can only truly speak if he is ready for a command that he is to be already waiting to hear.
So "finding one's way" seems to point to an attentiveness disinterested in trade, unafraid of travelling the Styx for nothing more than an anticipated command of the familiarity of life in the alien underworld. Heidegger cannot be held responsible for this conclusion.

Brush: ~surfing-ant at DeviantART. 
Book in background: Amy Butler's Midwest Modern.

Not Fool's Gold

Thomas Hardy gives a twist to what is meant by a liberal education in his description of Tess in Tess of the D'Urbervilles: "Almost at a leap, Tess thus changed ... to a complex woman. Symbols of reflectiveness passed into her face ... Her eyes grew ... more eloquent ... her soul that of a woman whom the turbulent experiences of the last year or two had quite failed to demoralize. But for the world's opinion those experiences would have been simply a liberal education." The education thus affords a straying if also an implied return to golden rules. Heeding the golden rules is difficult because their truth cannot be felt, and is implicitly easy to stray from: "'By experience,' says Roger Ascham, 'we find out a short way by a long wandering.' ... But it had not  been in Tess's power—nor is it in anybody's power—to feel the whole truth of golden opinions while it is possible to profit by them. She—and how many more—might have ironically said to God with St. Augustine: 'Thou hast counselled a better course than Thou hast permitted.'" Where education implies a striving towards ideals, liberal education allows for the (unnecessarily) prolonged empiricism of mistakes made by a sensitive soul (Tess is not just any literary character).
The passage reminded me of Vico's Heroic Mind, where university is described as the cure for students depraved by original sin, ailing in mind and soul to perfect their better nature. In this classical education, poetry is to "calm the uncontrolled turbulence of the imagination", taught alongside, for example, geometry, taught to "hold in check innate errors". Poetry is read for its representations of ideal types, wherein even the wicked, "is most beautiful, because always self-consistent, always true to itself, harmonious in all its parts." By contrast, men in real life fall short, as they are not consistent and do not cohere. Poetry is curative by sharply delineating "the pure ideal type". By comparing a difficult boss to the evil ideal, one might realise the boss's potential for good and set to work to find ways to showcase those aspects. By addressing golden rules even when showing some practical difficulties of practicing what is preached, medicine may be had for the incoherence of lives through lengthy explanation and analysis.
For example, through the character of Tess's suitor, we see how what looks new, "the ache of modernism" is but a new definition of something timeless: "advanced ideas are really in great part but the latest fashion in definition-a more accurate expression, by words in logy and ism, of sensations which men and women have vaguely grasped for centuries." The novel shows in so many ways how easy it is to get carried away: by sensations, zeitgeist.

Hardy's novel, actually, I really only want to think of the first part, is very much about how much or whether or not one can shake off even the sensation of guilt, which like other sensations roughly guides the actions and makes an incoherent mess of things.
Adding to the problem of self-mastery, by which one can learn to manage sensations, is interference by society which may insidiously stunt this learning. In Hardy's novel, it is suggested that one can even be blinded by university. Through the character of Angel, who was not Cambridge-educated like his brothers, we see its failings (though I think that implicitly we also see its success in that it was Angel who made such tragic life decisions). University produces cogs in machinery, to the church or to academia, and not the well-rounded "hero" Vico describes, who knows physics as well as metaphysics; logic as well as poetry. The university-educated brothers, "whatever their advantages by comparison with [Angel], neither saw nor set forth life as it was really lived." And in this novel, life as it is really lived is a life of mistakes.
It would seem that but few people have the strength of character to accept their mistakes and also to stand up to those who deny the legitimacy of the 'prodigal' education. It is accidental that 'prodigy' sounds so close to 'prodigal', but to play off those words, where the prodigal wastes, the prodigy makes into signs and omens, possibly through the root of aio, I say. Taking this verbal happenstance further, the true liberal education is in part narrative and very much in need of special interpretation because the character is no longer that of the ideal, but is not wasted, being one seeking the ideal, seeking to be filled in by it as much as possible given depravity. It may be that for many fool's gold is hypocritical adoption of golden precepts that does not allow for their difficult and profundity. This is not true of everyone, and certainly not true of anyone at all times, because features like the good if philippic nature of Reverend James Clare must also be explained. If gold is the timeless lessons that keep one safe, fool's gold is the ism and logy of those sensations that can't just be resolved by the mechanical rotations of newness masking through newness the various forms of mistakes and sacrifice, so unfortunately fashionable in their many guises throughout the ages.

Magazine in background: Marie Claire Idees. 
Brush: Ewansim tape at DeviantART.

Can you see what you are now looking for?

The title comes from The Sophist, 229.  It is a phrase that deserves consideration: we cannot find what we are looking for if the image is not fixed in some way.  Fully influenced by the ideas in The Sophist, I might add that if what one is looking for is not fixed, one is constantly looking for something new.
It is a very fascinating dialogue, not least because it also stresses the importance that one "take courage" in thinking (242).  This advice, here given by The Stranger, is often given in Plato's other dialogues by Socrates.  In this particular context, courage means reconsidering what I will describe as dogma.  I would like to point out that any school of thought has its dogma: the difference among such schools being which of them is willing to reevaluate their own beginnings, as is stated in Cratylus (436): "Everyone must therefore give great care and great attention to the beginning of any undertaking to see whether his foundation is right or not."
Also, the school of thought represented by Plato is respectful of all great thinker-predecessors, regardless of whether their thoughts are conceded to: in Sophist (243) The Stranger says it is harsh and improper to impute famous men of old to falsehood.  In this way, a new conclusion is reached that is somewhat of a compromise: not-being is admitted, except it is modified as not the opposite to being but just different from it (257); the attempt to separate everything from everything else is taken to show the thinker is uncultivated (259).  As stated in The Statesman, measurement is not only to be made through the relativity between greater and less but also in terms of the mean (284): in other words, and to sum up this paragraph, classification is all-inclusive while having standards.  And we are taught today that that is a contradiction! Cross-questioning is presented as "the greatest purification" (230): ideas are to be questionned.
Speaking of today, we may know of the "tremendous battle" between materialists and those who believe in the existence of ideas in the mind: between those who break truth into moving fragments calling them not existence, "violently dragging down everything into matter," and those who believe in ideas (quotes from Sophist, 246).  We see this conflict openly in the 19th century: this same battle is cited in J.C. Maxwell's poem entitled, "British Association, 1874" from which I will quote just these lines:

From nothing comes nothing, they told us, nought happens by chance, but by fate;  There is nothing but atoms and void, all else is mere whims out of date!  Then why should a man curry favour with beings who cannot exist, To compass some petty promotion in nebulous kingdoms of mist?  But not by the rays of the sun, nor the glittering shafts of the day,  Must the fear of the gods be dispelled, but by words, and their wonderful play.

Through word play, we are told in The Sophist, the sophist hides "himself in a place we cannot explore" (239). He is depicted as an imitator akin to a juggler and other such entertainers.  "Look sharp, then, it is now our business not to let the beast get away again, for we have almost got him into a kind of encircling net of the devices we employ in arguments about such subjects, so that he will not now escape to the next thing" (235). "If the sophist tries to take cover in any of the various sections of imitative art, we must follow him always" (235). At 240 we learn that the sophist feigns ignorance and only questions what is deduced by words.  Thence, the sophist - in word play taking on new lines of thought - becomes "many headed".  They are beasts because what if they imitate the figure of justice and virtue and have no knowledge of it but just a sort of opinion (267).  This talk may remind one of the minotaur in the labyrinth.
It is a battle, one is to have courage and to be willing to even question what one holds in veneration (I choose this word knowing that some dislike it, but considering that it exists even where it is claimed not to).
The sophist "runs away into the darkness of non-being, feeling his way in it by practice" i.e. through empiricism, "and it is hard to discern because of the nature of the dark place", as opposed to the philosopher who is devoted, through reason (not empiricism) "to the idea of being difficult to see because of the brilliant light of the place: the eyes of the soul of the multitude are not strong enough to endure the sight of the divine" (254).
I would like to illustrate this idea through the example of a "real" friend as opposed to the fair weather version.  Some people are very adept at disappearing when trouble is at hand.  The real friend will retain the image of the friend in trouble and remind the friend of their potential until they have mastered their circumstances.  Or, to put it another way, the real friend who is friend to themselves does not believe in the terrible appearance of a "bad" circumstance and speak poorly of it and magnify it until it becomes more terrible like in a soap opera ("for tales and falsehoods are most at home there, in the tragic life" i.e. in the life portrayed in tragedy, Cratylus 408), rather, this friend retains the image of goodness and does not:

complainingly point them out and inveigh against them, in order that their own neglect of them may not be denounced by their neighbors, who might otherwise reproach them for being so neglectful; and hence they multiply [346b] their complaints and add voluntary to unavoidable feuds. But good men ... conceal the trouble and constrain themselves to praise, and if they have any reason to be angered against their parents or country for some wrong done to them they pacify and conciliate their feelings, compelling themselves to love and praise their own people. Protagoras (346)

The eyes of the soul must be strong to perceive this.  It takes courage and I do not know that I have always seen what I was looking for.

Magazine: Marie Claire Maison.  Brush: lace by webgoddess at DeviantART.

Mid-Life Revision

Though many of my favourite books have been taken by the famished road of this life, I have managed to keep a set of letters written to me by my well-wishers: they are testament to the fact that if I was ever missing something in proximity, support was lent from afar. One letter, from an ex-Hollywood "motion pictures" director and producer, advised that I wait for the tide to come in. The letter quotes Browning's Ring and Book, a recent news story about how a grand ocean liner had to do just that, as well as the story of how bridge workers waited for the tide to come in to help them raise an otherwise impossible section. Another letter argued that if one would not get angry at a baby, one ought not feel frustration at oneself as one is learning. Plato's Meno argues similar: in it, Socrates suggests that virtue may be a divine gift—though one may become more open to it by realising one's lack thereof.
The Meno encourages one to push on in one's questioning of the 'right' way—which some deny, in fact, if I understood correctly, this is addressed in 306 of Euthydemos which may have been referring to a thinker who, while against the eristic questionning that cares not for meaning "but merely fastens on any phrase that turns up, and these are the heads of their professions today" (! 305), is also against the idea that it is worthwhile to pursue virtue, or happiness (Isocrates, Against the Sophists, 13.2). But Plato's Socrates, while always returning to notions of justice, virtue, happiness, wisdom, and so on, by no means conveys a fixed formula for the achievement of such. Euthydemos, which pits him against two brothers versed in setting the rhetorical snares of word play (that "sorcerer's art" 289), shows how even in that contentious environment, he could bring the conversation round to do what he had asked the haughty brothers to do: to demonstrate to a youth how to dedicate himself to virtue (e.g. 278, 288). The brothers admit that their style "leaves no escape" for their interlocutors (276): their ostensible success is made possible because they care not about the meaning of what they say and in fact become annoyed when Socrates tries to pin down the meaning of their words: this is the strength of the verbal traps: words are twisted (the same word is used in "opposite conditions" 278) until prey is caught. It is noted, however, that the art of speech makers does not make one happy (289) and that if one learns such tricks, one will be none the wiser (278) though such speakers may appear—to some—that they are victorious. In this context, the 'right' is presented, quietly, Socrates being attacked on all sides for taking the middle way.

The Meno demonstrates more particularly the methodology of this way. Socrates explains that he makes use of those points that the questionned person acknowledges he knows (75). (No one is to be expected to make quantum leaps... "wait for the tide.") Socrates demonstrates how to help someone "recollect" what their soul "might" (he admits he is unsure of what he says, 86b) already know: he helps a boy find the right answer through repeated questionning (81-85, esp. 84 and 85). The questions first reveal that the boy does not know what he thought he did, and from there, it is argued that through continued "joint" questionning (the questionner participating...this is the true meaning of dialogue, Gadamer writes in Truth and Method, to not know where the conversation will go—it is made anew with each new moment and with each new interlocutor), the person questionned would be able to recover the answer themselves.
Socrates argues that "the belief in the duty of inquiring after what we do know will make us better ... and less helpless than the notion that there is not even a possibility of discovering what we do now know nor any duty of inquiring after it" (86). This is a fine answer to the problem at 306 in Euthydemos.
Socrates encourages us by saying that we might discover everything the soul does not remember "if we have courage and faint not in the search" (Meno, 81). Also, we are reminded in Euthydemos that "the sport of the sciences" (278) will try to trip us up in our words. Socrates, like a Stoic in this respect, is not afraid to appear defeated.
There is much I "recollect" from Socrates, who argues in the Meno that we recollect more than learn, which is a statement that has much meaning if we consider that we are always laying the ground for what we learn, always being shocked by the "flat torpedo fish" (79, 84) of experience that shows us that we have been taking the 'wrong' approach to something. Were this "something" only intellectual, we could quickly master the word play of the brothers and be done with it. But this "something" is sometimes not even the primary matter at hand. Sometimes, for example, we have done the work but need to wait. Sometimes we might want to review how it is that we handle our interlocutors. What I "recollect" from Socrates (what I wish I had always mastered) is to demonstrate more than criticise.

Socrates is also willing to enter into the game with his interlocutors: he was ready to speak with the brothers, and be defeated, momentarily, by their absurd "sport of the sciences" which rings true even today with the sometimes phoniness of jargon or ridiculous ideas that one finds one must make apologies to. Whether he was ultimately wise in his own life is something I do not know that I have the capacity to discuss. I think that maybe sometimes our ends are just like the end in Euthydemos where Socrates looks like he is defeated, but what defeat is that, if we read his dialogues for edification even today in this jaded age. I have written before, if topically, of the Taosim in Socrates, but again I am reminded of this connection, to a passage by another Taoist book,   莊子, in 外物 (I wrote about before), 6:

Zhongni said, 'The spirit-like tortoise could show itself in a dream to the ruler Yuan, and yet it could not avoid the net of Yu Qie. Its wisdom could respond on seventy-two perforations without failing in a single divination, and yet it could not avoid the agony of having its bowels all scooped out. We see from this that wisdom is not without its perils, and spirit-like intelligence does not reach to everything. A man may have the greatest wisdom, but there are a myriad men scheming against him. Fishes do not fear the net, though they fear the pelican. Put away your small wisdom, and your great wisdom will be bright; discard your skilfulness, and you will become naturally skilful. A child when it is born needs no great master, and yet it becomes able to speak, living (as it does) among those who are able to speak.'

Just like Socrates says: we are to have courage and not faint in the search. We are not to fear the pettiness of the sport of the sciences and to do our best. We who are far less wise than Socrates or the tortoise need not fear such an end, but if difficulty is encountered, we might begin to understand that there is something natural about that, in terms of worldliness Zhongzi names "myriad".
...when the burdens come that we cannot possibly bear, then we wait for the tide. Sometimes there are necessary changes in things. Browning mentions this in The Ring and the Book. ... There are times when we are anxious to make some port of victory, to accomplish some task; but also there are times when we must "wait for the tide." But in the waiting, we are certain the tide will rise, and because of that certainty we have faith and hope.
This post is dedicated to Al Viola and Stone Woman. Also thanks to Brandon's series on Plato's dialogues.

Brush: Photography Grunge by BR7 at DeviantART.