Socratic Psychology

   In our current crisis of the studies and practices called psychology and psychiatry, it is possible to return to the foundations, both of this and the Western science of man, to correct a few wrong turns and to replenish the enterprise, as by the watering of roots.

   Psychology is of course the account, or –logy, of the psyche or soul and mind. As an enterprise of knowledge, or scientia, science- it has a basis that is part philosophical and part included in “natural philosophy” or material science. From the teaching of the oracle of Delphi, commanding “know thyself,” Socrates teaches in his Apology that “the unexamined life is not worth living for men” (38a). So he would go about examining his fellow Athenians, as he did the poets, politicians and statesmen. The truly useful part of modern psychology, from the “talking cure” discovered by Freud, is in our self reflection or the healing effects due to the capacity of the soul to know itself. All therapeutic enterprises are measured by their ministry to this- despite the occasional apparent benefits of deception.

   Psychology as a division of the university was just being born as the School of Athens declined and went underground in ancient Alexandrian Greece. Hence, Keats, in his “Ode to Psych,” calls her the “latest born and lovliest far/ Of all Olymopus’ faded hierarchy.”

   The most elaborate account of the soul in a Socratic writing is most likely found in Plato’s Republic, and the erotic works add significantly to what is there abstracted. But the Apology is the place to start when looking to gather principles of a psychology from this most enigmatic teacher, who always claim he knows he does not know anything worthwhile. He claims to know that human wisdom is worth little or nothing, but that divine wisdom- even that knowledge of nature sought by the natural pre-Socratic philosophers- is the possession not of man but of the God. This is the basis of what is called his moderation, and it is a principle of psychology. The mad are unable to question some first principle they may have, but have a bit wrong, often with tragic consequences.

    Another first principle of the Socratic regard for the soul is that the soul is more importand than the body. In the Apology, Socrates tells the Athenians,

I go around and do nothing but persuade you, both younger and older, not to care for bodies and money before…how your soul will be the best possible

(Apology, 30,b)

He also teaches:

Not from money does virtue come, but from virtue comes money, and all other good things for humans both publicly and privately.

Apology, 30b)

He has plenty of other more enigmatic sayings, too such as

…for to fear death is nothing other than to seem to be wise, but not to be so0. For it is to seem to know what one does not know.”

(Apology 29a)

Hence,

I do not care about death in any way at all…but my whole care is to commit no injustice or impious deed

(Apology32b)

   Other famous Socratic maxims are such as that virtue is knowledge, that the just man harms no one, and that there is no harm possible for a good man (41d) and better activity than conversing with the great and wise (41b).

   For our psychology, we ask: What is the health of the soul? It seems to know all these things about the abnormal, the dysfunctional, the maladaptive, the unprofitable and the non-compliant, we ask, what then is the proper function of the soul? What is the health of the soul? With rare exceptions, as perhaps Jung and Maslow, our psychology and psychiatry simply assume answers to these questions, and base life-altering diagnoses on these unexamined assumptions. They literally seem to mean, “you know, normal, like us,” but with all the authority of medical science. We ask: “What if justice either IS, or is necessary to, the health of the soul? If so, our entire psychology must fail from the start, due to the attempt to imitate the natural sciences and to follow the apparent conclusion of modern sociology, that all “values” are culturally relative. We get our “first principles” from common sense, tradition, philosophic ethics and fashionable opinion, and our psychologists and psychiatrists, being human, are in the same boat as all, so to speak. Every statement made by professional and our pop psychologists contains and at the same time denies making an ethical assumption, because the heath of the soul is in truth an objective basis of ethics. While, as Socrates, we cannot know this within a body of science and practice, we can make progress in the pursuit if we try, but will not if we do not try. Our suggestion is that some might spend their lives inquiring, and psychology by this make the Socratic turn, becoming philosophical.

   The two clearest statements of the principle of Socratic psychology are found in the Minos and Laws. At the end of Book I of the Laws, The Athenian Stranger says to Klinias:

This then- the knowledge of the natures and the habits of souls- is one of the things that is of the greatest use for the art whose business it is to care for souls. And we assert (I think) that the art is politics. Or what?

Kl. It certainly is.

And from Minos:

…whatever are those things which the good lawgiver and pasturer distributes to the soul in making it better?”- …but surely it is shameful for the soul of either of us to be manifestly ignorant of those things in which good and base inhere, while having investigated the things that pertain to the body and the rest!

 

(Translated by  Thomas L. Pangle, in The Roots of Political Philosophy: Ten Forgotten Socratic Dialogues, p. 66)

Reading the Allegory of the Cave

   These brief notes indicate a fuller account that can be drawn out by reading the central books of Plato’s Republic. [I have typed out a Comprehensive exam answer on the Sun, Line and Cave, “On the Philosophic ascent in Plato’s Republic,” in the WordPress menue hovering in the philosophy section.]

 

   The account may be said to begin from a point made by Seth Benardete, that there seems to be no place for political philosophy in the three images of Sun, Line and Cave. We argue that it is there, but veiled, as might be demonstrated by following suggestions in the works of Leo Strauss and Alan Bloom.

 

   The cave is “by nature.” Here: Where is the place of political philosophy in the Sun, line and cave images? Bloom: “Only by constant reference back to the divided line can one understand the allegory of the cave.” The key to the demonstration is in Book 10. What fun! Plug in the city.

 

 

   Bloom: The poetic images are to be used as the geometers use the figures they draw… Strauss: The human things are the key to understanding all things. There are no artificial things outside the cave. Man is the highest image. City and soul have the same form, in Books III-V.

 

   3/3 Draw the three images, sun, line and cave, together on the same paper. Where do the images of the poets go? And images as the the three part city and soul? Now watch the soul, as the female element is added. And at 501, the imago Dei: the cause of the laws, Genesis 9:6; 1:26.

 

   The particulars of the image are of course very important, and the account recurs at 517 and 535). There are shadows and phantoms seen in water, divine appearances in water, and such, and the things themselves, including humans. Note that the entire pattern of the line- a segmented line divided again in the same proportions- is repeated outside the cave. The account makes up what reminds of Jacob’s ladder, a pattern helpful for ascending and descending in metaphysics. To say the least, there is a bit more to Plato than linguistic universals and the originals of math.

 

    There is of course the one and the two, and within these, the philosopher and king, one king of the visible, while the good is king of the intelligible. Third from a king and virtue” is a key phrase, from Book X.

 

Tom Waits: Waltzing Matilda

Pasted from Songmeanings.com:

Wasted and wounded, it ain’t what the moon did
I got what I paid for now
See ya tomorrow, hey Frank can I borrow
A couple of bucks from you
To go waltzing Matilda, waltzing Matilda, you’ll go waltzing Matilda with me

I’m an innocent victim of a blinded alley
And I’m tired of all these soldiers here
No one speaks English, and everything’s broken
And my Stacys are soaking wet
To go waltzing Matilda, waltzing Matilda, you’ll go waltzing Matilda with me

Now the dogs are barking
And the taxicabs parking
A lot they can do for me
I begged you to stab me
You tore my shirt open
And I’m down on my knees tonight
Old Bushmills I staggered
You buried the dagger in
Your silhouette window light
To go waltzing Matilda, waltzing Matilda, you’ll go waltzing Matilda with me

Now I’ve lost my St. Christopher
Now that I’ve kissed her and the
And the one-armed bandit knows
And the maverick Chinaman, and the cold-blooded signs
And the girls down by the strip tease shows go
Waltzing Matilda, waltzing Matilda, you’ll go waltzing Matilda with me

No, I don’t want your sympathy
The fugitives say that the streets aren’t for dreaming now
Manslaughter dragnets and the ghosts that sell memories
They want a piece of the action anyhow
Go waltzing Matilda, waltzing Matilda, you’ll go waltzing Matilda with me

And you can ask any sailor
And the keys from the jailer
And the old men in wheelchairs know
That Matilda’s the defendant, she killed about a hundred
And she follows wherever you may go
Waltzing Matilda, waltzing Matilda, you’ll go waltzing Matilda with me

And it’s a battered old suitcase
To a hotel someplace
And a wound that will never heal
No prima donna, the perfume is on
An old shirt that is stained with blood and whiskey
And goodnight to the street sweepers
The night watchman flame keepers
And goodnight Matilda, too

   The Louis Armstrong voice and the drunkenness of the song is part of the brokenness, as the Matilda” is said to be the backpack of a wanderer. This replaces his dancing partner, in the trauma of a broken love that sent him on the road. The episodic stream of half rational images, too, is like muttering drunkenness, reliving the trauma that set him on the road Traubert is said to have been such a man.

   So Matilda is the emptiness where woman goes, the universal defendant in a thousand trials for the striking of the heart of every failed lover, and it is his own fault, too, dragged down by the vices that now flock to have a piece of him. But as Robert Plant says, Many, many man/ Can’t see the open road.”