Emanations

[I]t is not proper for someone to withhold what he has learned in philosophy from someone else. This would be utterly disgraceful. Indeed, just as this entire universe emanated from God for no particular advantage to Him, so too is it proper for someone who has achieved some perfection to try to impart it to someone else. In this way he is imitating God as best he can.

Levi ben Gershom (Gersonides), The Wars of the Lord, Volume One, Seymour Feldman, tr. Jewish Publication Society of America (Philadelphia: 1984) p. 97. Tamar Rudavsky has a handy article on this very Aristotelian philosopher and polymath at the SEP. I keep intending to do something here on Gersonides, but it keeps slipping my mind; something to keep in mind for next year, perhaps.

In Silence Now the Purpling Summer Passes

August
by Clark Ashton Smith

In silence now the purpling summer passes,
The swallows fly;
The failing river scantly glasses,
Where amber twilights wane,
Our dreaming kiss above the flow'rs that die...

Will love at last remain?
Ever I pray to find
(Though all the heav'ns be blind!)
The gold of love and summer in thy hair;
And breathe between thy shadowy breasts again,
In eves of autumn wind,
All flowers that failed upon a windless air.

Academic Philosophy's Homogeneity

Eugene Sun Park has an interesting article, Why I Left Academia: Philosophy’s Homogeneity Needs Rethinking:

The pressure to accept and conform to a narrow conception of philosophy was pervasive. When I tried to introduce non-Western and other non-canonical philosophy into my dissertation, a professor in my department suggested that I transfer to the Religious Studies Department or some other department where “ethnic studies” would be more welcome. When I considered exploring issues of race in my dissertation, my advisor remarked that she had always thought of Asian Americans as “basically white,” so she was genuinely surprised that I would have any desire to pursue such topics.

Underlying these remarks are highly problematic assumptions about who “we” are and what historical figures and texts comprise “our” intellectual heritage. This is certainly a complicated and contested set of issues. For the purposes of this discussion, I’ve vastly oversimplified matters with my naïve talk of West vs. East, and my use of broad categories like Asian philosophy and analytic philosophy. But one thing is absolutely clear and indisputable: “We” are no longer mostly white men of European descent. (In fact, it’s doubtful “we” were ever this.) At colleges and universities across the country, women and minorities are now frequently in the majority. While much of the rest of the academy has evolved to reflect these demographic changes, philosophy remains mired in a narrow conception of the discipline that threatens to marginalize philosophy even further.

That many academic philosophers are extremely parochial is certainly true. The only philosophers I've personally met who deny this are philosophers who would without any doubt be high on other people's lists of the preeminently parochial-minded. To some extent this is just the comfort of inertia. Modern philosophy departments were originally founded in opposition to psychology departments; they were places within the academic structure in which people could come together who thought the methods of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century psychology were misguided; they were built to provide a political counterbalance within university life to the rising influence of psychology as a field. That's simplified, but the bulk of definite early academic institutions devoted to philosophy were formed in opposition to psychology; there's a reason (to take just one obvious example) why one of the oldest and most eminent philosophy journals is called Mind. In any case, the core of the academic philosophy we have today grows out of this historical circumstance. In analytic departments one often comes across references to LEMM -- Language, Epistemology, Metaphysics, and Mind -- and the centrality of these four is due almost entirely to the early intensity with which academic philosophy opposed psychology. Those philosophers trained students who were exposed to philosophy taught this way, who continued on in the same vein, and so it went, always changing, but only slowly broadening, until the present day, in which people stick with what makes them comfortable, and what makes them comfortable is usually an advanced kind of thing that they got a taste of as undergraduates.

But there is surely more to it than inertia. One sees this in arguments about 'philosophical quality', which are almost always in reality arguments about use of resources. People clearly attack the quality of feminist philosophy or continental philosophy, for instance, because they don't want competitors to their preferred way of doing things. The attacks are rarely any good. Yes, some of the specific criticisms hit their targets, but this is easy to set up anywhere in philosophy. Analytic philosophers who dismiss continental philosophers for scientific ignorance rarely dismiss analytic philosophers talking about (say) C-fiber firings, despite the fact that the latter are practically never better informed about the actual science than the former. Indeed, I have repeatedly come across analytic philosophers who dismiss out of hand any attempt to correct them as irrelevant to their point. A couple of years back someone criticized the feminist philosophy journal, Hypatia, as too 'narrow' to be considered a first-tier philosophy journal; a criticism that in and of itself shows that the philosopher in question had never bothered actually to sit down with a few issues of Hypatia before making a judgment, regardless of whether it is a first-tier philosophy journal or not. What people are usually talking about when they speak about 'philosophical quality' is 'what I have to treat as worth part of my time'; this is why so many discussions of 'philosophical quality' so often seem to involve an extraordinary amount of ignorance and childishness. It's always unclear why philosophical quality requires self-appointed guardians, but even that aside quality can hardly arise from dogmatic parochialism, even if it occasionally does so despite it.

But it's hard to know, of course, what to do about it. Experts in East Asian philosophy will not appear in departments overnight, and often the worst offenders are people who can hardly be convinced to treat Plotinus or Rosmini seriously, much less Akṣapāda Gautama. I remember being shocked in graduate school that I had fellow grad students who didn't know the difference between Anicius Manlius Severinus Boethius and Boethius of Dacia, but the sheer naivete of that has been made more clear every year since.

Politeia (Part I: Opening Moves)

Plato's Republic hardly needs an introduction, being one of the most important and influential works of philosophy ever written. It was often referred to in antiquity as the dialogue "On Justice", and, of course, is most commonly referred to today not by its Greek name, Politeia, or Polity, but by the latinized version, 'Republic'. The dialogue is Plato's second longest (only the Laws is longer) and in antiquity was often treated as a collection of ten dialogues, one for each book. Scholars today commonly treat it as a super-dialogue formed out of previous dialogues -- earlier forms of Book I (which could stand alone and has a structure much like a standard aporetic dialogue) and Books II-V were spliced together and then developed into then ten-book dialogue we now have. This is certainly possible, and even plausible, given the significant anachronisms found throughout; but as always with such speculations, we need to keep in mind that they are speculations.

You can read Plato's Republic online in English at the Perseus Project and in French at Wikisource.

The Characters

  Socrates of Athens
Socrates is the first-person narrator.

  Glaucon, son of Ariston
Glaucon is Plato's older brother; he is also a speaking character in the Symposium and Parmenides.

  Polemarchus, son of Cephalus
Polemarchus was a fervent democrat who would later be executed by the Thirty. We have the record of what happened from Lysias, his brother, although, of course, Lysias is not a perfectly objective source. Polemarchus's house in the Piraeus is the location of most of the dialogue.

  Adeimantus, son of Ariston
Adeimantus is Plato's oldest brother; he is also a speaking character in Parmenides.

  Niceratus, son of Nicias
Niceratus is the son of the Nicias who was a character in Laches. While present, he does not speak.

  Lysias, son of Cephalus
Lysias is the same speechwriter who is discussed in Phaedrus. While present here, he does not speak.

  Euthydemus, son of Cephalus
Plato is the only early source we know who even mentions this third son of Cephalus. He is not to be confused either with the Euthydemus in Plato's Euthydemus or the Euthydemus who si the representative student of Socrates in Xenophon's Memorabilia. While present, he does not speak.

  Thrasymachus of Chalcedon
Thrasymachus was a famous orator, and is mentioned several times in Phaedrus and briefly in Clitophon. He is consistently associated with Lysias and Plato makes a great deal of his desire for money.

  Charmantides of Paeania
Very little is known about Charmantides from outside this dialogue. From a small amount of monumental evidence we can surmise that he was quite wealthy and probably almost as old as Cephalus. While present, he does not speak.

  Clitophon of Athens
This is the Clitophon of Plato's Clitophon, where he was also depicted as associating with Thrasymachus.

  Cephalus of Syracuse
Most of what we know about Cephalus comes from the speeches of his son Lysias. {{}} He ran a shield-making workshop, with many slaves; as one might expect, this was a highly lucrative business during the Peloponnesian War, and he seems to have been one of the wealthiest people in Attica. He and his sons were metics, which means they had more rights than foreigners (like Thrasymachus) but fewer than citizens.

In addition there is an unnamed slave of Polemarchus, who briefly speaks, and also apparently several other unnamed men who listen to the discussion without speaking.

Book I

Socrates opens the dialogue by narrating that yesterday he went down to the Piraeus with Glaucon to see the festival and pray to the goddess Bendis. As they were heading back to Athens, they were stopped by the slave of Polemarchus, who asked them to wait. Polemarchus, who was with Adeimantus, Niceratus, and a few others, insists that they stay, and after some banter between the two about force and persuasion, Socrates agrees. They go to Polemarchus's house, where they find Thrasymachus, Clitophon, and some others, including Polemarchus's father, Cephalus. Cephalus welcomes Socrates and chides him for not coming down to the Piraeus more often to visit, remarking that as physical pleasures vanish with old age, desire for the pleasures of conversation increase.

Socrates replies that he enjoys talking with the very old, because of their experience, and asks if old age is very difficult. Cephalus says that he often gets together with other people his age, and most of them complain about the lost pleasures of youth ("sex, drinking parties, feasts, and the other things that go along with them" (329a). Others complain about how poorly the elderly are treated. But, Cephalus holds, the real problem is just the way people live. If people live in a way that is orderly and contented (kosmioi kai eukoloi), the burdens of age are bearable; if they live immoderately, both youth and age are unbearable. Socrates remarks that most people would think that Cephalus could only say this because he was very wealthy. Cephalus replies that facing old age while poor is very difficult, but that having wealth does not automatically make one's old age better.

Socrates remarks that Cephalus doesn't seem excessively devoted to money, and asks what the greatest benefit of being wealthy is. Cephalus, admitting again that most people wouldn't agree with him, says that as you get old, you begin to think about Hades, and about the potential consequences of having lived a life of injustices. Being wealthy helps you to avoid deceiving people and to pay back what you owed to men and to gods.

Socrates asks whether justice just is telling the truth and paying what you owe, noting that you do not give a friend a weapon you borrowed if they are out of their mind. But Polemarchus jumps in and says that this is exactly what it seems to be, quoting the famous line in Simonides about how justice is rendering what is due to each. Cephalus leaves to do sacrifices, and Polemarchus takes over his role. After some questioning, Socrates elicits from Polemarchus that he takes this to mean that we should benefit friends and harm enemies (cp. Clitophon). This makes the just the same as the appropropriate and fitting (opheilomenon kai prosekon); but the further question is, for what? After some discussion, Polemarchus says money (331b), but this just runs into similar problems, leading to the apparent conclusion that justice is the skill that governs using money when you aren't using it as money, which doesn't seem a particularly important skill, and, moreover, it seems to bring us to the conclusion that the just person would make a good thief (cp. Hippias Minor). Polemarchus agrees that this is not what he intended, but insists that justice is benefiting friends and harming foes. But this runs into the obvious problem that we could be friends with unjust people and enemies to just people, due to being mistaken; and thus justice would in those cases including harming just people. So it seems we must say that justice is benefiting the just and harming the unjust. Socrates goes on to argue, however, that it is never just to harm anyone, and suggests that whoever came up with the idea that justice involved harming one's enemies was probably a "wealthy man who believed himself to have great power" (336a).

At this point Thrasymachus hurls himself into the conversation (336b-c):

What nonsense have you two been talking, Socrates? Why do you act like idiots by giving way to one another? If you truly want to know what justice is, don't just ask questions and then refute the answers simply to satisfy your competitiveness or love of honor (philotimou). You know very well that it is easier to ask questions than to answer them. Give an answer yourself, and tell us what you say the just is. And don't tell me that it's the right (to deon), the beneficial (to ophelimon), the profitable (to lousiteloun), the gainful (to kerdaleon), or the advantageous (to sympheron), but tell me clearly and exactly what you mean; for I won't accept such nonsense from you.

Socrates says that clever people like Thrasymachus should not be hard on unclever people like them, and Thrasymachus laughs, saying that this is just Socrates' usual irony (eironea) or deceptiveness, and that he bet some others earlier that if Socrates were put on the spot to answer questions, he would slip into irony just to avoid doing so. Socrates responds that it's difficult to answer questions if Thrasymachus insists on eliminating all the likely answers beforehand rather than letting him answer in the way that turns out to be true after investigation. Thrasymachus in turn complains that Socrates wants to avoid teaching, instead preferring to learn from others without being grateful. But the others involved, especially Glaucon, convince Thrasymachus to give his own account of justice.

The account, of course, is well-known: justice is nothing other than what is advantageous (to sympheron) to the stronger. Different cities have different regimes; in each of these regimes there is some ruling power. Justice is what is advantageous to the ruling power. Socrates, of course, recognizes that this is one of the forbidden answers, with 'to the stronger' attached; so he focuses in on this modification. Ruling powers are capable of erring, even about what is advantageous to themselves; but this means there can be cases of conflict, e.g., it is advantageous to the ruler to be obeyed but the ruler may command something disadvantageous to the ruler. Polemarchus is very impressed by this argument; Clitophon is not. The two square off, with Clitophon insisting that what Thrasymachus holds is that the advantageous to the stronger is whatever the stronger thinks is advantageous. Thrasymachus denies that this is what he means, because someone who is in error is not one of the stronger insofar as he errs.

Socrates then argues that in every other craft (techne), the craft is advantageous to what is less powerful or weaker than the craft itself -- medicine has power over the body and works for its advantage, etc. Thrasymachus responds that shepherds and cowherds tend sheep and cows for their own good, or their master's good, not for the good of the sheep and the cows. Likewise, justice benefits the stronger and harms the weaker. In business it is unjust men who come away wealthier, not just men. In taxes it is the just who end up paying, not the unjust. In subsidies it is the unjust who get the funds, not the just. Just people in public offices find that their private affairs suffer because their public responsibility hampers their ability to maneuver for their benefit and the benefit of their friends; unjust people thrive because they ignore any responsibility that does hamper them in this way. Thus, says Thrasymachus, "A person of great power outdoes everyone else" (344a). (This single sentence, ton megala dynamenon pleonektein, introduces one of the most important ideas of the dialogue, that of pleonexia, the craving for more and more, which Plato regards as the root of injustice.) Thrasymachus concludes:

Those who reproach injustice do so because they are afraid not of doing it but of suffering it. So, Socrates, injustice, if it is on a large enough scale, is stronger, freer, and more masterly than justice. And, as I said from the first, justice is what is advantageous to the stronger, while injustice is to one's own profit and advantage. (344c)

All of this is quite important, and the ideas raised by Thrasymachus will be considered throughout the dialogue. Socrates replies that he is unpersuaded by it, however. He asks if rulers rule willingly, which Thrasymachus says that they do. But in every other craft, people don't rule just for the sake of ruling, but for some benefit, because it is the ruled that benefit from the craft. If we are talking about the shepherd, the sheep benefit just from the shepherd's being a competent shepherd, regardless of whether the shepherd gets anything out of it or not. Any benefit for the shepherd has to be added on.

Socrates proposes that love of money (philargyron) and love of honor (philotimon) are despised by decent people when it comes to matters of rule. Since the craft of ruling would not benefit the ruler, and since decent people would refuse to be regarded as ruling if it meant being seen as money-grubbing or attention-whoring, decent people have to be compelled to rule. But what could compel a decent person to take up politics? Only the fact that it is a terrible burden to be ruled by someone less just than yourself. Thus it still seems to be the case that justice is not what is advantageous to the stronger. But Thrasymachus in his argument has raised an even more important question, because his argument for his thesis involved claiming that the unjust life was better than the just life. He asks which life Glaucon would consider better, and Glaucon replies that he regards the just life as more profitable.

Socrates asks whether Thrasymachus considers justice a virtue and injustice a vice, and Thrasymachus denies both, since injustice is profitable and justice is not. Those who are unjust and can bring whole cities under their sway are in fact competent (phronimoi) and good (agathoi). Injustice on such a scale is splendid (kalon) and strong (ischyron). Socrates asks whether a just person wants to outdo (pleon echein) the unjust person, but not the just person, according to desert, and Thrasymachus says he does, and also says that the unjust person thinks he deserves to outdo (pleon echein) everyone. On the basis of this, Socrates argues that it is in fact the just person who is competent, because competent people in every other field are not interested in outdoing the competent but the incompetent: it is always the competent who make differentiations in what people deserve, and you consistently find that the people who think they deserve more than anyone else are actually incompetent. This argument makes Thrasymachus blush. Socrates goes on to argue that the just are stronger than the unjust because they work together and the unjust are constantly making enemies of men, of gods, and even of themselves. Thus it is justice that is the virtue and injustice that is the vice.

Thus what remains is to look at whether the just have better (meinon) and happier (eudaimonisteroi) lives than the unjust. Socrates thus argues that in everything else, what corresponds to virtue/excellence is what performs its work well, so that what is virtuous for the soul (psyche), i.e., whatever it is that makes us alive, is what makes it so that we live well. But since justice is the virtue, it is what makes us live well, not injustice, and since nobody regards it as profitable to live badly, justice is more profitable (lysitelesteron) than injustice.

Thrasymachus essentially concedes the argument to Socrates, although obviously without being convinced, but Socrates notes that he is not satisfied. Rushed on by the argument, none of the points he mentioned were discussed adequately, and the especially important point is that they never actually determined what justice was, and without knowing what justice is, they can't seriously know whether it is a virtue or makes anyone happy.

And thus ends Book I. One of the things that makes the Republic as long as it is, is that no major issue raised will fail to be woven into the whole tapestry by the end; quite literally everything will find its place -- even side comments will bloom to fruition later.

  Additional Remarks

* The Piraeus is about five miles away from Athens proper, although the walk is entirely within the Long Walls:

"Lange Mauern". Licensed under Public domain via Wikimedia Commons.

* It is perhaps notable that, just as in the dialogue Clitophon, Clitophon spends most of the dialogue not listening to Socrates and getting what Socrates has previously said wrong, so here he gets Thrasymachus wrong, too, since (as Polemarchus notes) he attributes to Thrasymachus something Thrasymachus does not actually say. And when asked by Socrates, of course, Thrasymachus himself denies that Clitophon's statement is what he means. It seems that this has to be deliberate: Clitophon gets everyone wrong, whether he's talking Socrates in Clitophon or Thrasymachus in the Republic.

* The discussion between Thrasymachus and Socrates, of course, echoes (or is echoed by) the discussion between Callicles and Socrates in Gorgias; but the two dialogues take the basic points in rather different directions. Rachel Barney, in her excellent SEP article on Callicles and Thrasymachus, notes that the kinds of views put forward by both seem to be found elsewhere, e.g., in the works of Antiphon the Sophist, and suggests that the positions put forward by Callicles, Thrasymachus, and Glaucon (when Glaucon reformulates Thrasymachus's position in Book II) can be seen as part of a systematic attack on this influential position:

Antiphon's text and meaning are unclear at some crucial points, but the idea seems to be that the laws of society require us to act against our own interests, by constraining our animal natures and limiting our natural desires and pleasures; and that it is foolish to obey these laws when we can get away with following nature instead. Without wanting to deny the existence of other contemporary figures working similar terrain, we can easily read Callicles, Thrasymachus and Glaucon as Plato's analysis of Antiphon into three possible positions, distinguished in order to clarify the complex philosophical options involved in the immoralist challenge. Thrasymachus represents the essentially negative, cynical and debunking side of the immoralist stance, grounded in empirical observations of the ways of the world. At the same time his idealization of the ‘real ruler’ suggests that this is an unstable and incomplete position, liable to progress to a Calliclean ‘heroic’ form of immoralism. Callicles represents immoralism as a new morality, dependent on the contrasts between nature and convention and between the strong and the weak. Glaucon shows that immoralism can do without the latter: we are all complicit in the social compact which establishes law as a brake on self-interest, and we all have every reason to cheat on it when we can.

Thus the Republic when paired with Gorgias constitutes a full-scale attack on all the major ways one could go about holding the position that might makes right, or any position equivalent to it. It is this, combined with Plato's ingenuity as a writer, that has made the Republic the classic it is: nowhere else do you find such an intense defense of civilization against the idea that repeatedly threatens to destroy it.

Crowned, Girdled, Garbed and Shod with Light and Fire

Christopher Marlowe
by Algernon Charles Swinburne

Crowned, girdled, garbed and shod with light and fire,
Son first-born of the morning, sovereign star!
Soul nearest ours of all, that wert most far,
Most far off in the abysm of time, thy lyre
Hung highest above the dawn-enkindled quire
Where all ye sang together, all that are,
And all the starry songs behind thy car
Rang sequence, all our souls acclaim thee sire.
"If all the pens that ever poets held
Had fed the feeling of their masters' thoughts,"
And as with rush of hurtling chariots
The flight of all their spirits were impelled
Toward one great end, thy glory--nay, not then,
Not yet might'st thou be praised enough of men.

A Philosophical Bendideia (Re-Post)

Since I'm gearing up to go through the Republic for the Plato/Xenophon project, I thought I would re-post this comment from two years ago.

Plato's Republic is notable because it doesn't take place in Athens itself. It occurs in the Piraeus, which was the very nearby docktown serving as home for the formidable Athenian navy. When people are setting out the background for the Republic, they often emphasize the fact that it was considered the sort of place reputable Athenians would rarely go; it was crawling with Thracian foreigners, and had the sort of reputation docktowns often do. So what is Socrates doing in the Piraeus? The answer lies with the Thracians.

The Thracians had a moon goddess, called Bendis, a very wild sort of goddess. Due to an oracle given at Dodona, the Athenians had established a shrine for her. Both the Athenians and Thracians had festivities devoted to her, and in the fifth century these festivities, while still remaining distinct, had become so popular that the day was made an official holiday, the Bendideia. While Thracians and Athenians had distinct processions, the festival was given full ceremonial backing by the state. In the beginning of the Republic Socrates tells us has gone down to the Piraeus with Glaucon for the very first such holiday, to see how it would be celebrated.

"I was delighted with the procession of the inhabitants," he says; "but that of the Thracians was equally, if not more, beautiful." After seeing the processions and making their prayers, Socrates and Glaucon begin to head back to Athens, but are stopped almost immediately when young Polemarchus has a servant physically grab Socrates's cloak (not the last time in the dialogue that Polemarchus will stop someone with a grab). Polemarchus is at the festival with a group of young men, including Adeimantus and Niceratus. Polemarchus insists that Socrates and Glaucon remain -- indeed, he jokingly threatens to force them to stay because they are outnumbered. When Socrates still refuses, Adeimantus points out that there are evening festivities -- especially a horseback relay race with torches. And Polemarchus dangles the last bit of bait by saying that a whole group of young people are going to be getting together to talk, so Socrates and Glaucon stay, and the rest of the dialogue occurs in Polemarchus's house.

Commentators have occasionally speculated as to the significance of this elaborate set-up. Descending and ascending end up being important concepts throughout the dialogue, most strikingly in the Allegory of the Cave, and sosome have suggested that there is an important significance to the fact that Socrates and Glaucon descend to the Piraeus, and this seems to be plausible. Others have suggested that there is an irony, since Socrates will be charged later with worshipping foreign gods, that the whole scene is a festival in which a foreign god is given official recognition. Others have suggested a sharp contrast between the wild revelry of the barbarian festival and the civilized topic of the discussion.

There is probably something to all this, although it's hard to know how far to take it. But I would suggest that, at the very least, there is something else going on. I mentioned that Socrates says that the procession of the Thracians is just as beautiful as the procession of the Athenians, if not more so, and that Bendis was a Thracian goddess. The Thracians are mentioned explicitly one more time in the dialogue:

Must we not acknowledge, I said, that in each of us there are the same principles and habits which there are in the State; and that from the individual they pass into the State?--how else can they come there? Take the quality of passion or spirit; it would be ridiculous to imagine that this quality, when found in States, is not derived from the individuals who are supposed to possess it, e.g., the Thracians, Scythians, and in general the Northern nations; and the same may be said of the love of knowledge, which is the special characteristic of our part of the world, or of the love of money, which may, with equal truth, be attributed to the Phoenicians and Egyptians.

Notice that the Thracians are associated with "the quality of passion or spirit" while "the love of knowledge" is associated with the Athenians. The love of knowledge, of course, is closely associated with reason. And the quality of passion or spirit here is thumos (or thymos, depending on how you transliterate it). It's hard to translate; 'spirit' in the sense of 'spirited' is very close, which is why it is usually used, but it's our drive for exaltation, honor, eminence, glory. Thumos is important in the Republic, and what is notable is that much of the dialogue is concerned with arguing that justice in human beings requires a particular relationship between thumos and reason. One sees this, for instance, in Socrates's many-headed image of man: we have a human head, a lion head, and a many-headed monster. The human head is our reason; the heads of the many-headed monster are our passions; and the lion head is our thumos. Left to themselves the heads of the many-headed monster will terrorize the human head and, because they have no unity will drive a human being every which-way. But if the human head and the lion head work together, they can intimidate the many-headed monster, giving it unity and order. Other examples of the important relation between reason and thumos can be found.

It's significant, then, that the Thracians, who are associated with thumos, and the Athenians, who are associated with reason, are joined together in the festival: they remain distinct, but they both play a part. And, remember, Socrates said that the procession of the Thracians was a part of the festival just as beautiful as that of the Athenians. The Piraeus, with its heavy mixture of Athenians and Thracians, on the Bendideia, the day that is most due to the mixing of Athenian and Thracian culture, is the perfect setting for a dialogue in which the relation between thumos, represented by the Thracians, and reason, represented by the Athenians, plays a key role. Even if we read a sort of implicit disapproval of the revelry and foreignness of the festival (I think it, like Plato's disapproval of democracy, is often exaggerated), it is surely an ironic disapproval, because the foreign revelry is itself a sort of picture of what the Republic proposes. From the very beginning, the very way in which the dialogue is set, we know that the what the Platonic Socrates is proposing here is a philosophical Bendideia, the idealized truth of which the Bendideia itself is a crude picture.

Anti-Natalism at the Limit

John Danaher discusses an interesting recent argument from suffering by Dagfinn Sjaastad Karlsen:

(1) There exists an omnipotent, omniscient, and morally good Creator (a ‘true God’).
(2) Beings who suffer have been caused to exist.
(3) A true God meets any requirement entailed by benevolence.
(4) Benevolence requires that harm be avoided unless its avoidance implies greater harm or deprivation of benefits that outweigh the avoided harm.
(5) The never-existent cannot be deprived.
(6) The falsity of (2) avoids harm.
(7) The falsity of (2) entails no harm discouraged by benevolence, nor any deprivation of benefits (from (5)).
(8) A true God could have caused (2) to be false (from (1)).
(9) Benevolence requires that (2) be false (from (4), (6), and (7)).

What's called benevolence here is what's usually called nonmaleficence; this would be a purely stipulative matter except for the fact that nonmaleficence is very often considered only a presumptive or prima facie obligation capable of being overridden by more robust moral principles, showing that the argument is assuming that there are no other relevant moral principles on the table. Karlsen assumes that the only or even most obvious way to reject (3)+(4) is to take divine goodness to be 'inscrutable', but this is very obviously false; there are a lot of different ways one could go here; (4) is not as innocent of presuppositions as it is taken to be. Giving someone a free immense and ongoing benefit in exchange for having risked (and, as it happens, received) a painful papercut today would violate 'benevolence' understood in this way: the only reason (4) allows for harm not being avoided (note that it is not 'harm being caused' but the much weaker 'harm not being avoided') is avoiding worse harm or an overweighing deprivation of actual benefits. (If one were to interpret it as allowing not giving the immense and ongoing benefit as deprivation of benefits, it wrecks validity of the argument, because (6)+(7) would no longer cover all the options that need to be considered to draw a conclusion. Thus it has to be deprivation of benefits already in hand, and not deprivation of future benefits.)

Karlsen states flat-out, "The primary objective of morality is to avoid harm." While it is uncontroversial that this is an objective, Karlsen actually needs it either to be the only objective or the primary objective in such a way that it can never under any circumstances or conditions be subordinated to another objective. That is, simply holding that it is the usually-most-important of many objectives is too weak, because then (3) would immediately be in doubt -- perhaps there are exceptions to the requirements of benevolence consistent with being morally good.

What (4) is effectively doing in the argument is making it so that one is not allowed to consider what benefits might follow from existence or non-avoidance of harm. Take a very simple example like letting one's children play a sport. Letting one's children play a sport is not avoiding harm; the risks of harm involved in playing a sport are many, extensive, and ineliminable from the game. In sports people will occasionally get hurt and, again, (4) does not require that one be causing the harm oneself, but only that one not be avoiding the harm. (This interpretation is not only the most obvious interpretation of the words, it is required by (8)'s having any function in the argument. (4) in this argument requires that one avoid harm not just by not causing it but also by eliminating risks for it.) It is almost never going to be the case that not letting your children play sports implies greater harm or deprivation of benefits than a serious sports injury; there are plenty of children who do just fine not getting anywhere near sports, and while one makes the worst sports injuries as rare as possible, the only way to avoid them entirely is not to let any children play sports ever. Now we see here a case where at the very least where people in fact regularly consider the benefits of non-avoidance of harm in their reasoning, and, indeed, clearly think it is defective not to do so. But even if we set that aside, while we could obviously discuss the prudence of the options on the table, is it really a violation of the requirements of benevolence to allow one's children to participate in activities with a risk of harm on any other grounds at all except to avoid greater harm or deprivation of benefits in hand? Are we really all committed by the requirements of morality to strict tutiorism? There are excellent reasons to reject such an idea, and, in fact, the number of serious views in ethics consistent with it are very, very few.

So the argument seems to run into problems from the get-go. It's worth noting, incidentally, that the argument overall is in fact simply an anti-natalist argument taken to its limit. Anti-natalism is a philosophical position that is, as they say, trending upward. The reason that Karlsen's argument runs into this problem is simply that anti-natalist arguments usually do. It's relatively easy to argue that people should be cautious about having children; it is remarkably difficult to argue that everyone has presumptive or prima facie obligation not to have children, and the arguments for such obligations usually depend on highly controversial ethical assumptions. Karlsen needs something even stronger than this sort of prima facie anti-natalism; and, in fact, his argument is a rigorously anti-natalist argument, requiring that no one procreate (which is a non-avoidance of harm involving causing beings who suffer to exist) if they can at all help it. The reason (4) ends up being odd the way it is, is that it's the way Karlsen is getting something like the asymmetry central to rigorously anti-natalist arguments like David Benatar's; it is a way to avoid the question of whether a being who suffers in any way can also have a genuinely good life.

This, of course, is all not even getting into the vexed question of whether (5) is true. However, the primary questions about (5) are really questions about (4), as well. (5) is clearly not true as a matter of how 'deprived' is used in colloquial speech, so the question is whether it still turns out to be true in whatever very specific sense is required to make (4) true, assuming it can be made true.