Insignificant Wranglings

Today’s Plan:

• Mollick Responses / AI Experiments
• Some Theoretical Terms
• Fuck Plato (A Super Short History of Rhetoric)
• Ong and Literacy
• For Next Session

Some Theoretical Terms

Okay, if we are going to talk about “literacy” in the ways that Ong and I tend to do, then we are going to need a few things. First, we need to define a few terms. Second, we are going to need to talk about Plato.

Metaphysics

In short, metaphysics is a branch of philosophy that attempts to identify the absolute foundation of existence. “Meta” translates (mostly) as beyond, and thus “Meta-physics” asks questions about what exists “beyond” the physical world, what underlies it or (more commonly) transcends it. It also asks how/if we can approach said beyond.

Ontology

Ontology is perhaps the most complicated of the three terms I’ll introduce today–it also has different meanings to different disciplines. Let me start by loosely introducing “ontology” as “what one considers real” (and metaphysics as “how reality comes to be”). Why introduce them that way? Because that’s how Plato introduced them, and, as Alfred North Whitehead once quipped, “the safest general characterization of the European philosophical tradition is that it consists in a series of footnotes to Plato.” I much prefer Plato’s quip about Plato and will share that one in the next section, crudely titled “fuck Plato.” Moving on.

Plato’s ontology is metaphysical, meaning that this reality in which we live is predicated upon another, “transcendent” realm. This is generally called Idealism, Plato’s idea that the reality in which we live is a poor, pale, unfortunate, changing imitation of a richer, vibrant, amazing, immutable realm of pure idea. Everything that could ever be thought of or made already exists in this Ideal realm. The Ideal of everything that ever could exist is already imprinted in our brains at birth, and it is through the use of our brains that we rediscover them. The material world is, again, an unfortunate pile of sludge made worse by stupid people (so so many stupid people) who cannot see that they play with sludge (or shadows whatever fuck Plato) and will probably try to kill you if you tell them they are playing with sludge like they did his teacher. I am ranting a bit too much and free writing this so let me pull this together. Ontologically speaking, Plato believes that material reality is merely a signifier that points to a higher Ideal signified. We will revisit this point after you have read the Ong.

Aristotle is Plato’s student and he kind of thinks the whole transcendental Idealism thing is bullshit but doesn’t really want to say that too bluntly to his former teacher. He ends up arguing that any material entity is part material and part idea, and that the two work in correspondence to bring a thing into being (along with a context and an artisan, but I don’t have time for this today). What’s important about Aristotle is that he changes “ontology” to mean “system of classification.” This meaning still exists today (and is particularly important in computer science for teaching computers how to write). Aristotle’s ontology can be thought of as a heuristic for breaking a thing down into its parts *and* for imagining how to classify all the things (i.e., animal, vegetable, mineral, human). We are going to come back to Aristotle and how things get made/exist when we read the Heidegger essay, since Heidegger begins by asserting that modern-industrial technology desecrates Aristotle’s ontological interest in all creation-as-poesis.

This one is also tricky and has a lot of meanings depending on discipline, thinker, and context. Generically, “ethics” is almost synonymous with “morality,” (i.e., ethics is the study of moral systems, of how we decide what is good or bad). I don’t like to use ethics this way. Ethics can also mean how we actually make decisions when moral systems come into conflict or cannot provide a clear answer. Morality means the rules–but what happens when it is unclear which rule we should follow? Ethics! I like this one better (and it was how I learned the term), but most of my career has been dedicated to a different perspective on ethics–that is, ethics of alterity or of the other. That is, ethics is how we treat the stranger, a science of hospitality, an inquiry into why “otherness” can be so difficult to manage and why we are quick (often unconsciously quick) to homogenize the other into something familiar, and same, (and often the bottom of a binary that authorizes us to dismiss, order, or destroy them).

I am introducing these terms because I will (and Ong will, and Derrida will via Heidegger) argue that literacy, in its semantic operation, produces metaphysics. Literacy also produces, perhaps, Aristotelian ontology (it certainly enables it). And, ultimately, Derrida’s critique of literacy (poststructuralism)

The way we use, treat, and think about words dictates how we will treat other people and the contextual world around them and us. Full stop.

[Didn’t have time to do Episteme vs Doxa, but this seems really useful for ChatGPT]

Fuck Plato

Time is working against me. It is 12:42 and I still have to read all of your responses before class starts. So this might be quick.

I mentioned above Whitehead’s quote on Plato and my preference for Nietzsche. Let’s go:

To be attracted to the Platonic dialogue, this horribly self-satisfied and childish kind of dialectic, one must never have read good French writers — Fontenelle, for example. Plato is boring. In the end, my mistrust of Plato goes deep: he represents such an aberration from all the basic Greek instincts, is so moralistic, so pseudo-Christian (he already takes the concept of “the good” as the highest concept) that I would prefer the harsh phrase “higher swindle” or, if it sounds better, “idealism” for the whole phenomenon of Plato. We have paid dearly for the fact that this Athenian got his schooling from the Egyptians (or from the Jews in Egypt?). In that great calamity called Christianity, Plato represents that ambiguity and fascination, called an “ideal,” which made it possible for the nobler spirits of antiquity to misunderstand themselves and to set foot on the bridge leading to the Cross. (Twilight of the Idols)

Sorry to the Christians in the room. And Hitler intentionally misinterpreted this line to try and make Nietzsche appear antisemitic. He isn’t. He just really doesn’t like any form of organized religion (but, like Heidegger is a full-fledged Nazi and we’ll talk about that more when I introduce him).

One retort I have to Nietzsche–Plato isn’t boring, but dangerous. He’s dangerous because he’s authoritarian and anti-democratic. His political structure is an intellectual oligarchy, in which philosopher kings (um, him and his favorite students) have to make all decisions for all people because they are incapable of thinking through complicated problems. He also argues that parents should have their children taken away after birth and given to specialists because people are also too stupid to raise children. The historic Socrates, from what we can piece together from Plato’s early texts (particularly the “Apology”) and other writers like Xenophon (who also wrote a history of Socrates’ trial and execution), was a “sophist” who didn’t think anyone could know anything with certainty. We might say that he was an insignificant wrangler who liked to show people their own ultimate insignificance. I like that guy. In Plato’s hands, Socrates becomes an insufferable arrogant asshole who knows everything and continually mansplains things to anyone unfortunate enough to get in his path. Actual sophistic dialogue and dialectic (the idea that we should all be able to debate every side of a question in order to produce the most complexity from which we can and must draw what each of us thinks is the least-bad answer) is replaced by long monologues and short replies (as Luna and I joked Tuesday, “yes Socrates,” “no Socrates,” “what else do you think Socrates”).

And, look. There are times when I look at our current hellscape of a world and wish I could just go into the code and edit a few things and make everyone do what I think is right. But then I remember the lesson of Galadriel the Elven queen from LotR that any attempt to impose one’s vision upon the world will ultimately end in horrific violence and instead of dictating to people as if they were inferior we have to work with people who are in fact our material equals because one day we will all die and simply turn to dust. No one’s dust is better than anyone else’s, even if some folks will have done horrific things before they turned.

Why am I writing SO much about Plato before we read Walter Ong’s discussion of literacy? Let me turn to another classical philologist, Eric Havelock, and his book The Preface to Plato. I don’t have time to chase the exact quote down, but Havelock has a kind of throwaway comment in the book that, as much as Plato thought writing was bad, dangerous, and would lead people to lose the ability to think (sound familiar?), writing allowed Plato to develop his entire system of thought, and that system of thought looks a little bit like writing. That last clause is pretty tricky, and Walter Ong basically spend three decades trying to explain it. That’s the essay you will read for homework. Fin. Time: 1:06.

For Next Session

Finish reading Ong’s “Writing is a Technology that Restructures Thought” and complete Write-Up #1 (see Canvas).