the Concept of Irony

&& (I have to figure out how to make the paragraph sign on this computer. Anyway, I imagine that thinking of information as a commodity is itself a fairly modern phenomenon... though to further support what you were saying - the belief that I universities one can or should diminish the traditional master/ student relationship as one between a person who knows and explains to one who is ignorant and listens probably does go together with a sense of knowledge as being something cheap and easy to come by. Having sessions where students who have not yet learned to read carefully and have little frame of reference with which to analyze texts talk at length about what they felt and thought while reading the text does for me in some way fit with blogging, surfing the net, commenting on whatever and picking up factoids and opinions from various sources... when I was a student myself I remember feeling like my time was wasted when the floor was given too often to classmates, many of whom had nothing valuable to contribute. Everything has gone democratic. Why pay or work for expertise when everyone is an expert?
As for what you wrote in your last post about your professor's 'myth', I'm not so sure I understood the myth itself, which makes it difficult to say anything about your criticism of it. I'm not sure exactly where he's drawing his lines, so I can't say if they should be fuzzier, and the one thing I can say is that the way you described his position, it certainly did seem simple and of dubious value. While it doesn't feel in the least bit presumptuous to me for a philosopher to speculate about the nature of Being and perception and so forth, once philosophers get to talking about other sciences and disciplines, I get suspicious... just as you seem to do. But even then, something like Foucault talking about epistemological shifts seems okay to me - he might not be right, there's some sloppiness in the initial formulation, but it can be argued with and modified, and there was a lot of work done in archives underlying his initial claims - he did, after all, have his Ph.d. in one of the social sciences, and it was the social sciences that he began by critiquing. But just as when you began talking about how knowledge is valued in our society, I feel like I'm drifting into a region where I'm outside of what humble competence I might have.)

Anyway, on to my actual subject. I haven't been writing lately in part because the paper I'm writing is finally taking shape, and why write casually and badly about what I'm already trying to write rigorously and well elsewhere? Why do violence to my twenty-page thought (which actually ought to be longer), by cutting it down to one? I've often mentioned my own feeling of unease when I sense I'm misrepresenting the thoughts of people or books I'm chatting about, but it's kind of worse to feel I'm misrepresenting and diminishing my own thoughts. Nevertheless, I'll say a few things about what I'm writing, because that's pretty much all I'm reading and thinking about at the moment (though the weekend was spent listening to more than twenty speakers at a very long conference I helped organize, and teaching is taking a lot out of me at the moment). It shouldn't be a surprise to you that I ended up making my Sade paper revolve around a comparison between Blanchot's reading of Sade and Kierkegaard's interpretation of Socrates. Just as makes Sade synonymous with pure negation, Kierkegaard defines Socrates, or socratic irony, as pure negation. In both cases negation is defined in opposition to Hegel (though young Kierkegaard is much more Hegelian than Blanchot). Kierkegaard tries to maintain a strict distinction between Socrates and Plato (he's dismissive of Xenophon and admires Aristophanes, but, of course mostly uses Platonic dialogues, particularly the Apology, the Symposium and the Phaedo). In order to attain ideality, it is necessary first to negate the actual. In Plato, this negation is a starting point from which the Idea can be attained. For Socrates, the idea exists merely as a boundary. The destruction of the actuality is the goal of all Socratic thought. It is an infinite movement, but void of content. Negativity itself becomes absolute. It would initially seem that in Blanchot, no similar opposition can be set up (the short little description I just gave will give a sense of how much of Hegel is left in Kierkegaard - though I Socrates' own thought the negative is not just a moment in the accomplishment of work, of the negative giving birth to the positive, in world-historical terms, Socrates is seen as the negative moment that gave birth to Plato (and the cynics, etc.) as a new positivity. Still, Blanchot describes literature as a sort of constant self-erasure. Literary writing is, for him, always trying to return to the negative space of pure possibility... what the writer creates is a translation which is necessarily faithful because that which he is translating from, the dark space preceding creation, has no proper existence before being translated... it has no characteristics of its own, no set identity. It would be lost if not translated. Each writer brings to light a specific dark of night, which is, properly speaking, nothing. Nevertheless, that specific nothing, that silence, that space of possibility is what interests the writer more than what he has written (which has become something and gained characteristics, positive content). I could go on, but you probably get enough of the point. The main thing here is that, self-devouring as literature may be in Blanchot's description, and as shaky as the writers positive content may be in comparison with Plato's ideas which at times seem so clear and so close in certain dialogues, it is still aiming at a sort of ideality. Though Sade is mentioned by Blanchot as the writer par excellence at one point, Sade is unique in that the destruction of actuality, for him as for Socrates, appears as an end in itself rather than a point of departure. As with Socrates, Sade deals with the infinite/ absolute, and as with Socrates it is an infinite movement which stops short of ideality and doesn't appear to strive for positive content of any sort.
In a sense, I suppose that's my central argument. Everything else is used to add nuance, make the argument more convincing, give examples, etc. A couple of times you've brought up Derrida's 'Plato's pharmacy', which I might actually incorporate into the paper briefly to deal with the Blanchot quote about the demon of writing possessing Sade and Socrates... as it's the only place in the books I'm dealing with where the two men are brought together, I kind of have to bring it up and do something with it... I also have to talk about freedom in relation to negation since that's a constant theme in Blanchot, and just slightly less in the Kierkegaard. I have to admit I hadn't read the Derrida article when we started the blog, and I'm still not finished... I think its an amazing piece, and I hope I'll find a chance to discuss it here.
I'll be very interested to hear what your thoughts are on this post, but please don't be too brutal. Though these ideas are in a rough form here, unlike every other entry I've made, this actually has reached the phase of things I'm developing that sort of matter.

a genealogical myth of philosophy

I read something by my supervisor that struck me as problematic, but I can't quite put my finger on what I find wrong with it, so it might not be a bad idea to air some of the grievances.

He begins the paper with a Heidegger-inspired "genealogical myth of philosophy." Heidegger-inspired in the sense that it draws on Heidegger's distinction between ontic sciences, regional ontologies, and fundamental ontology. The idea is that there are various ontic sciences that go about interrogating particular kinds of beings: living beings in the case of biology, rocks in the case of geology, and so on. We're driven to interrogate entities because we want to understand their nature better: we want to know what kinds of entities there are. These ontic sciences all operate within a particular framework, a set of assumptions about what questions there are, how we should go about asking them, what basis of knowledge we all agree on, and so on. In Kuhnian terms, normal science operates within a paradigm. Call this paradigm a regional ontology. Occasionally, problems will arise that will make people start questioning the regional ontology. That's largely what philosophers do: philosophers of science aren't doing science but are doing regional ontology, where they question the framework within which the ontic science takes place. The Heideggerian step is then to ask what we're presupposing in doing our regional ontologies. This question then leads us back to fundamental ontology and Heidegger's beloved Question of Being.

Now, there are a few things that trouble me about this. Perhaps the central concern is that he calls this a "genealogical myth" because obviously it's not meant to be a rigorous description of how knowledge or science or philosophy or inquiry actually work, but rather a framework for thinking about it. A regional ontology for philosophy, if you will. But I can't help but think it's a bit sloppy and lazy to introduce something while granting it's far from rigorous, but then move on to other things without returning to question its assumptions. And my suspicion isn't just that it's drawing neat lines where things are far messier, but that it actually is a bad myth, it distorts matters in a number of important ways. Though I'm not sure I'm quite succeeding in putting my finger on how.

One simple objection is just that lines are far fuzzier than this myth suggests, though I suspect the use of "myth" was meant to grant that point. It can only have bite if I can show that these fuzzy lines are too fuzzy to make the distinctions worth drawing. But, for instance, it's not like scientists never question their paradigms. "What is life?" is as much a biological question as a philosophical one. And indeed, many of the people working in the "regional ontologies" of philosophy of biology or philosophy of physics are scientists first and foremost rather than philosophers. My uncle, a chemistry professor, once remarked to me that philosophers tend to come up with very simplistic notions of what it means to do science because they've never really done it themselves, and it takes many years of working in the sciences to really have a clear notion of what goes on in the sciences.

Not just do I think the hierarchical distinctions are problematic, I also think that a three-tiered hierarchy groups together things that don't really belong together. Mulhall talks about different regional ontologies, giving the philosophy of religion and the philosophy of science as two examples. But are they really the same sorts of things, and more important, are science and religion really two commensurable "ontic sciences"? The myth I gave above--recapitulating his own--gives a scientific example, where it's easier to operate within the simple assumption that scientists are in the business of accumulating knowledge and that this accumulation can then be interrupted by questioning the overall framework. I'm not sure the same accumulation of knowledge occurs in any non-scientific field. What's the "ontic science" of religion in the business of doing? Science isn't one way of answering our curiosity about the world; it's the way of doing so. My interest in art or religion isn't provoked by a question of "what sorts of entities are there in the world?" but by entirely different kinds of question altogether.

This problem become more acute when we consider various ontic sciences deal with different kinds of entities, so that regional ontologies are asking the question of what it means for something to be an entity of that nature. He writes that philosophy of science asks what it is for something to be material, philosophy of mind asks what it is for something to be mental, philosophy of religion for something to be divine, and so on. That strikes me as bizarre on a number of levels. Firstly, I haven't done much philosophy of science, but I've done enough to know that "what is it for something to be material?" isn't a question they ask. That's a question for the metaphysicians. And also, it further reinforces this suggestion that the material, the mental, and the divine are just three different kinds of entities, which sounds all right if you're Descartes, but sounds very odd to a more contemporary ear. It takes some unnecessary reification and grouping together of apples and oranges to insist that there are divine or aesthetic entities just like there are material entities.

I also think this genealogical myth would be inimical to Wittgenstein, who's one of Mulhall's other great heroes. Wittgenstein explicitly rejects the notion of a "second-order philosophy," which is what fundamental ontology sounds like on this picture. And he was also very clear that he wasn't doing anything connected to science. Nor did he take himself to be interrogating entities. This might be Heidegger's genealogical myth of philosophy, but I don't know how much we can extend it beyond Heidegger.

Anyway, I don't know if any of this sounds like sound criticism to you. I don't feel I've quite put my finger on what troubles me about this genealogical myth, but I do find it problematic.

Writing, what inspires us, and the future of print media

I've noticed that you begin each post with some remark about how scattered your thoughts are and how you're unable to say any of the things you want to say, and then reflect on how this blog is really meant as a conversation anyway and not a forum for polished thoughts. I very much sympathize, and I might add my own temptation to begin each post with an apology for how long it's taken me to write anything. But maybe we could save keystrokes by inventing a shorthand. For instance, instead of writing "my thoughts are all scattered and I haven't had time to order them, so this is all a bunch of chaotic nonsense, but I suppose this blog is supposed to me more of a conversation anyway" you could just type "§" and I would understand what you mean. Or we could even put it in degrees, so that, depending on the intensity of your feelings about your crapness, you could either write §, §§, or §§§.

This one comes very late. I'll give it a §§§.

Hopefully I'll manage to say a few things in response to you and then reflect on something I read far too long ago now in a separate post.

I'm interested that you say that this blog isn't an instance of what Plato means by writing, since it's a dialogue, and since we can quite actively defend ourselves in it. I wonder if Plato felt the same way about writing in dialogue form, that he'd somehow managed to find a literary form that doesn't have literature's weakness. I somehow doubt that. First, because "yes, Socrates"/"indeed, Socrates"/"I couldn't agree more, Socrates" hardly represents vigorous counter-argument. But also because writing is different from speech for more reasons than just that the writer isn't present to defend it. Writing also lasts, and can be read by anyone who can read at any time and place that the piece of writing is available. I can defend what I say to you in one of these posts (though even there, it's a much more distended project than a real conversation), but other people can read this blog, and you could presumably return to what I've written years later--after I'm dead, even--and continue to interrogate the text. I have much more limited control over where my words go. The text has a life that's separate from its author in that sense. I suppose that's where this notion that authors can achieve immortality comes from: their words live on long after they die. For writing to be truly like speech, it would have to be more like a sand mandala, written in an unstable medium, and deleted as soon as it's completed. It reminds me of Keats's moving epitaph: "Here lies one whose name was writ in water."

There's also the further set of points that Havelock among others make: that writing differs from speech not just in the ways that it can be accessed and disseminated, but also in the cognitive tools it calls for. My dad's actually done a fair amount of work on this in terms of educational development. Literate and non-literate people think differently. In particular, literate people deal far more in abstraction, are far less metaphorically fluent, and all sorts of bizarre differences (apparently non-literate people aren't taken in by optical illusions). Now, even in conversation, we think like literate people, of course, but I think it's telling that we could even consider written communication like this to be approximating a conversation.

Having re-read what you originally said about nature and nurture, I think I can be forgiven for not realizing you meant to claim that the distinction was problematic. You did say it was "logically evident" and asked rhetorically "what other option could there be" besides the two. Though you do grant from the beginning that the distinction between craft and inspiration is problematic. I'm still a bit puzzled by your approach of questioning the distinction and then insisting that we use it nonetheless. I agree that an imperfect distinction is better than no distinction at all. My concern with the craft/inspiration distinction wasn't simply that it was imperfect, but that it was potentially distorting, and that we might do better to frame the matter in a different way. Maybe I'm wrong about that--I certainly don't have some brilliant alternative paradigm--but that was what I was trying to argue.

One slightly different paradigm comes via Lewis Hyde in his book The Gift. Do you know it? He discusses cultures of gift exchange, and in particular contrasts gift economies to market economies, suggesting that creative work is much more akin to a gift economy than a market economy: there's no zero-sum interaction, the gift only has value if we share it and give it away, there's a continual cycle of giving and receiving that we cut ourselves off from if we aren't gracious in both accepting and giving gifts, it's a personal exchange rather than a business transaction, and so on. One of the questions the book struggles with is how creative work can survive in an environment where our interactions with others are so totally dominated by market exchange. (He also suggests that caring occupations like motherhood are devalued in the modern world for similar reasons: we don't recognize its value because its value isn't monetary.) He doesn't say we shouldn't try to sell our creative work at a profit, but just that we will find that the gift vanishes very quickly if we use it simply with the aim of making a profit. If we "sell out," as it were.

I think you're also right that the craft/inspiration distinction isn't really one about innate and acquired tendencies, and I agree that we're prone to wonder about the mystery of why sometimes the inspiration flows and sometimes it doesn't. I also think you're right to suggest that this mystery is just a special case of the more general problem of weakness of the will. Because it's not really just a question of why the inspiration isn't coming. It's usually--and here again, I feel the craft/inspiration distinction doesn't help us--a question of why I'm unable to do the work. Not a matter of "I have the craft, so where's the inspiration?" but more a matter of "why can't I focus?" When I suffer from writer's block, it's not a case of my being in full work mode and having the work not come. Usually when I suffer from writer's block I'm fidgety, prone to procrastination, lazy, eager to be distracted. It's not just the inspiration that's abandoned me, but the work ethic. The will is weak.

Maybe this brings us back to the Greeks. They worried a lot about weakness of the will.

Anyway, some thoughts about my worries about the devaluation of the intellect. First, I agree with you that writing can be a leisure activity, and grant that the professional writer is a relatively new phenomenon. Maybe we don't need so many professional novelists anyway (though I should add that journalism does require professionalism, which might explain why, for the moment at least, it's journalism that's suffering most from writing's going digital). My concern was a more abstract one about a culture that's used to receiving information for free, and grows to expect that. That, coupled with this culture being a consumerist culture, which tends to value things largely by their cost. This is a very different world from that of Montaigne or Margueritte de Navarre. And I don't think it's a matter of speculation but of fact that the humanities have taken a nose-dive in recent decades in terms of their general esteem in the culture and the number of jobs available to people who want to work in those fields. It's not that people care less about information--if anything, the Internet has provided us with a glut of information that we consume greedily--but that people hold that information in lower esteem.

Perhaps a corollary point is that the steady flow of information also makes us expect more quicker. I don't know how much damage that does to the patient accumulation of information required in careful research. People still care about culture as much as they always have, but we have a less patient culture in general. People still paint and go to galleries, but no one paints like the Old Masters did. People still listen to music and go to concerts, but no one makes music like Mozart or Beethoven did. We even play Mozart and Beethoven a lot faster than they were probably played back in their day. Like King Lear, I feel we need to learn patience.

non-entry

well - you say you're richer for having read my last entries, but I find that hard to believe... especially if the train of logic was too convoluted for you to follow in parts (and I was rambling - part of the idea of the blog is to jot down thoughts, and true to the original intention, however long some of my entries might have been, none of them have been carefully crafted or edited in any way... I suppose it could be asked what the point is of spewing forth, but I really do think of it as the only substitute available to meeting up and talking over drinks - which brings us back to Plato and the idea of the writing being unable to defend itself...this blog being an instance of dialogue and therefore not what is meant by writing. This does seem to be a running theme and Proust stands as the counter-position to Socrates, basically believing that writing, understood as monologic writing, is the only valid vehicle for thought and expression). Anyway, I did kind of want to defend myself on a couple of points - you said that genes express themselves through the environment and that the division between nature and nurture is bogus - which is precisely what I was saying, and I brought it into play with craft in inspiration, the same way you did, to say that no real separation is possible. Admittedly, I did also say that though no strict separation is possible the dichotomies in question, however tenuous and problematic, are not worthless... both dichotomies deal with the interaction of something innate (as a set of potentialities) and something acquired (which determines how those potentialities unfold)... which isn't really want I want to say - inspiration cannot be called innate. It is, however, outside our control, while craft is something that can be intentionally and methodically cultivated (sort of). And yes, holes can be pokes in all of these statements, and in the post where I talked about this, I started to poke holes in those dichotomies myself.
All this to say that however much nonsense I was spewing, it wasn't nonsensical for the reasons you brought up. The starting point of my argument is being used as the counter to that argument... what I tried ineptly to articulate throughout the whole rest of the post was why I didn't feel like simply dismissing the topic once the problematic nature of the discussion was acknowledged... my reason basically boils down to this: though it isn't an absolutely compelling topic, my thoughts and reading bring me back to it periodically, and when they do, I don't find myself always thinking the same thing on the topic in the same way. It doesn't lead my thoughts to go in circles but to scatter in all directions. I have no solid arguments to build around it, but it does provide scattered reflexions that sometimes end up profitable when thinking or writing about something else entirely. This will sound wishy-washy and vague - it is sort of wishy-washy and vague... but they address inevitable though unanswerable questions about what could be different or what could have been different. Anyone who has ever felt they wanted or needed inspiration when it wouldn't come is bound to start thinking about what allowed them to produce when they were productive, what failed them, how can inspiration be forced to return, and if it is gone, is it gone because of something they did... which maybe doesn't sound like such an inevitable set of questions, except that lack of inspiration is a single instance of a more general set of thoughts... shy people wondering whether they could have been out-going had certain things been different, whether it is still possible to change - in fact, anyone who is dissatisfied with any aspect of their own behavior, who gets frustrated with any form of weak will - people who keep telling themselves they'll stick to a diet and then fail to do so, are bound to whether whether the failure of the will represents something fixed and outside of their control or whether it can be altered - this may seem to move away from 'nurture', except that I see the term as attaching not just to the environment we stand in a passive relation to, but everything that can be in any way shaped, changed or controlled.
ANyway, on the question of the devaluation of the intellect, I have no idea. Certainly, the idea that the writer, thinker or scientist has to be a paid professional is modern. Thinking of the sixteenth century - Montaigne, who wrote the essays in retirement, mainly to distribute among his friends, Marguerite de Navarre, the queen who wrote the Heptameron for the court, in fact... I don't know why I focus on that century or bother with specific examples when they are so numerous... think of all the doctors who have been great writers. Of course making films or certain sorts of scientific advances without financial backing seems unthinkable nowadays, but for books - all you need is a certain amount of leisure, and plenty of people have that. Most people have always been indifferent to culture, and most people always will be. The fetishization of culture by people who see culture as some incomprehensible sacred space that edifies by osmosis is nothing new (the audience for middle brow movies and people who will pick up a classic or visit the museum the way they ride their exercise bikes or take their vitamins, or the pretentious people who wear their culture like a badge of merit). As far as those who have a genuine, meaningful connection with art, or history or philosophy or some science or whatever else, I don't thing they are less numerous or less enthusiastic than at most other times. I run into them everywhere I go.
I don't know if knowledge has been devalued... devalued by who? People might not recognize the importance of certain institutional fixtures for filtering and checking information - it would be nice to have more well paid news people who didn't have to worry about finding sponsors and cutting costs. I am worried about the death of print media. I have no idea just how much the position of academics has changed - I don't know what it was like before. I generally don't feel comfortable trying to say anything at all on subjects of this sort... I don't know if society is doomed. I get more and more amazed at how consistently badly the government is run - which may seem off topic, but I really feel that if we collapse culturally it will be because of failed institutions and political decisions. I don't feel that individuals have necessarily stopped caring about information, or thought (though as a society we are undoubtedly less and less disciplined individually as well as collectively). It is just important that the schools be in good shape and the overall quality of life not decline too drastically.
I'm a horrible trend spotter by the way - when the movie Titanic came out, and then again when that video game rock band came out, I remember thinking, "they'll lose a fortune - who the hell would be interested in that?"

even quicker clarification

I realize, quickly skimming what I wrote, that it might sound like the last three paragraphs are a quotation from Leon Wieseltier. If you've ever read him, you'll know that's not the case. The last three paragraphs are a quotation of me from an e-mail I sent a friend and didn't have time to write anything more original for you.

Some quickies: Phaedrus, craft vs. inspiration, free content

I've been in a play and am going away this weekend and haven't had time to do much of anything for a while. I managed to find the best part of an hour to finally write something, but I wound up spending the best part of the best part of that hour reading your last four posts. Sadly, your reward for your diligence is that I end up richer for having read some wonderful entries and you end up poorer for my not having time to respond in a way that's at all appropriate.

In particular, I haven't had a chance to even digest, let alone think about, what you said about Phaedrus. I'm not entirely sure I follow your point, but that could be because I don't entirely remember my own point, which you're responding to. Though I agree that it's a lot more subtle in the Phaedrus than simply a condemnation of writing in favour of speech. Surely you've read Derrida's essay on Phaedrus? I've only read the first twenty pages or so, but already there I can see the threads coming apart. One thing I've never been sure what to make of in Plato is how the suggestion that written texts are second rate is supposed to be read. Given that what we're doing is reading a written text. A soft case of the Liar Paradox?

One other little thing before I try to squeeze in a thought of my own. You defend some appeal to a distinction between craft and inspiration by comparing it to the distinction between nature and nurture, which you take to be almost analytic. I think that's a singularly bad analogy--at least to support your case--since most psychologists and biologists think the nature/nurture distinction is bogus these days. As Matt Ridley puts it in the title of a book on the topic, we're better off thinking of "nature via nurture": our environment shapes the way our genes express themselves. So there's no neat way even in principle of saying it's part nature or part nurture. And I think the same could be said for craft and inspiration: inspiration comes via craft. What kind of inspiration we have, how we express, that we're inspired at all, is shaped by the way in which we've prepared ourselves to channel our creativity. To look at inspiration and craft as two distinct entities confuses matters more than it clarifies them, I think, and that's the sense in which I called the dichotomy bogus.

I was supposed to leave the house five minutes ago, which doesn't leave me time to say what I wanted to say in a way that's all personal and spontaneous. Instead I'll do the crass thing and simply copy and paste from an e-mail I sent a friend on the same topic. Shortly after sending it, I found Leon Wieseltier had written something along similar lines in The New Republic:

It occurs to me that increasingly, it's become difficult to make a living as a producer of content. Already with music and movies, it's so easy to package into data that there's a lot of piracy and the industries have to make concessions in order to make piracy less appealing. Newspapers and magazines are suffering as people now expect their content to be available free online, and to survive as a journalist you have to do a lot of free-of-charge blogging and twittering in addition to the content you produce for money. Now that things like the Kindle and google books are taking off, books too are becoming increasingly susceptible to packaging as data and free viewing, and when people get used to that, they'll want to pay less for books too.

And I think the repercussions go beyond that. I'm keenly aware of how much worse the market is for academics than it used to be. I think part of it is a mentality that academics, as purveyors of content, should be doing more for less money, since in the age of easy access to reams of data, we expect to get more content at less cost.

What worries me is that it seems like knowledge and culture are being devalued, not just in terms of it being harder to make a living at them, but that people estimate their relative worth lower. Does any of this ring true to you or am I just talking nonsense? I worry a bit that increased access to information also risks making us crasser.

Phaedrus

Of the two short texts I'm supposed to be looking at (or long since finished looking at actually) that Blanchot wrote about Sade, one of them is called 'the madness of Sade', and on the last page of the essay he writes "[Sade's] demon was not the demon of lubricity. It is more dangerous than that. It is Socrates' demon, which Socrates always resisted and Plato would have preferred not to give into: it is the madness of writing, a movement that is infinite, interminable, incessant." There's another half a page, and then a quote from Sade explaining that, however much it leads men to shiver, the philosopher must be prepared to say everything... I'm not doing a very good job of translating, but you get the point of that last statement. As far as the demon of writing and comparisons between Socrates and Sade, before I can deal with that, I suppose I should say one or two things about Phaedrus.
Since last I wrote, I've read through the Phaedrus... I'm not sure whether I had read it before and forgotten most of it, or simply read enough about it second-hand that large sections of the argument were familiar. The most valuable thing in there might be the origin of crickets... those who were so overwhelmed when music appeared that they could no longer interest themselves in food or sleep or anything else but playing music - they would have starved to death if the gods hadn't taken pity on them and turned them into crickets, able to make music with their legs and live without sustenance. Anyway, the dialogue certainly does accord well with what you said about the platonic Socrates' relation to writing, and makes my previous position hard to defend (which doesn't mean I won't try...). Yes, as you said, Plato's Socrates distrusts writing because a written text can't defend itself. He says near the end of the dialogue that writing is a frivolous pursuit, and the only writers who can be called wise are those who are able to defend his statements when challenged and demonstrate the inferiority of his writings out of his own mouth - they must be writing as a pastime and not imagine that writing is a serious pursuit. He has nothing but contempt for those who place great value in their literary works on whose phrases they spend hours "twisting them this way and that, pasting them together and pulling them apart". There is, however, something very weird about the Egyptian myth he gives as the origin of writing... namely that it is a god who comes down and delivers writing, while it is a man who criticizes the gift this god has given him, bringing up all the objections that Socrates will seem to subscribe to afterward, saying "if men learn this, it will implant forgetfulness in their souls, they will cease to exercise memory because they will rely on that which is written, etc." Don't get me wrong, I don't claim to know what this detail means or whether it means anything, but Socrates is generally pious, and objects to stories in which gods behave in an immoral or unfitting manner. It should also be pointed out that earlier in the dialogue, Socrates delivers a long lecture demonstrating that love is a bad thing, totally convincing Phaedrus, before he turns around, admits that he didn't mean a word of it and sets about proving the opposite. Why should we have faith in what Socrates is saying now? Particularly considering we are taking in the speech in written form, knowing that this is not simply a recording of a real dialogue that was written down after the fact, but that we are reading something which was carefully composed in writing. I realize that these are the sorts of things that us literature people quibble about, but I do think they are serious objections, precisely because Plato cannot have been unaware of this contradiction as he wrote. It should also be noted that in this dialogue it is stated with particular clarity that the art or knack of persuading people is a necessary prerequisite to teaching or philosophizing - sophistry is here neither useless or harmful, except that it must be subordinated to a higher end... sophistry is jumbled together with the composition of poetry, whether written or oral, and with every imaginable written form, including even the writing of laws. What Socrates seems to me to be speaking against is much less writing than a certain purely passive relation to writing or to the words or teaching of others. There is here a doctrine of self-reliance, a warning against epigones, and a warning against learning the conclusions that other people have come to through their though and their lives rather than looking carefully at the process by which those conclusions were reached. Just as texts shall not be used in place of memory, they shall not be used in place of thought. I also think it is noteworthy that the Symposium, being the most closely related text, centered around the same topic and keeping Phaedrus as a central character, begins with a follower of Plato acting in a spirit directly contrary to Plato - while the slavish devotion of Apollodorus (and at the end Aristodemus, who, like a dog is sleeping in the corner, but perks up when his master is about to leave and follows him out) while this devotion might be a sign merely of Socrates ability to elicit love, of being the truly erotic individual, it must be noted that Socrates always approaches the people he would speak with in what might appear as a deferent manner, respectfully telling him he is sure they would know better and he would like them to explain things to him. In the Symposium in particular, though he'll come out with some belated cutting remarks about Agathon's speech, Socrates is pure charma dn seduction, drawing men toward the truth. Apollodorus walks around abusing everyone he meets - even when they want to ask him about his favorite topic (Socrates), he still treats them abrasively. A follower necessarily betrays the thought of his teacher. It is also noteworthy how often in Plato's dialogues it is the follower of a school that Socrates argues with rather than the founder. Gorgias does very little talking in Gorgias - even in Phaedrus, Phaedrus is representing Lysias, whose speech he so admired. Though Socrates does undermine Protagorus, he treats him relatively leniently, finding a point of agreement that preserves a part of what Protagorus initially claimed. Part of what Socrates seems to attack is often the credulousness of a follower... though of course presumption and the belief that one knows more than one really does is clearly the more important target. Socrates' true followers went off and started schools of their own. Anyway, I'm drifting off subject.
The madness of writing, the willingness to say anything. Sade and Socrates were both silent because they couldn't be quiet, weren't willing to be quiet, couldn't imagine life without continuing there eternal process of negation. But that isn't the main link between them. Sade complained that if you killed a man, his suffering was soon over, the pleasure was fleeting. Every crime was flawed and imperfect, fleeting and unsatisfying. Unlike Socrates, Sade did feel that increasing these small pleasures in quantity and diversity was a worthwhile pastime, but his main interest in all of his writings is very clearly the pursuit of the ideal form of Crime (and he calls the pursuit of this ideal form philosophy). Sade's virtuous characters are punished, but so are his evil characters... the only difference is that the evil characters don't mind their punishment, as long as they are being imprisoned, tortured or killed in pursuit of Disorder and Crime. In order to commit crimes on the level of the Absolute, it is necessary for Sade's most important crimes to be virtual - unlike a theft, a rape, a murder or any ordinary act of perversity, a book that corrupts its reader (Sade, like Socrates had a great deal of faith in a speaker, teacher or statesman's ability to have a real moral effect on his audience), a book that corrupts is a crime that continues taking effect long after the death of its author. While a person can only be killed once, the number of people a book can corrupt is limitless - here we are moving away from any attempt to link Sade to Socrates, the search for ideal forms really is the one small point of intersection - well, that and the sense of compulsion, the unity of life and thought, philosophy experienced as holy quest and the figure of the philosopher as the highest form humanity could aspire to. Blanchot most often links Sade to Hegel, the links to Nietzsche are so numerous and obvious people often seem to embarrassed to bring them up except in passing - Sade could be used as a starting point to teach stoicism or Epicurianism as well. Learning philosophy with the Marquis de Sade would be a fun class to teach...