How to Be A Great Friend: The Great Books of the Western World on Great Friendship.

These are the basic readings on friendship. If you want to be a great friend, here is how.

1. Start with Lysis. This is supposed to be about friendship but actually Socrates is just teasing. Listen in on how Socrates uses the passion for Lysis to direct him to a wise end? This is one aspect of being a great friend: direct your friend to their own greatness. The Lysis of Plato is the single best instruction manual on making friends with young people, because it shows intead of tells you how.

2. Next, read Cicero On Friendship. If the Lysis is the best guide to young friends, the dialog On Friendship by Cicero is the best instructions on how to make friends with elders. Notice how wonderfully Gaius and Quintus draw Laelius out; can you see how they manipulate him with words to show his best qualities? Since it is no deceit to bring out good qualities in your friends, the text of this short dialog really shows another great lesson in friendship: use words to draw out the best qualities in your friend.

3. Finally, we come to a crucial parting point in the lessons on friendship: whether to follow the heart or the head? Francis Bacon is a friend of the head variety, whereas Michel de Montaigne is a friend of the heart. Both have essays entitled ¨On Friendship¨. Between them you must choose your lesson. Which is more important to you? Which is more important to your friend? And, are you aware of the consequences of either path? Among friends with worldly goals and practical concerns, this is the essential thing to know. So the lesson these two men suggest is: Be aware of what kind of friendship you are in, heart or head, and what consequences flow from that.

4. Last but not least are the ethical analyses of Aristotle, the reasoning of Epictetus, and the essay of Seneca. These mordant analysts cover the same material as Cicero with less charm. And they instruct me in the finest lesson of friendship, which is: Be friends only with people who make you happy and who you love to make happy. Because anything that lasts must make the effort to be charming. This

There they are: my four lessons of friendship:
1. Direct your friend to their own greatness. (Especially in young friends)
2. Use words to draw out the best qualities in your friend. (Especially in elder friends)
3. Be aware of what kind of friendship you are in, and what consequences flow from that. (Especially in peers)
4. Be friends only with people who make you happy and who you love to make happy.

Asimov's Foundation and the Great Books of the Western World

The Foundation Series and Great Books of the Western World have many common points. Both Foundation and GBWW are concerned with the preservation of the civilizing influence of reason and Western culture. Both address theories of knowledge and power. Both attack ethics and the sentiments with great feeling and strong views.

But as the Great Books of the Western World is a real life conversation spanning the ages, it is about true things and actual stories, which even though fiction are based in true cultures and times. The Foundation Series is fiction through and through, fiction in the best, the Aesopian, sense of the word. The world of Foundation cannot and could not ever exist.

But in a deeper sense Asimov's Foundation is poetry; it is a fiction that shows more truth than a history can.

The underlying context of Foundation occupies the same epistemic space as Plato's ideal republic. Socrates insists that reality can be measured; how much more does the fictional Hari Seldon force nature to yield up her secrets through psychohistory! The Encyclopaedists of the Foundation represent the Platonic educational ideal, and the various scurrilous derring-do of the first book of Foundation represent symbolically much of the political dialog that followed in the wake of Plato's work these last few thousand years.

Finally, in the annoyingly analytical smugness of the psychohistorians, starting with Hari Seldon himself, we can see Aristotle's rational and dry wisdom at work.

The key point of dissimilarity between the Great Books and Asimov's Foundation is simply that Asimov has a far more narrow view of knowledge than the Great Books. Asimov's Foundation, when exposed to the harsh, humane, realistic light of the Great Books, reveals itself to be marred by a narrow scientism and cramped by reductionistic cliches.

Nevertheless, as Harold Bloom would put it, the Foundation Series expresses considerable anxiety towards the centralized authority of the Western tradition. The Empire is doomed, but the Foundation will endure through the dark age of irrational faith and mystical, magical thinking. Asimov's effort to assert reductionist scientism makes the Foundation Series (at least in the first three books) vital and genuine.

Finally, comparison with the Great Books casts a new light on the latter books - ie, 'Foundation's Edge', 'Foundation and Earth'. If the heroic effort to ward off the forces of gaian wholism in the latter books of the Foundation Series is not entirely convincing, then the fault is perhaps not in the vitality of the writer but in the weakness of the material.

On the Lysis of Plato: "All will be your friend if you are wise."

If you are wise, Socrates says, all men will be your friends and kindred because you will be useful and good; but if you are not wise, neither father, mother or kindred or anyone else will be your friend.

This is Socrates' juicy snare for the friendship of Lysis.

Just as for Aristotle the chief good is reason and the sum of all goods happiness, so also for Socrates wisdom is the chief good and love between friends the sum of all goods.

How to account for the paradoxes of friend and enemy Socrates lays out in the Lysis? I think he draws the paradox from the biological and spiritual meanings of friendship. A friend may be useful to practical ends but a bad person ideally speaking. Socrates is being sophistic.

Prudent friendships, as Aristotle reveals, combine usefulness, mutual affection, and pleasure in one anothers' character by doing kind services. And even Aristotle fails to observe the developmental curve: friendships evolve from being mostly useful to being mostly pleasant then to being mostly based in affection. A sound friendship has all three aspects, but at any one time only one aspect is dominant: pleasure, utility, or affection. But all three belong, because we are physical beings as well as spiritual.

(Taking the Aristotle cap off...)

Socrates says "God draws like to like" as friends. True enough. But like in what sense? Clearly what makes friends like one another are questions at the core of human nature. Why are we the way we are? To what extent are we like angels and like animals? In the answers to these questions a view of friendship can arise. But again it is between the animal and the angel that human friendships become possible.

I challenged myself to come up with my own view of friendship. Here it is:

"There is no cause of friendship: all friendships arise in accordance to the field of consciousness as expressions of their own self-nature. Different loves arise from different self-natures. Each kind of friendship is incommensurate to another.

"Broadly speaking, there are three kinds of friendship: horizontal alignment, vertical alignments, and mixed horizontal-vertical alignments. Horizontal alignment friends are mostly based in affection and supportive development of one anothers' full potential; they are heart-based. Vertical alignments are mostly based in utility and issues of control, power, exploitation and predation; they are solar plexus based. Mixed horizontal-vertical alignments are mostly based in pleasure.

On the Map of Consciousness, then, horizontal alignment friendships begin above level of consciousness 500; vertical alignment friendships begin below 199; and between 200 and 499 levels of consciousness of the Hawkins Map of Consciousness are mixed friendships, featuring aspects of both horizontal and vertical alignments."

Some of the High Moments From Plato's Meno

The Meno seems to present the original Socratic formula in the most basic terms. But because it has distinctive and important ideas in the beginning, middle, and end, it somewhat defies clear cut analysis. It is too good a piece to analyze without some measure of arrogance. I think that if you are not honestly baffled by the end of this dialog, I must impute your intelligence with rude names.

Socrates deftly prises the definition of virtue free from commonsense and common practice in the opening. It starts bad and gets much worse: not only don't we know what the Good is, but we seem to imagine there are many different goods.

Then in the middle, Socrates neatly demolishes the easy commonplace that education educates people to be good. We finish hardly even sure how learning itself occurs. Education goes quantum in Plato's Meno - it seems as if we become virtuous by some kind of spooky action at a distance.

Then in the end we figure out that we can't define any of these terms without first defining the ultimate context in which these terms occur. That is, 'education', 'goodness' and 'virtue' all occur in the ultimate context of the reality of a divine maker. Like it or lump it. But the deux ex machina is no easy answer here. The discussion of opinion versus knowledge that crowns the dialog completely undercuts any easy certainty you might place in the guidance of religious faith.

I'm surprised Meno didn't take his life there and then from philosophical despair. But the fact is that Socrates is quite definite in his faith that these things are knowable. And that once you begin to listen to the Socrates, something in his faith gives you faith and you begin to respond with genuine feelings, from disquiet to outrage, against the easy certitudes that falsehoods parade as under the name of "common sense".

Socrates show how uncommon true commmon sense is, and the Meno is an indefatigable guide to demolishing falsehood in the search for truth.

A Chance Meeting In Aristotle After Buying Plato's Gorgias

“Corgi-arse” seems to be the correct pronunciation. I don’t suppose the ancient Greeks had Corgi-like dogs.

I got it from Mary Martins for 13 dollars. I read Polus’ lovely sentence in Gorgias on the way home on the train about art and experience versus chance and inexperience. I had a chuckle at Socrates’ generally inquisitorial tone. I don’t think our friend Socrates was a very nice man.

As it happens, I contemplate Socrates’ key idea every day: “Every man does the good, the trouble is that they don’t know what the good is, therefore humbly accept that you don’t know anything and live from there.” This idea is a brilliant summary of Socrates, but no-where yet can I find the precise formulation of it. It is all in parts, scattered across the Gorgias and other texts.

To my delight, when I got home I read the first few pages of Aristotle’s Metaphysics before falling asleep on the couch with it open on my chest. Aristotle happened to mention Polus’ speech. It was like running into a stranger who knows a mutual friend.

The pleasure of books is the acquaintance with the wise. The pleasure of thought is the acquaintance with your own self through mind. And the joy of philosophy is to go beyond thinking out of love of truth.

Why Read Proust?

Why Read Proust?

There are many good reasons not to read Marcel Proust’s great novel A la Rechere du Temps Perdu.

It is uneventful. It can be boring. The narrator is a bitchy snob. It has too many outright lies in it to be autobiography, and too much tiresome bickering to be considered a novel. And it is too long.

It is cynical: all human relationships except close family are false, fake; naked unconscious self-interest and vanity drive all social interactions; childhood habits once broken can never be recovered; insomnia, poor health, jealousy, sadomasochistic urges, ungovernable impulses – all of these completely overrule and overdetermine the individual’s sense of reason.

It is capricious: a huge cast of mostly irrelevant characters caper about uttering strange irrelevancies, whose total sum is some kind of mysterious calculus of snobbery cloaking intense animalistic urges, which Proust seldom deigns to explain to readers living in a less uptight culture. Cruelty is commonplace between characters that are considered friends, and sexual compulsions bind everyone together invisibly and inseparably.

It is disorganised: the tone changes from page to page, from book to book, without warning, guidance, or apparent reason. The paragraph divisions are completely useless, presenting the book messily. The chapter headings are either hopelessly irrelevant or simply nonexistent; the reader is left to impose his own structure on the book if he is to make sense of it.

So why read Proust? If the good is the enemy of the great, surely Proust’s book is its own worst enemy? But if you read merely good books, then you are condemned to mediocrity. And since Marcel Proust’s book is both bad AND great, it provides the most uniquely vulgar amusements in the midst of the most sublime art. I don’t dispute its greatness; its goodness I sincerely doubt.

So why read it? I can tell you must read Marcel Proust. I can tell you it is great. But I cannot tell you why. Harold Bloom blathers on about identity and memory; I don’t know about that. I can only tell you that I do, you must, it’s worth it – that is all I can say.

Addendum: Okay, okay, so Proust is funny, charming, insightful, sweet. His language is beautiful, delicate, tough, and sinewy. His ideas on love are shocking and wise in equal measure. And the badness of Proust’s book makes the great qualities all the more astonishing. It is as if it were discovered that Thomas Aquinas has been, in addition to writing his Summa Theologica, the author of some pornography – I kid you not: Proust is THAT shocking.

Taosim and Quantum Physics in Plato’s Timaeus

In my last post I blogged about the Platonic version of the Tao. Here then are two versions of the same passage that are subtly different, representing for me the yang and yin, the hard and the soft, of Plato's classicism.

Here is the particular Jowett 1871 translation, which captures all the logic and none of the theurgy:

First then, in my judgment, we must make a distinction and ask, What is that which always is and has no becoming; and what is that which is always becoming and never is? That which is apprehended by intelligence and reason is always in the same state; but that which is conceived by opinion with the help of sensation and without reason, is always in a process of becoming and perishing and never really is. Now everything that becomes or is created must of necessity be created by some cause, for without a cause nothing can be created. The work of the creator, whenever he looks to the unchangeable and fashions the form and nature of his work after an unchangeable pattern, must necessarily be made fair and perfect; but when he looks to the created only, and uses a created pattern, it is not fair or perfect.

And here is the version I examined in the previous entry, the wave-like, lucid and poetic 1965 translation of Desmond Lee:

We must in my opinion begin by distinguishing between that which always is and never becomes from that which is always becoming and never is. The one is apprehensible by intelligence with the aid of reasoning, being eternally the same, the other is the object of opinion and irrational sensation, coming to be and ceasing to be, but never fully real. In addition, everything that becomes or changes must do so owning to some cause; for nothing can come to be without a cause. Whenever, therefore, the maker of anything keeps his eye on the eternally unchanging and uses it as his pattern for the form and function of his product the result must be good; whenever he looks to something that come to be and uses a model that has come to be, the result is not good.

On the Timaeus of Plato

I love how Plato uses multiple frames of introductory ideas in his work.

The Timaeus is framed first by the fanciful gossip of Solon’s story of Atlantis, and second by the superb verbal-magical invocation of Timaeus himself, which is what I wish to quote here (segment three: prelude). Plato’s third frame in the Timaeus, introducing chance and free-will, alters this second frame significantly and is the subject for another post.

So here is the second frame, Timaeus’ invocation of the creation of the cosmos:

“We must in my opinion begin by distinguishing between that which always is and never becomes from that whichis always becoming and never is.”

This is the basis for the physical world for Timaeus, for the macrocosm. But it is important to note that Timaeus is coming out with substantially the same idea as Lao Tze, on the other side of Eurasia at roughly the same period. He here invokes the Tao with these words and those to come. Timaeus, fully aware that speech is a magical act, prefaces this quoted statement with an invocation both to the gods and to his own powers – that is, he wisely invokes the macrocosm and the microcosm before beginning to talk of first and last things.

“The one is apprehensible by intelligence with the aid of reasoning, being eternally the same, the other is the object of opinion and irrational sensation, coming to be and ceasing to be, but never fully real.”

This is a startling description of the quality of Yang and Yin, or Shiva and Shakti. The most modern concept of this is the particular and the wave. The wave is potential particulars, or a conceptual carrier for particulars, or in some way a not-quite-real concept which fills in all the explanatory gaps which the particle concept does not.

But Timaeus goes further, describing the subjective response to these macrocosmic forces. The basis of physical reality is implied to be the source of subjective activity: that is to say, our (microcosmic) awareness of changeless evokes reason and intellect, and the awareness of the always-changing evokes opinion, obscurity, sensation and irrationality. Thus the perrenial wisdom of getting our focus of changeable things, and putting attention of the changeless: by focusing on the changeless we submerge into quiescience our irrational and sensational qualities. The process of self-enquiry suggested by Ramana Maharshi recommends that as the classical direct path to truth.


But listen to what Timaeus says next:

“In addition, everything that becomes or changes must do so owning to some cause; for nothing can come to be without a cause.”

We can infer then that the unchanging, reasonable, and intellectual is self-caused or uncaused, arising from its own nature directly.

What follows next is THE key statement of classical thinking:

“Whenever, therefore, the maker of anything keeps his eye on the eternally unchanging and uses it as his pattern for the form and function of his product the result must be good; whenever he looks to something that come to be and uses a model that has come to be, the result is not good.”

If that sentence doesn’t move you then how do you know you are still alive?

In one sentence Timaeus transmits the essence of classicism as method and means to the creation of art. The esoteric meaning of what Timaeus is saying is that the creation of a thing along classical lines is a recreation of the cosmos, and at the same time an emotional and energetic participation in the original creation. Each and every creative act invokes God into the person of the creator. Creative work is theurgy, and creation brings the reason into alignment with the Reason of the cosmos.

Think about that one for a while!

Gaiawriter's Top Ten Ways To Increase Intelligence.

1. Engage complex forms of art, science and culture with your feelings and thoughts, recording what you notice. Classical music, great novels, galleries, museums, scientific education, and above all, the fine art of intellectual conversation - these are time honored ways to increase intelligence. For most of human history conversation has been the main human art form.

2. Seek patterns. Seek the essence. Seek the edges. Seek the extremes. Seek the grey areas. Seek to understand rather than to simply know a fact.

3. Simplify what you learn by talking it through with yourself or someone else.

4. Look at the teachers of your teacher. Whatever field of interest brings tears to your eyes, or makes you heart leap, or makes your belly flutter, find the key personalities of that field and look up their influences. Read their bibliographies. Scan their indexes. Listen to whose names they drop. Understanding intellectual influence in a field is key to sophisticated insight.

5. Explore the limits of the intellect. Through human history, intelligence has consistently failed to provide a reliable guide to wise action. Philosophy has not found answers but only more questions. So the key to increasing intelligence is to learn what intellect can and cannot do: these fields are known as hermeneutics, epistemology, phenomenology and metaphysics, however most mature spirituality traditions also include strong and valuable critique of intellectualism.

6. Own your emotional bias. Don't fake a dispassion which only very few highly developed people have. Get emotional about your ideas and thinking. Define your biases and then test them out. If they fail, humbly accept the failure and move on to a new bias. Pretending you are above it all and have understood everything is a waste of precious time.

7. Honor tradition. Most intellectual rebels need therapy, not intelligence increase. The strongest and finest minds flower right in the heart of the great and unbroken intellectual traditions of the world. Whether you are Chinese or Peruvian, your tradition will include intelligent discourse somewhere. Find your tradition and honor it.

8. Settle for second best. We are all stupid in some areas and smart in others. The simplest approach is to embrace the fact that sometimes you are going to be dumb no matter how smart you are. The sight of a toddler educating a retired university professor about building blocks is always charming only so long as the professor does not strike a prententious pose of being above mere play.

9. Practice mental masturbation. The only difference between mental masturbation and genuine intellectual activity is that mental masturbation is done simply for the joy of it, not in service to some greater value. Mental masturbation is wonderful, inexpensive, harmless fun, and comes (sic) highly recommended by the greater thinkers of all time.

10. Study mathematics and Plato.

Why mathematics? Mathematics is the fundamental tool of science; knowing maths gives you new eyes to see thinking not as connections between physical qualities but as abstract living forms of reality.

Why Plato? Plato's dialogs are the heart of the entire Western intellectual tradition, the essence of the enterprise of philosophy, and the core of all ideas in politics, science, metaphysics, and many other fields. I suggest you start with the refined word-play of Protagoras or the fun sensuality of Symposium.

Warning! Reading Plato involves discovering for yourself that most of your thoughts are actually 23 centuries old and the fact that your deepest thoughts do not belong to you at all. You can expect from Plato nothing other than a profound intellectual shock. Time and again through history, Plato plants the acorns that later become oaks.

I admit now that I have deceived you, reader. In fact there is only one best method to increase intelligence, but most people are unable to apply that method for various reasons. I have broken the one method into nine suggestions, but the single key direct act of intelligence increase I have hidden from you.

Because the truth is that by applying the last of these ten ways to increase intelligence, you will automatically be applying the other nine. Studying mathematics and Plato has been the best way to increase intelligence for the last 23 centuries, and remains the pre-eminent way to increase intelligence today in spite of the Nintendo DS Brain Gym and Smart Drugs.

So, then:

1. Engage complexity with feelings and thoughts. The most complex cultural objects we possess remain Plato and Mathematics.

2. Seek patterns. The best expression of pattern is through number (mathematics) and dialog (Plato).

3. Simplify by talking things through. (Plato talks everything through; that's why they're dialogs and not essays.)

4. Look at who taught your teachers. The truth is that Plato taught your teachers. All of them? Find out for yourself.

5. Explore the limits of the intellect. The common experience has been that the limits of our intellects have been reached already and usually surpassed by others.

6. Own your emotional bias. If you react emotionally against the suggestion that Plato and mathematics are the best base possible for intelligence increase, then test your ideas out and come back to Plato and mathematics when you have failed enough.

7. Honor tradition. Traditionally Plato and mathematics are, along with the study of Latin, the main expressions of intellectal activity in the West. If something works better for you go for it.

8. Embrace being dumb. Few arenas of cultural activity are more humbling that Plato's philosophy, over which the generations have toiled, and mathematics, in which humankinds most abstract thoughts are expressed.

9. Practice mental masturbation. The greatest mental masturbator of all time, Socrates, lies within the pages of Plato. And, just for your own peace of mind, I do not recommend having sex with a mathematician; you might figure out why for yourself after studying the field.

10. Above all, study mathematics and Plato.

10. Above all, study mathematics and Plato.

10. Above all, study mathematics and Plato.

Did you get that intelligence increase tip I mentioned before?

10. Above all, study mathematics and Plato!