Cyrenaics do it with the lights off

I've found a curious report about Cyrenaic attitudes to sex and desire in Plutarch's Non posse:

ὅρα δ’ ὅσῳ μετριώτερον οἱ Κυρηναϊκοί, καίπερ ἐκ μιᾶς οἰνοχόης Ἐπικούρῳ πεπωκότες, οὐδ’ ὁμιλεῖν ἀφροδισίοις οἴονται δεῖν μετὰ φωτὸς ἀλλὰ σκότος προθεμένους, ὅπως μὴ τὰ εἴδωλα τῆς πράξεως ἀναλαμβάνουσα διὰ τῆς ὄψεως ἐναργῶς ἡ διάνοια πολλάκις ἀνακαίῃ τὴν ὄρεξιν.

Consider how much more measured are the Cyrenaics although they have drunk from the same wine-jug as Epicurus: they think that one ought not to have sex in the light, but rather prefer darkness so that the mind, taking in the images of the act vividly through the eyes, should not time and again rekindle the desire.

Plutarch Non posse 1089A (= SSR IV.A.207)

The Loeb points also to:

(1) Plut. QC 654D (= Us. 61) where, although the text is perhaps corrupt, we are apparently told that Epicurus rather wantonly encouraged lights-on sex (σκοπῶμεν οὖν, εἰ δοκεῖ, πότερον ἐμμελῶς καὶ προσηκόντως ὁ Ἐπίκουρος <ἢ> παρὰ πᾶν δίκαιον ἀφαιρεῖ τὴν Ἀφροδίτην τῆς νυκτός·) This is part of a longer discussion of Epicurus' Symposium in which Epicurus advised that the best time for sex is before dinner so that digestion should be disturbed as little as possible.

(2) Plut. QC 705A–B (not in SSR): ὅθεν οὐδεμία τῶν τοιούτων ἡδονῶν ἀπόκρυφός ἐστιν οὐδὲ σκότους δεομένη καὶ τῶν τοίχων ‘περιθεόντων’, ὡς οἱ Κυρηναϊκοὶ λέγουσιν, ἀλλὰ καὶ στάδια ταύταις καὶ θέατρα ποιεῖται, καὶ τὸ μετὰ πολλῶν θεάσασθαί τι καὶ ἀκοῦσαι ἐπιτερπέστερόν ἐστι καὶ σεμνότερον, οὐκ ἀκρασίας δήπου καὶ ἡδυπαθείας ἀλλ’ ἐλευθερίου διατριβῆς καὶ ἀστείας μάρτυρας ἡμῶν ὅτι πλείστους λαμβανόντων.

The kind of pleasures being discussed here under the topic 'That the pleasures of kakomousia should particularly be guarded against, and how', are the pleasures from watching and listening to musical performances.

The message in the first two passages seems to be that the Cyrenaics had some idea that sex in the dark was preferable while Epicurus took a more visual approach in order, Plutarch wants to insists, to ensure that there were some useful memories of the event stored away for repeat enjoyment at a later time.

Clearly, however, the Non posse 1089A passage is a little odd – or, at best, very compressed – since it is surely not at all plausible that the Cyrenaics' view was based on the very Epicurean-sounding eidōla theory of perception which is invoked there. So I am a little confused.

There is something rhetorical about the passage, no doubt, and Plutarch is enjoying making the Cyrenaics into the more sober hedonists in comparison with the Epicureans. But I am finding it a little hard to imagine why the Cyrenaics would have been so keen on turning the lights out.

Robert Brown comments: 'Presumably, the Cyrenaic recommendation was based on the hedonistic reasoning that sex in the dark affords more pleasure (cf. Eur. fr. 524 N).' [1]. Maybe. That's an empirical matter, of course, and may vary from person to person. And there is no sign of that sort of justification in the Non posse passage which refers only to the apparently unwanted re-kindling of desire. It is also not clear why the Cyrenaics would have been particularly averse to rekindling desire unless the implication is that remembering the act via the visual memories might at a later time (perhaps time and time again, if that is the sense of πολλάκις) set off a desire which might be hard to satisfy and therefore painful. On the other hand, that would be a sort of prudential rationale on the Cyrenaics' part for which in general they seem not to have had much time .

Any ideas?

[1] R. D. Brown, Lucretius on love and sex (Leiden, 1987), 109 n.23.

Old fools and symmetry arguments

Since I started thinking about the Epicurean arguments against the fear of death I have been collecting 'symmetry arguments': arguments that make a point about the proper attitude to take towards post mortem non-existence on the basis of some account of our attitude to pre-natal non-existence. Yesterday I found another interesting example in Philip Larkin's 'The old fools' (in his High Windows (Faber and Faber, 1974). The second stanza begins:

At death you break up: the bits that were you
Start speeding away from each other for ever
With no one to see. It's only oblivion, true:
We had it before, but then it was going to end,
And was all the time merging with a unique endeavour
To bring to bloom the million-petalled flower
Of being here...

So, to bulldozer through the poetry for the philosophical argument, Larkin denies the symmetry between the two periods of non-existence on the grounds that the first - pre-natal non-existence - is tolerable because it will end while the second - post mortem non-existence - is to be feared or hated because it will go on for ever.

Horrible histories

The CBBC programme Horrible Histories is still making me laugh. There's a good collection of sketches here, but I'll link directly to a couple of my favourites:

Stone age tool-set ad:



Helen of Troy as a teen photo-love-story:



And not on YouTube yet, the lovely song 'I'm a Greek (part II here)' sung by Aristotle and Archimedes: 'I'm a Greek! I'm a Greek! We're all so magnifique!'

Surprise appearances

I still find it a bit surprising when I see people I know or work with mentioned in non-academic sorts of things. There usually are a couple in the Saturday paper here and there, and I'm beginning to get used to them. But then there are the very unusual sightings.

For example, I recently discovered the excellent Professor Oliver Rackham (pictured here alongside his recent portrait) cited approvingly in Steve Lowe and Alan McArthur's The best of Is it just me or is everything shit? He appears in the entry s.v. 'Carbon offsets'. Oliver is praised for comparing 'the practical effect of carbon offset tree-planting to drinking more water to keep down rising sea levels'. (I think the thought comes originally from his wonderful book on Woodlands but it seems to have become a favourite observation, judging by a quick Google search.)

Defending ‘Socrates’

Last year I wrote a response to an interesting paper by Constantine Sandis. His piece, in Think 17/18, 85–98, was entitled ‘In defence of four Socratic doctrines’. (That volume of Think is not available on-line but you can find a pdf of an uncorrected proof here.) My response, ‘On defending Socrates’, was in the same volume, pp.99–101. (A pdf of a draft of that piece can be read here.) Now Sandis has replied to my response (and to John Shand’s – whose response to Sandis was published in that same volume, pp.103–7) in Think 22, 101–5. If you have the right access to CUP's online journals, you can read that 2009 piece, ‘Contextualist vs. analytic history of philosophy: a study in Socrates’, here.

Responses to responses are not always necessary or welcome. But Sandis raises two points that I think are worth pursuing. The first, more local one, concerns a thought about the reasons that we might find offered in some Platonic work or other for the notion that there are ‘Forms’, for example the Form of beauty. Sandis writes (2009, 102):

Warren objects that it is ‘far from necessary to make the leap from the recognition of some common property of ‘beauty’ which we can identify in such diverse instances as Helen of Troy, the sunlight on a college lawn, John Coltrane’s A Love Supreme and an elegant mathematical proof to the assertion that there must be some further thing, ‘beauty itself’, distinct from and separate from all these instances.’ He suggests, instead, that (i) concepts such as that of beauty may be a family resemblance concept besides which (ii) even if this is not so, there remain alternative accounts that are metaphysically more plausible than that of Plato. I could not agree more with both of these last two remarks, but I fail to see how they support his view. For any concept X of a thing Y, the fact: that X is a family resemblance concept does not demonstrate that there is no such thing as Y. If anything, we might say that there must (at least in some relevant sense) be such a thing as Y for there to be a family resemblance concept of it in the first place.

I merely meant to claim that the fact that a variety of items might all reasonably be said to be ‘beautiful’ is no reason to think there must be Beauty distinct from and independent of these various beautiful items. There might, in fact, be no particular quality or qualities that all these items share. I had no view on the matter to support or not to support; I wanted to say that there is insufficient reason to think that this Platonic argument is at all plausible. Perhaps I should have stressed the insistence on what I take to be the distinctly Platonist notion of a Form of Beauty, namely that it is ‘separate’ from the various items that might truly be said to be beautiful. [1]

Still, as I now understand Sandis, his aim was to suggest that a less ontologically committed view can be a defensible version of the ‘Socratic’ thesis of Forms and that a complementary, but similarly deflationist, Wittgensteinian account of ‘recollection’ can be offered in which ‘recollecting justice’ amounts to ‘recollecting the multifarious ways in which words such as ‘justice’ and ‘knowledge’ are used’ (2008, p.90). Again, I suppose it might and it is an interesting idea. But at this point the deflation seems to me to have gone so far as to let all the Platonic air out of the thesis. What is left is not a Socratic view, to my mind, with or without scare quotes, nor a recognisably Platonic one. (In fact I wonder whether the Socrates of the Meno more or less explicitly says that this is not at all the right way to proceed: Meno 72b–d.) This is what troubled me most: if the price of making a ‘Socratic thesis’ more ‘relevant and plausible’, indeed ‘defensible’, is to drain it of the recognisably Platonic substance, then I don’t see why we begin by wondering about a Socratic thesis at all.

This brings us to the second and perhaps more interesting point in Sandis’ 2009 piece. I had previously not sufficiently appreciated the sense in which his 2008 piece is avowedly ‘anachronistic’ (2008, p. 90). Still, I imagined that the reason the journal editor asked my to reply was because I was thought to be someone who would do so from a background of work in ancient philosophy. So I did. Still, Sandis now helpfully makes clear his view (2009, p.103):

My central task was ... to offer a Wittgensteinian reading of certain Socratic doctrines in the hope that this renders them more relevant and plausible than standard interpretations do (though the latter may well be correct from a historiographical point of view). Indeed I write of my own account that ‘such a linguistic reading of Plato may seem ridiculously anachronistic, and I certainly wouldn’t want to put it forward as the correct interpretation of his methodology’.

I am not sure that a Wittgensteinian reading makes a Socratic doctrine more relevant or plausible. Perhaps it does; for now, let us leave that question aside. I am certainly not objecting to the idea, as Sandis puts it, of an ‘analytical’ (which later he glosses as ‘non-historiographical’, 2009, p.104) rather than ‘contextualist’ (for which Sandis – I imagine with a smile – offers ‘antiquarian’ as an alternative title) approach to the history of philosophy generally. I suppose I see myself more as following the latter course while Sandis on this occasion chose the former. But we should be clear: ‘contextualism’ does not preclude critical evaluation or analysis. And, I would suggest, analytical approaches cannot be entirely innocent of context. Sandis asks:

If determining what a historical figure or set of figures actually thought is an aim not shared by the analytic approach, then where exactly does its value lie? (2009, p.104)

To my mind, it is sometimes part of my job to try to work out what some historical figure or other actually said or meant. Sometimes, I suppose they thought what they said, but that is not always the case and for the most part I am interested in ancient texts rather than long-dead people. In the case of Plato, for example, the interpretative job is importantly complicated by the fact of the form of his writing and the range of ideas in the different works tto such an extent that it is usually prudent to work rather with the question: What does this dialogue actually have to say about this philosophical question? The context for the contextualist approach can vary. (In the case of Socrates I confess I am inclined to give up on wondering what the historical Socrates actually thought.) [2]

Sandis goes on:

The consideration of a philosophical text in (varying degrees of) contextual isolation allows us to focus on the most charitable formulation of arguments and ideas which it has inspired or anticipated. (2009, p.104)

I suppose I see much less of a disjunction between the two approaches. Charitable interpretation (informed by philosophical analysis) has an important role in contextualist approaches (since the context is often of itself insufficient to determine a single clear interpretation, both for complete texts and to a larger extent in incomplete or fragmentary ones). And at this point Sandis and I may simply be involved in a verbal disagreement; the bracketed ‘(varying degrees of)’ in the last quotation is perhaps significant. For me, for there to be much sense in calling a thesis under scrutiny ‘Socratic’, it ought to have a fighting chance of being a thesis we might reasonably think could be ascribed to Socrates, whether by this we mean the historical figure or the figure in some Platonic work or other. Otherwise, I see no reason to invoke the name; let’s just get on and wonder what we now ought to think about beauty, expertise, and such like. It may, of course, be true that Wittgenstein, say, thought that his own view of some matter or other could be ascribed to or was in some way inspired by a reading of Platonic works. But that is itself a question for contextualist interpretation.


[1] ‘For any concept X of a thing Y, the fact: that X is a family resemblance concept does not demonstrate that there is no such thing as Y’. Of course. And I suppose this is true on either of the following construals of X and Y. If X is supposed to stand for e.g. beauty and Y of some thing, e.g. a sunset, then of course the notion that beauty is (or may be) a family resemblance term does not demonstrate that there is no such thing as a sunset, or even a beautiful sunset. (I did not claim it did.) If X is supposed to stand for e.g. a concept of beauty and Y of some thing, e.g. beauty, then of course the notion that the concept of beauty is a family resemblance concept does not demonstrate that there is no such thing as beauty. (I did not claim it did; I do claim that the ‘beauty’ that would be consistent with the hypothesis is not recognisably a Socratic or Platonic idea of beauty.)

[2] There are some helpful thoughts about this in J. Barnes, ‘La philosophie entre guillemets’ in M. Canto-Sperber and P. Pellegrin eds. Le style de la pensée: recueil de textes en hommage à Jacques Brunschwig, Paris 2002, 522–47, at 529ff. Barnes is reacting to the two pieces, by Brunschwig and Aubenque, I mentioned in an earlier post here.

Goths in hot weather

A wonderful blog with terrific pictures of some very committed goths. And even some music:

Tradotto!

For the first time something of mine has been published in translation. An Italian edition of my 2007 Presocratics book has now arrived. Here's the cover, not perhaps as nice as the English original but bright and breezy all the same. Click on it for the link to the publishers. I haven't seen a copy yet so if someone does, they will have to tell me how I sound in translation.

Children's laureate

The new Children's laureate is Anthony Browne. I love his Voices in the park and, of course, My Dad.

In other news, I managed yesterday to smash my favourite cereal bowl, one of the Kellogg's 'footbowls' they gave as free gifts during the Japan/Korea 2002 World Cup (which had some games on at our breakfast time because of the time difference, geddit?). I loved that bowl because somehow it was proportioned just right -- except it was no good for Weetabix (vita-bix?): for those you need a bowl with a broader more or less flat base otherwise the biscuit doesn't soak up the milk evenly and you get a soggy end and a dry end. Still, today S bought me a FC Barcelona cereal bowl to replace it. It made my day.

More Brown idiocy

Lucky us: the Department for Innovation, Universities and Skills (DIUS) has been scrapped (report here) and replaced by a new Department for Business, Innovation and Skills under Lord Mandelson. Universities and other tertiary educational institutions do not merit their own department and, it seems, are now viewed by this government as a subsidiary arm of business. Hopeless. The goals of the new department, we are told, are as follows:

• Advocate the needs of business across government, especially of UK small businesses;
• Promote an enterprise environment that is good for business and good for consumers;
• Design tailored policies for sectors of the UK economy that represent key future strengths and where government policy can add to the dynamics of the market;
• Assess the changing skills needs of the UK economy, especially the intermediate and high skills vital in a global economy and design policies to meets them through public and privately funded life long training;
• Invest in the development of a higher education system committed to widening participation, equipping people with the skills and knowledge to compete in a global economy and securing and enhancing Britain's existing world class research base;
• Continue to invest in the UK's world class science base and develop strategies for commercialising more of that science;
• Continue to invest in skills through the Further Education system to help people through the downturn and to prepare Britain for the future;
• Deliver on the government's ambitious objectives to expand the number of apprenticeships;
• Encourage innovation in the UK;
• Defend a sound regulatory environment that encourages enterprise and skills;
• Collaborate with the RDAs in building economic growth in the English regions;
• Work with the EU in shaping European regulation and European policies that affect the openness of the single market and the competitiveness of
• European and British companies;
• Continue to work to expand UK exports and encourage inward investment to the UK.

So that's what universities are meant to be for... Any sign there of a commitment to the very best research and learning, scholarship and education in, say, the arts and humanities? No. I am instead apparently tasked with generating business leaders and entrepreneurs. The crass instrumentalist attitude this government has to education (it's not new: remember this?) knows no bounds.