Chin up!

We have been reading Epicurus' Kyriai Doxai in our seminar this term and I began last night to introduce KD 18-21, which attempt to show that Epicurus' hedonism can still offer a recipe for a good and 'complete' life: a life lacking nothing good. It seems that this might be a tall order for a hedonist because if (i) pleasure is the good then (ii) the more pleasure the better. That would seem to imply (iii) a longer life containing more pleasure will always be better than a shorter life containing less pleasure, and (iv) however long your life is, then, it always could have been better.

The Epicureans deny the inference from (i) to (ii), controversially, and therefore hope to avoid (iv) and rescue the possibility of a complete mortal hedonist life. Pondering all this I remembered one of my favourite quotations from Henry Sidgwick (perhaps most famous among the majority of Cambridge undergraduates for his Avenue...), Methods of Ethics Book II chapter 2 'Empirical Hedonism' (p. 130 n.):

It is sometimes thought to be a necessary assumption of Hedonists that a surplus of pleasure over pain is actually attainable by human beings: a proposition which all extreme pessimists would deny. But the conclusion that life is always on the whole painful would not prove it to be unreasonable for a man to aim ultimately at minimising pain, if this is still admitted to be possible; though it would, no doubt, render immediate suicide, by some painless process, the only reasonable course for a perfect egoist-- -unless he looked forward to another life.

(There is a very handy e-text of the whole work here and links to other resources here.) Sidgwick's point is certainly true: whether or not we do or can live lives which are pleasant, all things considered, is not really relevant to the question whether hedonism is true. In fact, hedonism is compatible even with a very dark view of our chances of ever living a life in which pleasure predominates over pain. Of course, should hedonism be true and it be the case that pleasure will never predominate over pain then this would recommend immediate suicide: things can only get worse if they are prolonged. (I wonder if he had a cheeky smile on his face as he wrote this note. Hard to tell whether he's the kind of person who ever had a cheeky smile...)

Anaxagoras' Apophthegmatik?

This morning in the PhD seminar we were thinking about the presentation of Democritus in Aristotle Met. Γ 5. But this was one of the little passages which struck me as requiring a bit more thought. It’s not about Democritus at all but Anaxagoras:

Ἀναξαγόρου δὲ καὶ ἀπόφθεγμα μνημονεύεται πρὸς τῶν ἑταίρων τινάς, ὅτι τοιαῦτ’ αὐτοῖς ἔσται τὰ ὄντα οἷα ἂν ὑπολάβωσιν.

Arist. Met. 1009b25–8

There is also related a saying of Anaxagoras to his friends that things will be for them just as they conceive.

For Aristotle this is further evidence of a general trend in early philosophy for mistakenly believing that all appearances or opinions are equally true, a trend which he sees as eventually resulting in the unfortunate consequence that these otherwise serious thinkers turn out to say that one and the same thing can simultaneously be F and not-F or that two contradictory opinions or perceptions can be simultaneously true.

My question is: Why think this bit of Anaxagoras has anything to do with that set of epistemological and metaphysical questions? What puzzled me initially was the future tense: ἔσται. If the sense is broadly epistemological then this would have to be generalising: ‘things will (sc. always) be as you take them to be’. But the sense would surely just as well be satisfied with a plain present. On the other hand, Diels–Kranz include it as DK 59 A 28, the first of the section: ‘Apophthegmatik’, and that seems to me to be also quite possible; perhaps it even makes better sense of the future tense. Encountered outside of the Aristotelian frame, this little saying might easily be taken to be an exhortation to the power of positive or optimistic thinking: ‘Things will turn out as you think...’ Of course, if that’s right, then Aristotle has either misunderstood or else has wilfully included here in his catalogue of early assertions of this general view something he knows well is not absolutely apposite. Lanza’s note in his 1966 edition of Anaxagoras thinks this is intolerable (ad A 28, p. 37–8) on the grounds that (i) this would imply there was some kind of Anaxagorean ethical view, which is otherwise unattested and (ii) Aristotle would not be guilty of such ‘una voluntaria grave improprietà’. I’m not sure about either reason. Cherniss, who is cited with disapproval by Lanza, is predictably quite happy with finding Aristotle so guilty and can comfortably say that A 28 is a bit of Anaxagorean moralising. I don’t think there are easy answers to Aristotle’s propriety or otherwise, but it is certainly clear that in this passage he is on the look out for any sign in his predecessors of passages that point in the general direction of the thesis he’s proposing. And I am also not so sure of Lanza’s (i). First, a good case could be made for there being a moral or teleological aspect to Anaxagoras’ cosmology. I don't think I've made up my mind about that yet. But certainly, there are other snippets of moralising here and there ascribed to Anaxagoras, and some are found even in Aristotle himself (see DK 59 A 30 = EN 1141b3ff. and 1179a13, EE 1215b6ff, 1216a11, indeed all of the ‘Apophthegmatik’). Now, these may be meagre pickings, but I’ve no reason to doubt that Anaxagoras was also interested in matters ethical, broadly conceived.

Reading Sextus Empiricus

Apologies for not saying very much recently about ancient philosophy. This is mostly because I have been stuck doing various sorts of administrative nonsense over the first few days of term or have been tidying up things for publication so they're not the right sort of stuff to be thrown into the ether. But something I've gone back to in the last couple of days has got me wondering, and it's just possible somebody reading this might be able to help.

I am trying to think about Sextus Empiricus and about various ways of reading his work. People are interested in and have written a lot about his sources and also about the structure of PH and M. People have also sometimes been interested in the strength of the various arguments he offers and about how to account for the fact that some of them are pretty crummy, indeed so evidently crummy it's worth thinking about why they are there at all. (Sometimes, people point to the last chapters of PH (PH 3.280-81) and the idea that sometimes only a weak dose is needed to cure someone of a dogmatic ill. I think this is a bit odd, by the way: a weak dose is still an effective dose, even if its effectiveness is limited; it can tackle only mild (e.g.) fevers. I don't really see how someone with a weak commitment to a dogmatic position would be served by a bad argument while someone heavily committed to a view will need a better argument... It's rather good to think that the level of commitment to some dogmatic view or other does not vary in direct relation to one's ability to spot a decent argument.)

Anyway, what I can't find much discussion of is how we are supposed to read the text. I mean: Is it supposed that we just start at the beginning and move through to the end? Is it the sort of thing you go to to 'look up' a particular counter-argument? Are you supposed to flick backwards and forwards, adding to and supplementing the gappy arguments? (How possible was it to find particular bits of text, in any case?) Indeed, I am beginning to lament the lack in Sextan studies of the (perhaps sometimes excessive) sort of discussion you find of Platonic works. Find what looks for all the world like a crap argument in Plato and people get terrible exercised over how it is in fact pedagogical, or proleptic, or an invitation to further reflection, or some such. It's all to be made right by thinking about the interaction between the text and an active, thinking, reader. Why not try some of that with Sextus? A Pyrrhonist, after all, is supposed to be in some sense an active thinker, open to new arguments and only ever provisionally suspending judgement. In that case, I wonder if we should grant the reader a more active role in engaging with Sextus and, in turn, grant Sextus a more sophisticated notion of how his text might be read and used. I can't see much of this sort of thing in the literature on Sextus, but if there is some out there I'd be very glad to hear of it.

Now, this is all a bit up in the air at the moment and Sextus himself is not overly forthcoming with handy pointers about what we should do with him. But I'm going to see how far these thoughts take me.

Methadone

It's not easy finishing something you've enjoyed enormously. So when S and I got through season 5 of The Wire I was left with an odd combination of feelings. I have never watched anything on TV so engrossing and I suppose in a way I was sad that I had to leave that world behind. I'll watch it again, of course, but that will be a different experience.

Anyway, to help the come-down we've gone back to Homicide: Life on the street which is, as STC said yesterday, obviously a bit of a dry-run for The Wire. (In fact, I think she said it was to The Wire what Titus Andronicus is to King Lear...) It's a bit odd watching things backwards, as it were, like this and I suppose that you inevitably start viewing the earlier series is a teleological way. Still, we watched the first episode last night and beyond the shaky camera work the dialogue is recognisably sharp and witty mixed with the equally familiar grim realities of the job. And Gus from the Baltimore Sun is a cop! With a terrible haircut.

Just one another thing I noticed from the first episode. This is 1993, right? So why are they all still using manual typewriters?

So it begins...

Easter term, that is. The exam term. A term of stress and anxiety followed by a couple of weeks of equally serious parties and ceremonies. And today is one of the most frantic days as we try to see as many students and tutees as we can before the teaching begins on Thursday. (It also so happened that today was one of the rare occasions when our childcare arrangements failed, so things are even more frantic than expected. Ho hum.)

Still, the sun is shining and college only really feels right when it is full of students doing whatever it is they do. Anyway, the place feels properly alive.

Jaffa cakes

Giles Coren makes an enormous one here, inspired by www.pimpthatsnack.com (their recipe is here):

When taxonomy matters

Reading a recent post on Fairing's Parish about taxonomy I was reminded of a recent momentous legal judgement about the correct classification of the M&S chocolate teacake, which has for twenty years been classified by the tax office as a biscuit and therefore subject to VAT. That means we the cake eaters have been overcharged by 17.5% per teacake. (It was not clear whether this has also affected what I take to be the paradigm example of this species, namely the Tunnocks tea cake, but never mind.)

In fact there are two issues here. First there is the question of how to distinguish between a cake and a biscuit. Of course, some cases are very obvious: a Rich Tea is a biscuit, but a Black Forest gateau is a cake. But there are some other more difficult examples. What, precisely, is a Jaffa Cake? (It seems to be classed for tax purposes as a biscuit, and the authoritative site: A Nice Cup of Tea and a Sit Down agrees.) Incidentally ANCOTAASD has a useful field guide for cake/biscuit identification here.

Second even once the specimen has been classified, there are some further very complicated rules about which biscuits and which cakes are subject to VAT. For example, a biscuit such as a chocolate chip cookie 'where the chips are either included in the dough or pressed into the surface before baking' is not subject to VAT, whereas 'wholly or partly coated biscuits including biscuits decorated in a pattern with chocolate or some similar product' are. The BBC offered the following useful table:

VAT ON CAKES AND BISCUITS

How various products are classified by HM Revenue and Customs

Standard rated [17.5% VAT]

"Biscuits"

All wholly or partly coated biscuits including biscuits decorated in a pattern with chocolate or some similar product

Gingerbread men decorated with chocolate unless this amounts to no more than a couple of dots for eyes

Chocolate shortbread

"Cakes"

"Snowballs" without such a base are classed as confectionary

Shortbread partly or wholly chocolate-covered

Zero rated [no VAT]

"Biscuits"

Chocolate chip biscuits where the chips are either included in the dough or pressed into the surface before baking

Jaffa Cakes

Bourbon and other biscuits where the chocolate or similar product forms a sandwich layer between two biscuit halves and is not continued on to the outer surface

"Cakes"

Marshmallow teacakes (with a crumb, biscuit or cake base topped with a dome of marshmallow coated in either chocolate, sugar strands or coconut)

Caramel or "millionaire's" shortcake consisting of a base of shortbread topped with a layer or caramel and (usually) chocolate or carob

Flapjacks

Surprising conclusions...

An article in this week's THE wonders whether universities ought to vary their methods of assessment and, perhaps, offer students a choice of different assessment methods. Perhaps that's right; I'm not sure. But one of the conclusions reached by the University Mental Health Advisors Network did make me splutter into my coffee...

A policy paper adopted by the network says: "Allowing students to know what questions they are going to be asked in an examination beforehand ... significantly reduces the fear factor associated with the unknown."

Who'd have thought?

Death wishes

I'm very much enjoying Julian Barnes' Nothing to be frightened of, partly because it is an excellently humane discussion of death, thoughts about death, grief and mortality (something of a professional interest of mine) and partly because of the occasional appearances in it of Julian's brother Jonathan. There's a nice list of reviews on the Barnes website here. I haven't been through them all but I did notice John Carey in the Sunday Times manages mistakenly to credit Seneca with the invention of the Symmetry argument: 'the time before your birth was no harm to you, so too will be the time after your death'. (Barnes' self-centred-- and surely jokey -- reply to the argument is worth a second thought, though.)

It has made me think over various things which I might come back to here now and then. First, there is an interesting exchange between the J. Barneses over the sense that can be given to the familiar funeral observation that X is 'what so-and-so would have wanted'... Is such a thought just plain silly?

It depends on what the implied antecedent of this claim is. It is certainly silly, I think, if the thought is something like: 'Had so-and-so been here [sc. at her funeral], this is what she would have wanted'. I suppose there might be some far-out view of post mortem existence which believes that it is possible to witness one's own funeral, perhaps even experience being buried or cremated, but even on this view the wish ought to be expressed not in the remote conditional form but in a plain indicative: 'It is what so-and-so wants', or '... did want', '.. said she wanted' etc. I suppose the fact that it is not in the indicative is meant to convey the idea that in fact no one can be pleased at how one's own funeral is being conducted, but once you have grasped that point then it's probably important to go on to see that given this fact then it becomes non-sensical to worry about whether the funeral would or would not meet the approval of the deceased. There are views which hold that it does indeed matter to the deceased how their interests and wishes are treated after their death but, again, holding one of these would best be served by simply saying: this is what so-and-so did want.

So the only proper sense I think that can be given to the familiar kind of wish is that it conveys the idea that such-and-such is what so-and-so would have wanted had we bothered to ask her what kind of music, say, she wanted at the funeral. That is, while she was alive, this is the sort of thing she would have requested for her funeral. Whether it is rational to have preferences about how one's remains and memory are treated after one's death is another question entirely, of course.

Plutarch in Oxford

The provisional programme and booking details for Eleni Kechagia's conference on Plutarch and philosophy (Oxford, 14-15 July 2008) have now been posted here. I'm going to be saying something about Plutarch's anti-Epicurean polemic in the Non posse.

Nostos

Good news today. For the last two years I've been squatting in what should have been one of the Fellows' guest rooms. Next week I get to return to my own office and I went to have a look around today. The room itself was locked up but the college have decided to do a makeover on the staircase with new carpets and a lick of paint. It all looks very nice; there are even new signs pointing people in the right direction around the maze of corridors. It will be good to get back. I suppose most Cambridge fellows feel very proprietorial about the offices (or 'rooms'; in my case there's only one room, so it's not so appropriate). In fact, it is the issue which generates the most envy between people in college and can generate the strongest feelings if there is ever a proposal to move someone out or rearrange office distribution... In Corpus, it is one of the few things that is at the sole discretion of the Master, and it is not a power which I would want to have.

Other good news. While waiting for the new Portishead album (Third, out April 28) I can listen to the new James album, out on Monday. I might even dig out my old t-shirt to celebrate. There's some info about it (the album, not the t-shirt) here. From a sneaky listen to the preview tracks it's recognisably the sound that takes me straight back to a Sixth Form common room and arguments over the tape player which usually ended with a compilation of 'Come Home', 'How was it for you?' and (though this is a bit hazy) something by The Wonder Stuff (possibly: 'It's yer money I'm after baby'). Heady times. But what has happened to Tim Booth's hair? I thought the silly beard was a prop for his appearance as Judas in the (cringeworthy) Manchester Passion. But apparently not. (Here he is, by the way, if you can bear it, singing 'Heaven knows I'm miserable now' (2 mins into the clip.) I can't count how many ways this is so wrong. To do this to this song... Why? Just because it mentions 'heaven'? The horror. The horror.)

Symmetry arguments for Platonists?

The Epicurean symmetry argument says that death is not to be feared since post mortem time is not relevantly different from pre-natal time. And since no one thinks they were harmed in the time before their birth so no one should think that they will be harmed in the time after their death. The Epicureans team this with the further thought that death is the end of one’s existence just as birth was the beginning to explain why it is that neither of these times can include any harms.

The pseudo-Platonic dialogue Axiochus has an interesting spin on this argument. It is an odd work, to be sure, which seems to lump together Epicurean, Cynic, and Platonist elements into a therapeutic programme. But it seems to me that some elements which might seem incompatible are in fact not necessarily so. One of these is the clear appearance of a version of the symmetry argument at 365d–e which is followed by some grand Platonist rhetoric about the immortality of the soul. Here is Hershbell’s translation of 365d–366a:

“In your distraction, Axiochus, you're confusing sensibility with insensibilty, without realising it. What you say and do involves internal self-contradiction; you don't realise that you're simultaneously upset by your loss of sensations and pained by your decay and the loss of your pleasures—as if by dying you entered into another life, instead of lapsing into the utter insensibility that existed before your birth. Just as during the government of Draco or Cleisthenes there was nothing bad at all that concerned you (because you did not exist then for it to concern you), nor will anything bad happen to you after your death (because you will not exist later for it to concern you).

“Away, then, with all such nonsense! Keep in mind: once the compound is dissolved and the soul has been settled in its proper place, the body which remains, being earthly and irrational, is not the human person. For each of us is a soul, an immortal living being locked up in a mortal prison; and Nature has fashioned this tent for suffering—its pleasures are superficial, fleeting, and mixed with many pains; but its pains are undiluted, long lasting, and without any share of pleasure. And while the soul is forced to share with the sense organs their diseases and inflammations and the other internal ills of the body (since it is disturbed among its pores), it longs for its native heavenly aether, nay, thirsts after it, striving upwards in hopes of feasting and dancing there. Thus being released from upwards in hopes of feasting and dancing there. Thus being released from life is a transition from something bad to something good.”

You might think that here we have an odd combination of Epicurean and Platonist arguments. And in a way that is right. But I suspect that some attempt has been made to render the Epicurean argument consistent with Platonist dualism. First, it is true even on the Platonist view that the person concerned was not ‘around’ in the time of Draco and will not be around after death. This is not, of course, for the reasons the Epicureans think this is true: namely that the soul is mortal and does not pre-exist the living body. Rather, it is because – as Socrates points our here – the soul is only temporarily imprisoned in a body during life and when liberated spends its time not in the world of Draco or Cleisthenes, but in its proper heavenly place.

Second, and similarly, since perception is made the result of this enforced incarnation then a Platonist can equally accept on his own dualist terms the Epicurean notion that before birth and after death there is no perception.

The tricky phrase for this interpretation of course is the supposed explanation for why post mortem time cannot be bad: ‘because you will not exist later for it to concern you’ (366e2; the parallel claim about pre-natal time is at 366d8) since it is claimed only a few lines later that ‘we are each of us a soul’ (366e6) and since the soul is immortal, each of us is immortal.

But perhaps Socrates is deliberately attempting to move the ailing Axiochus from a common-sense notion of his identity (he is Axiochus, born on such and such a date etc.) to a new and surprising sense of his identity (he is an immortal soul…) Certainly 366e6: ‘For we are each of us a soul’ sounds like a grand announcement, which is fleshed out further in what is to come. And it is certainly helpful, in that case, that Axiochus could go back with this new-found identification of his self with an immortal soul and see that the symmetry argument is still just as relevant.

Also, the phrases at 366d8 and e2 which are generally translated using the English ‘exist’ can perhaps be read in a less determinate way so as to lessen any explicit inconsistency. (Forgive the transliteration…I can’t get Greek to work on this machine.)

366d8: archên gar ouk ês, peri hon an ên

366e2: su gar ouk esêi peri hon estai

I wonder whether 366d8, for example, can be read as follows: ‘For in the beginning you were not such as it could concern you’; and e2 could be ‘for you will not be such as it will concern you’. Both these claims could be asserted without qualms by a dualist who accepts an immortal soul.

Sucking up...

We've given in and bought a Dyson. Lovely it is too. Younger daughter decided immediately it looks like a space ship, which I suppose is pretty cool for a hoover. I wondered for a while about the rechargeable, hand-held ones that look like a big gun from the Alien films*, but didn't succumb. Real willpower that.

I had to take old dead hoover to the WEEE recycling centre near Milton (great name; less exciting when you get there). I left it alongside a phalanx of other dead hoovers, including a number of formerly natty Dysons (mostly the older candy-coloured ones...). They looked quite sad, all in a row, but anything of them that can be salvaged and repaired will be.

* That reminds me. I would like to have the Alien films on DVD but they insisted on putting out a set of the four films under the name: The Alien Quadrilogy. Quadrilogy? WTF? There's a perfectly good word for a four-work sequence alreadys without the need to bastardise Latin and Greek like that. (Or perhaps, on second thoughts, the hybridity of the title is a deliberate nod to part of a motif of the films themselves... No, surely not: it was just a cock-up.) Anyway, as a result I can't buy them. Damn.

Springtime...

... in Cambridge.

Some Easter thoughts

Tomorrow will be Easter Sunday and today it is snowing. Aggressively. It's a nice feeling, though, as if this really is the last throes of Winter before we can get on with some warmer and sunnier weather.

Perhaps because it is the Easter weekend, there has been a lot on the news about the Catholic church's displeasure that the PM is reluctant to allow his MPs a 'free vote' on a new embryology bill which would include measures licensing the creation of 'hybrid' embryos. (It looks now as if he might give in.) Anyway, I certainly don't share the Archbishop of Canterbury's certainty that such a bill would be a 'monstrous attack on human rights, human dignity and human life' (extracts from his sermon can be read here). But I did think it worth looking at the HFEA's consultation report, which seems to have been conspicuously absent from much of the discussion in the last couple of days. The full report can be read here, and it's rather interesting. In particular, it gives a clear and detailed account of the current state of scientific research and useful comparisons with similar legislation in other countries.

Also, Appendix D (p. 63ff.) gives data from written responses to the consultation. Now, I don't know who actually responds to these -- I imagine it is not an entirely representative slice of the population since people are more likely to reply if they have strong views one way or another and particularly wish to influence the process, but it's worth a look. Most respondents expressed the view that licensing such research would not be permissible and -- this is the most interesting bit for me -- many of them tried to offer a reason why.

The graph puts them in the following categories:

Life is sacred
'Yuck' responses
Human dignity
Slippery slope
Unconvinced by science
Safety risks
Potentiality of the embryo

Playing God

The first four tend to be the most popular. I'm not quite sure what to make of them, but I'm pretty sure that a 'Yuck' response can't really be a particularly persuasive argument against chaging scientific research (unless, I suppose, the people concerned were all emotivists...).

Philosophers behaving badly

Those classical types could certainly be rude about one another. Here's the latest gem I've discovered, perhaps paying back Epicurus for his cute aphorism about 'spitting on the good'.

The second-century Platonist Calvenus Taurus seems to have been particularly attached to anti-Epicurean anti-hedonist agenda of an extreme kind. Certainly, the terms of his attacks on Epicurus as reported by Aulus Gellius NA 9.5 are uncompromising:

Taurus autem noster, quotiens facta mentio Epicuri erat, in ore atque in lingua habebat verba haec Hieroclis Stoici, viri sancti et gravis: ἡδονὴ τέλος, πόρνης δόγμα· οὐκ ἔστιν πρόνοια, οὐδὲ πόρνης δόγμα.

But our own Taurus, whenever he made mention of Epicurus would have on the tip of his tongue this phrase of the Stoic Hierocles, a pious and serious man: ‘That pleasure is the goal of life is the dogma of a whore; that there is no providence is not even the dogma of a whore’.

Nice.

Saturday science...

Yesterday was fun. Cambridge was full of eager families joining in the excellent Science Week activities. Because of the kids' particular current enthusiasms we concentrated on the stuff in the Sedgwick museum -- real dinosaur bones (an allosaurus foot and arm were the highlights) and lots of fun geology stuff including a model erupting volcano. (Crowd pictured...)

This annual event really is excellent, and the volunteers -- many of them students -- were superb too. It's not east, I imagine, to field questions from toddlers, keen kids and pushy parents, as well as the familiar Cambridge eccentrics. But the ones we met managed still to sound enthusiastic and happy to share their interests. Our kids, anyway, loved it.

And it sets a very high standard for the first 'Festival of Ideas' -- the university's equivalent to the science week festival but concentrating on arts, humanities and social sciences, coming up 22 October - 2 November later this year.

Shurely Shome Mishtake?

Our former Dear Leader, 'Tony' Blair, is to teach a seminar at Yale next year on faith and globalisation. Here's the BBC report. Good grief. And here's the press release from Yale. The best part is here, quoting Yale's President:

"As the world continues to become increasingly inter-dependent, it is essential that we explore how religious values can be channeled toward reconciliation rather than polarization. Mr. Blair has demonstrated outstanding leadership in these areas and is especially qualified to bring his perspective to bear."

I wonder what he is referring to as evidence of TB's outstanding leadership in these areas. I hope he's thinking more of Northern Ireland. Then again, TB strikes me as someone who seems not to be able to distinguish holding a belief sincerely from holding a true belief, so it might be just the seminar to enrol in. Say at the end of your paper that you really felt you were doing the right thing and you're bound to get an A.

RIP Gary Gygax

Gary Gygax, co-creator of Dungeons and Dragons, died this week, which reminded me of what a great hobby those games are. I must have spent a lot of time between the ages of about 8 and 14 playing RPGs: not just D&D, but also RuneQuest, Warhammer FRP, Traveller (that one was really good), one based in the US in the 1920s, Call of Cthulhu etc., and I had a great time. Yes, it was a bit geeky. Yes, perhaps we should have been outside kicking footballs or each other rather than rolling odd dice and pretending to be other people, but it was creative and sociable and it involved all sorts of numerical and linguistic skills. I don't think it can quite be matched by the more recent online variants. There was a brief unfortunate incident when an RE teacher at school tried to claim that it was a form of satanism, but we got over that relatively quickly...

Heracles and the kids from Fame...

Some more thoughts about ponos and pleasure. I've been looking again at Xenophon Mem. 2.1, the bit with Prodicus' story of the choice of Heracles. It seems to me that in his attempt to persuade Aristippus of the importance of virtue and self-control, Socrates is in danger of failing to register clearly a distinction between pleasure taking in hard work or self-denial and pleasure won as a result of hard work and self-denial.

At 2.1.18-20 Socrates appears to be emphasising the latter option: pleasures are like the animals caught after a long day of difficult hunting (18), a reward for a period of hardship and, more importantly, the goal for which that hardship is undertaken. At 2.1.20 Socrates quotes a nice tag from Epicharmus to help make the point:

τῶν πόνων πωλοῦσιν ἡμῖν πάντα τἀγάθ’ οἱ θεοί.

The gods sell us all good things in exchange for our toils.

It's like the line from the beginning of Fame: 'You want the good? Well, the good costs. And right here's where you start paying... in sweat.' And that's the main thrust of the last speech given by personified Virtue at the end of this dialogue: training and exertion, a refusal to gratify desires immediately, is a way to ensure the eventual enjoyment of more pleasure than would be won in a profligate life. Pain and toil itself is not good, but it can be used to get what you really want.

But there is another strand to Socrates' argument even here (2.1.19):

καὶ τὰ μὲν τοιαῦτα ἆθλα τῶν πόνων μικροῦ τινος ἄξιά ἐστι, τοὺς δὲ πονοῦντας ἵνα φίλους ἀγαθοὺς κτήσωνται, ἢ ὅπως ἐχθροὺς χειρώσωνται, ἢ ἵνα δυνατοὶ γενόμενοι καὶ τοῖς σώμασι καὶ ταῖς ψυχαῖς καὶ τὸν ἑαυτῶν οἶκον καλῶς οἰκῶσι καὶ τοὺς φίλους εὖ ποιῶσι καὶ τὴν πατρίδα εὐεργετῶσι, πῶς οὐκ οἴεσθαι χρὴ τούτους καὶ πονεῖν ἡδέως εἰς τὰ τοιαῦτα καὶ ζῆν εὐφραινομένους, ἀγαμένους μὲν ἑαυτούς, ἐπαινουμένους δὲ καὶ ζηλουμένους ὑπὸ τῶν ἄλλων;

These rewards from effort (ponoi) are worth little. But those people who toil (ponountas) in order to acquire good friends or to do down their enemies, or to become powerful in body and soul, and who run their household well and do well by their friends and benefit their country, how should we not think that these people toil in pleasure (ponein hēdeōs) for such goals and live joyfully (euphrainomenous), being contented themselves and being praised and envied by others?

The contrast mentioned at the beginning of the quotation is between these serious goals and the goal of hunting in the previous paragraph. The goals detailed here are worth a lifetime of effort since they are most valuable and lasting. What's most interesting, though, is the passage in bold since this seems to say that the very effort involved in itself a source of pleasure. It is not merely that the goal of being envied or having a well-run house and good friends is a source of pleasure worth purchasing in exchange for some toils. Socrates is surely being deliberately paradoxial by asserting that toil itself can be done in a pleasant way (ponein hēdeōs), and this is just the sort of thing that seems to have been attractive to the Cynics.

I'm not sure that Socrates here sees the distinction between ponos being itself pleasant and ponos being a means to greater pleasure in the long-run. At least, if he does see it he is not concerned to make much of it. Either way, he will have some ammunition against Aristippus and will be able to offer some argument against his chosen way of life which deals in terms which Aristippus himself might agree are valuable.

Eurosong fever

Come on, UK, it's time for us to make up our minds over which act we are to send as a sacrificial victim to the Eurovision Song Contest in Belgrade. The choices are here for you to listen to, but it's not a great bunch. I reckon Michelle Gayle is the least awful but we'll still get no votes. Probably something to do with us invading various countries recently.

Ireland, however, have got the right idea. It might not be 'My lovely horse', but this is about what the competition deserves.

More Cynicism-

Some more thoughts provoked from the last discussion with the B3 team:

What did Antisthenes think about pleasure and pain? There are snippets of information here and there. For example:

DL 6.2: He thought that pain (ponos: perhaps 'toil' or 'hard work' would be a better translation, but ponos often carries the connotation of discomfort or pain) is good (for which claim he pointed as support to the example of Heracles). Apparently he got this idea from Socrates' hardiness.

Saying that pain is good does not, of course, require you to think that pleasure is bad. There are plenty of texts which talk of pain/ponos being instrumentally good. And it might be instrumentally good in the sense that it allows you to win greater pleasure in the long run.

But there are other texts which offer the stronger claim that pleasure is for some reason not to be pursued.

DL 6.3: He said he'd rather be mad than feel pleasure.
DL 9.101: Epicurus thought that pleasure is good; Antisthenes thought that it is bad.

The second of these is perhaps less compelling because it is clearly part of a set of doxographical divisions and categorisations which by their nature cannot always capture more subtle views. Anthisthenes is a nice contrast with the hedonists. Other texts appear to ascribe to him distinctions between pleasures and also the claim that some - perhaps those that are worked for, or deserved - ought to be pursued. (E.g. Stob. 3.29.65: you should pursue pleasures 'after' (meta) ponos but not those 'before' (pro); cf. Stob 3.6.43 and 3.18.26 on the proper attitude to 'everyday' pleasures; Athenaeus 12 513a even says that Antisthenes thought pleasure to be good, at least pleasure 'of the kind that is not later regretted'.) The sources may be a bit jumbled here. Still, there is no doubting that he thought some, perhaps even all, pleasure is best avoided.

Then there is the depiction of Antisthenes in Xenophon, esp. Symp. 4.39:

καὶ πάντα τοίνυν ταῦτα οὕτως ἡδέα μοι δοκεῖ εἶναι ὡς μᾶλλον μὲν ἥδεσθαι ποιῶν ἕκαστα αὐτῶν οὐκ ἂν εὐξαίμην, ἧττον δέ· οὕτω μοι δοκεῖ ἔνια αὐτῶν ἡδίω εἶναι τοῦ συμφέροντος.

And all these things seem to me to be so pleasant that I wouldn't wish to enjoy each of them more, but less. Some of them seem to me to be in this way more pleasant than is beneficial.

Antisthenes has been describing his frugal lifestyle and the way in which he can make do with very little. He has accustomed himself sufficiently to a life free from luxury that he takes great pleasure from his modest house and simple life. Most important, these things provide him with pleasure. Of course, it is possible to think that this is once again pleasure of a different sort from the pleasures rejected in e.g. DL 6.3, perhaps like Diogenes' pleasures in despising pleasures. But that doesn't seem too convincing since Antisthenes' point appears to be that he too enjoys being warm, not being hungry, sex and all the other things we might think of as simple and obvious cases of pleasure. More to the point, his last comment in Xenophon surely points to him being aware of a problem similar to that raised for Diogenes' views. Antisthenes is concerned that he is enjoying the frugal life too much. Perhaps it's time for some advanced training in frugality or a bit more ponos. This is not quite like the problem faced by Diogenes: Antisthenes is not concerned that he is taking pleasure in the very fact of his being ascetic. Rather, he is concerned that his asceticism is in a way self-defeating. His avoidance of luxury has made his frugal life now appear luxurious to him.

Cynic pleasure

I've been trying to piece together what the Cynics think about pleasure, but it's not at all easy. Here’s a first set of thoughts.

Diogenes Laertius (6.71) says this is the view of Diogenes of Sinope:

καὶ γὰρ αὐτῆς τῆς ἡδονῆς ἡ καταφρόνησις ἡδυτάτη προμελετηθεῖσα, καὶ ὥσπερ οἱ συνεθισθέντες ἡδέως ζῆν, ἀηδῶς ἐπὶ τοὐναντίον μετίασιν, οὕτως οἱ τοὐναντίον ἀσκηθέντες ἥδιον αὐτῶν τῶν ἡδονῶν καταφρονοῦσι.

(1) For even the despising of pleasure is itself the most pleasurable, when we are accustomed to it; (2) and just as those who are accustomed to a life of pleasure find it unpleasant when they pass over the opposite, so those whose training has been of the opposite kind derive more pleasure from despising pleasure than from the pleasures themselves (trans. Hicks, lightly modified; I've added (1) and (2) for reference).

I think I can understand (1) although it is clearly phrased in a deliberately paradoxical fashion. I suppose it says that after a time the very practice of denying yourself indulgences can become something pleasant. Perhaps you begin to take pleasure in the fact of your self-control. You begin to enjoy the state of mind you reach now that you are no longer busy pursuing pleasure. We might even say that there are two kinds of pleasure involved here: (a) pleasure of the sort that most people enjoy, and (b) pleasure of the sort enjoyed only as a result of disdaining pleasures of type (a). Now, here’s a thought: Pleasures of type (b), we must further suppose, must be somehow sufficiently different from pleasures of type (a) as to be acceptable and not deserving of a similar kind of meta-disdain, for fear of a regress. (You can imagine a particularly hard-line ascetic scolding a student who dares to say that he is in fact taking pleasure in his disdaining pleasure...) This seems like a coherent thought, though not a very persuasive one. I suppose the idea behind (1) as a whole is that it allows a response to an objection based on the notion that the life Diogenes recommends on other grounds (e.g. that it is a ‘natural’ life) looks inhumanly devoid of pleasure. Not so, comes the reply, since the disdain of pleasure can itself provide pleasure. But in that case, pleasures of type (b) cannot be so different from pleasures of type (a) that they won’t do as an answer to this kind of objection.

What about (2)? The analogy appears to be between a hedonist who feels disgust when forced into temporary asceticism and an ascetic who, we are told, takes less enjoyment from an indulgent night out than from a night in despising pleasure in the way elaborated in (1). In both cases, the life one is accustomed to makes it unpleasant to live, however temporarily, in an alternative way. So the hedonist will feel that his very way of life is being denied and will find it unpleasant, that is to say less choice-worthy in terms of what he finds valuable, namely pleasure. But Diogenes also wants to say that the ascetic, on the other hand, if made to life the life of a hedonist, will find that life unpleasant compared with his own. But is this why he doesn’t want to live such a life? Presumably not; because it is not, I suppose, in order to experience the pleasures of disdaining pleasures (as in (1)) that the ascetic takes up his asceticism.

Every day is like Sunday...

.. well, it isn't. One of the few things Moz gets wrong. Partly, this is because yesterday was good for two reasons which are not common to every other day.

1. I discovered that new Portishead, Tricky and Massive Attack albums are due this year. Hooray. I briefly indulged in remembering my MPhil year in 1995-6 when we watched This Life and watched them listening to Portishead before doing the same ourselves. And then I remembered how Alex, Mark, and I could do an excellent a capella version of the This Life theme tune -- esp. that guitary bit just before the end of the opening credits.

2. Robert Carlyle was in the new BBC Sunday drama, The Last Enemy, ('Look! See how bad ID cards will be!) and got through the whole first episode without saying a word. He just looked a bit moody, typed a bit while sitting in an anti-surveillance cage-thing, and did that thing when he flexes his jaw muscles with his mouth closed and his cheek wobbles a bit. Menacing. I don't think he's really a baddie, though, because in BBC drama things these days the baddies are the ones wearing the suits.

Sources for a new Diogenes Laertius

Nick used the following anecdote last night to illustrate a point in Plotinus. I can't remember quite what the Plotinian point was, but this made me laugh. Robert rightly wondered if it had the air of a Diogenes Laertius anecdote. So in good Laertian style, I got this version from Wikipedia (which DL would surely have loved. He could have submitted rubbish poems on various people...).

The Life of A. J. Ayer (extract)

Rogers [1] says of Ayer: At a party that same year [2] held by fashion designer Fernando Sanchez, Ayer, then 77, confronted Mike Tyson harassing the (then little-known) model Naomi Campbell. When Ayer demanded that Tyson stop, the boxer said: "Do you know who the fuck I am? I'm the heavyweight champion of the world," to which Ayer replied: "And I am the former Wykeham Professor of Logic. We are both pre-eminent in our field. I suggest that we talk about this like rational men". Ayer and Tyson then began to talk, while Naomi Campbell slipped out.

It is not know what the two men talked about. It is unlikely that Tyson as a result of this meeting became Ayer's akoustês...

Notes

[1] See Rogers, Ben A.J. Ayer: A Life, Grove Press, 1999, p. 344.
[2] 1987.

Pest control?

I should be used to seeing slightly odd things around college, but this is something new. For the past couple of days, Old Court has been home to two birds of prey. They looked pretty comfortable despite the fog this morning. I shall do some research and find out why they are here...

UPDATE: I am told they are here to scare pigeons.

Platonic polemic

I'm afraid I haven't been up to much that is blogworthy recently, but I have been thinking about a paper I'm giving this summer at a conference on Plutarch and philosophy, on Non posse and Plato's Republic. I more or less fell into the topic since I've been thinking about Republic IX and also about Epicurean hedonism and this Plutarch text seems to me to be a nice way of bringing the two topics together. There is always the danger, I suppose, that my preoccupations have me seeing things in the Plutarch that are not necessarily that prominent or significant, but I'll live with that. There's definitely something in it, though, and more than the obvious links between e.g. Non posse 1091D-E and Rep. 584dff. (For example, it seems to me that Rep. 586a-b lies behind a lot of Plutarch's polemic, coupled with the familiar Epicureans-as-pigs idea.)

Anyway, the overall point is going to be something like this: Plutarch uses the work to bash the Epicureans over the head with Plato's Republic. They are completely wrong about pleasure, the soul, the body, what humans are, what the value of knowledge is, death, the gods -- in short, all the important stuff of philosophy. But it's a clever way of doing this because Plutarch uses all sorts of quotations and cues from the Epicureans themselves as a way of damning them and also because it seems to me there is good reason to think the Epicureans had already had a go at Plato's Republic themselves. Certainly, Plutarch's annoyer-in-chief, Colotes, had stuck the boot into the myth of Er. No wonder, then, that Plutarch reaches for the Republic for his material in retaliation. He likes turning the tables in this way: Adv. Col. is an exercise in showing that not only was Colotes wrong in his criticisms of earlier philosophers, but the criticisms really apply to the Epicureans themselves and not their opponents; Non posse, its companion-piece, on this view is an exercise in showing how the Epicureans' serious misunderstanding of the nature of human beings and the proper nature of pleasure shows that far from offering a recipe for a pleasant life, they in fact deny us all proper and fulfilling experience of pleasure.

That's the line, anyway. Now I just have to write the thing and that, I tend to find, is where things get tricky and the text gets in the way of all the neat and tidy points I want to make. Ho hum.

Astronomical

Me: How was playgroup today?

Daughter #2: I bumped into ____. We were running. We crashed together just like Earth and Theia.

I only got the last bit because we've been watching Earth: Power of the Planet over and over. But in case you're wondering, it's explained here.

Perhaps Callicles was right...

Well, we now know just why it feels so pleasant to scratch an itch... Read the Times report here. (And thanks to JB for the link.) The picture, by the way is of Robert Arneson 'Pablo Ruiz with Itch' 1980, Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, Missouri. Found on flickr.com. (Click on the picture for more details and for the photographer's credits.) Does he look like he's enjoying it?

Plato, pleasure, and the arts

Plato sometimes gets a bad press for his views on the value of art, mostly because of his insistence in Republic on cleaning up the content of poetry, his concentration on the various potentially harmful (and beneficial) psychological effects of different rhythms and the like and his general metaphysical distaste for mimetic representations. But in a class this morning we came across an interesting passages in Laws II which might add another dimension. Here, it seems, the Athenian is prepared to imagine a class of works of art which are properly judged solely according to the pleasure they produce.

ΑΘ. Οὐκοῦν ἡδονῇ κρίνοιτ’ ἂν μόνον ἐκεῖνο ὀρθῶς, ὃ μήτε τινὰ ὠφελίαν μήτε ἀλήθειαν μήτε ὁμοιότητα ἀπεργαζόμενον παρέχεται, μηδ’ αὖ γε βλάβην, ἀλλ’ αὐτοῦ τούτου μόνου ἕνεκα γίγνοιτο τοῦ συμπαρεπομένου τοῖς ἄλλοις, τῆς χάριτος, ἣν δὴ κάλλιστά τις ὀνομάσαι ἂν ἡδονήν, ὅταν μηδὲν αὐτῇ τούτων ἐπακολουθῇ;

ΚΛ. Ἀβλαβῆ λέγεις ἡδονὴν μόνον.

Laws 667d-e

So pleasure would be the proper criterion in one case only. A work of art may be produced with nothing to offer by way of usefulness or truth or accuracy of representation (or harm, of course). It may be produced solely for the sake of this element that normally accompanies the others, the attractive one. (In fact, it is when this element is associated with none of the others that it most genuinely deserves the name 'pleasure'.)

You mean only harmless pleasure?

Trans. T. J. Saunders

This discussion seems to carve out a category for a possible work of art which is neither mimetic (and so is not available for evaluation in terms of its accuracy, here: quantitative and qualitative isotês) nor can serve any purpose (and so is not available for evaluation in terms of its usefulness, here: ôpheleia). The Athenian refers to them as 'play' (paidia). Items in this category we would rightly judge solely in terms of the pleasure they produce. Presumably, the more pleasure the better. This is fine, I suppose, both because this class is likely to be relatively small and also because since in these cases we have specified that there is no sense in which these objects might either mislead or otherwise do harm they are sufficiently ethically and psychologically safe that pleasure can be allowed as the proper criterion of evaluation. Importantly, it is only in these cases that pleasure should win the day -- precisely when there is no reason to worry that there are other criteria worth being concerned about -- and in cases where we can make judgements involving standards of accuracy or use these will take priority.

Now another question arises. Does the Athenian imagine that there genuinely are works of art which fall into this category? He gives no examples. If there are any examples, what would they be? Painting, music and sculpture are all cases of imitative arts, we soon discover (668aff.) Perhaps the lack of examples is simply because whatever things fit in this category we need not bother about them as lawgivers or educators. Certainly the Athenian says that they need not bother talking about them or giving any further account of them (667e-8). But if there are no examples of works in this category, then this argument is also perhaps something of a reductio. Only on these very stringent criteria would it be right to judge a work solely on its production of pleasure; but given these criteria no work would qualify. So it is never right so to evaluate works of art.

Cuts

More bad news. The AHRC, as a result of the Comprehensive Spending Review, has announced that it will be able to offer only 2/3 of it previous number of new postgraduate awards. So there will be only 1000 (that's right, 1000) AHRC funded new postgraduates this coming year. The situation will improve a bit next year, but won't get back to the previous 1500 until at least 2011. Not good news at all if you're about to take your finals and desperately want to stay for further research since for most UK students an AHRC grant is the only way to fund work for a higher degree.

Please draw your pain

We had an interesting discussion in the first of this term's classes for the finals ancient philosophy paper 'Pleasure'. We were discussing Ryle's contention (‘Pleasure’ in his Dilemmas, (Cambridge, 1954)) that -- broadly speaking -- although pains are locatable and 'clockable', pleasures are not. I found one of the pain description charts that are often used by patients trying to describe pain to doctors as an aid to diagnosis and pain-relief (click on the thumbnail for a larger version). Can you imagine an analogous version for 'pleasure'? 'How many hours of the day do you feel pleasure?' 'Please draw your pleasure, indicating its location and expressing its quality...'

O tempora!

Such is the decline in classical learning... I realise that Facebook's US formatting may confuse some people who fail to see that they ought to enter their year of (eventual) graduation and not the year they entered the school/university etc. (you see, it's all to do with, say, 'the class of 95'), but there really is no excuse for people listing themselves as e.g. 'Cambridge Alum' before they have graduated. Come on, people! It's a complete pain if you're trying to find somebody. You have first to wonder whether they will have understood the instructions properly.

Amazing!

I know this may not be a surprise to many, but I have just worked out how to rotate my monitor to portrait mode. It's a bit odd and I reckon it will take me a while to get used to it, but certainly it makes word-processing a bit nicer and lots of webpages (including www.classics.cam.ac.uk) look rather nice in this format. I'll live with it for a bit and then decide.

Managing expectations

Oliver Burkeman's discussion of strategic incompetence is spot on. Unfortunately, encouraging others to have low expectations of me is something I find very difficult to do. (It's just a kind of lying, isn't it? Sure, the outcome might be beneficial in one sense -- I might be asked to do less --- but there's always the danger my cover might be blown.) But there are others who are much better at it and seem to have no qualms at all, so perhaps I should model myself a bit more on them. On the other hand, it's not clear to me that they have arranged such low expectations intentionally. Maybe they just are incompetent, and not strategically so.

Now, can anyone set up an add-on for Thunderbird that lets me answer an email but won't send the reply for a good couple of hours afterwards? Then I can enjoy the mental freedom of an empty inbox while not seeming to be too efficient.

UPDATE: the busy bees have already done what I wanted. Download the 'Send Later' add on here (right-click and save link as).

Pedantry

Daughter #1 (in histrionic style): My leg itches! It feels like it's bro-o-ken!

Me: _____, your leg is not broken.

Daughter #1: No, Dad. I said it feels like it's broken.

I surrender.

It's tough enough...

.. for a UK student just to get funding to do a PhD in the arts and humanities from the AHRC. Those luck people who get an award are usually grateful and rightly so -- this is public money funding what many see as indulgent higher higher education. But for a University Faculty these awards come at a high price: the AHRC's regulations which penalise departments if a certain proportion their students on these scholarships do not submit in time are hard to understand. Worse, they penalise in particular students in subsequent years who want to come and study by 'blacklisting' departments. (You can read their Submission Rate Policy here [Word document] or go here.) Simon Blackburn has a sensible discussion of a not-so-sensible policy here in the THE (no S any more). The problem really bites when the AHRC is not sensitive to there being reasons for late submission besides indolence or some other academic vice. Students have in any case plenty of reason for trying as hard as possible to submit their theses on time. Usually, this is because their funding runs out and they won't earn much else unless they have a doctorate. And if they have got themselves an academic job, it seems to me that this just goes to show that a promising young academic has been properly and profitably funded.

No one thinks it is reasonable to throw public money at graduate students who never finish and never make any further use of the time and investment expended on them. But if there is a stick to be applied then it's important to aim it properly.

Bias

This report from Friday's Guardian is a bit depressing. Another piece of important work from the Sutton Trust points out the misconceptions common among state-sector teachers about Oxbridge applications and the success rate of state-schooled applicants. (See the brief report of the Trust's own site here.) Many of the teachers surveyed, for example, falsely believe that it is more expensive to study at Oxbridge than at other universities. The danger is that this leads to them discouraging students from applying.

This all sounds quite familiar. My wife and I both came to Cambridge from good comprehensive schools. We both benefited, in particular, from enthusiastic and inspiring help from one or two particular teachers. It's quite possible that without that fortune I would not have considered applying.

So what should we do? It seems to me that it shows the importance of the university targeting outreach work not only to students but also to teachers. After all, if we can get a teacher interested and enthusiastic about what the university can offer, that enthusiasm and knowledge can be passed on to his or her students year after year.

Sponge-throwing

I've just noticed the slightly odd reference to sponge-throwing in the passage from Chrysippus I quoted in the last post:

For in disappointment we are 'outside of' or 'beside' ourselves and, in a word, blinded, so that sometimes, if we have a sponge or a bit of wool in our hands, we pick it up and throw it, as if that would achieve something.

How often would people throw sponges about? Were there sponges just lying around in ancient houses like those foam stress-relief toys? [1] It reminds me of the other very famous instance of someone getting all fed up and throwing a sponge, namely the story of Apelles the painter in Sextus Empiricus PH 1.28:

Once, they say, when Apelles was painting a horse and wished to represent in the painting the horse's foam, he was so unsuccessful that he gave up the attempt and flung at the picture the sponge on which he used to wipe the paints of his brush, and the mark of the sponge produced the effect of a horse's foam (Bury's translation).

For Sextus, this is an example of how the sceptic might stumble upon tranquillity about a given question not by finding a convincing answer but by coming to see how all the possible answers are somehow not convincing enough. Best then to suspend judgement and -- hey presto! -- that's something that brings along the tranquillity we wanted all along. Apelles' story was perhaps quite famous (I wonder if it was in Antigonus of Carystus' account of the painter's life; Antigonus also wrote a Life of Pyrrho, the philosophical inspiration for Sextus' scepticism). But anyway, here's my thought:

Is Chrysippus' reference to throwing a sponge in frustration part of a discussion over the Apelles' story, or something like it? Perhaps it goes like this: the Stoics interpret Apelles' frustration in a way consistent with their general intellectualist account of the emotions. At the root of it is some kind of dispositional belief combined with some judgment about the current failings of his attempts to paint the horse's foam. To get things right, for the Stoics, Apelles ought to get his general beliefs right about what truly matters and what does not. Does it really matter if in the end your painting looks a bit crappy? As in their more famous account of the archer, a good painter is a painter who does all a painter can do to try to get the right result. The final result itself if not ethically significant. (This seems to me not altogether plausible, at least in the case of painters, but that's another story. A good painter is surely someone able to produce good paintings and, because in Apelles' case we are thinking about mimetic art, a good painting will be one which convincingly represents the intended subject; the end result in this instance is clearly rather important...)

Anyway, Sextus has a different story: for him, what matters is that Apelles did get the right result after all (the sponge did create the desired effect), but it did not happen in the way Apelles had expected. The frustration he feels at the repeated failure of his individual attempts at the right technique for painting the foam leads cumulatively to a feeling that there is no particular way to get this right. And it is this position of dissatisfaction which leads to his gesture of surrender -- throwing the sponge -- which unexpectedly leads to the right result.

Now, I have no idea how plausible this is. In any case, the story of Apelles is a nice way to contrast the Stoics and sceptics on an important bit of psychology. And, of course, for Sextus, Apelles' story stands for a general account of Pyrrhonist method, not just an account of a Pyrrhonist's emotional life. But I do wonder if buried somewhere in the mass of evidence we have lost there is some connection between Chrysippus' remark and Sextus' story.

[1] Come to think of it, didn't the Romans -- and probably Greeks -- use sponges as a way of cleaning themselves after using the toilet? And probably also in the bath? You can learn a lot about Greek toilets here. Not sure whether that's a plausible situation for one to feel beside oneself in disappointment, though...

Door-kicking

It's nice when you are reading something ancient and come across a passage which strikes a very particular and direct chord. I'm reading Margaret Graver's new book, Stoicism and emotion (Chicago, 2007) and enjoying it a lot. I was also very pleased to read a passage from Galen which she discusses near the beginning of chapter 3. She is interested in the sense that the Stoics can give to the idea that emotions are 'up to us', that is are ultimately dependent on ourselves and we can be held responsible for them. This is a hot topic for some ancient philosophers, closely related to the famous discussions over the possibility of akrasia -- 'weakness of will' or 'incontinence' -- the possibility that I might be overcome by anger, or pleasure, or erotic passion, or some such and end up acting contrary to my better judgement. The Stoics' general psychological picture would appear to rule out this sort of phenomenon. So it is interesting to hear Chrysippus saying something like this:

“οὕτω γὰρ ἐξιστάμεθα καὶ ἔξω γινόμεθα ἑαυτῶν καὶ τελέως ἀποτυφλούμεθα ἐν τοῖς σφαλλομένοις, ὥστε ἔστιν ὅτε σπόγγον ἔχοντες ἢ ἔριον ἐν ταῖς χερσὶ τοῦτο διαράμενοι βάλλομεν ὡς δή τι περανοῦντες δι’ αὐτῶν. εἰ δ’ ἐτυγχάνομεν μάχαιραν ἔχοντες ἢ ἄλλο τι, τούτῳ ἂν ἐχρησάμεθα παραπλησίως.” καὶ ἐφεξῆς “πολλάκις δὲ κατὰ τὴν τοιαύτην τυφλότητα τὰς κλεῖς δάκνομεν καὶ τὰς θύρας τύπτομεν οὐ ταχὺ αὐτῶν ἀνοιγομένων πρός τε τοὺς λίθους ἐὰν προσπταίσωμεν, τιμωρητικῶς προσφερόμεθα καταγνύντες καὶ ῥιπτοῦντες αὐτοὺς εἴς τινας τόπους καὶ ἐπιλέγοντες καθ’ ἕκαστα τούτων ἀτοπώτατα.”

Chrysippus, in Galen PHP 4.6.43-5 De Lacy

Here is Graver's translation:

For in disappointment we are 'outside of' or 'beside' ourselves and, in a word, blinded, so that sometimes, if we have a sponge or a bit of wool in our hands, we pick it up and throw it, as if that would achieve something. And if we happened to be holding a dagger, or some other weapon, we would do the same with that... And often, through the same blindness, we bite keys and beat at doors when they do not open quickly, and if we stumble on a stone we take revenge on it by breaking it or throwing it somewhere, and we say very odd things on such occasions.

This is cited by Galen as part of his general discussion of Platonic vs. Stoic psychology and that is obviously a worthy and interesting discussion in its own right. The passage made me smile, though, because intense rage at inanimate objects is something to which I am, unfortunately, personally prone.

Now, I am quite prepared to believe that this failing is 'up to me' in the sense relevant to my being subject to moral evaluation for it. But there it is. I could probably do with some well-aimed psychological therapy at the hands of some Epictetus or Socrates. (Then again, they would probably annoy me even more...) And I do know that it has landed me in some hot water. For instance, I once was coming into the house from the garden and carelessly as I opened the door allowed it to bump into and push over my little girl, who had been in the house trying to spy me through the cat flap. In the heat and emotion (embarrassment, anger, self-criticism) that followed, I somehow decided that the right thing to do was to kick the offending back door very hard. I managed, however, to put my foot right through the cat flap, smashing it. So the whole thing was made much worse and I had to spend the rest of the afternoon finding and fitting a replacement.

Well, I'm not sure whose analysis of these situations is right, Chrysippus' or Plato's. But I'm sure that they happen. And it shows that you don't need to go digging around high literature like Homer or Attic tragedy to find illuminating and complicated psychological examples.

Something sustaining

Back at work in earnest today, and I've just realised that I've been through ten or so contributions to the Cambridge Companion to Epicureanism that I am editing and have been changing the bibliographies to a slightly incorrect formatting. Bum. I'll have to go back tomorrow and hunt down the pesky edited volumes and move people around. Yes, I know Endnote or something else clever would probably do it for me, but if not all the contributors use it and if I have always been too mean to shell out then I suppose I'll just have to buckle down and do it old skool.

Still, I was cheered up tonight because younger daughter chose one of my favourite stories for bedtime: chapter two of Winnie the Pooh, '...in which Pooh goes visiting and gets into a tight place'. If you haven't read it (shame on you) then you can do so here. I'm not entirely sure that its copyright kosher to put that on the 'net, but it's there. In fact, even if you have read it, then treat yourself to five minutes fun and read it here. It's best, of course with the E. H. Shepard illustrations (shame on those Disney folk...) The prose is brilliant -- especially the exchanges between Rabbit and Pooh. But tonight I particularly enjoyed the reference Pooh makes to the sort of book he would like to hear while he is waiting to get thinner and become unstuck from Rabbit's front door:

"Then would you read a Sustaining Book, such as would help and comfort a Wedged Bear in Great Tightness?"

(The capitals are important.) That sounds like just the sort of thing that would help me right now, both in my post Xmas/too many Celebrations (the chocolates)/ aren't those new 85% cocoa After Eights good/ just another glass of wine then... sort of state and in my metaphorical need for sustinence in a time of Great Tightness.