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PHILOSOPHY In writing this lesson to you I am going to completely ignore outside social and political reality – even though that very same reality has put us inside exactly where we are: reclusive boxes in our Boo Radley stage of history. I am going to ignore it, and my goal is to distract you so that you might forget about it for a while. This is really a lullaby, not a lesson: a lulla-lesson. There are two reasons for this choice of mine to frame the lesson in irrelevancy: 1) It seems to me that addressing reality (social and political reality) head on, in its own terms, is an exercise in futility – ultimately, reality wins that way and the person who argues with it directly, in reality’s own terms, just gets absorbed into its language. Reality doesn’t just win, it gets fatter. So I am going to ignore the terms of social and political reality and be silly instead (silly on purpose, of course not really silly at all – silliness is just an appearance, and appearances are left behind). Just like the appearance of seriousness, which as you should know by now, always ends up becoming silly. Imagine that it is destiny to always end up in a different place than where you began (seriousness always become silly, and silliness always become serious). 2) The second reason for my irrelevancy is in direct contradiction to the firstly stated reason: in reality, I do believe that reality (social and political reality) is modifiable, but in order to modify it, the terms of address and the center of discussion must shift. By telling you that something is impossible, my “hidden” purpose is to make you want to imagine it as being possible: desire is activated by dangling something in front of you that you don’t have, that you “can’t” have (that something is possibility). To “empower” you (what a cliché!) you must be made aware of how utterly powerless you are – you must pass through the hologram of your own powerlessness. To tell you that you are already empowered is to make you self-satisfied in your impotency. Here, what you see happening, is one thing (the impossible – or the irrelevant, or the silly) becoming its opposite (the possible – or the relevant, or the serious). When things become their opposite without directly intending to – that is, when the unconscious plays its role in determining their arrival at a destination, and not just the obtuse conscious – this is called dialectic. Dialectic = the logic of how a thing becomes its opposite. And you will see that dialectic is one of the arts most characteristic of ancient Greek philosophy. Certainly you are confused. Good. Better to be confused about all of this than to be confused about how you will survive in this world. Have you already forgotten that the world exists? Excellent. The world might be a better place once you return to it like Madonna, like a virgin, for the very first time. Philosophy Is a Love Story There is the etymology of the word, as you might expect. Philosophy is one of the most beautiful words a person could ever discover, alongside poetry. The word is Greek, as surely you already imagine. It is a compound of two words: φίλος (fílos) which means more than a friend – yes, that kind of “friend”: in fact, a lover. And secondly σοφία (sofía) which means wisdom (and this has nothing to do with your GPA or how many facts you know, or how many skills you possess). The philosopher is the lover of wisdom. And to explicate this I draw your attention back to Socrates’ speech in Plato’s Symposium, where love and wisdom are the same topic. But note something: when you love someone do you possess her? Do you think love and possession go obviously together? Does something in you not tell you that in reality love and possession are opposite things, and that they easily repel each other? Do you not sense that a state of possession is a love gone bad? And do you not sense that love grows abundantly in the complete absence of possessiveness? Do you not intuit that possessiveness is a symptom, an

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expression, of insecurity – or lack of security in oneself? Has life not taught you these things already? If life hasn’t, then no class you take ever can. And yet, here is a mystery for you, in love’s magic two people freely give themselves to each other as though they were possessed (in the psychic sense) by a spell. How did that happen? How did freedom (I can be whatever I want) become its opposite (I want to be yours)? What dialectic moved through reality here, turning it into a dream? What poetry altered life’s course? These are all mysteries taken from the language of real life (real life as it becomes a dream), but they illustrate the fundamental concept expressed in the word philosophy: the love of wisdom. The point is that the philosopher loves wisdom, but does not possess it. Yet by knowing, or believing that he does not possess wisdom, he is already infinitely wiser than the “wise man” – the person who believes, and announces, that he does in fact possess wisdom. – Wisdom escapes the statement of its possession, and takes refuge in the house of the fool, the person who doesn’t know that he possesses anything. First image, on the level of conscious discourse: lover of wisdom ≠ wise man. Second image, on the level of magical (unconscious) discourse: lover of wisdom > wise man. Third image, on the level of comedy: wise man = killer of wisdom – why? Because, as Oscar Wilde said, “each man kills the thing he loves” – by inadvertently possessing the life out of it. You will notice the many implications stemming from these two very different initial positions in relation to wisdom. A lover desires that which he does not possess. Lover of wisdom = lover of learning. Yes, the true definition of a student, inside or outside of school. Desire, curiosity, and an awareness of one’s ignorance (I am not wise) is what motivates the philosopher, the lover of wisdom, the one who understands himself to always be incomplete in relation to how much there is to learn and discover. This is an open relation to the world, one based in the constantly renewed ability to discover, to wonder, to be transformed. The philosopher is like the fool. To know oneself to be ignorant is the first step of philosophy, and of learning: it takes courage and honestly to make this step. The possessor of wisdom on the other hand – the “wise man” – sets himself in the position of already knowing everything that is important and thereby not needing or wanting to learn anything else. Why would the possessor of wisdom desire, and search after, what he already believes to possess? In a reversal from what is said (“I am wise”) to what is lived (“I don’t need to learn anything more”) the position of the wise man reveals itself to be ignorant and arrogant, closed to the world, destructive or sedative of desire, ultimately static in itself and monotonous. The perennial voice of authority speaks in the guise of a wise man. Philosophy has nothing to do with that voice. A choice to make: preference for philosophy’s confusion or possessed wisdom’s bluff? I am not bluffing, this is a deep-going choice. Or is it a choice at all? A courageous soul is already chosen by confusion. The question of being a philosopher or a wise person is a question of how to be in the world, how to frame one’s words, how to look at things, how to relate to others, how to exist. The truly wise know they are ignorant, but wish to learn something. The genuinely ignorant believe that they are ok as they are, and don’t need to learn anything: that is precisely what makes them ignorant. “I don’t want to learn anything”: the emblem of ignorance. Want, also said desire. This brings us back, yet differently, to our previous lesson regarding love. What is the nature of desire and attraction in terms of wisdom – and is it really that different in terms of wisdom from how it appears in relations between people? School, as you know, extinguishes all desire for learning by forcing you to learn things. And who can possibly

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love something, or someone, they are forced to love? Being forced to do anything is a surefire way of having it done badly, without spirit, without enthusiasm, without meaning or conviction. Like a badly arranged marriage. A good teacher, let’s say, plays a small role in relation to a subject. The point is that the student may be fascinated and intrigued – attracted by a subject, a mystery, a something that is believed to contain a power that can change life, without altering its surface at all. Maybe only people who believe in magic can really learn anything (and those people are called “fools” by common sense). For everyone else there is the internet, where all the answers are patiently waiting to be downloaded. Yet isn’t the belief that a machine can give you all the answers itself a form of magical superstition? – (When fetishized, machines appear as manmade gods). Perhaps magic can never really be escaped, and science is a just a defiant denial of this immutable truth, an inability to come to terms with it, to coexist with it. Let’s look more closely at the love (desire) contained in the concept of philosophy. It is very much like physical desire. It uses physical desire as its metaphor. Here is a Greek vase from the fifth century BC:

This vase depicts the movement of desire, or the relation of desire – since desire is a relation. Perhaps the problem in the last sentence is the word “the,” which implies singularity – “the only way, the only definition, the definitive definition.” No, truth defeats itself by being spoken this way – because it doesn’t allow itself to be discovered, pursued (exactly like how the man is pursuing the woman on the vase). And how truth is arrived at is actually definitive of how truth is lived: truth has a life and a reality that encompasses the journey to it and not only its

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destination (its static form as fact). The figures on the vase are mythological: they are the representations of the male and female followers of the god Dionysus: the god of ecstasy. The male is called a satyr, and the female a maenad. What defines them is their desire to pursue ecstasy, oblivion, bliss, self-destruction and the renewal that it contains. What we see on the vase is a pursuit, and this is the fundamental movement, or relation, established by desire. The satyr is pursuing the maenad. The desire that makes him pursue her is represented in his erection. The point here is not to be vulgar, but to be easy to understand. Desire is what establishes a pursuit. Even when desire is “physical” – as you might imagine it to be in the vase’s image – it is always also mental (the brain is a sex organ). Because desire always moves through fantasy. If all of this holds true for a relation of desire between people, why then would it not also hold true for a relation of desire between a person and wisdom? Wisdom, what is that? Ideas, language, symbols, concepts, a mode of being? What is wisdom? But consider: for wisdom to be pursued it must attract, it must fascinate, it must “turn you on” mentally. The attraction of what a person imagines to be wisdom is “difficult” to define because it always moves through fantasy, which defies common terms of definition – fantasy is always spoken in a personal, individualized language. And so in fact a person becomes more herself – more real in her singularity – by becoming more fantastical. Mystery, enigma, hologram – these are the passwords of seduction and its gravitational force. They all apply to wisdom and to its pursuit. Passwords, as you know, open hidden worlds. Or maybe they create imaginary worlds that then drift into reality. We are talking about discovery and learning here, we are talking about the love of wisdom. The fascination by wisdom, which implies a moment of idealization of wisdom just as the love of a person always contains an element of the fantastical idealization of that person. “The reality of love would be incomplete if it did not acknowledge illusion as one of its integral components,” wrote Gaston Bachelard, a French philosopher of the twentieth century. But this definition applies just as much to the love of wisdom as to the love of a person. What motivates a person to learn, to read, to ponder, to discover? The desire has to be stimulated, the intellect has to be aroused. How can wisdom do that? It is indeed an art. Consider: learning without desire, having meaning imposed on you by force is akin – metaphorically speaking – to rape. Rape, the opposite of seduction. Having meaning imposed, the opposite of pursing it out of free interest and curiosity. After a certain point you should learn nothing in school except what your own curiosities are. You should learn, or discover, what it is you want to learn about and discover. In doing so you learn about and discover yourself. And that is the point, the essence, of the “Humanities.” What are you interested and curious about? What attracts you, pulls you, what do you want to pursue intellectually? But these questions all are based in your desires as they move through fantasy. To cultivate them is to make a person able to learn, which is already an accomplishment. To stunt them is a form of violence. Irreparable violence than results in ignorance: the inability to learn. Upon “graduation” you should have more questions than answers: you should be a “fool” and not an “expert.” You should love learning, and not your GPA. You should, you should, you should… what am I saying? I shouldn’t say anything more. Returning to the vase, you may wonder what is the significance of the maenad (the woman) running away, and not only running away but also brandishing a snake (“stay away!”) and an object that looks like a badminton racket (“I said, ‘stay away!’”) Consider this component of the pursuit as it pertains to wisdom. How does wisdom always remain one step ahead of its lover, its pursuer? How does wisdom say, “you can never fully possess me, because you can never fully know me.”? In what way is wisdom like – metaphorically like – a person who plays

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hard to get? Because there is always more, and you never arrived to where you thought you were going. When you learn you always discover that there is more to learn. An answer, a concept, a degree of wisdom is never the end. Wisdom is infinite, and it can be pursued forever without ever being exhausted, completed, mastered, possessed. Wisdom, by its infinite nature, always escapes its domestication in the mind of the self-satisfied learner. This can appear very troubling, but it is also very exciting for who knows how to play with troubles. There is always more to learn, are you drawn further, are you pulled along by the horizon and its enigma? Are you plagued by curiosity as if it were a love fever? This is the pursuit of knowledge. It requires courage and persistence: just as Ovid and Chrétien said about love. The pursuit of wisdom always destabilizes itself because it is never complete, or rather, once it feels itself complete because it has exhausted its ability to sustain the tension of its own desire, it is no longer a living wisdom. This is really a very simple concept, it is the concept of a game. We play games all the time, which games to do we play? The Greek word for game – as in the Olympic games – is αγώνας (agónas) – here is a game for you: you already know this word but perhaps you don’t know that you know it. Therefore you know it unconsciously. You know the Greek word for game, agónas, because it forms the basis of the English word agony (and the Spanish word agonía). No pain, no gain? Who does a player, an athlete, a person in gym clothes really compete with? Who is the real opponent in the game if not your own limit? Your own limit of endurance, your own limit of strength, your own limit of ability, your own limit of wisdom? What pushes you beyond these limits? That is the game. And games are meant to be fun, even when they are difficult. Their difficulty is the fun. This is a wonderful paradox. And it certainly applies to the game of pursuing wisdom. Philosophy for an Indian Summer Dear students, it is late September, yes, I know we are living through many catastrophes, but it is still late September, we are in southern California, and you are young. Go out and live, find life, and be a philosopher yourself. There is one more concept I’d like to give you, taken from the treasure of Greek philosophy, which maybe you can bring with yourself out into the world – the real world – where philosophy actually happens, where it actually means something. That concept is the midwife. A midwife is a woman who helps deliver babies. Two thousand and four hundred years ago, in Athens, Socrates conceived of the role of a teacher as a midwife – as someone who helps another person give birth to her own ideas. This is very different than someone telling you what to think, what to do, and who to be. In Plato’s book Theaetetus, there is a passage of dialogue between Socrates and Theaetetus (who is a mathematician) that presents the notion of the teacher as a midwife of truth. Truth that is self-discovery and discovery of the world in the same movement. I give you this passage here to read, to consider, with the hope that you find good midwives in your lives who help you give birth and rebirth to yourselves: SOCRATES: This isn’t lack of fertility, Theaetetus. You’re pregnant, and these are your labor- pains.

THEAETETUS: I don’t know about that, Socrates. I’m just telling you my experiences.

SOCRATES: Don’t be so serious! Haven’t you heard that my mother Phainarete was a good, sturdy midwife?

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THEAETETUS: Yes, somebody did tell me once.

SOCRATES: And have you heard that I practice the same profession?

THEAETETUS: No, never.

SOCRATES: But it’s true, you know: I do have this skill. It’s a secret, though, my friend, so don’t tell on me. Because people don’t know, it isn’t part of my reputation, which is only as an eccentric and someone who confuses people. I imagine you’ve heard that?

THEAETETUS: Yes.

SOCRATES: Do I need to tell you the reason for my reputation?

THEAETETUS: Yes, please.

SOCRATES: If you consider midwifery as a whole, you’ll soon see what I’m getting at. I mean, you are aware, of course, that no woman practices midwifery while she is still of an age to get pregnant and give birth herself. It’s only those who are past child-bearing.

THEAETETUS: Yes.

SOCRATES: This is thought to be due to Artemis, who is childless, but is in charge of childbirth. She wanted to reward women who are like her, but barren women weren’t the recipients of her gifts of midwifery, because human nature is too weak to become skilled in matters of which it has no experience. Instead, therefore, she gave the job to those whom age prevents from giving birth.

THEAETETUS: That’s plausible.

SOCRATES: And isn’t it also plausible – isn’t it necessary, in fact, that midwives are better that others at recognizing whether or not women are pregnant?

THEAETETUS: Yes.

SOCRATES: And that’s not the end of their abilities: their chants and the drugs they administer can induce labour and relieve the pains, as they see fit; can bring a difficult birth to a successful conclusion; and can bring on a miscarriage, if that is what seems best.

THEAETETUS: True. […]

SOCRATES: So you can see how important midwifery is, but it still falls short of my business. For women cannot produce offspring which are sometimes true, but sometimes illusory, with the difference hard to discern. I mean, if that were the case, the finest and most crucial task that midwives could perform would be distinguishing the true from the false. Don’t you agree?

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THEAETETUS: Yes.

SOCRATES: Well, my midwifery has all the standard features, except that I practice it on men instead of women, and supervise the labour of their minds, not their bodies. And the most important aspect of my skill is the ability to apply every conceivable test to see whether the young man’s mental offspring is illusory and false or viable and true. But I have this feature in common with midwives – I myself am barren of wisdom. The criticism that’s often made of me – that it’s lack of wisdom that makes me ask others questions, but say nothing positive myself – is perfectly true. Why do I behave like this? Because the god compels me to attend to the labours of others, but prohibits me form having any offspring myself. I myself, therefore, am quite devoid of wisdom; my mind has never produced any idea that could be called clever. But as for those who associate with me – well, although at first some of them give the impression of being utterly stupid, yet later, as the association continues, all of those to whom the god vouchsafes it improve marvelously, as is evident to themselves as well as to others. And they make this progress, clearly, not because they ever learn anything form me; the many fine ideas and offspring that they produce come from within themselves. But the god and I are responsible for the delivery. […] There’s another experience which those who associate with me have in common with pregnant women: they suffer labour-pains. In fact, they are racked night and day with a far greater distress than women undergo; and the arousal and relief of this pain is the province of my expertise. […] Now, why have I gone on at such length about all this to you? Because I suspect, as do you yourself, that you are in pain, and that this is due to pregnancy. So let me take on your case: remember, I’m a midwife’s son and practice the art myself. When I ask a question, set about answering it to the best of your ability. And if, on examination, I find that some thought of yours is illusory and untrue, and if I then draw it out of you and discard it, don’t rant and rave at me, as a first-time mother might if her baby was involved. In the past, my friend, when I’ve removed some piece of nonsense of theirs, people have often worked themselves up into such a state that they’ve been ready literally to bite me! They don’t believe that I’m acting out of goodwill; it doesn’t even cross their minds that no god bears ill-will either. I do what I do because it is my moral duty not to connive at falsehood and cover up truth. Who has cared about you and respected you enough to be a midwife of your own ideas that are formed within you? You’ll note that this care and this respect is characteristic of love. Here I bring our lesson to a close. May the weather distract you, and provide all the answers to the questions this lesson raised. Dimitri Papandreu September 20, 2020