Number, the primary science, I
Invented for them, and how to set down words in writing –
The all-remembering skill, mother of many arts.
Aeschylus, Prometheus Bound
Trust in writing will make them remember things by relying on marks made by others, from outside themselves, not on their own inner resources, and so writing will make the things they have learnt disappear from their minds.
Plato, Phaedrus
It is necessary to understand that war is common, strife is customary, and all things happen because of strife and necessity.
Heraclitus, FRAGMENT 80 (quoted in Origen, Against Celsus )
Since the days of Pythagoras, men have argued (in the war of the words), over the truth of one’s being in the eternal truths of mathematics. Though their science was dodgy (the formal scientific method would have to wait several centuries), the ancients sought for consistency in truths by which one could find some kind of security amidst the changing faces of Nature. Patterns and repetition emerge from observation and remembering. Reasoning and the war of words succeeded the costly physical battles to establish domination over other men.
Not long after Pythagoras, Plato resurrected Socrates’ theory of the eternal Forms behind reality. The theory of the Forms is not systematically worked out in the Republic and the idea of a theory back in fifth century BC Greece seems to be only the dominant idea or argument in a battlefield of sophistry. Whether or not Plato came to the fore due to the decline of Greek culture after the fifth century (the rise of the plebs, the decline of Attic tragedy), the idea succeeded. Forms became necessary and would be the foundation in the “long history of an error” right up to Descartes and beyond.
Founding the Idea of the Forms in the Republic, is the argument by Socrates for a Justice that is good-in-itself as opposed to those cynical sophists arguing for people acting in their own self-interest as justice. The idea of an eternal, heavenly source of goodness – or the Good – was popularised by Plato who believed the heavenly bodies were in fact, deities (astronomy will have to be revised). To demonstrate his idea, Socrates takes a larger view and imagines a just society as the origins of Justice will be more easily seen, the larger the object is. And for the education of the “privileged” class of this imagined community, the Guardians (of Justice, arbiters of truth), he needs to address the whole being, body and soul. But first, the soul. Plato begins his argument in the words of Socrates thus:
So let us tell the tale of education of our imaginary Guardians as if we had the leisure of the traditional storyteller… And we shall begin by educating mind and character… In this education you would include stories… These are of two kinds, true stories and fiction [pseudos: [TN] both fiction and, in suitable contexts, “lies”: and this ambiguity should be borne in mind]. Our education must use both and start with fiction. Plato, The Republic, 376d-377a
Plato goes on in the words of Socrates to sort and sensor through Homer’s tales as to what is proper and improper, particularly the right and wrong behaviours for a god to undertake; behaviours like gods changing forms would be untrue and such stories would unfit for the proper education of the Guardians.
For example, in The Odyssey, Menelaus and his men escape from an island by ambushing their captor-god, Proteus, who changes forms rapidly in a bid to escape their hold on him. The story resonates with an account by R.D. Laing in the Divided Self of patients being unable to “hold on” to Proteus, the changing forms in a fleeting and ephemeral present, and remain trapped on an island unto themselves. The schizoid is “an individual the totality of whose experience is split in two main ways – (1) there is a rent in his relation with his world; and (2) there is a disruption of his relation with himself.” The schizoid begins with doubt as to the reality of his outward appearances and cultivates a whole dramatis personae of affects to enact reality onstage for the outside world. The schizoid has a fear of being seen as an object as their very existence depends upon being seen and how they are seen by others. The schizoid sees others as an object. “It laughs programmatically in response to my joke,” a patient tells Dr R.D. Laing, sending chills down his spine.
The schizoid is the product, according to the existential account of R.D. Laing, of an insufficient childhood. The mother never recognises the child and the child grows up esteeming its own invisibility. The schizoid is under erasure. The schizoid doubts the reality of its own existence. Nobody can perceive one’s truest, inner intentions, backstage and behind-the-scenes so to speak. In a sub-species of hyper-Christianity, the followers of the schizoid ethos are dead to the world and alive to God, paying silent witness to the fact, bearing their crossed-out realities. Psychosis eventually develops when the fictions they have invented – the “unconscious disguise” – is born out of actual perceptions rather than willed manifestations of their imaginations as the mind forms Ideas out of habit and repetition in a closed system, turning inward on itself, producing its own affects to dominate and control the “reality.”
And what do I see outside my window but hats and coats which may cover automatic machines?
Descartes wrestled with his own doubts in his early Meditations. In a thought experiment he recorded the men walking along the streets outside his window, may only be machines underneath the clothing. Geometrical truths, he decided, were the only truths of substance that could withstand the possibility of a deceptive demon hallucinating the evidence of his senses. Mathematics is non-phonetic writing, the non-spoken word but Descartes could not suppress the belief in a God that guaranteed his cognizance and guards a source of fundamental Goodness – the conscience – outside himself. The activity of his thought as opposed to the passivity of his body and senses, proved the reality of his own existence to himself, the modern Cartesian subject, God-given, sovereign and free. God as idea over matter makes man lord over all his dominion. Thought gives substance to the idea of God by way of our ability to actualise and manifest degrees of freedom.
And none of them knew they were robots… Mr Bungle, California
For all these powers of deduction and scientific reasoning, an orgiastic mystery still remains. The schizoid exploits the difference from an insecure, ontological position, resigned to the mask. He or she believes in the machine. Sexual activity may be used to experience reality, not for gratification. But this dead way of existence is not an affirmation of the mask, anymore than the schizoid acts out of faith. “The false self does not serve as a vehicle for the fulfilment or gratification of the self.” For the schizoid, acts are their greatest fear. One of Laing’s patients forgot herself while walking through a fair. She became afraid she would cease to exist if she wasn’t always aware of herself. The act locates the schizoid in the outside, beyond the systems of control they’ve been building since they were children. Acts are fake. The world of imagination and phantasy obey magical laws, not the scientific laws of cause and effect. Science-fiction fantasies of persecution and surveillance, thoughts controlled by aliens, are common complaints by those who are schizophrenic.
Living in a modern world of Hollywood and three dimensions, the hyper-conscious schizoid seems far removed along a space-time continuum from the conflicts and dramas of the fifth century Athenians. There’s no going back, no resurrection of old ideas from the cold grave of historicism to save the future present schizoid. That battle is lost. The fall into language is complete, Prometheus bound in Cartesian co-ordinates. He gave us the gift of fire to build computers and write weblogs. In the ancient war of the Words, Plato overcame Aeschylus. Plato (rightly) valued writing only as a “source of amusement.” The living speech of the philosopher sublated dead writing. Prose ruled over poetry (after the fifth century BC, very few new tragedies were written). Universities (beginning with Plato’s Academy, the Clouds) replaced the informal pre-Socratic omniversities. Fiction turned into faction. Lovers of wisdom would be versed in rhetoric and metaphysics and the poetry in motion of the stars to the apple falling off the tree became merely allegorical, a scientific model for imitation, a tool for the “improvers of mankind.” All that is omniversity but knowable, is tied to the twin pillars of Religion and Science. Cartesian men are robots and God is a science-fiction.
