Rethinking the Foundations of Education: Stratford Caldecott

Rethinking the Foundations of Education: Stratford Caldecott

In my ongoing exploration of educational possibilities, this looks promising.

Plato and Ecstasy

A student wrote:

In Book 6 of Plato's  Republic, Socrates describes the true philosopher by saying,

It is the nature of the real lover of learning to strive for what is; and he does not tarry by each of the many things opined to be but goes forward and does not lose the keenness of his passionate love nor cease from it before he grasps the nature itself of each thing which is… And once near it an d coupled with what really is, having begotten intelligence and truth, he knows and lives truly, is nourished and so ceases from his labor pains. (Book VI, p. 170)

This description describes the learning process as a form of childbirth, as only once one reaches knowledge and truth of the good and what is or the pattern of the entire universe does one reach new life.  Learning is most certainly grueling and painful.  It leads one to question their values and current beliefs and to work toward forming a new life based on the knowledge gained.  It’s easy to see education as boring drudgery that we’re force to do but that serves no true purpose, just as it is easy to see childbirth as something that is painful and stressful and not really worth going through.  In reality, childbirth is one of the greatest miracles in the world, because it creates a whole new life, a new being, out of seemingly nothing.  In the same way, education is just as great of a miracle, because by filling our minds with intangible thoughts, concepts, and beliefs we shape our entire lives.  Furthermore, we can even use these intangible thoughts – if they’re the right thoughts – to gain eternal life.  So yes education and learning can be boring, painful, and seemingly worthless but Plato points out that if we persevere, the labor pains end, the miracle occurs and we reach new life.

Respondeo ad eum

You notice some good things here.  One thing overlooked, though, is the overall metaphor which Plato uses for the act of true learning.  Wisdom (not knowledge) is the beloved, the philosopher is, literally, the Lover of wisdom.  Like a lover with beloved is the seeker of wisdom with what he seeks.  Thus, not to be too indelicate, the act of true learning is likened to the whole PROCESS of baby making – desire, romance, pursuit, sexual passion, conception, gestation, delivery.  Plato doesn’t see these as discreet events but as a single continual process of movement upwards (anabasis).  Desire leads to babies.  Desire of wisdom leads to pursuit of, then joining with wisdom and finally birth of self.  There is much here to explore, but two things of particularly note; first that Plato calls philosophy a “true erotic pursuit” – emphasis on the eros, or love.  Anything done out of love is easy rather than drudgery and that seems to be the point; contrary to Glaucon’s thought that it is bitter and offers little reward,  it is most sweet (like sexuality - note Glaucon's confusion on this) and offers the greatest reward (the self).  Second, though, is the loss of self which occurs in passion.  Called ecstasy in Greek, standing out of self, this same ecstatic sense is in sexual union, religious experience, and philosophic satisfaction.  The theme is evident in great images such as “The Ecstasy of Saint Theresa” by Bernini 

and in the sleepy-eyed images of the Bodhisatva in Buddhist Icons

This loss of self is a staple of philosophic understanding both in Greek and in Eastern thought.  Paradoxically, without such passionate loss of self, there is no true wisdom and no rebirth of self.  (oddly, mothers who have gone through natural childbirth say the same thing occurs physically in childbirth as well)  But then Plato seems to be all about paradox.

Zeus and Ares and the origins of war

Copy of the Severian period after a Greek bronze original by Alkamenes dated 420 BC.
From the sacred area in Largo Argentina, 1925.

In Book 5 of The Iliad Zeus says to Ares:

Most hateful to me art thou of all gods that hold Olympus, for ever is strife dear to thee and wars and fightings. Thou hast the unbearable, unyielding spirit of thy mother, even of Hera; her can I scarce control by my words. Wherefore it is by her promptings, meseems, that thou sufferest thus.  Howbeit I will no longer endure that thou shouldest be in pain, for thou art mine offspring, and it was to me that thy mother bare thee; but wert thou born of any other god, thus pestilent as thou art, then long ere this hadst thou been lower than the sons of heaven.

ἐκ γὰρ ἐμεῦ γένος ἐσσί, ἐμοὶ δέ σε γείνατο μήτηρ:
εἰ δέ τευ ἐξ ἄλλου γε θεῶν γένευ ὧδ᾽ ἀΐδηλος
καί κεν δὴ πάλαι ἦσθα ἐνέρτερος Οὐρανιώνων.

It never occurred to me before but Ares is the son of Zeus - that has significance. From whence come the origins of war?  From whence comes the perennial human urge to destroy our neighbors?  Certainly one could say that good men (such as Hector) engage in war only as a response to injustice or to protect proximate goods such as family, home, honor; but wars frequently seem to start for not so good reasons (like an Archduke being shot in Sarajevo).  Homer seems to be suggesting here (though maybe it was an insight predating Homer in the original genesis of the Pantheon - the Theogony) that war, Ares, is the child of Zeus.  What is Zeus?  Is it rational thought?  law?  the dominance of the world through reason?  but Zeus is still subject to erotic passion, weakness, lying and treachery - a Byzantine political sort of god he is.  Can rational control over the world exist in any other way?  Perhaps the comment is that the very attempt to control the world, set it in place, orchestrate everything through reason is itself deeply flawed; employing a treachery of sorts, seeing honor and love as utilitarian, easily succumbing to the temptations of eros and ultimately being forced to employ violence for control.  Perhaps, Homer seems to indicate, the very root of conflict within the human heart is rational thought itself.  

By Jove, that's worth pondering, I think.

Statue of a male deity, brought to Louis XIV and restored as a Zeus ca. 1686 by Pierre Granier, who added the arm raising the thunderbolt.

The republic and the structure of beauty.

So I found the Bloom translation of The Republic online:



http://archive.org/stream/PlatosRepublicallanBloomTranslation/PlatosRepublictrans.Bloom#page/n173/mode/2up

And I found this excellent article about Plato's structural pattern:

"Arithmetical Patterns in Plato's Republic" by John Bremer

Especially interesting is the "Appendix: On Musical Matters" in which Bremer suggests is that the Polity (the Republic) is based on the structure of musical harmonics:

Bremer writes:

Although it may seem strange to us, and alien to our own procedure in the writing of a text, it is quite possible that Plato laid out the arithmetical/musical structure first (obviously having the outline content of the argument and its course in mind). That this would not be unthinkable or unique can be confirmed, in more modern times, by Beethoven's sketchbooks that show he frequently left an open space for an exact number of measures to be composed later. Moreover, the internal structure of his works reflects an arithmetical symmetry; for example, the first movement of his Fifth Symphony has 502 measures, with crucial musical structural events at measures 125 and 250.

See the manuscripts here: Beethoven-Haus Bonn Digital Archives.

Astounding.

Thrasymachus and the tyrant soul

The opening of the Republic contains a brilliant incarnation of the tyrant soul in the person of Thrasymachus.  What does a tyrant look like?  We normally say, look at Hitler, or look at Stalin, or look at Che Guevara - 

El dumbasso

But there is a certain glamour to these men (if we can call it that) which obscures the horror and foolishness, the weakness of the tyrant.  With Thrasymachus the glamour is removed and we are left with a tyrant soul, but one that is restrained, foolish, and ultimately powerless before the good man (Socrates).

Several times in the course of the discussion Thrasymachus had made an attempt to get the argument into his own hands, and had been put down by the rest of the company, who wanted to hear the end. 

Note at the beginning that Thrasymachus, though wanting to speak, is restrained by the others around him.  So too the tyrant is restrained by others though his absolute assurance of the rectitude of his cause threatens to break free and devour those around him.  When at last unrestrained the tyrant terrifies those around him like a wild beast or monster

When Polemarchus and I had done speaking and there was a pause, he could no longer hold his peace; and, gathering himself up, he came at us like a wild beast, seeking to devour us. We were quite panic-stricken at the sight of him. 

He roared out to the whole company: What folly. Socrates, has taken possession of you all? And why, sillybillies, do you knock under to one another? I say that if you want really to know what justice is, you should not only ask but answer, and you should not seek honour to yourself from the refutation of an opponent, but have your own answer; for there is many a one who can ask and cannot answer. And now I will not have you say that justice is duty or advantage or profit or gain or interest, for this sort of nonsense will not do for me; I must have clearness and accuracy. 

I was panic-stricken at his words, and could not look at him without trembling. 

and then proclaims

justice is nothing else than the interest of the stronger 

"Justice is the advantage of the strong" or "Might makes right" says Thrasymachus.

This attitude is at the root of the problem;  tyrants do not grow up overnight, nor are they born tyrants.  Tyranny begins with an idea such as this one, a fundamental mistake about the nature of a crucial idea (humans are machines, justice is relative to strength, sexual satisfaction justifies every action) and, though it is a mistake rather than "sin", it nevertheless becomes lethal once it is unchained.  Law, restraint, order are the guidelines, the playground, the restraints that protect the good men from the bad and the bad men from themselves.

As Chiaromonte says,

If man is only a creature of nature, an animal endowed with a few supplementary faculties, then it is proper for the individual to be completely absorbed in the satisfaction of his appetites and in unlimited self-aggrandizement at the same time that he is a slave to the needs of the species as expressed by the claims of the social machine.  In that case the world is nothing but an outlet for the ego or a deaf, hostile presence, if not both.  It then becomes pointless as well as impossible to understand whatever is different from one’s self, to take others into account, to recognize the ultimate mystery of the world, to surrender to the arcane order that certainly rules the universe, to share the feeling expressed by Albert Einstein when he said, “To know that what is impenetrable to us really exists and that it manifests itself in the highest wisdom and the most radiant beauty of which only the most elementary forms can be grasped by our faculties – this sentiment is at the center of true religiousness.”

Such men as Thrasymachus see laws as relative and consider other people sheep to be fleeced;

You fancy that the shepherd or neatherd fattens or tends the sheep or oxen with a view to their own good and not to the good of himself or his master; and you further imagine that the rulers of states, if they are true rulers, never think of their subjects as sheep, and that they are not studying their own advantage day and night. Oh, no; and so entirely astray are you in your ideas about the just and unjust as not even to know that justice and the just are in reality another's good; that is to say, the interest of the ruler and stronger, and the loss of the subject and servant; and injustice the opposite; for the unjust is lord over the truly simple and just: he is the stronger, and his subjects do what is for his interest, and minister to his happiness, which is very far from being their own. Consider further, most foolish Socrates, that the just is always a loser in comparison with the unjust.  First of all, in private contracts: wherever the unjust is the partner of the just you will find that, when the partnership is dissolved, the unjust man has always more and the just less.  Secondly, in their dealings with the State: when there is an income tax, the just man will pay more and the unjust less on the same amount of income; and when there is anything to be received the one gains nothing and the other much. Observe also what happens when they take an office; there is the just man neglecting his affairs and perhaps suffering other losses, and getting nothing out of the public, because he is just; moreover he is hated by his friends and acquaintance for refusing to serve them in unlawful ways.  But all this is reversed in the case of the unjust man.  I am speaking, as before, of injustice on a large scale in which the advantage of the unjust is more apparent; and my meaning will be most clearly seen if we turn to that highest form of injustice in which the criminal is the happiest of men, and the sufferers or those who refuse to do injustice are the most miserable -- that is to say tyranny, which by fraud and force takes away the property of others, not little by little but wholesale; comprehending in one, things sacred as well as profane, private and public; for which acts of wrong, if he were detected perpetrating any one of them singly, he would be punished and incur great disgrace -- they who do such wrong in particular cases are called robbers of temples, and man-stealers and burglars and swindlers and thieves. But when a man besides taking away the money of the citizens has made slaves of them, then, instead of these names of reproach, he is termed happy and blessed, not only by the citizens but by all who hear of his having achieved the consummation of injustice.  For mankind censure injustice, fearing that they may be the victims of it and not because they shrink from committing it. 

They see lawful men as saps:

Soc: I suppose that you would call justice virtue and injustice vice? 
Thr: What a charming notion! So likely too, seeing that I affirm injustice to be profitable and justice not. 
Soc: What else then would you say? 
Thr: The opposite, he replied. 
Soc: And would you call justice vice? 
Thr: No, I would rather say sublime simplicity. 
Soc: Then would you call injustice malignity? 
Thr: No; I would rather say discretion. 
Soc: And do the unjust appear to you to be wise and good? 
Thr: Yes, he said; at any rate those of them who are able to be perfectly unjust, and who have the power of subduing states and nations; but perhaps you imagine me to be talking of cutpurses. 

And they do not see humans, but slaves, objects, lesser beings.  Consequently such men consider themselves to be godlike.  Nothing they do can be wrong, nothing they say can be in error, they always look good, they always "succeed" in life and going from one success to another they are seemingly divine.

It is by no means true that he who invokes History, or Science, or the Present in justification of actions is merely bowing to the fatality of an impersonal force.  It is to himself he is actually yielding, himself he is indulging.  What is in question here is the very nature of the individual who has become enslaved by a world so constructed as to lead him from one vainglory to another, from satiety to satiety, from tedium to tedium. (Chiaromonte)

But it is a brittle, brutal, hollow form of godliness; a Satan in the ice type of godliness eternally gnawing on the same grisly cannibalistic food.  As Socrates shows, the sense of being wrong or making a mistake or being proven a fool is terribly difficult for such a person; how could they (have a run in their stocking; leave their zipper down; have broccoli in their teeth; make a tactical error; say something stupid) if they are gods?  

For the humble man such errors are okay, commonplace - god has mercy on losers - or more to the point one's sense of mortality, knowing one is not a god, allows one to be much stronger when the inevitable failure of life occurs.  "Success", then, does not consist of moving from one prize to the next, nor does it consist of an unblemished perfection.  Rather success seems to be learning to deal with failure; realizing that all humanity is a general wreck and failure; Socrates failed, Frodo failed, even... Christ failed.  And strangely, failure is something we can learn to live with.  It is an option.  If we do not make it an option then, like Thrasymachus, we "produce a copious amount of sweat" and blush when we actually do fail. 

Thrasymachus made all these admissions, not fluently, as I repeat them, but with extreme reluctance; it was a hot summer's day, and the perspiration poured from him in torrents...

We also must be insufferable to be around and foolishly truculent when we know we are in the wrong.  The tyrant soul MUST resort to violence to cover its own weakness and failure.  Hubris can do little else.

What is most intriguing about this Thrasymachus episode is that the tyrant soul, embodied here in Thrasymachus, is also the hubristic soul.  The tyrant thinks he is a god; so too does the hubristic man actually make of himself a tyrant - both to himself and to others.  Like Satan in Dante's hell he is an inverse of the truly free, aristocratic man who allows himself to be beaten, laughed at, struck, and crucified on a pole.

This equation between hubris and tyranny, though, is particularly intriguing because it includes event eh most banal forms of hubris - all the intricate lies we tell ourselves to justify how good we are to ourselves; "I'm good enough, I'm smart enough, and gosh darn it, people like me" (to quote the junior United States Senator from Minnesota).  

"The Self", whatever that thing in my head that tells me this lie regularly, has a tendency to become tyrannical; to dominate over everything I do and insist that I am the most important thing; to put me first rather than others.  To be "friends with ourselves and with god" we must, then, lose the sense of the self; die to ourselves - an action easier said than done.  "The Ego dies five minutes after we do."  Zen Buddhism suggests that the self is actually a lie - nonexistent - an illusion we construct in order to manage whatever the thing is that registers pain and pleasure.  But as the preacher in Ecclesiastes says, "Vanity of vanities, all is vanity":

Vanity of vanities, saith the Preacher, vanity of vanities; all is vanity.

What profit hath a man of all his labour which he taketh under the sun?

One generation passeth away, and another generation cometh: but the earth abideth for ever.

The sun also ariseth, and the sun goeth down, and hasteth to his place where he arose.

The wind goeth toward the south, and turneth about unto the north; it whirleth about continually, and the wind returneth again according to his circuits.

All the rivers run into the sea; yet the sea is not full; unto the place from whence the rivers come, thither they return again.

All things are full of labour; man cannot utter it: the eye is not satisfied with seeing, nor the ear filled with hearing.

The thing that hath been, it is that which shall be; and that which is done is that which shall be done: and there is no new thing under the sun.

Is there anything whereof it may be said, See, this is new?  It hath been already of old time, which was before us.

There is no remembrance of former things; neither shall there be any remembrance of things that are to come with those that shall come after. (Ecc.1:1-11)

In the end, the tyrant and the tyrant soul are vain, foolish, ignorant, small, petty, risible, and imprisoned in its own stupid little world.  

el presidento

Our current era seems to specialize in making tyrants.  Vanity, the "me" generation and "look at me as I (invite my date to a prom, flaunt my promiscuity, throw around my ignorance, do violence to others). This is what Marshall MacLuhan meant when he wrote

Ours is the first age in which many thousands of the best-trained individual minds have made it a full-time business to get inside the collective public mind… To keep everybody in the helpless state engendered by prolonged mental rutting is the effect of many ads and much entertainment alike.

MacLuhan goes on to point out that

The more illusion and falsehood need to maintain any given state of affairs, the more tyranny is needed to maintain the illusion and falsehood.  Today the tyrant rules not by club or fist, but, disguised as a market researcher, he shepherds his flocks in the ways of utility and comfort.

and also

Perhaps that is what the public wants when it reaches out for the inside story smoking hot from the entrails of vice or innocence.  That may well be what draws people to the death shows of the speedways and fills the press and magazines with close-ups of executions, suicides, and smashed bodies.  A metaphysical hunger to experience everything sexually, to pluck out the heart of the mystery for a super-thrill. … (Yet) this is merely an extreme instance of what is literally ghoulish.  The ghoul tears and devours human flesh in search of he knows not what.  His hunger is not earthly.  And a very large section of the “human interest” and “true story” activity of our time wears the face of the ghoul or vampire … womb, tomb, and comfort have always been interchangeable symbols in this world.  The same mechanism of sentimentality dominates both.  In other words, his is a popular dream art which works trance-like inside a situation that is never grasped or seen.  And this trance seems to be what perpetuated the widely occurring cluster image of sex, technology, and death which constitutes the mystery of the mechanical bride.

Our era seems to produce shadows, lies, ghoulish fascination with horror and awfulness.  It produces lack of restraint and excess of indulgence.  It produces wolves amidst the sheep.  In short, it is an age of tyrants.  At times such small-souled, pusillanimous men and women seem to have the upper hand; they have broken free of their restraints and now terrify and panic us like wild beasts.

Yet "evil men can do no harm to good men," says Socrates in the Apology and in one respect he seems quite correct.  There is an unassailable beauty and security in goodness; a great freedom in the soul that has passed through failure and death; a tremendous joy in the midst of all the physical harm and awfulness that small-souled tyrants inflict on the rest of us.

In order to be free we have to experience a type of death; not metaphorical but very real b/c it involves letting go of all the previous notions we had, previous safeguards we established, and previous bastions of self we constructed against just such a failure.  But failure is, ultimately, the only way to really be born again.  Enduring of such calamity breeds wisdom, goodness, understanding, love and above all a tremendous laughter.  And it gives us the strength to say to tyrants

David, Goya and the sickness of our age

Comparing this painting

The Death of Socrates is a 1787 oil on canvas painting by the French painter Jacques-Louis David.

With this painting

The Third of May 1808 -  completed in 1814 by the Spanish painter Francisco Goya,

Note in the first one the nobility of characters, the strength of Socrates' bare chest, the calm facing of death; he continues to point heavenward even while reaching out for the hemlock with his other hand, while all around him are noble, grieving friends.  The colors are crisp, the lines are clean.  There is a long dark tunnel symbolizing the passage of death but at the end of the tunnel is, not darkness, but a light source and a stairway with three figures ascending (one waves goodbye) - as though to signify that death is not final and there is hope for a better world of light.  Seated at the entrance to this tunnel is an elderly man clothed in white, his head resting on his breast as though in sleep - perhaps Socrates himself in another form.  The figure is based on the golden triangle and resembles images of the seated Pharaohs, themselves images of noble royalty even after death.  

David was a propagandist, it is true, but here at the peak of the Enlightenment, with all its glorious sentiment about human reason, human accomplishment, hope in human abilities, there is a sense that man can accomplish great things without the hocus pocus of the clerics; man alone pulling himself up by his bootstraps.  As Nicola Chiaromonte writes,

Belief in progress is often held to coincide with faith in science and reason.  But the pursuit of exact knowledge and clear ideas does not necessarily imply faith in progress.  Individuals can easily believe in the cultivation of science without thinking that progress inevitably follows it; especially if they are not concerned with either knowledge or reason.  It is when intellectual, moral, and social progress are considered the necessary consequence of the pursuit of science and reason and become inextricably bound up with them that the problem of their real connection arises.

Faith in a reason which not only speculates, discovers, and invents but works for the good of mankind can be found in the writings of the initiators of modern rationalism. ... This is the picture of a paradise on earth achieved by dint of ingenuity and indefatigable effort.

Yet not even a generation later and such optimism and faith in humanity would result in the greatest World War Europe had seen since the 100 years war of the 14th and 15th centuries.  Napoleon Buonaparte storming across Europe had little care for the individual, for cultures, for human life.  He put to the torch villages, to the sword or shot scores of peasants, to the prisons hundreds of dissenters. Thus we get Goya's iconic painting.

Here the lines are blurry, the colors dark and brooding; an inky sky looms over the brazen hill of stucco against which the peasants are being lined up and executed.  Like sheep they are herded up a stair (the same stair in David's painting?), weeping and their supplications are in vain. The main figure in white and yellow throws up his arms imploringly or in resignation but the look on his face suggests fear, not defiance or stoic nobility.  While at his feet lie the blood and inglorious corpses of his friends.  They all have been reduced to cattle, faceless, nameless, their humanity stripped away. The Napoleonic soldiers are no longer human either, their faces hidden, their heads swathed in the large hats of the Hussar cavalry - they are jackboots and their thuggery is part of the machine.  Like a machine they are their to thresh the wheat (note the wheat colors of the victims) but they are lifeless, dark and grim.  In the background is the city on the hill, no lights, lifeless, itself a grey darkened hulk; as if to suggest that the hoped for future is itself an illusion or lie now stripped of comfort.  

Goya's image is extremely grim, but he seems to have seen prophetically the writing on the wall; to make of man something other than God's image - a machine or automaton - is to ensure the destruction of the weak at the hands of the strong.  Would it were not so, but this same slaughter and barbaric treatment of others occurs repeatedly after the Napoleonic wars are concluded.  It occurs here

Gettysburg - 1863

Then here

Passchendale - 1917

Then here

Auschwitz - 1945

Chiaromonte seems to be correct in his analysis that "men began to feel that no belief was strong enough to withstand the pressure of faits accomplis.  It is a very small step from this mood of doubt and distress to teh grim conclusion that beliefs do not matter at all, and that in politics as in art, in art as in personal behavior, the only thing that counts is the will to act.  With or without conviction, he who acts is right.

"The will to act" or "The Will to Power" as Nietzsche calls it leads to an automatism that is lethal.  Without a religious sense man has no encouragement not to obliterate other men.  "The automatism of the present world does mortal man the greatest possible harm.  It increases his physical power while increasing his capacity for aimless action, that is to say, his stupidity.  At the same time his capacity for good becomes atrophied, since it is generally believed that man's power over matter and his ability to acquire material possessions solve or cancel all other problems."

Euthyphro: the beginning, the end, and the abandonment

Plato begins his great dialogue "Euthyphro" with the eponymous main character greeting Socrates on the steps of the Archon.  Socrates is going up to his trial (and consequent execution), Euthyphro is descending from prosecuting his own father.  Εὐθύφρων says to Socrates

τί νεώτερον, ὦ Σώκρατες, γέγονεν,

What new thing, O Socrates, has come over you?

The name "Socrates" means in Greek "unbroken power".  In other dialogues Socrates is frequently related to Odysseus (Republic), to the polytropic trickster figure (Apology), and to the sun god (Phaedo).  Consequently the opening can be read as "What new thing, O trickster figure/sun god, has come over you?"  

The word "γέγονεν" also translates as "overshadowed", "buried", "swallowed up".  It is a reduplication of the root word "Ge" (Gaia) meaning earth and thus has connotations of pouring earth over someone, as in the tomb or as Achilles does at the death of Patroclus.  It also bears uncanny resemblance to the island of Ogygia (another word constructed around a reduplication of "Ge") where Kalypso "overshadowed" or imprisoned Odysseus.  The translation then can be further modified to read "What new thing, O Trickster figure/sun god, has overshadowed (or buried) you?"  There is a strong hint here of the sun god being in the tomb and thus a connection to the primary tenet of the Eleusynian cult whose major philosophy was of spiritual transformation from dark to light, tomb to sky, death to life.  

The Ceres cult of Eleusis was a cult primarily of resurrection professing that spiritual growth occurred through experiences of death that operated as doorways into a broader, more free perspective.  For members of this cult physical death was itself merely a stepping through the door into another form.  Their major image of such transformation was the gnomic expansion in the Golden Spiral:

Initiates of this cult frequently held service in caves (like temples) or other underground venues that represented the labyrinth of the soul and out of which, like the butterfly out of the chrysalis, the maturing soul was destined to emerge.  Thus one would expect a movement in the dialogue from dark to light.  As J.B. Kennedy expresses in his most excellent examination of the dialogues, "Plato's Forms, Pythagorean Mathematics, and Stichometry", this sort of structural pattern was ubiquitous throughout the work of Plato who based his dialogues on a 12 point mathematical and musical pattern.  Kennedy writes

There are now several kinds of evidence that Plato's dialogues have a stichometric (intentional mathematic structure of lines, syllables and cadences within a work) structure: the lengths of speeches, the alignment of some speeches and key concepts with the twelths, the parallel passages, and the parallel negative and positive ranges.  The musical interpretation of these features is natural and coherent: a twelve-note scale with harmonic and dissonant ranges underlies the surface narrative of the dialogues.

At the end of "The Euthyphro" we would expect to find, therefore, a musically harmonious return to the initial theme.  If the work paralleled the Eleusynian principle of transformation from dark to light, the opening would suggest darkness/death/enshrouding (which it does) and the ending would suggest light/life/liberation.  At the end of the dialogue, quite conveniently, Socrates in somewhat mock disappoint upbraids Euthyphro for fleeing from the dialogue and not teaching Socrates the meaning of holiness.  Socrates says that he had hoped, upon learning such a meaning to be able to confound his accusers (who themselves are a metaphor in the dialogue) and live a better, happier life.  He says;

I have been made wise by Euthyphro about divine matters and am no longer through ignorance acting carelessly and making innovations in respect to them, 

καὶ δὴ καὶ τὸν ἄλλον βίον ὅτι ἄμεινον βιωσοίμην.

and that I shall live a better life henceforth.

The last line also could be "And indeed henceforth that different life, that better one, I will live."  Such is what Socrates might have been able to say had Euthyphro, "correct, linear, right thinking", truly been a priest and shown him the way.  Instead, however, Euthyphro flees from the conversation with a lame excuse of a prior appointment.  Socrates chastises him saying

οἷα ποιεῖς, ὦ ἑταῖρε. ἀπ᾽ ἐλπίδος με καταβαλὼν μεγάλης ἀπέρχῃ ἣν εἶχον

Oh my friend, what are you doing? You go away and leave me cast down from the high hope I had...

or

"What are you doing, O my friend, from the great (μεγάλης) hope which I had & held throwing me down (or "overthrowing me") you leave (or depart this life, or abandon) me"

The vocative opening of "ὦ Σώκρατες," parallels here with the vocative "ὦ ἑταῖρε" - a word that means "friend" in Greek but which carries the connotation of a female companion or entertainer.  The romantic overtone of this exchange is stunning - Socrates seems like the ardent lover and Euthyphro the jilting boyfriend putting forth a transparent excuse for shedding the "excess baggage" of the woman no longer loved.  Since Socrates was fond of putting on masks, frequently speaks openly of love for men, and like the trickster was not afraid to don the role of the feminine when need demanded, there is a strong possibility that here too he is the jilted girlfriend.  

More to the point too is that such a reading hearkens back to the earlier references to Naxos, Daedalus, and Ariadne.  In other dialogues Socrates is described as "the bull" or "looking under his brows like a bull" and in the Republic he confronts the animal ferocity of Thrasymachus who is compared to a basilisk and to a minotaur.  Euthyphro, like Theseus, is displays tremendous ingratitude in abandoning his Ariadne "divine perfection"  after she has helped him escape from the dark of the labyrinth.  Like Theseus too Euthyphro has a more important place to go, a prior engagement, and so neglects others truly in need (like Socrates).  His conventional thinking, a thinking that cannot ask questions or entertain real thought lest it jeopardize reputation and livelihood, has no defenses against the truly lethal minotaur of the mind.  He can, therefore, neither save others nor save himself b/c donuts are waiting in the narthex.  And so Socrates must face his trial and death alone (or so it would seem).  And thus we come to the Apology.

And what of Ariadne?  According to the myth Dionysus, the god of resurrection, finds her on Naxos, weds her, and gets her with a brood of darling, shining children (including one Oenopion, god of wine).  She steps through the door of sorrow and pain and enters into a "τὸν ἄλλον βίον ὅτι ἄμεινον" - a new and better life with the god.  So perhaps things didn't turn out so bad in the end.

The Euthyphro: What is Holiness?

The "Euthyphro" dialogue asks the initial question "What is Holiness?"

The common answer (of the Polyphemus, the hoi poloi, the crowd) = "doing the will of god."

But how do we know "the will of god?"  

Euthyphro's first response reflects this sort of answer when he says "Holiness is doing what I'm doing now" (namely prosecuting evil) To which Socrates asks what the universal definition (rather than the particular of prosecuting evil) would be; What is Holiness?

His second response is "Holiness is what is agreeable to the gods" (all the gods or some?  wouldn't there be contradiction among gods?)

Euthyphro's third response is that "Holiness is doing what all the gods agree upon is agreeable" (but would all the gods agree upon this particular thing in this instance in this way?  wouldn't that limit "holiness" to a very small category?)

This prompts Socrates to raise the "Euthyphro Dilemma"

Is a thing holy because God loves it?  or is it loved by God because it is holy?

If the first thing then holiness is arbitrary and we cannot know the will of God (except as slaves).  If the second then there are things that exist prior to God (and thus God is not really God).

NOTA BENE: even the Christian dodge of this dilemma, that God and Holiness are synonymous really evades the problem rather than solving it - answering thus returns to the idea that we have the answers; we know the will of God; it is doing what we are doing now (and so we are back at square one).

In my estimation the resolution of this dilemma is NOT THE POINT!  To try and resolve the dilemma not only treats the work wrongly as philosophy and not as mythopoeic speculation but also depletes the dialogue of its central power.

http://wlasseter.blogspot.com/2011/04/plato-euthyphro-naxos-and-all-that.html

http://wlasseter.blogspot.com/2011/04/euthyphro-dilemma.html

A dilemma exists, according to Plato, not to be solved but to generate inquiry, thought, reflection and humility.  Thus the dilemma doesn't have a resolution; yet it is central to the dialogue.  In its power it creates a seemingly insoluble problem; a maze or labyrinth like unto that labyrinth into which Theseus, guided by Ariadne, descended in order to kill the Minotaur.  What is the Minotaur (metaphorically speaking)?  What do Ariadne and her clue represent?  And why does Theseus abandon her on the island of Naxos?  

What does hubristic security do but "abandon" the beauty that led us out from darkness and then "abandon" others to their fate?

The dilemma should generate in us a humility and gratitude for the lifeline or clue given us to bring us out of darkness.  Not knowing, and thus the sense of wonder, is the first step toward wisdom; and to be truly wise we first have to be emptied of any illusions that we really know something like a god knows it.

Just such a lifeline is offered to Euthyphro at this point by Socrates: Perhaps Holiness is a form of Justice?  Which form of Justice is it?

Euthyphro offers his fourth definition at this point - "Holiness is that form of Justice concerned with looking after the gods - as a slave looks after his master." (then humans are slaves, there is no advocate, and the will of God is just as arbitrary and inscrutable as before) - What is the nature of the "looking after"?

Euthyphro offers his fifth definition - "Holiness is knowing how to say and do things gratifying to the gods; prayer and sacrifice.  It is a sort of formula or magic; a science of sacrifice and prayer." (What, then is gratiyfing to the gods?)

Euthyphro offers the sixth and last definition - "Holiness is giving things to the gods that benefit them."  (What could the gods gain from us?  they are gods - immortals - they have everything!)

To this Euthyphro suggests that the gods desire Holy things from us... and we are back at square one; What is Holiness?

The dialogue that purports to answer the question of holiness never directly gives a definition.  So What is Holiness?

Frustrating.

What does Plato expect us to take away from "The Euthyphro" as an understanding of holiness/piety?

Perhaps this video might help:

No?  

Perhaps this article?

The Indefinite Dyad

Or maybe this video instead?

Why is Plato so cryptic and hidden in his message - why not just come out and say "Holiness is ...."?  Wouldn't that be easier for all of us?  Wouldn't that lead us better to right thinking?  

But wait, why doesn't Christ come out and say "Holiness is..." (because he doesn't, dontcha know)?  Christ says "be holy as your Father in heaven is holy" which is a bit of a riddle and a dilemma since we cannot be as holy as all that (seemingly).  

So What is Holiness?  Clue (see what I did there?) = the answer to "what is holiness" is in the dialogue - not "in" like a textual definition but literally in the dia+logos (the word of two; the conversation between the many and the one) itself;

"For where two or three gather in my name, there am I with them." (ου γαρ εισιν δυο η τρεις συνηγμενοι εις το εμον ονομα εκει ειμι εν μεσω αυτων)

Does that help you get out of this labyrinth of thought?

If not, then do we find ourselves, like the Psalmist, panting with thirst?  or like Pentheus trying to bind Dionysus the bull?  

Maybe this leads us to Holiness?  It certainly seems to lead us to confusion, dizziness and a readiness to cry out "Yield: I know that I know nothing."  

"A broken and a contrite heart, O God, You will not despise."

And maybe that moment, being purged of the hubristic need to cling to knowledge and, being purged, having an empty readiness willing to see things in a new light, filled with wonderment and awe, or fear - perhaps that moment is the first step to real wisdom.

"All philosophy begins in wonder," writes Aristotle.  So maybe the whole point is an attitudinal shift - a curing of the soul from hubris - a being born again and seeing the world like a child seeing snow for the first time.  

"Unless you are born again and become like one of these little ones you will have no part in the kingdom of heaven."

Simone Weil certainly thinks so.  

So too, it seems, did Plato who saw the end of hubris as the only way out of the labyrinth of human sorrow & despair.

Post Script: Perhaps Rumi had it right: