Cȯsꭑọ ∴ ọꭑƨȯƆ @cosmiccitizen@schelling.pt

Met a very funky cat at a mosque tonight. He said he was a US Marine, then in the Bandidos biker gang, before becoming a messianic Jew and eventually a Muslim. He's also dyslexic. He says the Large Hadron Collider is supposed to open a portal to the dimension of the djinn.

Analogia
Process & Reality
Collected Papers of CS Peirce

In my mind I associate Wassily Kandinsky and Henri Bergson as the midwit mediocrities who you meet on the way (in art) to af Klint or Delaunay, (in philosophy) or to Whitehead or Peirce.

I think this is kind of a reading of Plato contra the Eleatics.

"You can say whatever you want as long as you're morally correct."

"Ah, I see you had an original thought. But did you consider that you used a word from my list of sneer words? You have now given me the right to heckle you in the ancient tongue of 'people who pretend to read theory.'"

I'm not an EA person but there's definitely a respectable case for being one. What I can't stand is the Twitter Marxists who found a keyword ("philanthropy") that matches one of their pre-written scripts and so launch into pre-composed monologues about the power of class of power of class of power of class etc.

A: "This is the 'Do Whatever You Feel Like' machine. You can just do whatever you feel like unless someone presses that button."
Q: "What happens if someone presses that button?"
A: "The machine wages total, limitless war on someone."
Q: "Scary! But you said I can do whatever I feel like, right?"
A: "Absolutely. That's what the machine is all about!"
Q: "And does 'do anything' include pressing the button?"
A: "You know it! We're all about doing whatever."

But furthermore, because The World has this potential-of-potential that is continually developed into Actuality along the lines of its internally harmonious composition, Plato attributes all these properties of The World to the transcendent act of patterning itself, the pattern of patterns, the form of forms. This is what the Timaeus is about.

Towards the end of his career, Plato realizes that the same criteria of Organism that he sought in the polis and in the psyche are best ascribed to The World.

The World is the final ground of explanation, it is the final actual thing, it is the final self-contained thing, and it has the final internally harmonious composition. It is on the basis of the infinite, mutable changes of The World that the The World can be said to have a psyche -- which, recall, I'm defining as potential-of-potential

OK I'm going to get another Person from Porlock in a minute so I have to start dropping truth-bombs with minimal explanation.

I think that there's a smug sense in which this gets misunderstood. Yeah, of course Plato is appealing to a special status for the philosopher. But he's actually saying that the reflective life has the capacity, the bandwidth for trans-valuation. There's' something so much more narrow about appetite and esteem: they're not really fit for trans-valuing values.

If I haven't made it plain already: this is the harmonious, organic composition of the Platonic psyche, according to the Republic.
The appetites (epithumia) sustain the animal body and so experiences appetites.
The esteem (thymos) sustains the social self and so experiences shame and glory.
The logos is that which is capable of abstracting from both the evaluation of appetite and glory. For this reason of trans-valuation, Socrates says that the logos must be in charge.

I am not a person who believes that Plato's point is a kind of infinite play of ironies. I think Plato had a specific ground for the ironic aporia of his dialogues. I think he was demonstrating that dialectic, if it's going to be a form of rhetoric, simply cannot produce virtue in an individual.
For Plato, rhetoric operates by drawing people along into illusions and word-games based on the non-harmonious operations of their internal faculties.
But a virtuous person has no such disharmony.

This self-sufficiency is the true subject of Meno. This is also parallel with Charminides. And Socrates' failure in both cases demonstrates his explicit goals is actually a deeper refutation of the sophists' interest in gaining some kind of reductive nominal explanation of a humane topic of interest like arete (a sense of total excellence exclusively evident in a thriving example). Virtue is a virtue of organisms, not words. Dialogue can circle what is unspeakable but it cannot say it.

But I think that Plato was interested in demonstrating the process of pulling out special knowledge by pure inference from a single intellect. Socrates' real magic is in working out a proof with any willing audience. Socrates isn't pulling the answers from the common nomoi, as the rhetors were, but rather Socrates works from the self-contained answers of the individual.