Life in a Thumbnail

A suggestion for new possibilities in language

2012-01-15T00:58:00.000-08:00

Someone with the handle of "VT" made a fascinating comment on an Al-Jazeera blog this AM. She observed that dictators have often made use of the possessive adjective when describing their subjects, as in; These are "my" people. It would be great to have non-possessive forms of words that refer to people. I think the same distinction should be made with interpersonal relationships, like "my" wife, or "her" friend. Thinking through the languages that I'm familiar with, I don't know of any that have this subtle quality... I like the use of "who" instead of "that" when referring to human beings - this could provide the same possibility.

Reflections on my mother's passing

2011-11-08T06:10:00.000-08:00

Personal loss is never easy and as we continue living, we continue to be incomplete in some way. During my last moments in my mother's living presence, morning light was streaming in through the window as I stroked her hair and hoped that she knew I was there. At her funeral the next week, I could barely speak. But others spoke comforting words of great eloquence, and sang the music she loved. My nephew Tyler, now a strapping athletic young man, spoke tenderly of his childhood memories, and many hours spent with his grandmother. My brother, a PhD student in mathematics, mentioned her love for education. Many people spoke of how she had touched their lives as a teacher. This brought on intense reflection of how she impacted these and many more lives, like ripples in a pond, including my own humble efforts in that direction.

Through random coincidence, on the same day that my mother passed away, another person died under quite different circumstances. In Libya, close to the end of a brutal struggle that tore his country apart and cost thousands of lives, the former dictator was found hiding in a drainpipe, and quickly killed. Over a period of 42 years, many people sacrificed their lives in resistance to his brutality. In a cruel reversal of the spread of good will by the acts and lives of kind people, the ripples of violence, brutality and deferred dreams spread throughout his country, the region, and the world. In contrast to my mother's 80 years, many of the lives that were lost were quite young, including many children in neighborhoods that had been attacked with deadly military hardware. But the healing began even before Gaddafi was killed, in areas that were free of his rule. People started broadcasting opinions and even entire languages that had been forbidden. Even as the last vestiges of fear were broken down, people in other parts of the word drew hope from the successes of the Libyans. But much needs to be done. There is still a great deal of cruelty and oppression in the world, especially in Syria at the moment. My own personal losses, as real as they are to me, seem insignificant by comparison.

May the collective power of all of the compassion and good work of people like my parents and grandparents, the good people of Libya, and others all over the world outweigh the evil, and may we go forward in hope and peace. For the rest of my life, I will hold the examples of my parents, grandparents, and my other teachers in my mind for ongoing inspiration. As Sophocles' Antigone spoke in his play from so long ago, "it is the dead, not the living, who make the longest demands."

Plato, Socrates and the Limits of Specialized Knowledge

2010-11-03T02:46:00.000-07:00

In religious and intellectual history, there was often a transition from an oral tradition to a written one. Just as the myths and ancient stories of Gilgamesh and Oedipus began as oral traditions long before they were written down, we find that the practice of philosophy underwent a similar transition, not just in Greece, but in other cultures as well. There is also a strong connection between this transition and the expansion of human communities into cities, with increasing specialization of functions within those societies. One is no longer primarily a hunter-gatherer, but instead might be a stonemason, a merchant, a farmer, or even ... a teacher. Within smaller groups of people or societies, anyone might be a teacher, and many of the skills are shared among most members of the community. An elder member of the group might also have a special role as a shaman or keeper of the oral traditions. As oral traditions became written traditions, the acts of writing and speaking took on somewhat different roles. Teaching was well established as a specialized profession by the time of Socrates, and a form of public education had been in place in Athens for about a century, so that most male citizens would have been be literate.

Beyond this, people would send their children for special tutoring in oratory or other topics that would give them an edge in an increasingly competitive environment. These tutors are mentioned in Plato's writing, and the character of Socrates spends a good deal of time distancing himself from them. Socrates even goes as far as to deny that he is (or ever was) a teacher.

Some of these teachers were referred to as Sophists, who might have claimed to possess sophia or wisdom, and that they could make others wise, or at least verbally persuasive, for a fee. Socrates on the other hand, was seeking wisdom, and the practice of seeking wisdom was known as philosophy. Let's examine the term; used to describe this task engaged in by Socrates, Plato, Aristotle and others. As many of you know, the term "philosophy" can be translated into "the love of wisdom." Socrates himself describes his mission to find wisdom. This brings us to a more specific definition of the term "philosophy" in the cultural context of Socrates' world. The ancient Greeks recognized four kinds of love, with phiia being a specific kind of love that is being directed in this case toward sophia; or wisdom. Although these words for love changed in meaning over time, the word philia was used to describe love for friends, and the loyalty we have for them. Twenty-three centuries later, when William Penn wanted to describe his imagined city of Philadelphia as a place of religious tolerance and fairness, he used the ancient Greek words to name it as the "city of brotherly love." Because the English word "love" is so ambiguous, we sometimes borrow words from Greek or other languages as adjectives to specify the variety of love being described. Even Plato himself is turned into an adjective when we use the term "Platonic relationship" to exclude erotic or sexual love. In particular Socrates, as one who loves wisdom or who seeks after wisdom, is bound to the oracle (which had pronounced him to be the wisest), and if we believe him, his many conversations were not motivated by a desire show off by humiliating others, but rather by a genuine search for his own enlightenment, in humble obedience to the oracle.

I will refer often to Socrates instead of Plato, who as the written author represents all of the words of Socrates. As such, the author Plato has almost total control over the message. Almost total control, because the more public memories of Socrates would have been either corroborated or challenged by eye-witnesses, some of whom would probably have lived long enough to have read Plato's written account. With this in mind, the Apology, which focuses on Socrates' public trial, is the dialogue that is most likely to represent the actual words of Socrates rather than Plato's use of Socrates as a voice for his own ideas. In the Apology, there is also an implied inversion of political hierarchy in that those who were supposed to be the wisest were actually found to be the least wise. In Plato's works as a whole, there is a tension between elitism and democracy. We can explore this tension, especially as it is presented in the five dialogues that we are reading, and we can also examine it as it relates to the contrast between specialist and non-specialist approaches in the search for knowledge and wisdom.

First, we can explore some of the context behind these dialogues. The five texts that we read in First Year Seminar, while highly significant in themselves, are just the proverbial tip of the iceberg. Plato wrote at least thirty dialogues, and many of them are of significant length. For example, the Republic is exactly ten times longer than the Apology. Plato is also credited with thirteen surviving letters which give further explanation of his ideas.

By the time of Plato and Aristotle, the practice of philosophy, even in their relatively young culture, was already centuries old. Athens, which was named after the very goddess of wisdom, was a hotbed of intellectual activity. Natural philosophy, an important branch of philosophy, was part of the tradition which Plato and Aristotle inherited from a group known as the Pythagoreans. Natural philosophy, which Plato's student Aristotle expanded upon, became the foundation for much of our modern sciences. In the days of these classical philosophers, however, the practice of natural philosophy was politically dangerous, because it clashed with traditional religious beliefs, resulting in a conflict that is eerily similar to the contemporary argument over teaching evolution in public schools.

But the Pythagoreans did not practice the scientific method as we know it today. Rather they were mystics who worshiped knowledge itself as reflective of divine truth, and in order to protect themselves from religious conservatives and fear-mongers, conducted many of their activities in secret, much like the freemasons in later centuries. Pythagoras himself probably did not discover the famous theorem which bears his name. Some of the knowledge that the Pythagoreans treasured probably came from even older cultures in Egypt and Asia. The Pythagoreans' belief that mathematics reflected reality led to their descriptive view of the universe; "all is number." One of their favorite topics was the study of musical intervals. They were fascinated by the fact that the musical overtone series corresponds to ratios based on measurable lengths of vibrating strings. Mathematics had the ability to map reality, and reflected a deeper, eternal reality that underlies the world of appearances.

Pythagorean mathematics was one of several important influences on Plato's teacher Socrates. Athens, like today's "big apple" of New York City, attracted people from all over the world. When the philosophers Parmenides and his own student Zeno of Elea visited Athens - Socrates would have been about 20 years old. In Parmenides, Plato tells the story of the youthful Socrates' conversation with the visiting scholars. Parmenides shares his view that the universe is unchanging, and that motion and change are illusions. In other famous stories, Zeno supports Parmenides through his use of paradoxes; little thought-experiments that push logic to extremes in order to test statements about reality. Socrates later utilized these tensions in his many conversations, and his own comfort with paradox must have been the result of a lifetime of exploring them. In the Parmenides dialogue, there are extensive conversations about the One, and in an interesting kind of role reversal, the young Socrates, who became so formidable and devastatingly clever as an old man in the dialogues woven around his trial and death, is shown in this dialogue as an inquisitive youth, exploring logical objections to the very ideas later held so dearly by Plato, and with Socrates being corrected by the older Parmenides.

In the Euthyphro, Socrates seeks a definition of piety. Our English word comes from the Latin translation of the Greek word Eusebia. The word conveys duty and proper interactions with people, as well as respect for god or the gods. Piety is an important concept in many cultures both ancient and modern, including two important cultures contemporary with Socrates; those of ancient China and India. In China, the word for piety, now pronounced xiao4 in Mandarin, was associated with the reverence for one's ancestors, and of the younger for the older. The topic of piety was the entire subject of one of the Confucian classics, the Xiaojing. The ideogram for piety reveals two graphic components, the old (lao) being supported or resting on top of the child (zi). 孝 Also, with the order of writing from top to bottom, the young emerge from the old, and in the Xiaojing, we are reminded that our very existence is due to our parents.

In India, the word dharma was already in use by philosophers who regarded it as one of the four purposes of human existence. In this philosophical system, the four purposes of human existence were tied into stages in a person’s life, so that after the starting point of piety, one could turn one's attention to artha, to work and the specialized knowledge it requires, and then to kama, the pursuit of pleasure and happiness, and finally to moksh, to personal liberation, which might also be connected to the kind of liberation Socrates discusses in the Phaedo.

Throughout the ancient world, the notion of duty to one's society weighed heavily in the concept of piety. Of course each of these words has certain unique culture-specific characteristics, but if Plato had had the opportunity to discuss piety with his contemporaries in other countries, he probably would have been very interested in the shared, universal qualities, because Plato was always looking toward the One. Ultimately for Plato there can only be one piety, not many pieties.

In Euthyphro Socrates' search for a definition of piety eventually brings forth the idea of a hierarchy of being. First, Euthyphro claims that the holy is that which is loved by the gods. Eventually Socrates gets him to agree to a more complex definition; that what is holy precedes the state of being loved by the gods, and is not conditioned by or simply contained within the many things that they might love. Rather, if we imagine a state of being greater than our own, what is loved by the gods, and what is holy both partake of a higher level of being, not defined by conditions; not being acted upon.

In further discussion, the hierarchy of being appears again in the context of people taking care of animals. This also connects to the idea of specialist knowledge. Certain people with the right kind of specialized knowledge can take care of horses, or take care oxen, or take care dogs, but can certain people, with the right kind of knowledge, take care of gods? Do the gods really require our attention in the same way that animals would? And the things that those animals do for us in exchange for our care, especially in Socrates' pre-technological world, are not the kinds of things that we would expect from the gods. If we agree that the gods have a state of being greater than our own, then we can't really "take care" of them, because the hierarchy of being would be reversed.

Then Socrates mentions ship builders, house-builders, and farmers, all specialists producing various useful objects or outcomes, but how do these compare to the usefulness of sacrificing to the gods? Do we benefit the gods in the same way as the specialists benefit their clients by producing the useful things or outcomes? Again this points to a hierarchy of being, because if we imagine a being greater than our own, we can't presume to benefit that being by our actions in the same ways as we provide goods and services to other people in our communities.

Plato's hierarchy of being is expressed in a more precise way by the Theory of Forms The objects and phenomena that we encounter are just imitations of the absolute, unchangeable essences. Even the qualities that define the forms are themselves aspects of absolute form. The world that we experience is just a faint shadow of the real world of the absolute. Plato's student Aristotle, although obviously deeply influenced by Plato, did not share this view of the ultimate significance of forms, but was very interested in forms as a way of organizing our knowledge of the world.

On various levels of hierarchy, a form can be defined as a collection of qualities. Whether or not we agree with Plato or Aristotle, a form can also be regarded as a kind of essence. Individual incarnations of a form can come and go, but the pattern remains. For Plato, these patterns point to absolute, eternal knowledge, and for Aristotle, they represent the logical results of careful observation and comparison.

Modern concepts of form are still closely related to this idea. In object-oriented computer programming - an instance is formed from a class, a formula defined in code, much like DNA in biology. The code is brought to life only when an instance of the class is allocated to a computer's active random-access memory or RAM. Instances can have different variations of properties that are defined in the formula. Each time we open a software program, we are interacting with a new instance of that program.

This is a very organic approach to knowledge, and can be illustrated with very familiar examples. An individual chair might be an instance of chair-ness, but the concept of chair-ness; the essence of chair-ness; the form of chair-ness, is much more important and real to Plato than any particular chair. If we consider a house cat, the individual cats that come and go, are all instances that partake of an essence; the form of cat-ness.

Biologists organize this group of house-cats as members of the family felidae. Their categorization is by shared physical characteristics, but some scientists might be more interested in their behavior or their interaction with other species. Also there are pet-owners who might feel that cat-ness really is eternal, and who might therefore be convinced by Socrates to agree with Plato's assertion of absolute form. Also, dancers might be interested in the way that cats move, and yoga or tai-ji masters might be interested in studying their postures. And sculptors might emphasize certain aspects of cat-ness to be rendered in a relatively immutable form.

Addressing all of these aspects of cat-ness leads us to the views of various specialists. Returning to the biological hierarchy of categories, we can see that this particular hierarchy also relates to a body of specialized knowledge. Specialized knowledge would apply to the development of a precise taxonomy or vocabulary in order to define and clarify aspects of the world, especially at the extreme ends of the formal scale. In contemporary science, this taxonomy has extended all the way down to the subatomic level, and all the way back to the beginning of the universe. In the ancient world, that process of extension was just beginning. Aristotle is said to have been the last person to have been able to encompass the full range of significant human knowledge during their lifetime.

In the Meno dialogue, Socrates uses a geometric example with four squares divided by diagonal lines, a figure sometimes known as "Plato's diamond," to prove a random person's prior knowledge concerning the relationship of squares to the lengths of their sides. This figure is also found in Aristotle's four elements, and in Euclid. Again, we have a connection to the Pythagoreans through the contemplation of geometry, which reveals an underlying absolute form. Socrates guides Meno's servant through a series of diagrams to show the relationship between bounding lengths and the area of squares. First they determined that a side length of 2 produced a square of 4, which also happens to be double. Then they figured out that a side length of 3 produced a square of 9, which is obviously not double. Then they work with a square of 8 units, and try to determine the length of its sides. At this point, the servant starts wondering whether or not he really knows about the squares. That development is viewed very positively by Socrates, because we first have to realize what we do not know in order to approach true wisdom. The actual square root of 8 is never quantified in the dialogue, but rather is identified through visualization of the diagonal lines. That's just as well, because the number doesn't lend itself to easy calculation.

In his epistemological conclusion, Socrates claims that the servant must have remembered it, and not really have learned it, since Socrates hadn't really taught him, but rather just helped him remember, and the servant really came to this realization on his own. It might be argued that Socrates did teach the servant at that moment, although very quickly. But more important than this is the point that Socrates was making, that some things cannot really be taught, including virtue - and there is only one virtue - this highlights the significance of the One for Plato. He also uses the hierarchy of being in his choice of adjectives, when he describes Meno as proposing a "swarm" of virtues. We associate the word "swarm" with flying insects, which participate in a rather humble form of being. As Socrates states, if there is only one virtue, then virtue must be the same for women, for slaves, for everyone. At that point, however, there is an implied contradiction with Plato's own views expressed in another important dialogue, the Republic. In the Republic, there is a social hierarchy in which Plato's ideal government consists of an enlightened elite which holds political power. So what happened to the single virtue accessible to everyone? This is but one instance of the problem of the One and the Many. It has been suggested that Plato's ideas evolved over his own lifetime, and that his dialogues should not be taken as a uniform canon but rather as a series of explorations.

Philosophical problems are not the same as ordinary problems, which can have definitive solutions. Rather they are a kind of network of inter-related concepts that can only be appreciated more deeply over time. Problems such as the One and the Many, just now hinted at, or Essence vs. Existence, explored in more recent years, are to be appreciated and understood, but not answered in the conventional sense. This raises the question of whether philosophers, who often dwell on such matters, are specialists in the same way that there are specialists in other fields. Over time, branches of philosophy have evolved that explore these questions in certain systematic ways, but when returning to fundamental questions of being, we stand outside the world of ordinary speech. In Meno, Socrates suggests that the servant, until the point when he realized that he did not understand the squares, could have made many fine speeches about that which he did not know, a sarcastic reference to Meno himself, who at the beginning of the dialogue had bragged about having made public speeches on the topic of virtue. This is an obvious reference to the abuses of oratory, which was taught as a skill. Oratory was (and is) a kind of specialized knowledge, often used today in deceptive advertisements.

If Virtue cannot be taught, it must be remembered as a form of prior knowledge. This is similar to the "nature vs. nurture" question in developmental psychology, but here there is a kind of mystical twist: the pre-existence of the soul. When discussing the possibility of reincarnation, Socrates uses images from his own culture - Persephone rising up from the underworld, and bringing the souls of the dead for a new life. Although it would be tempting to speculate about a direct Asian connection for this belief, it might also point to a much older layer of communication connecting cultures in the ancient world. Also, with Plato's commitment to the One, there are implications of monotheism. This idea was also already present in Plato’s culture, and might in turn represent a much older connection to ancient Israel, just around the corner along the Mediterranean.

The problem of the One and the Many takes on a special poignancy in the Crito, since Socrates, with his own death approaching, tells Crito that for Socrates to escape would be to follow the morality of the many, to return evil with evil. The topic of specialized knowledge also returns, but with a very different implication. In Crito, Socrates seems to be identifying with the specialized knowledge of a physician or trainer. In this metaphor, the opinion of the specialist is valued as an example of avoiding the harm that might result if one consults a non-specialist for advice in physical training. Even today, the motto of physicians is "First, do no harm." The phrase "a little knowledge is a dangerous thing" might especially apply in this case. Perhaps in matters of ethics at least, the philosopher is the ultimate specialist, whose work holds the most value. Plato explores this idea in much more detail in another famous dialogue; the Republic.

In the Phaedo, the meaning of death is discussed. Socrates discusses his own impending death as inquisitively as he might any other topic, although the fact that his own death is immanent should make us take him a bit more seriously. He speculates that he might be able to converse with Homer. Dante must have read this story, because in Dante's vision of the afterlife, written about 1700 years later, this is exactly what happens to Socrates, who gets placed with the "virtuous pagans" and can therefore spend an eternity in the deep conversations he loves so much. Socrates mentions at different points that he is not afraid of death, and that he had already proven this during his military service.

In various parts of Plato's writing the body is viewed in opposition to the soul. This contrasts with the intellectual traditions of Asia, which have taught us that we can learn from the body. The body can be viewed as a microcosm of the universe, and we can harness the energies flowing through the body. Alienation from the body - for better or worse, however, became part of the European heritage. Sometimes this has taken an anti-intellectual and even misogynistic direction, especially during the Middle Ages. At other times it has led to more lofty concepts such as Descartes' "cogito ergo sum."

Whether or not we agree with Plato's distrust of the body, or his rather elitist views of politics, or the more abstract aspects of his philosophy, the figure of his mentor Socrates still inspires us today. We can identify with Socrates because he confronted the reaction of fear that many people seem to experience when faced with a person who they either can't or won't understand. The culture of fear is one of the most serious threats to contemporary civilization. Perhaps it has always been so in our history. Certainly we can disagree with Socrates, but why should anyone be afraid of him? Although it is hard to separate Plato's elitism from his presentation of Socrates, we do know that Socrates practiced civil disobedience on at least one occasion, when at risk to his own life, he quietly disobeyed the orders of the oligarchy, who had ordered Socrates to arrest Leon of Salamis, who would have been executed.

In our own recent history, one of the great practitioners of non-violent civil disobedience mentioned Socrates at a decisive moment. In his “Letter From a Birmingham Jail, written in 1963, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. wrote the following:
"Just as Socrates felt that it was necessary to create a tension in the mind so that individuals could rise from the bondage of myths and half-truths to the unfettered realm of creative analysis and objective appraisal, so must we see the need for nonviolent gadflies to create the kind of tension in society that will help men rise from the dark depths of prejudice and racism to majestic heights of understanding and brotherhood.”
Although Socrates practiced civil disobedience in resistance to the oligarchy, at another point, he upheld the law in the face of mob rule, when he insisted that a group of errant generals be tried one by one. Also in the case of his own death, he held the law above his own life.

Socrates might have been presented as a literary character, but he has also attracted the attention of artists. Artists, when they are mentioned in Plato, appear to be specialists, those whose knowledge is useful in some respects, but not a source in the search for wisdom. Now it might be argued that the arts really do reflect absolute form and geometric idealism, along with the emotions they express. But Plato seemed to view the craft of artists as a lesser mode of being. In some of his other dialogues, Plato does at least seem to be interested in the geometric implications of sound, which were already understood by the Pythagoreans. Plato himself thought that the human soul had resonance, and could be tuned like a stringed instrument, with just the right amount of tension producing the greatest harmony. And in the Republic, Plato recommended that young men be taught only the Dorian mode of music, to promote bravery. Despite the beautiful metaphor of tuning the soul, the draconian suggestion that people limit their music to only one scale has its counterpart in contemporary and recent totalitarian governments, which limit the arts as a way of limiting the possibility of political expression. However Plato's connections to music probably run much deeper than this rather strange restrictive suggestion. Jay Kennedy, a philosopher of science at University of Manchester, has recently made a startling discovery which confirms Plato's close connection to the Pythagoreans. Kennedy discovered that in many of Plato's dialogues, the lengths of the lines of text define integers that correspond to musical intervals. Numbers defining the consonant intervals, which are closer to the fundamental resonance, coincide with positive points about the Good and the One, while numbers of lines defining the dissonant intervals, which are further away from the fundamental resonance, correspond with text that mentions concepts such as shame and ignorance. It is possible that because the Pythagoreans were justifiably concerned about being persecuted by religious fundamentalists, they hid certain aspects of their knowledge using these kinds of esoteric techniques.

In spite of his interest in musical resonance, Plato did not seem to be a great champion of the arts, and unlike Aristotle, he did not seem to involve himself in that branch of philosophy we refer to as aesthetics, the study of beauty and value in the arts. Plato does mention "the Beautiful" as a form in the Phaedo and other dialogues, but doesn't really expand on the topic. It seems that Plato's mistrust of the body led him away from a serious exploration of this. Aside from their fascinating formal qualities, the arts are indeed "of the body." The arts participate in logic to some extent, but they also cultivate a refined sensitivity and awareness that arises, essentially, from the body, often leading to profound insight in the ecstatic moment, as well as the catharsis described so accurately by Aristotle in his theories about tragedy. The arts also express divergent visions of the world, and this might also have clashed with Plato's commitment to universalism.

It is very interesting then, that Plato and Socrates have inspired responses from artists through the ages. Soon after their lifetimes, sculptors tried to capture their likenesses, even though the philosophers themselves probably would have viewed these efforts as mere craftsmanship rather than as a reflection of true knowledge. Still, we might respond emotionally today to the non-verbal intensity of Socrates’ expression, which has been captured by those ancient sculptors. The Renaissance takes its very name from a rebirth of knowledge and art, and there was a new reverence for the concepts and characters we have been discussing. The painter Rafael gave us his own vision of "the School of Athens" in which several generations of great philosophers and intellectuals are presented together in a single setting (perhaps in the afterlife) in the manner of Dante's "virtuous pagans", conversing enthusiastically with each other. This fresco was commissioned in 1508 for the wall of a new papal library in Rome. Although Socrates is certainly present, our eyes are drawn to the presence of the figures of Plato and Aristotle in the center. Plato, holding a copy of his Timaeus, points to the heavens, or possibly to the One. Aristotle, holding his Ethics, stretches his arm forward to reach toward the world of human relationships and nature. Socrates, who didn't write a book, is shown in the act of conversation, probably with an orator. In the late 18th century, two years before the French revolution, the painter Jacques-Louis David portrayed Socrates in heroic terms. This time it is Socrates who points to the heavens. It is ironic that the artist who celebrated Socrates in this painting later himself became the servant of a tyrant, as did some of the students of the very hero who he portrayed so beautifully. In 1922, the modern sculptor Constantin Brancusi tried to capture the gaze of Socrates in a piece which has Socrates' eyes pointing out in two completely different directions, so that we must circumnavigate the piece in order to comprehend it. Turning to an even more abstract medium, that of instrumental music, we can listen to part of a work written in 1954 by Leonard Bernstein, his Violin concerto inspired by yet another of Plato's dialogues, the Symposium, an account of a discussion held by Socrates and others at a party. The primary topic of this discussion is love, and the general conversation shifts slowly from erotic love to ideal love. In this section of the concerto, Eryximachus the physician has just cured Aristophanes the playwright of hiccups, and is now speaking of the value of moderation in love, which benefits the body, and how imbalance in love can harm the body. We can hear how Bernstein expresses the enthusiasm and confidence of the physician, who proudly points to his own understanding of human nature.

Returning to the question of specialized knowledge, we have seen Socrates, perhaps as the voice of Plato, using this idea in two different ways. We do not look to the specialists for wisdom itself, but the knowledge of specialists such as doctors is still valuable, and eventually points to the authority of philosophers in Plato's ideal state. Today, especially in the midst of a serious recession, many are looking for the specialized training that can provide a greater level of income and economic security. As our global society becomes increasingly complex, the roles of specialists become increasingly critical, resulting in an explosion of knowledge, and an even greater explosion of data. In the information age, one of our biggest challenges is the interpretation of data, much of which is meaningless in itself. And what about wisdom? Is wisdom expanding along with knowledge and data? Do we have the wisdom to undo the damage caused by our species' abuses of technology? Perhaps we still need people like Socrates. Perhaps we need to recover, reconstruct or remember the oral tradition. In the context of an oral tradition, something amazing could emerge from our conversations. When Socrates challenges authority, it is always in the form of a conversation. Even when he risks infuriating the other parties, their presence together in the same space creates a kind of resonance that can't be duplicated through the written word alone. As long as someone chose to remain in the same space with Socrates, there was an implied consent to join him in truth-seeking. This was Socrates' act of piety, not the frozen words of a canonical statement, but the personal transformation that might result from human interactions, possibly bringing us closer to that which might be loved by the gods.

We still need Socrates who calls us to step out of our comfort zones - to occasionally let go of our "shop talk" and restricted language. We still need Socrates as an example of one who "speaks truth to power." By the time of his trial, the oligarchy of the 30 was finished, and a measure of democracy, even though rather limited, had been all-too-briefly restored. By submitting to the laws of an imperfect democracy as an abstract embodiment of his society, and by throwing his own life into the equation, Socrates held open the possibility that later generations might continue the search for wisdom and perfection, even if this search carries us beyond the confines of specialized knowledge.

The Arts as the last frontier of Artificial Intelligence

2010-03-12T11:54:00.000-08:00

Daniel Goleman's landmark book Emotional Intelligence described the social dimension of the phenomenon, which is more significant than measurable IQ in almost any social environment, including work, politics, and almost any other social context. As a musician who is also interested in artificial intelligence and the impending singularity described so well by Ray Kurzweil, James Martin and others, I have become increasingly aware that the concept of emotional intelligence has importance in another dimension as well; the realm of aesthetics and our relationship as human beings with rapidly-evolving machine intelligence.

A New Adventure - The Synapse Brothers

2009-08-10T19:13:00.000-07:00

The Synapse Brothers is a new improvisatory band that merges elements of electroacoustic music with jazz and fusion. The band features, in live performance settings, Bob Gluck (keyboards and electronics), myself (guitars and MIDI-guitar), and behind the scenes in pre- and post-production, electronic music pioneer Patrick Gleeson, whose beats and sound design embellish and grace the live playing. The repertoire of the Synapse Brothers explores original work and music of Herbie Hancock's early 1970s Mwandishi Band, of which Gleeson was a member. The results so far have been engaging and, at times, just plain fun.

Synapse Brothers at All About Jazz | Bob Gluck | John Myers | Patrick Gleeson

YouTube samples: "Singularity on Lark Street" |
"I Never Would Have You"

Emergence

2009-03-02T15:33:00.000-08:00

towers of snare hits, flowers of chords
clouds of cymbals, fireworks of melody...
At the Synesthetic Center, Sound and Image are One!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IBahEKXYmrE

A Ritual of Rediscovery - Crescendo's production of Distler's Totentanz

2008-01-13T10:23:00.001-08:00

Although it's very hard to describe this experience, which involved my witnessing of the re-creation by Alice Myers of a lost painting, the performance of mystical music written by a talented composer whose life had been crushed by fascism, and deeply moving interpretive choreography by a dear colleague, it was wonderful to be part of it! My own contribution was mainly in connecting the animation to the music. In that respect, this was a familiar role for me, since in 2003 Alice and I had collaborated on a technically similar project; the animation and projection based on paintings by Swiss artist Etienne Delessert for a performance by the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra of Ravel's "Ma Mère L'oye." In both projects, we brought our intellectual heritage of traditional art forms into new digital contexts. Alice's work was based on the famous Medieval panoramic mural painting from the interior walls of St. Mary’s church in the town of Lübeck in Northern Germany, where Hugo Distler (the composer of the Totentanz) served as organist. 24 human characters from all walks of life were shown cavorting with skeletal figures in a poignant assertion of the transitory nature of human life. Although the painting was destroyed during WW II, Alice was able to work with Danish scholar Martin Hagstrøm, who made available detailed black and white photographs of the painting that had been taken before the war, as well as color sketches that had been made into lithographs during the 19th century. After Alice recreated a full color version, forming a very large digital image, we used the characters in the image, and the panorama itself, as the basis of a series of animations coordinated with Distler's music and Wendy Shifrin's choreography. During the choral passages in Distler’s composition (conducted by Christine Gevert), characters come out of the painting after they are summoned by the narrator.

 The experience was deeply moving for everyone, including the performers and artists as well as the audience. During the preparations for the premiere of the production, I was teaching a section of First-Year Seminar at Simon's Rock. The pieces we were working on all seemed to explore the same theme - our awareness of mortality is deeply connected to the path of the Examined Life. In particular, I kept thinking about a passage from Antigone - "the dead make the longest demands." In my own imagination, I kept thinking about my personal debt to previous generations of musicians (J.S. Bach, Charlie Parker, etc.), and the awesome legacy of their artistic perfection.  

I also found the theme of mortality ironic in some ways, considering the ideas of Ray Kurzweil, who among others has pointed out that humanity is pushing back the boundaries of life and death along with the evolution of artificial intelligence and its (possible) eventual merger with organic intelligence.   In a similar way, the yhe project is enjoying a (kind of) technological afterlife. The first performances were given in Great Barrington MA on Nov. 9 and in Lakeville CT on Nov 10. We will present a video of the performance in March 2008 in Florence, Italy, at the annual convention of the European Cultural Association of the Danse Macabre. The dance continues!

Bach on the "Wrong" Instruments

2006-12-14T20:04:00.000-08:00

I had a most enjoyable time preparing for and playing in this concert with my colleague Larry Wallach:

I played the Lute Suite Number 1 on guitar, Larry played the Italian Concerto and a harpsicord partita (on piano), and we played an organ piece (my guitar was the right hand, Larry's piano the left hand and pedals. Alice Myers created the poster:

Covocation Address

2006-10-30T20:14:00.000-08:00

Covocation Address - Simon's Rock College - Great Barrington, MA

Sounds of Invitation, Sounds of Liberation

On behalf of my colleagues, I would like to invite you to this celebration of our 40th Academic Year, which is now in full swing. I would also like to invite you to participate in a kind of sonic journey, which has parallels with our academic journeys at Simon’s Rock.

Our journey begins with the Writing and Thinking Workshop, the first landmark in our General Education curriculum. The faculty always precede the workshop with an intensive training period of our own, in which we subject ourselves to the same techniques and exercises that we will share with our students.

It is the second day of our faculty training. My colleague Joan DelPlato, who as Coordinator of the Workshop models the role of a workshop instructor, has just invited us to write a response to some visual symbols we have drawn. As we put our minds and pens and pencils to work, Joan starts to write some announcements on the board for us. I briefly close my eyes to frame a thought or two, and hear her confident strokes of chalk on slate - a decisive impact followed by a smooth, softer sound of friction – Suddenly, the sound reminds me of the sound of brushes on a snare drum - evoking a musical response. Both sounds are full of meaning for me, because I regard both the drummer’s brushes and my colleague’s chalk board strokes as friendly invitations to express myself.

In the parlance of Writing and Thinking Workshop, we refer to this kind of invitation as a “prompt” – we are asked to write a response to a line of text, an idea, a concept, or even an image or piece of music. These prompts often grow into extended pieces, taking on a life of their own; sometimes expanding through other techniques and evolving into Senior Thesis projects, or even Convocation Speeches!

Elizabeth Blodgett Hall offered an invitation to the first Simon’s Rock students 40 years ago. A good invitation has to convey strength and confidence. She could have told these students, much as we do today, that you will be supported if you respond to our invitation, to step outside conventional expectations and start inserting your own ideas in between the lines of the material that we share with you. This is something that musicians have done for centuries, in a process known as trope-ing. An existing fragment of melody, such as the last few notes of a Gregorian chant, might be extended and stretched out, forming the foundation for a faster moving melody layered on top of it. Eventually, great polyphonic masterpieces emerged. Centuries later, American jazz musicians began elaborating on simple popular tunes, inserting structures of such beauty that their new melodies and improvisations took on a life of their own, and came to be regarded as works of art. Then these structures could in turn be elaborated upon by new generations of musicians. The result is much like the geometric progression of fractals, and it is potentially infinite.

From the perspective of someone who makes music, I can affirm that this is an intensely satisfying, even joyful process. And some of the stories that you may have heard about musicians being seekers and givers of pleasure – are true. But it’s not the pleasure of immediate gratification. Rather it’s the pleasure of transcendence that can only come from complete immersion, eagerly embracing the hours; the hours turning into years, the years turning into a lifetime. This quest for ecstasy often follows a vector that extends between boredom on one hand and the stress of too much challenge, on the other hand. The vector extends between redundancy, when the rules of a symbolic system are followed too blatantly, and chaos, when expression occurs within no recognizable framework.

Transcendence of a symbolic system requires mastery of a symbolic system. But very few of us can remember the exact moments when we first made the connection between a sound and a symbol, the moments when we began to acquire our first spoken language. When my daughter Lisa spoke her first words, there was no clear division between the symbolic and expressive dimensions. Now, I hear her discussing abstract topics with her fellow Seniors at Simon’s Rock, and both dimensions are clear. In a sense, all verbal communication is the sound of invitation, and we often forget to notice the musical qualities of the sounds we make as we speak. Only when we hear an unfamiliar language can we appreciate its qualities with the innocent ears of a musician.

At the highest levels of musicianship, we find that practitioners become especially interested in inflections, the subtleties of tone, and structures so minute that it becomes hard to describe them. Indeed, as we turn to the world of science and metering tools in order to understand the complex, constantly shifting energies of the overtone series, we find that each human being is already in possession of a unique voice - as unique as a fingerprint. To verify this, one only needs to make a phone call to a close friend or family member - your voice will immediately be recognized - millions of years of natural selection has made sure that you won’t have to waste a lot of time explaining who you are. Even if our voices are already unique at the biological level, musicians often try to cultivate and extend that uniqueness into the artistic domain. “To find one’s own voice” is a shared goal of many in the arts and humanities. Extending the musical metaphor to Simon’s Rock, we can say that here, we aspire to nurture not just the strength of each voice, but the uniqueness of each voice.

Awareness of sound is not just a channel for symbolic communication, but also for communication on an even deeper level. In the practice and experience of time-based art forms such as music, dance and theater, there is a phenomenon known as entrainment. This word is used to describe the way in which our heartbeats and other biorhythms tend to align themselves with an audible pulse. Ethnomusicologist John Blacking, when staying for a time with the Venda people in South Africa, was amazed to learn that all members of this society, including children, seemed able to stay in tempo while playing seemingly complex rhythms, without requiring the presence of a coordinating musician to beat out the time for them. Inspired by their ability to regulate themselves, Blacking described this shared ability as an “invisible conductor,” a metaphor for the shared perception of absolute time. This shared perception, affirming our presence in the world together, and making it possible for us to regulate ourselves without the need for an external authority, has profound political implications. At the very least, as with voice prints, it tells us that rhythmic synchronicity is not the exclusive domain of professional musicians.

Our curriculum includes voices of tradition and even offers the experience of multiple traditions, or multiple canons. But we also present the challenges to those traditions. This inevitably leads to tension. The musical term for tension, “dissonance” is often used in other contexts, and it is not uncommon to speak of social dissonance. As our first-year Seminar members can tell us, the root prefix, “Dis” was used by Dante to name a level of Hell reserved for those who consciously rejected the love of God. Musicians, however, spend our whole lives working with dissonance and consonance, tension and release. We find that a certain amount of dissonance is healthy. Many musicians have found that in order to reflect the complexity and tension of our modern experience, we need to use a broader range of materials, including those that might sound very dissonant to the uninitiated.

As subjective as the perception of dissonance might be, people have found that applying just the right amount of tension can create the conditions for harmony. Plato once suggested that the human soul could be tuned just like the strings of a lyre. While Plato was speaking of the benefits of internal tension for the individual, the same could be said of societies. Creating a safe space for people to present opposing views, while maintaining cordiality and the balance of power, is a delicate task. In musical terms, the jazz soloist has continuous interactions with accompanying musicians, with other soloists, and with the audience, so that the tension of being able to respond and yet at the same time keep track of one's own musical intentions becomes very challenging. The connections of jazz with democracy are well recognized, and most likely have something to do with the “invisible conductor” concept mentioned earlier. True democracy should be a constant challenge, and include the promise to be increasingly more responsive, not just a smug assertion that we are the best, and that others should imitate us. For me, teaching improvisation is much like teaching Seminar classes, encouraging people to speak and share their ideas, to express themselves clearly and decisively. The medium is different, but the process is very similar.

40 years ago, when Simon’s Rock was born – the Cold War was in its second decade, and the Vietnam war was intensifying. The Civil Rights struggle had exposed the ideological hypocrisy that infected the very heart of our nation, and many young people were starting to question the basis of all authority, in any form. According to all accounts, Betty Hall was very patient with her first students, even when they questioned her own authority. The youth of that period, including some of my colleagues here today, were eager and hopeful participants in movements for change. Some of us even had the arrogance to think that we could create our own culture. I would like to think that we are changing the world, in slower but more profound ways, by teaching at an institution like Simon’s Rock. But maybe we don’t want to change things too slowly. Now, 40 years after Simon’s Rock was founded, progress on many social fronts has stagnated or even atrophied. We are in the midst of another contentious war. Eli Pariser, a relatively recent Simon’s Rock graduate, is standing up to challenge the authorities of this day and age. His organization frequently sends me e-mails in his name, reminding me to vote, and asking for my help in various activities. I don’t mind.

Although Betty Hall passed away last year, new visionaries have come forward, to generously and patiently contribute their resources, so that Simon’s Rock, a great experiment in higher education, will not lose even a single beat in the great jam session of academe.

Hopefully the sounds that I make today, inviting all of us to reach beyond ourselves, but also deep inside ourselves, and echoing Betty Hall’s first invitation of 40 years ago, will evoke responses from those here today, especially from our students. This is what we hope for; that the sounds of invitation will evoke the sounds of liberation.

Hi Everybody

2006-10-12T16:57:00.000-07:00

This is my first entry. I'm playing solo guitar for the Cityfest jazz festival in Pittsfield MA tomorrow and spent a delightful day walking around the beautiful Berkshires where I live