"Life of Nicias," by Plutarch

"Nicias" by Joachim von Sandrat (1606-1688)

"Life of  Nicias," our selection this month, comes from Plutarch's Lives of the Noble Grecians and Romans. The work is also known as the Parallel Lives, as it contains side-by-side biographies of noteworthy personages of Greco-Roman antiquity, with commentary on the successes and failures of each pair.


Nicias was an Athenian political and military leader of the 5th-century B.C., and the selection relates tales of his penchant for pomp and circumstance, his political rivalries (especially with Alcibiades), and the Athenian military expedition to Sicily, which ended disastrously in 413 B.C.

Bust of Plutarch (ca. 46-ca.119)
in his home village of Chaeronia, Greece

It's a rich narrative, worthy of an epic motion picture.  At its center is the personage of Nicias, the reluctant warrior. He vied with more hawkish elements in Athens's political arena, and negotiated a truce with Sparta and her allies that bears his name.  In Plutarch's telling, is Nicias a hero or anti-hero?

You decide.

"Better Men, Braver and Less Idle": Meno's Paradox

In our meeting on the 25th of last month of Plato's "Meno," what's commonly known as "Meno's Paradox" came up.

As I mentioned in my previous post, the dialogue returns again and again to the question of what virtue is. Here's Meno:

"How will you look for it, Socrates, when you do not know at all what it is? How will you aim to search for something you do not know at all? If you should meet with it, how will you know that this is the thing that you did not know?" (Section 80d in the Grube translation)

The demonstration with the slave boy ensues, in which Socrates proves, and Meno accepts, that a slave boy raised in his household is able to work his way through a geometry problem (with what some consider "leading questions" by Socrates), despite having had no formal training in the discipline.

Socrates concludes that universal truths are embedded in the boy's soul, which he has the ability to "recollect."

"Meno's Paradox" is: if we know something, inquiry is unnecessary, however it we don't know something, inquiry is impossible.  How will we know the truth if we see it?

Socrates reply: "...I would contend at all costs in both word and deed as far as I could that we will be better men, braver and less idle, if we believe that one must search for the things one does not know, rather than if we believe that it is not possible to find out what we do not know and that we must not look for it." (Section 86b).

In other words: Dare to know.

Plato's "Meno"

Plato, from Raphael's "School of Athens"

Kudos to the 22 brave souls who made it to the library through intermittent severe thunderstorms on Monday evening for our spirited discussion on Plato's "Meno."

The "Meno" starts off with the title character posing a question as to whether virtue can be taught, is the result of practice, or is inborn.

After a lot of twists and turns -- requests for definitions, attempts at definitions, debates on epistemology (how we come to know), a math demonstration, a section on virtue as knowledge and another contrasting "knowledge" vs. "right opinion" -- a concluding colloquy between Socrates and Meno proceeds as follows (from the Grube translation):

SOCRATES: ...if we were right in the way in which we spoke and investigated in this whole discussion, virtue would be neither an inborn quality nor taught, but comes to those who possess it as a gift from the gods which is not accompanied by understanding, unless there is someone among our statesmen who can make another into a statesman. If there were one, he could be said to be among the living as Homer said Tiresias was among the dead [in Homer's Odyssey], namely, that "he alone retained his wits while the others flitted about like shadows."  In the same manner, such a man would, as far as virtue is concerned, here also be the only true reality compared, as it were, with shadows.

MENO: That is and excellent way to put it, Socrates.

SOCRATES: It follows from this reasoning, Meno, that virtue appears to be present in those of us who may possess it as a gift from the gods. We shall have clear knowledge of this when, before we investigate how it comes to be present in men, we first try to find out what virtue in itself is. But now the time has come for me to go. [Emphasis added].

Socrates then asks Meno to pass his newfound realizations on to Anytus, which will be "for the benefit of the Athenians," as Anytus apparently wields some influence. The dialogue then ends.

 According to R.E. Allen (1), the dialogue "ends in perplexity," and he calls it a piece of "dialectical irony," because Socrates concludes that even though he has asked and probed for a definition of virtue multiple times, these discussants could not produce a suitable answer as to "what virtue in itself is".

However, and this is my additional interpretation, some statesman who have this certain charisma, or "virtue," or "je ne sais quoi," as if as a divine gift, can pass it on to others.  (Witness how our political leaders have performed such feats at the podiums of the Republican and Democratic National Conventions during the past two weeks!)

Thanks to our attendees for grappling with this text, one of the most challenging we've read over the course of the last 12 years.

P.S. Purely coincidentally, our reading last month of the "Prince" had many references to what Machiavelli in Italian called "virtù."  Many thanks to Peter McGullam for noticing this interesting parallel between the readings.  At the risk of sounding a little reductionist, I maintain that Plato's "virtue," like Machiavelli's "virtù," is of the "can do," not "goody-goody" kind.

(1) Allen, R.E., The Dialogues of Plato, vol. 1. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1984, p.149.

"Am I politic, am I subtle, am I a Machiavel?'

Santi di Tinto's portrait of Niccolò Machiavelli (1469-1527). 

My title quote is from Shakespeare's "Merry Wives of Windsor."  Once you've noted the Bard's charming use of  "a Machiavel" as a singular personal noun, let the meaning of the adjectives "politic" and "subtle" sink in.

The line encapsulates the basic dilemmas surrounding "The Prince":  Is Niccolò's position statesmanlike or malevolent?  Does he depict affairs as they really are, or as they should be?  Is he at heart a republican or a monarchist?  Is he really "subtle," or is he ruthless?

Questions such as these make this first modern treatise of political philosophy fascinating.  We'll talk more on Monday.

P.S. Note well Niccolò's sixteenth-century political smile in portrait.  Would it fly in the twenty-first century?

Unpacking Foucault

Mural of Foucault by Thierry Ehrmann.

Michel Foucault (1926-1984) wrote this month's selection, "the Body of the Condemned," as the first chapter of his book Discipline and Punish: the Birth of the Prison. 

Foucault, who was a member of the prestigious Collège de France, wrote interdisciplinary works on diverse subjects including mental illness, medicine, sexuality, and in this case, the criminal justice system.

"The Body of the Condemned" puts Foucault's technique on display.  He starts with primary historical source materials. The first is an account of the attempted execution by drawing and quartering of Damiens for the failed assassination of King Louis XV in 1757, the second a 19th century day log of rules for "the House of Young Prisoners in Paris."

By the end of the piece, Foucault will have used such historical evidence to make a leap into theory. He asserts that by controlling a man's body, you ultimately control his soul.

de Beauvoir's "The Second Sex"

Simone de Beauvoir in 1967.

Our meeting tonight -- which will take place thanks to all who have helped to dig out the library and surrounding roads after Saturday's massive snowfall -- will be on the Introduction to Simone de Beauvoir's The Second Sex, first published in this country in 1953.

Let me offer the following as a brief intro to the reading.  The Second Sex is a lengthy work, so lengthy it was first published in two volumes (and the French edition, still in print, remains so).

It is a work that incorporates de Beauvoir's insights gleaned from the fields of biology, history, anthropology, sexology, etc. De Beauvoir builds her argument on a scaffolding of French existentialist philosophy.  Here are a few terms you need to know to understand the text in light of this:

en soi: "in itself": an inanimate object is a thing in-itself.  A table, for example, doesn't change.

por soi: "for itself": a human being is "for itself." Unlike a table, it can change, it is a "becoming."

Mitsein: from German, "being with."  Communities of people are a "Mitsein."

Alterity: "Otherness."  It is de Beavoir's basic premise that women are in a state of alterity vis à vis men, and this situation has led to their subordination to men throughout history.

Year-End Retrospective for 2015

Our first discussion of 2015 took place on February 23rd. Our selection was from "An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding," by David Hume.  Here Hume expresses an extreme skepticism of "operations of understanding" that go beyond our sensory impressions.

On March 23rd, we took up Percy Bysshe Shelley's "A Defence of Poetry," in which Shelly claims poetry to a higher form of expression than prose.  (Some readers may see irony in that Shelley,  one of the great English Romantic poets, made this claim NOT in a poem, but in an essay.

April 27th was devoted to "The Pardoner's Tale," from "The Canterbury Tales" of Geoffrey Chaucer.  Though Chaucer's Pardoner loves to preach that "Radix malorum est cupiditas," ("The root of all evil is greed,") he is quite up front about how it's money that motivates him. 

May 18th,  Leo Tolstoy's Second Epilogue to War and Peace was featured.  Here Tolstoy takes up deep philosophical questions about history,  in particular the "Great Man" theory, with Napoleon's invasion of the East as his case study.  By the way, now when people ask me, "Have you read War and Peace, I truthfully answer, "No, but I have read the Second Epilogue to it.

On June 22nd, we covered the short story, "The Man Who Would Be King," by Rudyard Kipling.  It is a tale of two adventurers in British India who found a colony in present-day Afghanistan.  Only one survives and returns to tell the story.

July 27th was devoted to "The Unknown Masterpiece," by Honoré de Balzac,  a truly great story that raises deep questions about art and genius.

The play "Six Characters in Search of an Author," by Luigi Pirandello, was our reading on August 24th.  Like the Balzac story,  it was concerned with philosophical issues of artistic creation.  The characters in this family, which today we would refer to as "dysfunctional," desperately seek to conform their behavior to a mold imposed from outside of themselves.

On September 28th,  we discussed Stephen Crane's story "The Open Boat," about four survivors of a shipwreck striving to row back ashore in a lifeboat.  It is a beautiful depiction of men who teeter on the boundary between sea and shore, death and life.

Sherwood Anderson was our featured author on October 26th.  His "Death in the Woods" tells the story of a country woman who dies in a snowstorm on her way home from town, where she had bartered eggs for some meat, liver, and bones from the town butcher.  Participants were impressed with Anderson's ability to give us a story that can so readily be approached either realistically or allegorically.

Our year ended on November 23rd, with "The Garden of Forking Paths," by Argentinian writer Jorge Luis Borges,  a wildly unrealistic World War I spy story that nevertheless delights as a reflection on the nature of time and the life choices an individual makes as he moves through time.

By the way,  if you were wondering whatever happened in January, we had to cancel, as there were predictions for blizzard conditions the evening we were to meet.  Let's hope for better luck next month!