Doctor Rafa On Fourfold Nature

Heh.

I told my lover a few days ago that he had been my first man. Looking at it, it seemed so personal, I didn't want anyone else running into it accidentally. I deleted it, after I'd been sure he'd seen it, and waited for some reaction.

When none came, no discussion, no acknowledgement, I wondered if I'd been mistaken. Was it not important after all? Not even enough to have any real--anything?

Perhaps it was amiss to expect a thank you, but now to treat it as a confused aftershock of a previously misleading relationship...I don't know. I thought it was important.

Maybe people just can't read subtext at all. I'm starting to think that more and more. It's definitely true of my non-lover friends. Everything has to be either explicit, or a private joke to myself. I don't mean that as a statement on intelligence; I don't think it has anything to do with intelligence. With those other friends, I suppose it must mean they don't know me very well. With my lover--who knows. These things happen.

I slept too much last night. I had hoped to be done working by this point in the day, but I've barely started.

An hour ago, I had a drink with a friend. He made cocktails, because I like them, and lay back on the sticky floor of his suite to ignore them as people came in and out.

It's harder to connect to people these days.

I'm trying to understand the Philebus version of nature.

We begin, along with Socrates, with three parts to the whole: the unlimited, the limited, and the mixed. We begin with the unlimited, which includes the entirety of the universe in its undifferentiated whole. The unlimited is the beginning of our experience, and there are endless gradations to the unlimited. “In a certain way,” Socrates expands, “the unlimited is many” (24a), calling to mind a continuous problem that should be on our minds when reading Philebus, the problem of the one and the many that is at the heart of this discussion of nature, as well.

As an example of the endless gradation, Socrates uses heat: “in the case of hotter and colder” Socrates states, “see whether you could ever conceive of some limit, or would the more and less…disallow to the genera an end” (24b). Protarchus, right again, states that he cannot. The very notions of heat and cold admit of endless gradation, going from the temperate to the infinitely hot and vice versa.

Looking at the full spectrum of hot to cold, however, and even to introduce the idea, it is necessary to begin to talk about limit. To begin to speak about the unlimited spectrum of temperature, we begin to talk about specific temperatures, to divide them into two realms: in this case, heat and chill. Thus we see how, to understand anything, we have to begin to limit the gradation, to take out specific instances from the whole and separate the totality into pieces. This separation is the second part of the whole, the limited.

Having defined the limit as a division having to do with our understanding makes the limited sound like a tool; this is not inaccurate. Having been introduced to the limited in this way, however, even before delving into its nature we are left with something of a problem. Is the limit entirely imposed by us on the unlimited, so that we may understand what we can of that whole—or is it also natural in some way, brought to us already limited, the universe naturally divided into parts that we only sense?

The limited is a tool to understanding anything unlimited—it is also natural in some way? Things that are” (26c)There is a problem here in deciding how we shape the world to force the limited for our own understanding, and what is inherently limited and divisible by nature. Do we impose the limit? How do we cut it up?

The limited is twofold“the offspring of the limit” (25d) is more problematic than the singular nature of the unlimited. Indeed Socrates does not resolve the problem of the limited , leaving the question on the table for us as it expands into the problem of cause and maker and hinges on the personal question of our humanity—there is a quantitative sense of limited (measure, numerical, homogeneous) “the equal and equality, and after the equal the double, and anything that is related as number to number or measure to measure” (25a) “by the insertion of number render them commensurate and consonant” (25e), and qualititative (heterogeneous, kind)
When we apply the limit to the unlimited , we get the mix. How can we have the limited without the unlimited? “once we see that each of the two has suffered a split and splintering into many, by a bringing together once more of each of the two into one” (23E), “the third is not just of some two things, but of all unlimited things that have been bound by limit” (27d)

The problem of the twofold nature of the limit and its application to the unlimited forces us to look at cause, to try to explain how the two reconcile into a single anything (particularly, a single human, which is what we should always be talking about in philosophy). However, this problem is only confounded at the causal level, where we see the same twofold nature. Why would we go to the causal level? “all things that come into being come into being on account of some cause?” (26e) But what is the cause?

Socrates says: “Isn’t it the case that the nature of the maker does not at all differ…from cause, and the maker and the cause would rightly be spoken of as one?” (26E). Protarchus should not simply agree with this assumption. We assume then that the cause is apart from the thing itself—nothing makes itself.

Then it becomes fourfold: Unlimited, limited, mix, cause

Cause versus maker—how do we understand the cause of the universe—is it qualitative of quantitative? Is it will or force?

This problem allows the specifically human--This problem makes virtue possible—how can something the same (human, quantitatively) be better or worse than another? We need to involve a qualitative understanding. Makes art, in the same sense of better and worse, and more generally, be possible.

What is art but the ability to restructure the limit? What do I do when I create –fiction,- a reality that doesn’t exist, where I can create characters you care for who do not exist. What do I do when I use language—I generalize about a world that you can picture, but to picture it is not for it to exist. When I write about a landscape, or a person, I pick out features. I pick out qualities that are important or evocative—I war too with this problem. Anyone trying to portray a person or any object in any artistic way will find oneself with a representation that is the result of this problem. What do we stress about the human form? What makes it beautiful? Is it the form itself? The character of the person?

Things impress themselves on our senses without our having to call them to us. To exist is to sense, and this is not something we turn off. But when we sense, we necessarily do so through the lense of our own experience. To create art solidifies that subjective glance at what we generally think is an objective universe. Art revels in the subjective and the objective.

We value well-done form. We marvel when we see an artist accurately, lovingly sculpt the human form in all of its complexity (as in David, for example), but would we value it if it were without the artist’s passion, what makes the art subjective? We value too the non-objective artist, the Picassos of the world, who invite us into a different way to see.

When we create art, we choose how to limit in a way that is most evocative of this problem. We see the contrast between the two kinds of limit, and we end up with a sort of mix as well.

Humans are all artists. We are both allowed a great deal of latitude in our world (we see how humans can influence our world) and we must worry at the depth of that latitude, for there seems to be very little innately to guide us. We have to worry to what extent we are artists, which has great importance in how we see ourselves related to our world (something that cannot help but be relevant to any human life).

It would be helpful if Stern would assign more papers, so I could get my head around it.