2018-04-20 NSFRI - Plato - Greater Hippias (295d-297c) - Piercing the Rhetoric
Channel: Pierre Grimes and the Noetic Society
Date: 2018-04-30

This material is posted under a Creative Commons BY-NC-ND 4.0 International license. 
See https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/.
 2018-04-20 NSFRI - Plato - Greater Hippias (295d-297c) - Piercing the Rhetoric

{ 20180420NSFRI }

 Dialogue(s): greater-hippias Sections: 295d-297cSecond NSFRI on the Greater Hippias. (Last week's talk is here. Also, we continue the next day in our NSSAT Saturday chat on the same topic.) This was really a fun talk.SynopsisPierre explores going through Plato's dialogue, Greater Hippias, replacing the word, "beauty" with the word, "wealth", since in our times, many more people seem concerned with wealth than with beauty.So -- if you were Socrates -- how would you talk with a Hippias about what is beauty -- or wealth?  Pierre plays Hippias and gives us all a chance to try responding to each of Hippias' answers, as if we were Socrates.HighlightsWhat is wealth? Gold?  "Exchange"?What is a good?What is a benefit?Why are Socrates' questions effective, but ours are not?PG: "Rhetoric needs a manner, style of using language to disguise what [one doesn't] know."Your job (as Socrates) is to pierce that.Cause & Effect ; Create vs CreatedDavid Hume: There are no causes: only regularities in patterns sensed.Only the effect comes into being. What causes it is not in "the world of appearances" (i.e., what we "moderns" would call "the physical universe".)This is a way of testing a person interested in learning the dialectic.Definition, demonstration, division, and analysis: Proclus' dialectic discussed in his Commentary on Plato's Parmenides.But Dillon (the translator) ignores "Self" (αυτο) in Proclus, too, as most translators of Plato do.If you have the idea of, or follow the logic of, the Self, you can't be a Christian / Jew / Muslim. (Why? because if you do (have it / follow the logic), you don't need "belief" or "faith".What is this thing, then, I call the Self?Why Self-logos; Self-wisdom, etc?  What does putting "Self" before each of these add?What if each hypothesis (in Plato's Parmenides of 9 hypotheses) is a "state of mind", i.e., state of awareness?"Consciousness" - modern absurd term used to avoid the cause of that consciousness, i.e., "The Conscious"."Mind", or state? Admits of degrees? ..of divisions?Therefore it may be that the Parmenides hypotheses are not "ideas" but are instead, "states of mind".Therefore, can we map the Parmenidean hypotheses onto the ox-herding pictures (or visa versa)?Socrates says (in Plato's dialogue, The Apology): What I do not know, I do not think I do.Thus, ignorance is not just, "not knowing something".  Ignorance is thinking you know something that you don't.Well, what does Socrates know?  What can he know? How is it possible that he can say this?  Is it possible he can say this, because he knows that he can only know one thing: "True Being" (i.e., divine luminosity / bliss / 2nd hypothesis)?What does this then imply for what it means to "know" something?  There is only one true "knowing", and that is it.  Everything else is.. something else (see the "divided line" in Plato's Republic, and the hypotheses of Plato's Parmenides, etc.)ReferencesGlenn R. Morrow and John M. Dillon, Proclus' Commentary on Plato's Parmenides, Paperback ISBN-13: 978-0691020891, ISBN-10: 0691020892; Hard cover 0691073058. Princeton University Press.  Plato's dialogue, Greater Hippias, transl. H.N. Fowler, in Plato: Cratylus. Parmenides. Greater Hippias. Lesser Hippias. (Loeb Classical Library No. 167) ISBN-10 0-674-99185-0. Harvard University Press.  The "ten ox-herding pictures" are displayed in the back of: Roshi Philip Kapleau, The Three Pillars of Zen: Teaching, Practice, and Enlightenment. ISBN-10: 0385147864, ISBN-13: 978-0385147866. Anchor Books.More infoNoetic Society Home PageAbout Pierre and Philosophical MidwiferyThe Pierre Grimes and the Noetic Society collection here on archive.org.