Winning Friends and Influencing People Without Worrying About Modernity

Even though I'm on vacation I've got to feed this book blog with something more nutritious than mere Amazon links and such. (Excited though I am to hear from the publisher that the paper version is almost out!)

So here's a question: was it a good idea to pack so much into the book about Dale Carnegie, of all figures? That is, do I think Plato really is arguing against ancient Dale Carnegies (sophists) more than he is arguing against - oh, say, an ancient Greek version of Stanley Fish? Or an ancient Greek version of some other relativist/pragmatist/anti-foundationalist Protagorean suspect I might have dredged up and propped up for this literary occasion? Maybe Richard Rorty? Heidegger anyone? Nietzsche? Wittgenstein? Wouldn't it be more interesting to give Plato a more formidable opponent, one more deeply and directly rooted in the philosophical tradition, by way of constructing an either/or (it's either this or that; one vision of how to think about life, or the other?)

I thought pretty hard about this - and posted about it briefly a month or so ago - but didn't say much about the grounds for my ultimate decision to go the Carnegie way in the book. I concluded that Carnegie was a more instructive figure of comparison. Partly this was a pedagogical decision. It's easier to introduce students to Carnegie than, say, Heidegger. This is supposed to be an introduction suitable for beginners.

But I also think the Carnegie route was strong on the inherent intellectual merits. It's important that Carnegie is a 'modern', pragmatic thinker who is, all the same, untroubled by modernity as an issue in itself. Carnegie reacts very negatively or dismissively to ideas and values that are positive and important in Plato's eyes. But his rejection of 'rationalistic Enlightenment' isn't due to his being a child of the counter-Enlightenment, or any sort of post-Romantic (as are the likes of Fish, Rorty, Heidegger, Wittgenstein, most all contemporary anti-Platonic suspects.)

Of course, modernity and its discontents is a pretty interesting and important topic, so it's not necessarily a good thing to talk around it, as if the last 500 years or so haven't happened. (One wants one's Plato book to have more contemporary relevance than that.) But I don't feel I've just skipped it ... not exactly. Dale Carnegie is exactly like ... Cephalus. The old guy who gets us started in Republic, book I. That's important. 

That's enough for a blog post, but how can I just stop without saying at least what 'modernity' is supposed to mean, anyway? No simple answer, obviously. But I've been reading a lot of George Scialabba, in preparation for an upcoming Crooked Timber book event. This book review by him, entitled, "The Curse of Modernity", is as good a start-point as any. From the review:

For most educated (and even many uneducated) Westerners ... all formerly unalterable authorities now lie in the dust, like Ozymandias. Science has banished the supernatural, technology has vanquished scarcity, and so, having lost its parents, ignorance and misery, morality is now an orphan. This is the triumphalist view of modernity, and [Philip] Rieff shared it; only instead of a triumph, he thought it a catastrophe. The dimensions of this catastrophe dawned on him gradually. The last chapter of Freud [Philip's book] is “The Emergence of Psychological Man,” a tentative sketch of what modernity had wrought. Until the twentieth century, in Rieff’s account, three character types had successively prevailed in Western culture: political man, the ideal of classical times, dedicated to the glory of his city; religious man, the ideal of the Christian era, dedicated to the glory of God; and a transitional figure, economic man, a creature of Enlightenment liberalism. Economic man believed in doing good unto others by doing well for himself. This convenient compromise did not last long, and what survived of it was not the altruism but the egoism. Psychological man was frankly and shrewdly selfish, beyond ideals and illusions, at best a charming narcissist, at worst boorish or hypochondriacal, according to his temperament.

But the worst thing about psychological man was his children. Raised without repressions, they were incapable of renunciation and regarded all authority as illegitimate.

This isn't just footnotes to Plato. He wrote it all out in the main body of his text - right down to the misbehaving kids. The trouble with Cephalus, in Plato's eyes, is mostly that his son is Polemarchus. Then it's downhill to Thrasymachus. All the same, it's important that Euthyphro and Meno, Cephalus, Polemarchus ... even cynical Thrasymachus are not really conscious of the philosophical stakes in these terms. They don't see all this as a 'crisis of modernity', or anything of the sort. So the discussion in the dialogues isn't about all this. Carnegie is like that, too: he just isn't worked up about all this. It's important that you can get as far as he does without getting further. To put it another way: Carnegie IS that allegedly transitional figure, 'economic man', who wants to 'do good unto others by doing well for himself'. I'm very skeptical that this 'convenient compromise' (it's definitely that) did not last long. I think it's been enduringly popular from Plato's day down to today.

Is it indeed so clear that it was just a brief stage on our handbasket ride to Thrasymachian egoist hell? It's not clear to me. Anyway, I ended up writing a book about it.

Comments

[Chris Dornan]

A lovely blog (you know how to make typepad sing) and a gem of a blog post. It all reminds me of the way films are now made and packed, a serious effort being made with the supporting material that goes into the DVD.

I really like your 'odd angles' approach, being far more likely to engage than any titan match-up.

I think and hope the book will be a big success--it seems to me that you have done such a good job that I have difficulty imagining it to be otherwise (though incidental matters like publishing it in Asia may count for more than they should do). I have said some really quite nice things about it in a short article my new and (alas) unvisited blog.

Scialabba it isn't, and being my blog I have stitched it into the blog's narrative, which is to say some very rude things about modern approaches to ethics, and I am afraid some of that may have splashed onto your lovely book. But I am really envious and know I will be pleased if I ever write anything half so good.

My blog article on 'Reason and Persuasion' can be found at:

http://senseorsensibility.com/blog/republic-reason-persuasion/

[Chris Dornan]

PS: I have posted an apology of sorts for my saucy comment at:

http://senseorsensibility.com/blog/punkphilosophy-com

[jholbo]

Hi Chris, thanks for your comment. You quote a commentator who takes a different line:

"There is nothing ambiguous about this. In Republic Plato is not primarily interested in politics in the real world: he is constructing an imaginary community, to serve as a paradigm. The primary purpose for any political exploration in the book is a ‘soft’ purpose—to help understand an individual."

You suggest that mine is the standard approach and that this other one is more contrarian. I do agree that I disagree with this author. But who's right, eh? In my view he or she is downplaying politics too much by ignoring an obvious third possibility: Plato is not primarily concerned with real world politics (this is obviously true), nor just with understanding individuals (this claim by your author seems to me, not obviously false, but implausibly strong); rather, Plato is interested in politics in an ideal sense, as distinct from any real world sense. He is interested in ideal states and ideal individuals, and the relationship between them. This is a pretty standard reading, and I'd need to see some serious explaining away of a lot of evidence to be budged from it.

That is, the book is called Politeai - political stuff. And, since there is apparently so much in Republic about politics (in an ideal sense, as opposed to a practical sense); and since the Cave lends itself so readily to being read as ideal political allegory, what is your author - Robin Waterfield's - argument against that apparently appealing reading? Plato's "Political Stuff" is about political stuff?

Why couldn't the book really be largely about what it appears to be about: politics AND the individual. And the relation therebetween. Rather than mostly about the individual and not really about politics?

I think my own mild departure from orthodoxy is in emphasizing that Plato never really loses his interest in Athens herself, which entails a lingering interest in practical as opposed to pie-in-the-sky ideal politics. It's easy to see Republic as about ideal political arrangements and forget how many specifically Athenian details are retained in the set up: starting with the obvious 'these are all Athenians, and this little play is set in Athens, and we are invited to remember what happened next in Athens' sort of way.

Anyway, as I said: thanks for the comment and the kind words (cheeky comments are par for the course and hardly even register on the blog richter scale of rhetoric, so no worries there.)

[Chris Dornan]

Hi John,

As I think you have probably guessed my ideal course on Republic would have yours _and_ Waterfield's as the set texts.

I find our contemporary way of reading Plato very interesting and worth thinking about as a vital philosophical issue in itself.

I find the current received interpretation highly symptomatic of the move away from personal ethics in the Enlightenment: much too messy and anyway associated with the discredited priests.

To the Enlightened thinker, man is fallen, but the problem lies in the environment, and this is where the problem should be fixed, by extending the sciences into the humanities.

I have written a post on my blog arguing that we are now looking at Republic through the lens of The Social Contract.

http://senseorsensibility.com/blog/republic-and-the-social-contract/

The first thing I do is to go back to the text and see what Plato is saying (this takes up the bulk of the article). For sure Plato discusses ideal communities and their interaction with ideal people, but he says repeatedly that this is to facilitate his rational argument for ethical action.

It is worth reading the post: I can't really do justice to it in this little box!

I appreciate the discussion.

[Brock]

Hey Prof. Holbo,

Just thought I'd mention that my copy of R&P shipped today from Amazon. I look forward to reading it. (I read parts in the PDF, but for a full book, I prefer reading paper.)

[jholbo]

Thanks Chris and Brock. Glad to hear that the stuff is shipping. (Sorry to be a bit slow responding to comments here.) I mean to give this site more attention in the near future.

[Brock]

My copy arrived today!