Reading Berkeley’s A Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge I was struck that his thought of abstract ideas, of which he seems none too fond so far, is what we now depend on for a good part of our lives: icons. Here’s his definition of abstraction, more or less:

For example, the mind having observed that Peter, James, and John resemble each other in certain common agreements of shape and other qualities, leaves out of the complex or compounded idea it has of Peter, James, and any other particular man, that which is peculiar to each, retaining only what is common to all, and so makes an abstract idea wherein all the particulars equally partake- abstracting entirely from and cutting off all those circumstances and differences which might determine it to any particular existence. And after this manner it is said we come by the abstract idea of man, or, if you please, humanity, or human nature…

Look at the icons on your computer screen.  Somewhere there is an icon of a person, and the more universal the icon — black and white and having no gender — the closer it comes to what Berkeley is taking about.  Look at the old Mac icons here, and you can see where those ultimately generic abstract ideas have been made to stand in for all things under that definition — all documents are one-page documents with lines of type.  Tellingly, the icons with the most particular features are those of the Mac itself, which I’m sure we owe to marketing.

I’m not through with the part of Berkeley I’m reading yet, but he seems to be headed in the same direction as Locke, in that he sees such abstractions as not real. The abstract idea of man is not  any man in particular.  The man exists, but the abstraction does not.  Berkeley seems to be going further to say that these general ideas are the cause of some of our problems.  That by thinking and speaking of that generality we confound ourselves because that generality does not exist — there is no there there.  That we — as I am fond of saying — think we’re so smart we think ourselves up our own asses.

Been busy on the school front and meant to post about it.  Went from one extreme to another and found some new favorite authors (Hobbes, Locke) and some I just need to plow through (Augustine, Aquinas).  I really need to start blogging this stuff to get my thoughts down.

Finished up the Socratic dialogs for this course and am now into Aristotle.  I need to sit down and gather my thoughts about the dialogs and capture it here.  The last one I did, Sophist, was a bear in that they kept going off on tangents about all kinds of things while obstensibly trying to define what a sophist was/is.  And Plato — which is who wrote/wrote down the Socratic dialogs — continued what appears to be his habit of letting his speakers explore every corner of a side issue even though the whole reason to bring it up is to shoot it down.

Luckily, sometimes the asides are as interesting as the main conversation.  But sometimes they’re not.  Anyway, I’ve got to gather my thoughts.  A lot of good stuff in there, and not all of it on my intended topic — leadership communication — which is a bonus.

It’s funny how little nuggets of wisdom are in places you hardly expect to find them.  I mean, I am reading the Great Books, but it’s easy to think you’ve got a piece figured out and then get surprised.

The Socratic dialog Timaeus is basically a run-down of the formation of the universe and everything in it.  There’s a lot of talk about how the the four major elements of creation — fire, water, earth and air — are made up of triangles and how that affects certain things. Here’s a tidbit:

But when the roots of the triangles are loosened by having undergone many conflicts with many things in the course of time, they are no longer able to cut or assimilate the food which enters, but are themselves easily divided by the bodies which come in from without. In this way every animal is overcome and decays, and this affection is called old age.

I started reading at a faster clip, but embedded within to the discredited science I found eternal truths or things that shine light onto the modern world — at least my dim understanding of the modern world.

Here’s one:

That which is apprehended by intelligence and reason is always in the same state; but that which is conceived by opinion with the help of sensation and without reason, is always in a process of becoming and perishing and never really is.

That pretty much describes all political messaging and commentary, as far as I can tell. Also logical versus emotional argument that makes so many relationships so much fun.

And, more to the point of my language studies, there’s this:

Thus, then, as the several elements never present themselves in the same form, how can any one have the assurance to assert positively that any of them, whatever it may be, is one thing rather than the other? No one can.

And this one sums up where I come down in the “lock ‘em up” versus “addiction is a disease” argument:

…and is for the most part of his life deranged, because his pleasures and pains are so very great; his soul is rendered foolish and disordered by his body; yet he is regarded not as one diseased, but as one who is voluntarily bad, which is a mistake.

Which explains why Portugal, which decriminalized drugs, is having more success than we are filling up prisons.

If you want the deep discussion these guys have it. If you want to read it for yourself, here you go.

Bust of Socrates at the Louvre by Eric Gaba.

Just got done reading Plato’s Cratylus, which is a dialog between Socrates and Hermogenes and Cratylus.  It’s about names, and whether or not names represent a thing because they convey or represent some truth about, or the essence of, that thing, or if they are just a bunch of name tags we’ve all agreed to use so we don’t confuse each other. There’s a lot of talk about the nature of things and lots of tracing Greek words back to their original meanings — sometimes their constituent letters. For a bit there is was kind of like reading Genesis: and the oo sound, which is the essence of the expression of awe, begat goo-goo ga-ga, which begat good, which begat goodness, which begat the Goo-Goo Dolls.

This dialog is under the Great Idea of language, hence the 30 or so pages about the naming of things.  Oddly enough, this is something I wrote about back when I was writing commentaries.  It’s not at all surprising to find out somebody else has done a much better job of thinking about it, and that I wrote a confident commentary without any knowledge of the existence of classic texts on the subject, much less what those texts said.

My main point before, which came up when we were deciding on a name for our daughter, agreed with the position that there was something inherently appropriate about a good name. That the name, or the sound of the name, was somehow right for that person or thing. I was very conscious, for example, that the fact that my two favorite first names for our daughter, Alexandra and Regina, said something.  Nothing “my little princess” about those.  Of course another thing I said in my old commentary was that people with the wrong name — a name that didn’t suit them — usually ended up being called something else. I have a brother-in-law and an old friend called Butch. I also know a guy who outgrew “Butch” and went back to his given name. So I don’t think there’s any one perfect name for a person — at least no one a parent can pick out while the child is in the womb — but I do think you can saddle a child with something so far from his personality that he’ll end up being called Butch or Rusty.

Knowing that to be the case, I argued for our daughter’s middle name to be very different from her first name, hence Alexandra Skye.  At the time it was more about wanting a nice flow and after the long Alexandra the simple Skye seemed to fit.  But also, I knew she might end up not wanting to carry around a big name like that, or might be some kind of retro-hippie-vegan, and then Skye would come in handy.

Well, the upshot of all that Socratic dialoging was that to know the name of a thing is not the same as knowing the thing — at least it’s not sufficient. That was kind of the start of the discussion, and kind of the end, too.  Here’s how Socrates put it:

How real existence is to be studied or discovered is, I suspect, beyond you and me. But we may admit so much, that the knowledge of things is not to be derived from names. No; they must be studied and investigated in themselves.

It struck me as I typed that quote that it’s a pretty good argument against book learning, which is kind of ironic.

Interesting Op-ED at the NY Times today about how universities ought to change to meet new challenges.  I don’t think most people realize the modern system dates back as far as it does, and that it was apparently adopted from Germany. The Germans have an even more rigid system where your future academic life — and in some ways your ability to educate yourself into a better life — are set early on — 3rd or 5th grade. Can’t recall which.

The author beats on the tenure system pretty well, and I must say that, while I’d like to protect academic freedom as much as the next guy, that system is probably a little too protective of professors.

The thing I really got from it was what the author said about specialization.  They make kind of a big deal about this in The Great Conversation, one of the cornerstone books of the program I’m in at Harrison Middleton.  I never really thought about it much, except that I was personally lucky to be able to do what I wanted at the undergraduate level and then wrap it all into a BA in liberal arts.  I had to do some interdisciplinary work, of course, but that was the good part for me (except for the math parts, of course), as my goal was to become a better writer.  So I wanted a wide range of things.  At the graduate level I was narrowed down quite a bit, of course, but still, the writing classes let me investigate some other things.  That, combined with my electives and the ability to range from hifalutin theory to green-eyeshade journalism made it a good program.

So I think more people could benefit from things like the Great Books, that expose you not only to a wide range of things, but to famousely smart people who were themselves extremely well-versed in a wide range of things.

I’m reading a book called Write for College for school.  Kind of funny, considering my background (journalist, editor, public affairs guy, master’s in journalism), but not hard to stay with.  Writing is one of those subjects I can keep reading about and reading about. There is always, I’m sure you’ll agree as you read this, room for improvement.

This is, I think, functionally my last assignment for this course.  There’s actually one left, but that’s just designing my program.  I’m turning in what I assume will be a draft with this assignment, so the last assignment will (barring a complete failure on my part) just fine-tuning my proposal.

My proposal is still too big, and that’s holding me back from finishing.  After the initial course you have to do two 24-hour blocks and an final project.  I filled the first 24 hours with just the language part of what I want to do, and that’s not right.  I need to fit some more in there if I want to look into a couple more Great Ideas and also hit a few literary highlights — Shakespeare, Montaigne, and so on.  Have to dig in deeper and narrow things down.