{"id":426,"date":"2009-02-16T16:05:59","date_gmt":"2009-02-16T14:05:59","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/egophobia.dap.ro\/?p=426"},"modified":"2009-02-16T16:05:59","modified_gmt":"2009-02-16T14:05:59","slug":"a-special-kind-of-platonicity","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.egophobia.ro\/?p=426","title":{"rendered":"A Special Kind Of Platonicity"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb constructs his<\/em> Platonicity in a dual cascade of ever shorter, more concise, explanatory definitions, out of which a third explicatory flow has grown, too. For want of space, on my part, and lacking any additional information, on the part of its author, I\u2019m not going to refer to, or, for that matter, quote, this latter (and later<\/em>, too, as it only appears at the end of the book) supplement excrescence.<\/span><\/p>\n

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The first cascading definition of his Platonicity, which plummets to the bottom of its solid conclusion, is necessarily longer, as it concentrates most of its noetic down-flow, and it reads like this:<\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

What I call Platonicity<\/em> after the ideas (and personality) of the philosopher Plato, is our tendency to mistake the map for the territory, to focus on pure and well-defined \u201cforms,\u201d whether objects, like triangles, or social notions, like utopias (societies built according to some blueprint of what \u201cmakes sense\u201d), even nationalities. (Prologue<\/em>, XXV, Plato and the Nerd<\/em>)<\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

The second one is what necessarily touches the ground beneath, and its more to the point formulation consists of the noetic splashes it produced at touchdown:<\/span><\/p>\n

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Platonicity is what makes us think that we understand more than we actually do.<\/span><\/p>\n

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Probably one of the most striking examples of exterior<\/em> Platonicity, as those commented upon by The Black Swan<\/em>\u2019s author, is that which critically analyzes the use, and importance, of breast-feeding:<\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Doctors in the midst of the scientific arrogance of the 1960s looked down at mother\u2019s milk as something primitive, as if it could be replicated by their laboratories \u2013 not realizing that mother\u2019s milk might include useful components that could have eluded their scientific understanding \u2013 a simple confusion of absence of evidence<\/em> of the benefits of mother\u2019s milk with evidence of absence<\/em> of the benefits (another case of Platonicity as \u201cit did not make sense<\/em>\u201d [my italics] to breast-feed when we could simply use bottles). (pp. 54-55)<\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

That which doesn\u2019t make sense thus becomes the norm of things and, accordingly, we should expect not to know what we do know. Feeding babies with milk bottles, in spite of its making no sense when breast-feeding has never ceased to be available as a traditional form of the norm, is always the current form of the norm.<\/span><\/p>\n

The special kind of Platonicity is the interior one, and is to be found in Plato himself, namely in Socrates\u2019 general attitude to death<\/em>, as it is evinced in the Apology<\/em> (29a), and in the Phaedo<\/em>, (67d-e; 116e-117b), where he expects \u201cquite cheerfully\u201d his upcoming demise, as well as in his particular attitude to death<\/em>, of which how he reacted to Crito\u2019s plea to accept to be saved by his friends is a characteristic example. Socrates serenely rejects this idea, all too in-human, and, I might say, fear-proof and, indeed, fear-free.<\/span><\/p>\n

Instead of reacting to his condemnation to death in a more human, sense-making way (thus, in a Platonicist fashion), he promptly rejects being saved by his friends and begins talking about the obvious \u201cphilosophical\u201d shortcomings of such a plan. In doing so, he exhibits no human emotions at all, and doesn\u2019t make any sense from an etymologically aesthetic point of view, proving to be, at least in this respect, exactly how he defined himself merely a month ago, in the Apology<\/em>, when he said of himself, half modestly and half conceitedly, but both modesty and conceit being theatrical, that he was \u201csuperior\u201d:<\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cFor it is generally believed, whether it be true or false, that in certain respects Socrates is superior to the majority of men\u201d (35a).<\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

This particular case of interior Platonicity stands against the larger background-like Platonicist modus vivendi<\/em> of Socrates, according to which he is the wisest of men in that he knows too well he doesn\u2019t know anything:<\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cWhat is probable, gentlemen, is that in fact the god is wise and that his oracular response meant that human wisdom is worth little or nothing, and that when he says this man, Socrates, he is using my name as an example, as if he said: \u2018This man among you, mortals, is wisest who, like Socrates, understands that his wisdom is worthless\u2019\u201d (the Apology<\/em>, 23b). <\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

At least perfunctorily, this statement of his proves to be nonsensical, if, de-constructed in a Socratic fashion, one thinks unworthy of oneself the very knowledge one bases one\u2019s very lack of knowledge upon in the first place.<\/span><\/p>\n

I wonder whether, in coining his Platonicity, and in so devising it theoretically, its author had in mind, as a starting point, these examples, among the likely many others taken from the textual corpus that\u00a0this intellectual construct has been named after.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Nassim Nicholas Taleb constructs his Platonicity in a dual cascade of ever shorter, more concise, explanatory definitions, out of which a third explicatory flow has grown, too. For want of space, on my part, and lacking any additional information, on the part of its author, I\u2019m not going to refer to, or, for that matter, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[295],"tags":[719,196],"class_list":["post-426","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-jurnal-eidotomic","tag-jurnal-eidotomic","tag-patrick-calinescu"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.egophobia.ro\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/426","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.egophobia.ro\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.egophobia.ro\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.egophobia.ro\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.egophobia.ro\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=426"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blog.egophobia.ro\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/426\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.egophobia.ro\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=426"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.egophobia.ro\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=426"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.egophobia.ro\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=426"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}