The secret of true dialectics
I was reading Plato’s dialogue called Philebus, which is one of his later dialogues; it covers the topic of pleasure’s role in a good human life, which had already been covered much earlier, in the Republic. But in this dialogue, Plato adds some subtlety to the theory of pleasure—but moreso, I think, Plato viewed it as a chance to fully demonstrate the nature of dialectics, which he was always in the process of discovering and refining. There are some insights into pleasure in this dialogue, but more than anything it is a formal exercise—a demonstration of how to do dialectics, and how to distinguish true dialectics from false dialectics. One gets the idea that dialectics had become popular in the years since his early dialogues—but that his followers were not doing it correctly; Plato had a successful Academy, where the art and science of dialectics was of course taught; yet Plato still must have felt that it was not being fully understood; so he spelled it out in this dialogue.
Socrates points out that the nature of reality, and knowledge, and Being itself is dialectical—we have a concept of Good, and many good things in the world; how can this one thing, the Good, be in so many different places at once? This relation between the One and the Many—how One can be Many, and how the Many can be One—is the essence of dialectics; and again, it is embedded into language, reality, existence in this very fundamental way. Dialectics, in this way, is unavoidable.
Early in the dialogue, Socrates says that dialectics is often done incorrectly, because it moves from unity right to plurality, and misses the middle ground—but that is where the most important truths are to be found. Perhaps dialectics had been getting more popular—due in large part no doubt to his own influence!—but the master of dialectics has some issues with how people are doing dialectics. It has become trendy, but lost its true essence:
“Nowadays the clever ones among us make a one, haphazardly, and a many, faster or slower than they should; they go straight form the one to the unlimited and omit the intermediates.”
Dialectics concerns the relation between One and Many, unity and particularity, monism and pluralism; how they feed into each other, how they depend on each other. But to gain real knowledge requires more than just those two elements—and real knowledge is the whole point of dialectics! Indeed, dialectics, according to Socrates, is “a gift of the gods to men” and is how “everything in any field of art that has ever been discovered has come to light.” Dialectics should produce knowledge that can be used—if it is a science, which Socrates (and later Hegel and Marx) insisted it was, then it must produce real knowledge which is used in the world; if it doesn’t do that, then it isn’t science.
Dialectics is unavoidable—Socrates traces it to speech itself: “The sound that comes out of the mouth is one for each and every one of us, but then it is also unlimited in number.” We all make the sound noises with our vocal chords and tongues, more or less—but we all sound different, say different things; the fundamental act of speech is the same for all human beings, but from this initial unity, an infinity takes over right away.
Socrates tells the story of Thoth, a legendary god of ancient Egypt, who is said to have practiced the truest and grandest dialectics that has ever existed—he discovered that vocal sound is unlimited, but also was able to fix limits on it, so that letters could be created. Speech was not one thing, as it seems—these similar vocal chord vibrations can be endlessly divided up; Thoth found this unlimitedness within the initial unity of vocal chord vibrations coming out of the human mouth; but then within this unlimitedness, he was able to make distinctions—he discovered vowels and consonants. These were called letters, and there was a definite number of them. And all these letters were particulars, but they needed to be understand as a whole, together, to have any meaning, or be used to communicate. The understanding of these letters came to be known under the unitary concept of the art of literacy. In all of this, we see the nature of complete, true dialectics—unity of vocal chord motion; unlimited noises; limiting the noises to types of noise (vowel, consonant, etc.); further limiting to letters; and unifying all of these particulars and pluralities under the unitary concept of literacy. This is Thoth:
(In later philosophy, encouraged by Cleopatra hundreds of years later in Alexandria, Egypt, Thoth would become merged with the Greek god Hermes, to create a new god—Hermes Trismegistus, who was the source of what came to be known as hermetic philosophy. The original Thoth, who Socrates says was either a god or a “god-inspired man”, is said to have lived around the same time as Moses, about 10,000 BC. They may have even known each other; and just as Moses began the long line of Hebrew prophets, Thoth began the long line of Greek-Egyptian prophets, which includes Plato himself).
Thoth’s dialectics did not simply move from unity (vocal chord motion) to particular (this or that different noise)—the types of noises were collected and divided, and turned into letters, images of noises, that could be fixed in front of our eyes, so that we could get ahold of this seemingly unlimited stream of noises that vibrate off our vocal chords; and through this, the art of literacy and advanced speech (a unitary thing) became possible.
Dialectics is the process of converting unity into particularity, and then particularity back into unity; but doing that requires an extensive intermediate period, where things are collected, categorized, tested, and so on; that was how Thoth was able to divide vocal chord vibrations into vowels and consonants, which then became the unity of literacy.
You have to do the middle ground work before the initial unity becomes a new unity—the particulars that you discover have to be useful in themselves—like the letters of the alphabet are—before a new unity is formed.