The New Yearbook for Phenomenology and Phenomenological Philosophy

Volume 11

Burt Hopkins, John Drummond

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• eBook ISBN: 9781317547280
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

The New Yearbook for Phenomenology and Phenomenological Philosophy

provides an annual international forum for phenomenological research in the spirit of Husserl's groundbreaking work and the extension of this work by such figures as Scheler, Heidegger, Sartre, Levinas, Merleau-Ponty and Gadamer.

Jacob Klein’s Two Prescient Discoveries

Eva Brann¹

St John’s College, Annapolis

Abstract: I present two of Jacob Klein’s chief discoveries from a perspective of peculiar fascination to me: the enchanting (to me) contemporaneous significance, the astounding prescience, and hence longevity, of his insights. The first insight takes off from an understanding of the lowest segment of the so-called Divided Line in Plato’s Republic. In this lowest segment are located the deficient beings called reflections, shadows, and images, and a type of apprehension associated with them called by Klein “image-recognition” (ει’ κασία). The second discovery involves a great complex of notions from which I will extract one main element: the analysis of what it means to be a number and what makes possible this kind of being, and, it turns out, all Being.

Keywords: Jacob Klein; Eva Brann; Burt Hopkins; imagination; ontology; non-being

Jacob Klein was in the last year of his nine-year tenure as dean of St John’s College in 1957 when I came as a young tutor. He died in 1978, still teaching. In those twenty-one years that I knew him he was above all a teacher, mine and everybody’s. His spirit informed the college. As dean, he had governed as a fierce defender of his conception of this remarkable community of learning. This passion had generous parameters, from smiling leniency toward spirited highjinks to meticulous enforcement of rules expressive of intellectual virtue. As a tutor he shaped the place by lectures that the whole college attended and discussed, by his classroom teaching that elicited from students more than they thought was in them, but above all through his conversation, which was direct and playful, serious and teasing, earthily Russian and cunningly cosmopolitan. We all thought that he had secret wisdom, which he was chary of dispensing out of pedagogical benevolence, but then again he would tell us things in a plain and simple way that went home as if they’d always been ours—I, at least, always had the sense of hearing wonderful novelties that I’d known all along. He had an aversion to discipleship and a predilection for wicked American kids. He was, on occasion, rousingly infuriating—when one made the attempt to extract definitive doctrines. His reluctance to pontificate was in part indolence (Jasha the Pasha), an indolence dignified by his aversion to philosophy carried on as an organized business, and in part pedagogical intention, a conviction that to retail one’s thought-products to students was to prevent inquiry. This pre-judgment against authoritative profession is, to my mind, his most persuasive and felicitous legacy to the college and the reason we still call ourselves tutors, guardians of learning, rather than professors, professionals of knowledge.

Nonetheless, there were doctrines and they were published. He had set himself against academic publication, so much so that I had to translate in secret what is now the subject of Burt Hopkins’s acute and careful analysis,² Jasha’s great book of his youth on the origin of algebra; though, to be sure, confronted with a fait accompli he capitulated quite eagerly.

What I would like to do today is to present two of his chief discoveries from a perspective of peculiar fascination to me: the enchanting (to me) contemporaneous significance, the astounding prescience, and hence longevity, of his insights. I might say that I grew up intellectually within a perspective enforced by our program of studies and reinforced by Jasha’s views—forgive the informality; it was universal in his circle—and having its roots in certain continental philosophers, of whom Husserl was the most honorable. It was the guiding notion that modernity is best apprehended as being in a ruptured continuum with Greek antiquity—a continuum insofar as the terms persist, ruptured insofar as they take on new meanings and missions. That perspective makes those who view the world from it avid participants in the present—critically and appreciatively avid. I will say right away and up front to what issues that I identify to myself as central to our present-day lives Jasha’s insights speak: first, to the ever-larger share that image-viewing and virtual experiences have in our life; here the question is what degree of “reality” is ascribable to images. Do originals retain their primary or even a residual function in a virtual world? And second, to the burgeoning of a brain science that tends to ascribe to human nature an ultimately physical being; here the question is approachable in terms of “emergence”: Granted that brain and mind are intimately linked, what is the manner in which the latter emerges from, or projects to, the former? How might an entity emerge, that is radically different from its constituents? It seems to me that these are the questions of consciousness—what we are aware of—and self-consciousness—who we are—that should most concern us, because they dominate the public world quite unreflectively.

The two insights, then, are both interpretations of Platonic writings and are set out in A Commentary on Plato’s Meno of 1965³ and Greek Mathematical Thought and the Origin of Algebra of 1934,⁴ respectively. The latter is a learned book written by a private European scholar for academic readers, the former is a very accessible work written by an American teacher for lovers of Socrates. Of both these notions Burt Hopkins has produced detailed analyses,⁵ which have added a new edge to doctrines I’ve lived with familiarly for half a century. I will, however, feel free here to supplement, embroider and question Jacob Klein’s interpretation of Plato and Burt Hopkins’s reading of Klein as I go. I’ll do it implicitly, so don’t trust this account for faithfulness to the letter, though I hope you may trust it for closeness in spirit. You’ll see, I think, what I mean when I speak of Klein’s immediacy and naturalness of interpretation: His readings sit well.

The first insight, then, takes off from an understanding of the lowest segment of the so-called Divided Line in Plato’s Republic, that mathematical image (picture it as vertical) of the ascent to Being and the associated learning. In this lowest segment are located the deficient beings called reflections, shadows, and images, and a type of apprehension associated with them called e??as?a, usually translated as “conjecture.” Klein’s interpretation will start with a new translation of this noun: “image-recognition.” The nature of these lowest beings—they are revealed as basic rather than base—is set out in Plato’s Sophist, so between them the Republic and the Sophist found the Platonic world.

The second discovery involves a great complex of notions from which I’ll extract one main element: the analysis of what it means to be a number and what makes possible this kind of being, and, it turns out, all Being. And again, the great text is the Sophist, together with the Republic, supplemented by Aristotle’s critical account of Plato’s doctrine. To anticipate the perplexity that is also the doctrine: Take any number, say two. It is constituted of two units; each is one, but both together are two. How can it be that two emerges from elements that are each precisely not two? I might say here that Socrates thinks, and I know from experience with students, that to find this perplexity gripping marks one possible beginning of philosophical engagement.

So now, after these broad previews, to some nitty-gritty. Socrates begins by dividing the whole line mentioned above in some arbitrary ratio and then the two subsections in that same ratio. So if the whole line is, say, 16 units, let the ratio be triple; then one segment is 12, the other 4. Then subdivide the 12-unit segment similarly into 9 and 3 units, and the 4-unit segment into 3 and 1. You now have four segments, two by two in the same ratio with each other and with the first division of the whole. Whether you want to make the top or the bottom segment the longest depends on whether you assign more length to the greater fullness of Being or to the larger profusion of items. It can also be shown that in all divisions of this sort, called “extreme-and-mean” ratio, the middle segments will be equal; Socrates will make the iconic most of this mathematical fact.

So the subsections make a four-term proportion called an analogia in Greek— a:b::b:c, and they mirror, as I said, the division of the whole line. You can read the line up or down: Down is the cascade of Being which loses plenitude as it falls from true originals to mere images. Up is the ascent of learning, ending in the direct intellectual view of the prime originals, the ει’ ́δη, the “invisible looks” in Klein’s language, usually called the “forms.” Beyond all Being there is the notorious Good, the unifying power above all the graduated beings, the principle of wholeness, which I’ll leave out here. At the bottom is that aforementioned “image-recognition.” Now just as each of the object-realms assigned to the upper sections is causally responsible for the ones below, so, inversely, in learning, each stage, each capacity, is needed for the learner to rise. None are left behind; all remain necessary. And so the bottom, the first capacity, is also the most pervasive. Children recognize images early on. Look at a picture book with a two-year-old: “Kitty,” he’ll say, pointing. “Careful, it’ll scratch.” “No, it won’t,” he’ll say, looking at you as if you were really naïve. That’s image-recognition, the human capability for recognizing likeness of a deficient order: a cat incapable of scratching.

It is as fundamental for Socrates as it is low on the scale of cognitive modes, because imaging is the most readily imaginable, the least technically ticklish way of representing the activity by which the realm of intelligible Being produces and rules the world of sensory appearances: Each decline in the degrees of being is that of original to image, each rise in the stages of learning is that of recognizing that something lower images something higher.

Just to complete the sketch of the Divided Line, here are the stages of knowledge and their objects in brief: Above images, there are the apparently solid objects of nature and artifice. The acquaintance with these is called “trust,” pistis. It is the implicit, unreflective belief we have in the dependable support of the ground we tread on and the chair we sit in—the faith that our world is not “the baseless fabric of a vision” that melts into thin air.

This whole complex of dimensionally defective images and taken-on-faith solidity of our phenomenal world is itself an image of the upper two parts of the line. The third part, equal in length to the second from the bottom, contains all the rational objects that look on the way up like abstractions from the sensory world— mathematical models and logical patterns. To these we apply our understanding, a capacity called in Greek “thinking-through,” δίανοια. They are then revealed as the types of originals of the sensory world that impart to it such shapeliness and intelligibility as it has. Thus they make natural science possible. Finally, there is the realm of direct knowledge. As happens so often in the dialogues, these upper reaches are named as inverses of the lower ones: invisible “looks” (since ει῏δος is from the vid-verb, the verb for seeing), and they are reached by a capacity for direct insight (which Aristotle will in fact analogize to sensing)—νóησις. Above and beyond is the very Idea itself, the idea of all ideas, the Good, wh...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Articles
• Discussion
• In Review