Dialogue on Dialogue
By Harvey Wheeler

[Preface: This is from The Virtual Academy, my work about a new Socratic pedagogy in computer-mediated teaching. This discussion follows the description of how Heraclitus prepared the way for Socrates and Plato. Here the basic process of the Socratic method is described by an example from classical Jazz . A following chapter describes more explicitly how Plato invented philosophy. ]

Reinventing Philosophy - Plato's Way

Reinvent philosophy? Why? Isn't that like reinventing the wheel? .... one of those once-is-enough kind of things?

No, because what Plato invented was not a thing like a chair or table but more like a machine tool or a lathe; an invention-making tool.

But who needs another invention-making tool? We've got Plato's and Aristotle's and Bacon's and Newton's, and more. Aren't they enough?

Enough in one sense but not in another because today we've got the kinds of problems that require inventions. So we've got to have invention-making tools.

But isn't that what science does? Don't scientists do this all the time? Isn't that enough?

No. It was enough until about the middle of the 20th century but not any more. Complexity has democratized invention-making. Today nearly everybody must be an inventor; not an Einstein or even an Edison but a small scale inventor. People have to change from thing-makers to invention-makers.

Never heard such a thing before. Everybody an inventor! How'd you get that idea?

It came out of one of the newer sciences - systems theory - which is about how big systems work. Visualize the rush hour traffic of Manhattan or Los Angeles as seen from an airplane: gridlock. What do you do when a gridlock develops?

Simple. Traffic cops and traffic lights; one-way streets, that's how.

Partly, but where to put them and how to time the light changes.

Easy! Anybody can see the answer intuitively, just by looking You put a traffic cop where you've got a gridlock. Plain as the nose on your face.

Yes, that's what was tried first and it taught us that intuitive solutions - treat the pain where it hurts - won't work when the cause lies under the surface where nobody can see what it is. It's like treating chicken pox by putting Band-Aids on the sores. Whenever a system is very complex and highly integrated, whatever happens anywhere affects many other things elsewhere. Intuitive solutions won't work and in fact even worsen the underlying problem. Systems theory says that there are "counter-intuitive" systems, meaning they are so complex that ordinary intuitions cannot solve their problems. New inventions are needed to re-design the system instead of merely putting in a replacement part.

Ah-ha! Am I right is suspecting that this brings us back to Plato and his wonderful invention-making machine?

Exactly! If we can understand how he invented the first invention-maker we might be able to turn out the counter-intuitive inventions needed in large scale organizations.

So, back to Athens to uncover Plato's invention?

Yes.... but first a slight detour through modern jazz and how jazz improvisation works because it is a kind of invention process.

Jazz? Plain old American jazz? Surely you jest!

No kidding. Classical American jazz as performed by Duke Ellington and Louis Armstrong. Their names may not be very familiar today but jazz and philosophy both developed out of earlier rituals.

You mean primitive rituals, like rain dances and war dances?

Yes, but even more basic rituals like the rites of passage performed to initiate youth into adulthood. Jews still do this in the bar mitzvah. Fraternal organizations like the Masons and Knights of Columbus do it. The high school graduation ceremony celebrates a four year rite of passage. Rituals are inductions from one state into another. When kings and judges and families are "invented" rituals anoint them. Our species uses this process for several different kinds of transformation. Take jazz for example....

So now we're invention people? With Plato and the Duke?

No, but jazz transforms sound into music. The Bach fugue does this, and the medieval rondo. Of course robins turn sound into music but only by instinct and only one song. Neither music nor knowledge is instinctual. Both had to be invented. Philosophy is a way of inventing knowledge out of words.

Wait a minute. Isn't language an instinct? Don't words and thinking come naturally?....

Not exactly. They were invented about 50,000 years ago - pretty recent really. How it happened isn't known for sure. The capacity for language is innate but not an instinct in the sense of being programmed into our genes. It's the main invention that distinguishes us from animals. Basic things like music and knowledge and law had to be invented. They had many unsung fathers. There were several jazz greats before Duke Ellington and there were many philosophers before Plato, Socrates especially.

So Duke Ellington and Plato really were alike?

Yes, in a fundamental way; they used the dialogue as an invention-maker.

Dialogue? Duke Ellington?

Yes, Duke Ellington used the dialogue method to perfect his art. He taught musicians how to create a higher form of jazz through a musical dialogue between the members of the band. Plato taught students how to create a higher form of knowledge through the Socratic dialogue, Both classical jazz and classical philosophy were created by the dialogue method.

Dialogue is just talk, isn't it? Everybody talks but not everybody invents.

Dialogue is commonly taken to mean any kind of discussion or argument but in education it means the special knowledge-making process invented by Socrates and Plato.

The word invention still bothers me. I associate it with things like the McCormick reaper or the telephone.

Most people do - the invention of the plow, the wheel, and new kinds of hardware. But it also means new kinds of actions and patterns and "software;" the phonetic alphabet, the Arabic number system, and geometry were new software systems. The dialogue method was a new way of making things in the mind instead of things in nature. Music is an especially mysterious invention. It uses vocal chords or instruments to make sound waves in nature that create music in the mind.

Meaning?... That it is different from both hardware and software? Or that it combines them both?

That's exactly the kind of question the ancients asked - in Greece, Persia, India, China. It puzzled Pythagoras and later Plato.

But Jazz came out of Africa didn't it? It doesn't answer such questions does it?

That's exactly why it helps. Many things came out of Africa - people, for instance! And some scholars claim that philosophy came out of Africa - in a controversial two volume study called The Black Athena. St. Augustine, who "invented" Roman Catholic Orthodoxy - Christendom - came out of Africa. He was of Berber (Atlas Mountains) heritage and grew up in Tagaste, North Africa.

Wow! I don’t know if I can handle this! But how does Jazz fit in?

Its structure grew out of African ritual. The musical dialogue performed by a classical jazz combo shows not only how jazz works but how the dialogue works in philosophy.

So, back to Duke Ellington and Plato, and all that jazz, eh?

Right on! Recall a jazz performance of say, TEA FOR TWO. Ellington recorded it many times. He would start with a familiar theme, say the simple "Tea for Two" melody. Ellington recorded it many times. The lead player, The Duke at the piano, begins by stating the melody - the theme - and then begins to "improvise." People think of improvisation as formless flights of musical inspiration and sometimes they are. However a master like Ellington has in mind several underlying forms of rhythm and harmony and scale and key when starting on a jazz riff. During the riff the underlying forms (the "logic") are maintained and the theme is occasionally restated - echoed - by the "chorus" - the members of the combo. Sometimes it is an actual vocal chorus but usually a chorus of musical instruments.

All that structure is really in a jazz performance?

No, in a classical jazz performance. Ellington for example begins by creating a new rendition of the tune, taking off on inventive riffs at every phrase of the theme. Before long the original theme has disappeared except in our mind’s memory, and by the fragments of it that the player or the chorus recall occasionally.

Then comes the second stage. The lead is tossed to a second player, perhaps a trumpet player. Although the original theme still may be echoed by the chorus, the trumpet player picks up the last phrase from the lead player and takes off independently. The theme is then developed into a second personal interpretation-rendition before it is handed on to a third player, perhaps a clarinetist.

The clarinetist goes through the same process, taking off from the last phrase of the trumpet player but again, in a special and personal way. Succeeding players, trombone, sax, bass player and finally drums, until the theme, by then completely transformed, is handed back to the lead piano player who picks it up where the last interpreter left off.

With a genius like Ellington, we hear echoed references to all the separate riffs that went before but in addition we also begin to recognize fragments of the original theme in a new form. Soon it is clear that his piano is rending the new themes back toward the original theme but in a new form. Gradually, as the threads of the original theme are perceived, it is realized that they now bear signs of the contributions of all the other players. Finally, to prove the point, "Tea for Two" is briefly reborn in its pristine form. After an Ellington has finished a jazz performance of "Tea for Two" one can never hear it again without also hearing the new manifestation he gave it. No one jazz performance may ever have worked exactly this way but the ones we celebrate as classics come very close.

Does this really happen? Or did you just invent it to illustrate your point?

Ah! Did I just "invent" it? Remember your question as you go back over the above process, and see what the "invention" was! But to answer directly: Partly yes, to both questions. And that was what Plato did to Socrates! But consider this summary of the jazz form:

1. Conflict: A theme is announced; counter-themes are presented and take its place.

2. Disappearance: The original theme has disappeared.

3. Renditions: To rend is to tear apart; rendition riffs by the players interpret and celebrate.

Note that in a classical Athenian; tragedy there is often a memorial service for the central character. Sometimes, as in Marc Anthony's funeral oration over Julius Caesar, the original person is hard to recognize in the eulogies delivered. In jazz, the various renditions are personal expressions of the relations of individual players to the memory of the original theme.

4. Omen: An omen is a harbinger or sign of things to come. The lead player starts from where the last rendition left off and "salutes" the prior riffs. Then a new musical theme begins to appear. It is an omen that "foretells" of the rebirth of the original theme in a new form.

5. Rebirth: - The new-born theme now appears. We know it is new but also that it is born out of the original theme.

Coda: Often a finale' by the entire company briefly restates the original theme and summarizes what has happened to it.

Now make a "thought experiment" in the mind. Take the forms of several great jazz performances and lay them out side by side as botanists do when seeking to define the typical oak leaf. The dialogue structure that emerges is like the form of dialogue in philosophy that is called "dialectics" and is a bit more precise.

Dialectics (in Plato, Aristotle, Aquinas, Hegel, Marx and Hesserl) featured:

1. Thesis

2. Antithesis (the thesis is split into parts and each part is explored)

3. Synthesis (A new creation made out of both thesis and antithesis)

It is a near-universal structure:

* It is the structure of the pre-literate rite de passage in which the adolescent goes through the tests and trials preparatory to being initiated an adult, and is finally "invented" as a new adult persona. That's how it got into both jazz and philosophy.

* It is the structure of the five acts of the classical Greek tragedy

* The structure of the Christian Eucharistic tragedy - the mass;

* The so-called Sonata form in Bach and Beethoven;

etc.

* The classical novel.

* It is also exactly the way human cells reproduce themselves! - sexual reproduction in which elements of both parents are synthesized into a newborn ("invented") child.

Can this really be? Seems too good to be true!

This is what a "school" of classicists, the "Cambridge Ritualists," have argued and with many modifications, it seems sound. Here's how applying the logic of jazz to education works out:

Ah! finally!

The educational challenge is to show adolescents how to reap the full harvest of the neurobiological development that occurs rapidly in the human brain during the teen years. Brain cells expand their networking capacities enormously by multiplying the interconnecting synapses between the neurons. This why the adolescent experiences a large jump in brain power. Educators call it the transition from "concrete" to "formal" mental operations:

* from dealing with the forms of things to dealing with the forms of thought;

* the ability to operate in a world of abstractions as if they were "real" (in the sense of "real numbers").

All normal human brains are capable of abstract thought - of thought processing - just like all humans are capable of learning tennis or the violin. But it seldom happens spontaneously. Most people have to take violin lessons and most of us have to learn thought processing.

Okay but how do we fit Socrates and Plato into this picture?

We repeat the basic steps that led Plato to the invention of discursive thought (chain reasoning). Several prior "inventions" prepared the way - Heraclitus, for example; he invented some hybrid seed ideas. Another one was a prior invention by the playwright Sophocles

The plot thickens again?

Exactly! Drama before Sophocles was strictly dialogue; there were only two characters on stage together at any one time, plus the chorus. That's the way rituals had worked. Sophocles invented the third character (later also a fourth) and the power of drama expanded enormously. Here's how it might have happened:

By the time of Sophocles Athens was already a big thriving city-state, a huge sea power and leader of a powerful confederate alliance against the Persians - a kind of NATO; a WATO - West Aegean Treaty Organization.

So the Persians were their "Russians?"

Kind of, or maybe their Nazis. However, despite revolutionary social chanages, imperial Athens held on to the old time religion, and their "bible": the myths of Homer and Hesiod. Sophocles was the son of a rich arms manufacturer and as a young man had trained as a shaman-priest in the temple of Asclepias, the god of healing. After the Athenian naval victory at Salamis that ended the Persian wars when he was only 15, he became the lead voice in the chorus at the ceremonies celebrating the end of decades of war. Later on his plays would adapt themes from Homer and use them to reflect the widespread post-war malaise among Athenians - like Americans after Vietnam. One basic issue recurred many times in many ways: what to do when traditional ritual duties were violated, or when their observance came in conflict with the urban secular laws of the new men of power.

Playwrights took themes from Homer and plot structures from temple rituals, for example, a coronation or an initiation rite, and developed them into a dramas more relevant to their own times. It was similar to the way biblical themes are used today in novels and movies - Samson and Delilah, The Crucifixion, Caesar and Cleopatra, Joseph and his Brothers, The Holy Grail, Ben Hur, The Passion Play, Fail-Safe, (It was originally entitled Abraham ‘59) etc. Contests between playwrights, similar to our film festivals, were held each year during the holy days of the deities.

Borrowing from the dramatic power of the rituals of the secret Eleusinian mystery cults, playwrights employed elaborate special effects and accompanied the on-stage action with sonorous instrumental and choral music to convey mystery, awe and power. The result was something like a Metropolitan Opera Company production of a Grand Opera like Faust or Aida, or more truly, a Wagnerian opera like Lohengrin. Sophocles was a master special effects producer, a kind of Spielberg. Gigantic terrifying characters with gross inhuman masks sprang on stage from the wings. Zeus Thunderer roared - actors using a "bull-roarer). Gods and goddesses descended "deus ex machina" (a god out of a machine) from the clouds by massive celestial cranes - Sophocles could have borrowed the engineering from his dad's arms factory. Greek audiences were in for a powerful emotional experience when they attended a play by Sophocles.

Are you making this up?

A little, the way lawyers have to make up what probably happened from circumstantial evidence. Take Sophocles' play Antigone. It stuck very close to traditional mythic themes and ritual demands. Antigone had accompanied her blind father Oedipus into exile. When her brother Polyneices was killed she did proper ritual rites over him in defiance of her "modern" uncle, King Creon.

Sophocles used the new third character to develop the conflict between conventional ritual and modern king commands, by statement and response in an inexorable logic of tragedy. Recitations by the chorus punctuate the story by recitations that clarify the background and express the feelings of ordinary citizens confronted by the king’s denial of traditional rites.

So it was a Vietnam War type problem? Getting back the bones of the MIA’s and giving them a proper burial?

Much the same - a lost struggle followed by conflict between modern state power and traditional duty to the dead. In adding a third character to make the point Sophocles prepared for the invention that was to transform Western culture.

Dialogue?

Yes, the third character kind of dialogue that Socrates and Plato used to convert argument into inquiry; dialectics. I imagine that Socrates might have occasionally stopped by to watch Sophocles conduct rehearsals.

And maybe he'd hear the actors complain and ask why this other new character was being added?

Right, and Sophocles would have a hard time explaining. He'd say trust me. I'm trying make this old myth about a baronial feud say something relevant for today and this new third character of mine helps. Socrates would have seen immediately that the same thing could be done to the art of rhetoric; dialogue as debate. He could use a third character to transform debate-winning into truth finding; to change fighting against a person to fighting against ignorance. Ancient rhetoric teachers were like today's Madison Avenue P.R. media consultants we call "spin merchants." Instead of using words to manipulate public opinion Socrates wanted to use words to discover truth - especially moral truth. The result as perfected by Plato was the invention of philosophy.

Athens had gone through crisis after crisis; long wars neither won nor lost and now was heading for a new one against Sparta. Her satellites were rebellious. There were spies, traitors, recession; demagogues and PR spin doctors. The people clamored for scapegoats and yearned for a return to the simple Homeric virtues being eroded by atheists and intellectuals. Then Athens lost the Peloponnesian war. Disintegration, depression, demoralization, reaction set it.

Sounds familiar... so Socrates was a martyr to truth, like Galileo?

No, like Giordano Bruno - Galileo saved his neck by recanting - and like Jesus. Plato was cautious, more like Galileo. He was even too sick, he claimed (!), to be with Socrates at the end. And after Socrates drank the hemlock, Plato left Athens for 11 years before returning to start his new research and teaching Academy.

Okay, now what did Socrates invent? then what did Plato add?

Good question. There were two stages - two inventions. The first came out of writing and the second out of math.

Writing, data processing with a stylus and a papyrus scroll, had already been invented but was used mainly for business and government records. The arts remained oral, even with innovative people like Socrates. In fact Socrates was particularly scornful of writing, claiming that it destroyed the teacher's personal charisma.

That's what today's teachers say about computers...

Exactly, but Plato was an accomplished poet. He could preserve and dramatize the wisdom of Socrates and hand it on to future students by writing it down. In doing that Plato discovered something that changed history. It started small and innocent, like lots of big things do. He wanted to preserve the wisdom of Socrates so future students could benefit from it. So he wrote down memories of the oral dialogues of Socrates on scrolls so they could be performed, like dramas were on feast days. It was to preserve the Odyssey Of The Mind by Socrates, like other plays preserved adventures of the Homeric heroes. The result was a dramatic script.

Did it really happen that way? Really?

Nobody knows for sure but it may be close to the truth because the stylus and scroll produced something new. Once Plato had written down several lines he'd be able to scroll back and edit them. Studying the scroll he could see quickly if the "action" - the trend of thought - was developing right. If not he could re-write the parts to do a better job of hemstitching together the threads of Socratic thought. When he looked over what he had produced he saw a new invention staring back at him. He had displayed in words the process of thought!

An oral dialogue is like a tune. You hear a theme and it stays a second in your mined and then fades away ... a pretty thought is like a melody... Writing the same themes down on a scroll automatically converts them into chain-linked thoughts that can be studied, analyzed, compared, re-written and improved. When Plato saw this it was something like Newton seeing that apple fall from the tree. Scroll-writing made it possible to state a theme; tear it into parts; eliminate the bad and keep the good; synthesize what survived into a new and better theme.

Aha! said Plato, like Paul Muni inventing pasteurization, I've invented discursive reason! It's there, plain as the wings on Athena! Right on the scroll! Living thought; the very Logos itself! This is real dialectics. With this new logic machine of mine anybody can learn how to make new knowledge.

One way of remembering what computers do is: "ES-RD-PC" standing for the computer operations Encoding, Storage, Recall, Display, Processing and Communication.

NOW: A PREVIEW OF COMING ATTRACTIONS:

Plato turned next to music - yes, music! - the mathematics of harmonic structures. Like most upper class youth in 5th century Athens, Plato had studied poetry and music; myth and performance. This was exactly when Pythagorean mathematics was first published, first in a book by a friend of Socrates and then in a later book by one of Plato's friends.

Pythagorean harmonics was the Newtonian mechanics of the ancient world. It was first invented in Sumer and appeared later in China, India, Egypt and Greece. The entire civilized world of antiquity operated on a harmonics type of "science" just as the entire industrial world operated on a mechanics type of science until Einstein. Both harmonics and mechanics served their worlds well for ages. Today's students can use a simple monochord to repeat the basic experiment that led to the invention of ancient harmonic science.

The monochord was to ancient science as the optical lens was to modern science. The breakthrough experiment that established harmonics as a science was a spectacular discovery.

Take a monochord - a wooden rod with a wire fastened at each end and a fret underneath the wire.

Estimate where the half point is and mark the wood.

Place the fret there and strike each side of the wire.

Each will sound almost alike. Move the fret until they sound exactly alike.

Measure each length with a ruler. Note that the ear was more accurate than the eye!

The result was the invention of the octave! It happened that way throughout the ancient world in the 6th century BC.

It was really the invention of Science: Ancient harmonic science. The tri-modal transitivity - C. S. Pierce - of Physics (vibrating wire); Mind (detection of octave); and Math (harmonic ratios)

All are mutually compatible! That was the basis of ancient harmonic science - a "normative" science: Everything had to be harmonized scientifically: temples, astronomy, cities (Plato’s Republic), astronomy, were all built out of Pythagorean harmonic science. It was a "genuine" science and lasted until Galileo. Plato’s "Second Academy" was dedicated to the application of harmonic science to everything.

That is how he concluded the just philosopher is 729 times happier than the tyrant!

WOW!

Harvey Wheeler is the author of Fail Safe, with Eugene Burdick, and a frequent contributor to The Idler.