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I am originally from India. I am settled in United States since 1969. I love mathematics, philosophy and clarity in thinking.

PLATO: The Political Solution

March 16, 2021 – 9:08 AM

Reference: The Story of Philosophy

Note: The original Text is provided below.
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Summary

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Comments

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Original Text

Automatically—without any hypocrisy of voting. Democracy means perfect equality of opportunity, especially in education; not the rotation of every Tom, Dick and Harry in public office. Every man shall have an equal chance to make himself fit for the complex tasks of administration; but only those who have proved their mettle (or, in our myth, their metal), and have emerged from all tests with the insignia of skill, shall be eligible to rule. Public officials shall be chosen not by votes, nor by secret cliques pulling the unseen wires of democratic pretense, but by their own ability as demonstrated in the fundamental democracy of an equal race. Nor shall any man hold office without specific training, nor hold high office till he has first filled a lower office well (Gorgias, 514-5). 

Democracy depends on equal opportunity in education. Democratic elections should depend on ability rather than on votes. 

Is this aristocracy? Well, we need not be afraid of the word, if the reality is good which it betokens: words are wise men’s counters, without value of their own; they are the money only of fools and politicians. We want to be ruled by the best, which is what aristocracy means; have we not, Carlyle-like; yearned and prayed to be ruled by the best? But we have come to think of aristocracies as hereditary: let it be carefully noted that this Platonic aristocracy is not of that kind; one would rather call it a democratic aristocracy. For the people, instead of blindly electing the lesser of two evils presented to them as candidates by nominating cliques, will here be themselves, everyone of them, the candidates; and will receive an equal chance of educational election to public office. There is no caste here; no inheritance of position or privilege; no stoppage of talent impecuniously born; the son of a ruler begins on the same level, and receives the same treatment and opportunity, as the son of a boot-black; if the ruler’s son is a dolt he falls at the first shearing; if the boot-black’s son is a man of ability the way is clear for him to become a guardian of the state (423). Career will be open to talent wherever it is born. This is a democracy of the schools—a hundredfold more honest and more effective than a democracy of the polls. 

It will be a huge problem if education is politicized. 

And so, “setting aside every other business, the guardians will dedicate themselves wholly to the maintenance of freedom in the state, making this their craft and engaging in no work which does not bear upon this end” (395). They shall be legislature and executive and court in one; even the laws shall not bind them to a dogma in the face of altered circumstance; the rule of the guardians shall be a flexible intelligence unbound by precedent. 

The primary task of education should be to develop the ability to think critically that can be trusted by others. But the trust from others requires that they themselves must be able to think critically to some degree.

But how can men of fifty have a flexible intelligence? Will they not be mentally plaster-casted by routine? Adeimantus (echoing, no doubt, some hot brotherly debate in Plato’s home) objects that philosophers are dolts or rogues, who would rule either foolishly, or selfishly, or both. “The votaries of philosophy who carry on the study not only in youth with a view to education, but as the pursuit of their maturer years—these men for the most part grow into very strange beings, not to say utter scoundrels; and the result with those who may be considered the best of them is, that they are made useless to the world by the very study which you extol” (487). This is a fair enough description of some be-spectacled modern philosophers; but Plato answers that he has guarded against this difficulty by giving his philosophers the training of life as well as the erudition of the schools; that they will in consequence be men of action rather than merely men of thought—men seasoned to high purposes and noble temper by long experience and trial. By philosophy Plato means an active culture, wisdom that mixes with the concrete busy-ness of life; he does not mean a closeted and impractical metaphysician; Plato “is the man who least resembles Kant, which is (with all respect) a considerable merit.” 

The ability to think critically and wisely must be supported by practical experience that comes from active living.

So much for incompetence; as for rascality we may provide against that by establishing among the guardians a system of communism: 

In the first place none of them should have any property beyond what is absolutely necessary; neither should they have a private house, with bars and bolts, closed against any one who has a mind to enter; their provisions should be only such as are required by trained warriors, who are men of temperance and courage; their agreement is to receive from the citizens a fixed rate of pay, enough to meet the expenses of the year, and no more; and they will have common meals and live together, like soldiers in a camp. Gold and silver we will tell them that they have from God; the diviner metal is within them, and they have therefore no need of that earthly dross which passes under the name of gold, and ought not to pollute the divine by earthly admixture, for that commoner metal has been the source of many unholy deeds; but their own is undefiled. And they alone of all the citizens may not touch or handle silver or gold, or be under the same roof with them, or wear them, or drink from them. And this will be their salvation, and the salvation of the State. But should they ever acquire homes or lands or moneys of their own, they will become housekeepers and husbandmen instead of guardians; enemies and tyrants instead of allies of the other citizens; hating and being hated, plotting and being plotted against, they will pass through life in much greater terror of internal than of external enemies; and the hour of ruin, both to themselves and to the rest of the State, will be at hand (416-17), 

To develop character during training, greed should curbed as much as possible. It is interesting to note that much of Capitalism has been guided by greed.

This arrangement will make it unprofitable, as well as dangerous, for the guardians to rule as a clique seeking the good of their class rather than that of the community as a whole. For they will be protected from want; the necessities and modest luxuries of a noble life will be theirs in regular provision, without the searing and wrinkling care of economic worry. But by the same token they will be precluded from cupidity and sordid ambitions; they will always have just so much of the world’s goods, and no more; they will be like physicians establishing, and themselves accepting, a dietary for a nation. They will eat together, like consecrated men; they will sleep together in single barracks, like soldiers sworn to simplicity. “Friends should have all things in common,” as Pythagoras used to say (Law 807). So the authority of the guardians will be sterilized, and their power made poisonless; their sole reward will be honor and the sense of service to the group. And they will be such men as from the beginning have deliberately consented to so materially limited a career; and such men as at the end of their stern training will have learned to value the high repute of the statesman above the crass emoluments of the office-seeking politicians or the “economic man.” At their coming the battles of party politics will be no more. 

The guardians will be trained to have a simple life and just enough wants that will be amply fulfilled by the state. Their sole reward will be honor and the sense of service to the group.

But what will their wives say to all this? Will they be content to forego the luxuries of life and the conspicuous consumption of goods? The guardians will have no wives. Their communism is to be of women as well as of goods. They are to be freed not only from the egoism of self, but from the egoism of family; they are not to be narrowed to the anxious acquisitiveness of the prodded husband; they are to be devoted not to a woman. but to the community. Even their children shall not be specifically or distinguishably theirs; all children of guardians shall be taken from their mothers at birth and brought up in common; their particular parentage will be lost in the scuffle (460). All the guardian-mothers will care for all the guardian-children; the brother-hood of man, within these limits, will graduate from phrase to fact; every boy will be a brother to every other boy, every girl a sister, every man a father, and every woman a mother. 

The guardians will have a common family. This is a controversial point.

But whence will these women come? Some, no doubt, the guardians will woo out of the industrial or military classes; others will have become, by their own right, members of the guardian class. For there is to be no sex barrier of any kind in this community; least of all in education—the girl shall have the same intellectual opportunities as the boy, the same chance to rise to the highest positions in the state. When Glaucon objects (458 f) that this admission of woman to any office, provided she has passed the tests, violates the principle of the division of labor, he receives the sharp reply that division of labor must be by aptitude and ability, not by sex; if a woman shows herself capable of political administration, let her rule; if a man shows himself to be capable only of washing dishes, let him fulfill the function to which Providence has assigned him.

There is no discrimination for the duties of the guardians based on sex.

Community of wives does not mean indiscriminate mating; rather there is to be strict eugenic supervision of all reproductive relations. The argument from the breeding of animals here starts its wandering career: if we get such good results in breeding cattle selectively for qualities desired, and from breeding only from the best in each generation, why should we not apply similar principles to the matings of mankind? (459). For it is not enough to educate the child properly; he must be properly born, of select and healthy ancestry; “education should begin before birth” (Laws, 789). Therefore no man or woman shall procreate unless in perfect health; a health certificate is to be required of every bride and groom (Laws; 772). Men may reproduce only when they are above thirty and under forty-five; women only when they are above twenty and under forty. Men unmarried by thirty-five are to be taxed into felicity (Laws, 771). Off-spring born of unlicensed matings, or deformed, are to be exposed and left to die. Before and after the ages specified for procreation, mating is to be free, on condition that the fetus be aborted. “We grant this permission with strict orders to the parties to do all in their power to prevent any embryo from seeing the light; and if any should force its way to birth, they must understand that the offspring of such a union cannot be maintained, and they must make their arrangements accordingly” (461). The marriage of relatives is prohibited, as inducing degeneration (310). “The best of either sex should be united with the best as often as possible, and the inferior with the inferior; and they are to rear the off-spring of the one sort but not that of the other; for this is the only way of keeping the flock in prime condition. … Our braver and better youth, beside their other honors and rewards, are to be permitted a greater variety of mates; for such fathers ought to have as many sons as possible” (459-60). 

Children must be properly born, of select and healthy ancestry requiring strict eugenic supervision of all reproductive relations. This point happens to be very controversial.

But our eugenic society must be protected not only from disease and deterioration within, but from enemies without. It must be ready, if need be, to wage successful war. Our model community would of course be pacific, for it would restrict population within the means of subsistence; but neighboring states not so managed might well look upon the orderly prosperity of our Utopia as an invitation to raid and rapine. Hence, while deploring the necessity, we shall have, in our intermediate class, a sufficient number of well-trained soldiers, living a hard and simple life like the guardians, on a stated modicum of goods supplied by their “maintainers and fore-fathers,” the people. At the same time every precaution must be taken to avoid the occasions of war. The primary occasion is overpopulation (373); the second is foreign trade, with the inevitable disputes that interrupt it. Indeed, competitive trade is really a form of war; “peace is only a name” (Laws, 622). It will be well then to situate our ideal state considerably inland, so that it shall be shut out from any high development of foreign commerce. “The sea fills a country with merchandise and money-making and bargaining; it breeds in men’s minds habits of financial greed and faithlessness, alike in its internal and in its foreign relations” (Laws, 704-7). Foreign trade requires a large navy to protect it; and navalism is as bad as militarism. “In every case the guilt of war is confined to a few persons, and the many are friends” (471). The most frequent wars are precisely the vilest—civil wars, wars of Greek against Greek; let the Greeks form a pan-Hellenic league of nations, uniting lest “the whole Greek race some day fall under the yoke of barbarian peoples” (469). 

It is best to have the capacity to defend one’s state, while avoiding the occasions of war.  But increase in population causes war and war serves to control population. Maybe broad education can help control population better. Foreign trade has the overtones of the greed of Capitalism that may lead to war.

So our political structure will be topped with a small class of guardians; it will be protected by a large class of soldiers and “auxiliaries”; and it will rest on the broad base of a commercial, industrial, and agricultural population. This last or economic class will retain private property, private mates, and private families. But trade and industry will “be regulated by the guardians to prevent excessive individual wealth or poverty; anyone acquiring more than four times the average possession of the citizens must relinquish the excess to the state (Laws, 714 f). Perhaps interest will be forbidden, and profits limited (Laws, 920). The communism of the guardians is impracticable for the economic class; the distinguishing characteristics of this class are powerful instincts of acquisition and competition; some noble souls among them will be free from this fever of combative possession, but the majority of men are consumed with it; they hunger and thirst not after righteousness, nor after honor, but after possessions endlessly multiplied. Now men engrossed in the pursuit of money are unfit to rule a state; and our entire plan rests on the hope that if the guardians rule well and live simply, the economic man will be willing to let them monopolize administration if they permit him to monopolize luxury. In short, the perfect society would be that in which each class and each unit would be doing the work to which its nature and aptitude best adapted it; in which no class or individual would interfere with others, but all would co-operate in difference to produce an efficient and harmonious whole (433-4). That would be a just state. 

There should be a small ruler class of guardians, a larger class of warriors, and a very broad class of a commercial, industrial, and agricultural population. There should not be too much disparity of wealth among population. Excess wealth should go to state to be used for improving the infrastructure of the society.

In short, the perfect society would be that in which each class and each unit would be doing the work to which its nature and aptitude best adapted it; in which no class or individual would interfere with others, but all would co-operate in difference to produce an efficient and harmonious whole.

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PLATO: The Psychological Solution

March 10, 2021 – 2:06 PM

Reference: The Story of Philosophy

Note: The original Text is provided below.
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Summary

Well, then, what is to be done? The first turn on our road is universal education. For the first ten years of life, education shall be predominantly physical. Steps must be taken to minimize conditioning of the children by their parents and elders. We must give to every child full equality of educational opportunity. Every school is to have a gymnasium and a playground; play and sport are to be the entire curriculum; and in this first decade such health will be stored up as will make all medicine unnecessary. 

But mere athletics and gymnastics would make a man too one-sided. Therefore, music must be added to the curriculum. Music is valuable not only because it brings refinement of feeling and character, but also because it preserves and restores health. A healthy and refined character influences positively in determining social and political issues. Our political psychology is perplexed because we have.not adequately studied the various appetites or instincts of man. Dreams may give us a clue to some of the subtle and more elusive of these dispositions. 

The must be a balance between athletics and music. After sixteen the individual practice of music must be abandoned, though it must be used to provide attractive forms for the sometimes unappetizing contents of mathematics, history and science. Even then these studies are not to be forced upon an unwilling mind.  A libertarian spirit must prevail within limits.

With minds so freely growing, and bodies made strong by sport and outdoor life, our ideal state would have a firm psychological and physiological base. But a moral basis must be provided as well, so the members of the community make a unity. Such moral requirement of the community must have sanction of supernatural authority to make men behave themselves. We must have a religion. 

A belief in living God and personal immortality can comfort man and help control base passions. Granted that none of the beliefs can be demonstrated; yet surelyit will do us no harm to believe, and it may do us and our children immeasurable good. For we are likely to have trouble if we undertake to explain and justify everything to their simple minds.

When they arrive at the age of twenty, they will face the first scrutiny and test of what they have learned. Those who fail will be assigned to the economic work of the nation; they will be business men, and clerks, and factory workers, and farmers. The selection will be more democratic than democracy. Those who pass this first test will receive ten more years of education and training, in body and mind and character. 

Those who fail the second test at age thirty will become the auxiliaries, or executive aides and military officers of the state. Myths should be used to persuade them to accept their fate. Those who pass are taught philosophy. Philosophy means: to think clearly, which is metaphysics; and to rule wisely, which is politics. To think clearly they shall study the doctrine of Ideas for the next five years. 

According to this doctrine, we sense what is there. The sensations develop into general ideas. From general ideas develop particular ideas through reason and thought. There come about laws and ideals. The ideas become more permanent the more they fit together and form an overall consistent picture. The essence of a higher education is the search for Ideas that fit together forming a complete picture of whatever subject that is being considered.

At the age of thirty-five, these students now enter the concrete world with no favor shown them. In this mart of strife they shall learn from the book of life itself. They shall earn their bread and butter by the sweat of their high brows. And this last and sharpest test shall go on ruthlessly for fifteen long years. Those that survive, scarred and fifty, sobered and self-reliant, shorn of scholastic vanity by the merciless friction of life, and armed now with all the wisdom that tradition and experience, culture and conflict, can cooperate to give—these men at last shall automatically become the rulers of the state. 

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Comments

In general Plato is right in proposing full equality of educational opportunity from a young age as the solution to all the ills in the society. But education is not just acquiring knowledge. A large part of education is to get rid of existing conditioning. 

Plato recommends taking children away from their parents to prevent conditioning by them; but, then, he recommends indoctrination through religious beliefs to secure compliance.

Plato recommends a uniform curriculum; and the success of children in this curriculum will determine their position in the society. However, the society simply needs to provide equal opportunity of advancement to all. Life itself will take care of who acquires what position.

An ability to think clearly should work as an antidote to the conditioning arising from family and religion. It should lead to a fine character. Life itself will teach the person as long as his confusion are being resolved in a timely fashion.

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Original Text

Well, then, what is to be done? 

We must begin by “sending out into the country all the inhabitants of the city who are more than ten years old, and by taking possession of the children, who will thus be protected from the habits of their parents” (540). We cannot build Utopia with young people corrupted at every turn by the example of their elders. We must start, so far as we can, with a clean slate. It is quite possible that some enlightened ruler will empower us to make such a beginning with some part or colony of his realm. (One ruler did, as we shall see.) In any case we must give to every child, and from the outset, full equality of educational opportunity; there is no telling where the light of talent or genius will break out; we must seek it impartially everywhere, in every rank and race. The first turn on our road is universal education.

For the first ten years of life, education shall be predominantly physical; every school is to have a gymnasium and a playground; play and sport are to be the entire curriculum; and in this first decade such health will be stored up as will make all medicine unnecessary. “To require the help of medicine because by lives of indolence and luxury men have filled themselves like pools with waters and winds. … flatulence and catarrh—is not this a disgrace? … Our present system of medicine may be said to educate diseases,” to draw them out into a long existence, rather than to cure them. But this is an absurdity of the idle rich. “When a carpenter is ill he asks the physician for a rough and ready remedy—an emetic, or a purge, or cautery, or the knife. And if anyone tells him that he must go through a course of dietetics, and swathe and swaddle his head, and all that sort of thing, he replies at once that he has no time to be ill, and that he sees no good in a life that is spent in nursing his disease to the neglect of his ordinary calling; and therefore, saying good-bye to this sort of physicians, he resumes his customary diet, and either gets well and lives and does his business, or, if his constitution fails, he dies and has done with it” (405-6). We cannot afford to have a nation of malingerers and invalids; Utopia must begin in the body of man. 

But mere athletics and gymnastics would make a man too one-sided. “How shall we find a gentle nature which has also. great courage?—for they seem to be inconsistent with each other” (375). We do not want a nation of prize-fighters and weight-lifters. Perhaps music will solve our problem: through music the soul learns harmony and rhythm, and even a disposition to justice; for “can he who is harmoniously constituted ever be unjust? Is not this, Glaucon, why musical training is so powerful, because rhythm and harmony find their way into the secret places of the soul, bearing grace in their movements and making the soul graceful?” (401; Protagoras, 326). Music moulds character, and therefore shares in determining social and political issues. “Damon tells me—and I can quite believe it—that when modes of music change, the fundamental laws of the state change with them.”*

*[Cf. Daniel O’Connell: ”Let me write the songs of a nation, and I care not who makes its laws.”]

Music is valuable not only because it brings refinement of feeling and character, but also because it preserves and restores health. There are some diseases which can be treated only through the mind. (Charmides, 157): so the Corybantic priest treated hysterical women with wild pipe music, which excited them to dance and dance till they fell to the ground exhausted, and went to.sleep; when they awoke they were cured. The unconscious sources of human thought are touched and soothed by such methods;. and it is in these substrata of behavior and feeling that genius sinks its roots. “No man when conscious attains to true or inspired intuition, but rather when the power of intellect is fettered in sleep or by disease or dementia”; the prophet (mantike) or genius is akin to the madman (manike) (Phredrus, 244). 

Plato passes on to a remarkable anticipation of “psychoanalysis.” Our political psychology is perplexed, he argues, because we have.not adequately studied the various appetites or instincts of man. Dreams may give us a clue to some of the subtle and more elusive of these dispositions. 

Certain of the unnecessary pleasures and instincts are deemed to be unlawful; every man appears to have them, but in some persons they are subjected to the control of law and reason [“sublimated”], and the better desires prevailing over them, they are either wholly suppressed, or reduced in strength and number; while in other persons these desires are stronger and more abundant. I mean particularly those desires which are awake when the reasoning and taming and ruling power [“censor”] of the personality is asleep; the wild beast in our nature, gorged with meat and drink, starts up and walks about naked, and surfeits at his will; and there is no conceivable folly or crime, however shameless or unnatural—not excepting incest or parricide [“Oedipus complex”]—of which such a nature may not be guilty. … But when a man’s pulse is healthy and temperate, and he goes to sleep cool and rational, … having indulged his appetites neither too much nor too little, but just enough to lay them to sleep, … he is then least likely to be the sport of fanciful and lawless visions. … In all of us, even in good men, there is such a latent wild beast nature, which peers out in sleep (571-2). 

Music and measure lend grace and health to the soul and to the body; but again, too much music is as dangerous as too much athletics. To be merely an athlete is to be nearly a savage; and to be merely a musician is to be “melted and softened beyond what is good” (410). The two must be combined; and after sixteen the individual practice of music must be abandoned, though choral singing, like communal games, will go on throughout life. Nor is music to be merely music; it must be used to provide attractive forms for the sometimes unappetizing contents of mathematics, history and science; there is no reason why for the young these difficult studies should not be smoothed into verse and beautified with song. Even then these studies are not to be forced upon an unwilling mind; within limits a libertarian spirit must prevail.

The elements of instruction … should be presented to the mind in childhood, but not with any compulsion; for a freeman should be a freeman too in the acquisition of knowledge. … Knowledge which is acquired under compulsion has no hold on the mind. Therefore do not use compulsion, but let early education be rather a sort of amusement; this will better enable you to find out the natural bent of the child (536). 

With minds so freely growing, and bodies made strong by sport and outdoor life of every kind, our ideal state would have a firm psychological and physiological base broad enough for every possibility and every development. But a moral basis must be provided as well; the members of the community must make a unity; they must learn that they are members of one another; that they owe to one another certain amenities and obligations. Now since men are by nature acquisitive, jealous, combative, and erotic, how shall we persuade them to behave themselves? By the policeman’s omnipresent club? It is a brutal method, costly and irritating. There is a better way, and that is by lending to the moral requirements of the community the sanction of supernatural authority. We must have a religion. 

Plato believes that a nation cannot be strong unless it believes in God. A mere cosmic force, or first cause, or elan vital,. that was not a person, could hardly inspire hope, or devotion, or sacrifice; if could not offer comfort to the hearts of the distressed, nor courage to embattled souls. But a living God can do all this, and can stir or frighten the self-seeking individualist into some moderation of his greed, some control of his passion. All the more so if to belief in God is added belief in personal immortality: the hope of another life gives us courage to meet our own death, and to bear with the death of our loved ones; we are twice armed if we fight with faith. Granted that none of the beliefs can be demonstrated; that God may be after all only the personified ideal of our love and our hope, and that the soul is like the music of the lyre, and dies with the instrument that gave it form: yet surely (so runs the argument, Pascal-like, of the Phaedo) it will do us no harm to believe, and it may do us and our children immeasurable good. 

For we are likely to have trouble with these children of ours if we undertake to explain and justify everything to their simple minds. We shall have an especially hard time when they arrive at the age of twenty, and face the first scrutiny and test of what they have learned in all their years of equal education. Then will come a ruthless weeding out; the Great Elimination, we might call it. That test will be no mere academic examination; it will be practical as well as theoretical: “there shall also be toils and pains and conflicts prescribed for them” (413). Every kind of ability will have a chance to show itself, and every sort of stupidity will be hunted out into the light. Those who fail will be assigned to the economic work of the nation; they will be business men, and clerks, and factory workers, and farmers. The test will be impartial and impersonal; whether one is to be a farmer or a philosopher will be determined not by monopolized opportunity or nepotic favoritism; the selection will be more democratic than democracy. 

Those who pass this first test will receive ten more years of education and training, in body and mind and character. And then they will face a second test, far severer than the first. Those who fail will become the auxiliaries, or executive aides and military officers of the state. Now it is just in these great eliminations that we shall need every resource of persuasion to get the eliminated to accept their fate with urbanity and peace. For what is to prevent that great unselected majority, in the first test, and that lesser but more vigorous and capable second group of Eliminees, from shouldering arms and smashing this Utopia of ours into a mouldering reminiscence? What is to prevent them from establishing there and then a world in which again mere number or mere force will rule, and the sickly comedy of a sham democracy will reenact itself da capo ad nauseam? Then religion and faith will be our only salvation: we shall tell these young people that the divisions into which they have fallen are God-decreed and irrevocable—not all their tears shall wipe out one word of it. We shall tell them the myth of the metals : 

“Citizens, you are brothers, yet God has framed you differently. Some of you have the power of command; and these he has made of gold, wherefore they have the greatest honor; others of silver, to be auxiliaries; others again, who are to be husbandmen and craftsmen, he has made of brass and iron; and the species will generally be preserved in the children. But as you are of the same original family, a golden parent will sometimes have a silver son, or a silver parent a golden son. And God proclaims … that if the son of a golden or a silver parent has an admixture of brass or iron, then nature requires a transposition of ranks; and the eye of the ruler must not be pitiful towards his child because he has to descend in the scale to become a husbandman or an artisan, just as there may be others sprung from the artisan class who are raised to honor, and become guardians and auxiliaries. For an oracle says that when a man of brass or iron guards the state, it will be destroyed” (415). 

Perhaps with this “royal fable” we shall secure a fairly general consent to the furtherance of our plan. 

But now what of the lucky remnant that ride these successive waves of selection? 

They are taught philosophy. They have now reached the age of thirty; it would not have been wise to let them “taste the dear delight too early; … for young men, when they first get the taste of philosophy in their mouths, argue for amusement, and are always contradicting and refuting, … like puppy-dogs who delight to tear and pull at all who come near them” (539). This dear delight, philosophy, means two things chiefly: to think clearly, which is metaphysics; and to rule wisely, which is politics. First then, our young Elite must learn to think clearly. For that purpose they shall study the doctrine of Ideas. 

But this famous doctrine of Ideas, embellished and obscured by the fancy and poetry of Plato, is a discouraging maze to the modern student, and must have offered another severe test to the survivors of many siftings. The Idea of a thing might be the “general idea” of the class to which it belongs (the Idea of John, or Dick, or Harry, is Man); or it might be the law or laws according to which the thing operates (the Idea of John would be the reduction of all his behavior to “natural laws”); or it might be the perfect purpose and ideal towards which the thing and its class may develop (the Idea of John is the John of Utopia). Very probably the Idea is all of these—idea, law and ideal. Behind the surface phenomena and particulars which greet our senses, are generalizations, regularities, and directions of development, unperceived by sensation but conceived by reason and thought. These ideas, laws and ideals are more permanent—and therefore more “real”—than the sense-perceived particular things through which we conceive and deduce them: Man is more permanent than Tom, or Dick, or Harry; this circle is born with the movement of my pencil and dies under the attrition of my eraser, but the conception Circle goes on forever. This tree stands, and that tree falls; but the laws which determine what bodies shall fall, and when, and how, were without beginning, are now, and ever shall be, without end. There is, as the gentle Spinoza would say, a world of things perceived by sense, and a world of laws inferred by thought; we do not see the law of inverse squares but it is there, and everywhere; it was before anything began, and will survive when all the world of things is a finished tale. Here is a bridge: the sense perceives concrete and iron to a hundred million tons; but the mathematician sees, with the mind’s eye, the daring and delicate adjustment of all this mass of material to the laws of mechanics and mathematics and engineering, those laws according to which all good bridges that are made must be made; if the mathematician be also a poet, he will see these laws upholding the bridge; if the laws were violated the bridge wouId collapse into the stream beneath; the laws are the God that holds up the bridge in the hollow of his hand. Aristotle hints something of this when he says that by Ideas Plato meant what Pythagoras meant by ”number” when he taught that this is a world of numbers (meaning presumably that the world is ruled by mathematical constancies and regularities). Plutarch tells us that according to Plato “God always geometrizes”; or, as Spinoza puts the same thought, God and the universal laws of structure and operation are one and the same reality. To Plato, as to Bertrand Russell, mathematics is therefore the indispensable prelude to philosophy, and its highest form; over the doors of his Academy Plato placed, Dantesquely, these words, “Let no man ignorant of geometry enter here.”*

*[The details of the argument for the interpretation here given of the doctrine of Ideas may be followed in D. G. Ritchie’s Plato, Edinburgh, 1902, especially pp. 49 and 85]

Without these Ideas—these generalization, regularities and ideals—the world would be to us as it must seem to the first-opened eyes of the child, a mass of unclassified and un-meaning particulars of sensation; for meaning can be given to things only by classifying and generalizing them, by finding the laws of their beings, and the purposes and goals of their activity. Or the world without Ideas would be a heap of book-titles fallen haphazard out of the catalogue, as compared to the same titles arranged in order according to their classes, their sequences and their purposes; it would be the shadows in a cave as compared with the sunlit realities without, which cast those fantastic and deceptive shadows within (514). Therefore the essence of a higher education is the search for Ideas: for generalizations, laws of sequence, and ideals of development; behind things we must discover their relation and meaning, their mode and law of operation, the function and ideal they serve or adumbrate; we must classify and coordinate our sense experience in terms of law and purpose; only for lack of this does the mind of the imbecile differ from the mind of Caesar. 

Well, after five years of training in this recondite doctrine of Ideas, this art of perceiving significant forms and causal sequences and ideal potentialities amid the welter and hazard of sensation; after five years of training in the application of this principle to the behavior of men and the conduct of states; after this long preparation from childhood through youth and into the maturity of thirty-five; surely now these perfect products are ready to assume the royal purple and the highest functions of public life?—surely they are at last the philosopher-kings who are to rule and to free the human race? 

Alas! not yet. Their education is still unfinished. For after all it has been, in the main, a theoretical education: something else is needed. Let these Ph.D.’s pass down now from the heights of philosophy into the “cave” of the world: of men and things; generalizations and abstractions are worthless except they be tested by this concrete world; let our students enter that world with no favor shown them; they shall compete with men of business, with hard-headed grasping individualists, with men of brawn and men of cunning; in this mart of strife they shall learn from the book of life itself; they shall hurt their fingers and scratch their philosophic shins on the crude realities of the world; they shall earn their bread and butter by the sweat of their high brows. And this last and sharpest test shall go on ruthlessly for fifteen long years. Some of our perfect products will break under the pressure, and be submerged by this last great wave of elimination. Those that survive, scarred and fifty, sobered and self-reliant, shorn of scholastic vanity by the merciless friction of life, and armed now with all the wisdom that tradition and experience, culture and conflict, can cooperate to give—these men at last shall automatically become the rulers of the state. 

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The World of Atom (Part XII)

March 6, 2021 – 9:30 PM

Reference: Boorse 1966: The World of Atom

THE WORLD OF ATOM by Boorse

PART XII – WAVE MECHANICS 

Chapter 62: The Principle of Least Action (William Rowan Hamilton 1805 – 1865)

On a General Method of Expressing the Paths of Light, and of the Planets, by the Coefficients of a Characteristic Function. Hamilton’s mathematics was based on the analogy between the behavior of light of very short wavelength and the behavior of ordinary particles of matter. He demonstrated that the dynamical problem may be solved by considering the motion of a system as though it were a gradual unfolding of a series of states, each one derived from the preceding one by an infinitesimal transformation similar to what we have when a ray of light advances from one wave front to the next. 

Chapter 63: The Wavelengths of Particles (Prince Lois V. de Broglie 1892 – 1987)

The Undulatory Aspects of the Electron. At small scales, there is dualism in Nature between waves and corpuscles. The wavelength associated with a corpuscle is as concrete a physical quantity as its mass. The velocity of the corpuscle is equal to the group velocity of its associated wave. Planck showed that energy is connected to frequency, E = hv. It can also be shown that momentum is connected to wavelength, p = h/λ. This is a fundamental relation of the Theory.

Chapter 64: A Wave Equation for Particles (Erwin Schrodinger 1887 – 1961)

Derivation of the fundamental idea of wave mechanics from Hamilton’s analogy between ordinary mechanics and Geometrical Optics. At close range, the particle appears to be a wave motion represented mathematically by a continuous manifold of wave functions. Using this approach, Schrodinger could derive the arbitrary integers assigned to electron’s energy-levels in the Bohr’s Atomic model.

Chapter 65: Statistics and Waves (Max Born 1882 – 1970)

Wave Corpuscles. The waves do not represent physical vibrations but rather the unfolding of the probabilities of future events from a given initial state. The complex amplitudes of the waves obtained as solutions to Schrodinger’s wave equation can be interpreted better as the probability of finding the electron at a location.

Chapter 66: The Uncertainty Principle (Werner Karl Heisenberg 1901 – 1976)

Critique of the Physical Concepts of the Corpuscular Theory of Matter. Heisenberg discovered the foundation of quantum mechanics—the uncertainty principle.The uncertainty principle refers to a limit on the accuracy with which we can measure certain pairs of quantities simultaneously. Heisenberg introduced his square arrays or matrices, which depict the electron as existing simultaneously in all possible Bohr orbits.

Chapter 67: The Barrier around the Nucleus (George Gamow 1904 – 1968)

Quantum Theory of the Atomic Nucleus. While Gamow’s paper explains the spontaneous emission of  particles (alpha decay) from radioactive nuclei, it also validates Schrodinger’s wave equation inside the nucleus and demonstrates the correctness of Born’s concept that the Schrodinger wave function is the probability amplitude for finding a particle in a given small neighborhood of space.

Chapter 68: Electron Waves (Clinton J. Davisson 1881 – 1958, George Paget Thomson 1892 – 1975)

Diffraction of Cathode Rays by a Thin Film. Davisson: Electrons reflect from crystalline surfaces. The relationship between the angle of maximum intensity, the speed of the electrons, and the lattice spacing in the crystal are the same as that for a wave. Thomson: The rings arising from diffraction show the wave properties of the electron. The radius of the rings is inversely proportional to the velocity of the electrons. These experiments provided evidence supporting the De Broglie equation.

Chapter 69: The Electron and Relativity (Paul Adrian Maurice Dirac 1902 – 1984)

The Principle of Superposition. All one needs to know about the observable properties in order to understand their physics is the algebra that governs them (theory of operators). A system in quantum mechanics must be looked upon as simultaneously being in a whole set of states rather than in some particular state. The electron is forced in one of these states due to the perturbation of measurement. Dirac’s idea of states very brilliantly connected the Schrodinger wave function with the probability concept ascribed by Born.

Chapter 70: “Holes” in the Dirac Theory (J. Robert Oppenheimer 1904 – 1967)

On the Theory of Electrons and Protons. Dirac’s theory predicts the existence of an infinite continuum of negative energy. Dirac proposed that all but few of these negative-energy states are filled with electrons with negative energy; negative-energy states that do not have electrons represent protons. Oppenheimer pointed out that this hole theory gave a different mass dependence and led to insurmountable difficulties. He proposed to retain the picture of the electron and the proton as two independent particles of opposite sign and dissimilar mass and to picture all of Dirac’s negative-energy states as filled. 

Chapter 71: Complementarity (Niels Bohr 1885 – 1962)

Discussion with Einstein on Epistemological Problems in Atomic Physics. The discussion led to the Principle of Complementarity: There are always two complementary and mutually exclusive ways of looking at a physical phenomenon, depending on how we arrange our apparatus to measure the phenomenon. When we deal with an electron, we must use both the wave picture and the particle picture; one is complementary to the other in the sense that the more our apparatus is designed to look for the electron as a particle, the less the electron behaves like a wave and vice versa.

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MAIN POINTS

  1. The behavior of light of very short wavelength approximates the behavior of ordinary particles of matter.
  2. The wavelength associated with a corpuscle is as concrete a physical quantity as its mass.
  3. The velocity of the corpuscle is equal to the group velocity of its associated wave.
  4. Energy is connected to frequency, and momentum is connected to wavelength.
  5. At close range, the particle appears to be a wave motion.
  6. The “waves” represent the unfolding of the probabilities of future events from a given initial state.
  7. The electron seems to exist simultaneously in all possible Bohr orbits.
  8. The mathematics applied to electrons seems to work inside the nucleus as well.
  9. A quantum system is simultaneously in a whole set of states rather than in some particular state.

THEORY
The mathematical development seems to confirm that electrons are a wavelike flow that has variable consistency. Even the nucleus is a pattern of a very condensed flow.

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The SLC Policies

March 4, 2021 – 6:58 PM

Reference: Course on Subject Clearing

The following policies apply broadly to all SLCs.

POLICY # 1: The study materials for a subject follow the logical sequence in which the concepts are developed.

This policy is followed in developing the math materials from Level 00 to Level 2 at Course on Mathematics. Later levels provide materials that are selected per this policy.

POLICY # 2: The study materials are presented on a gradient such that they are suitable for a student studying them for the first time. 

These math lessons were developed to address the “holes” in the understanding of High School dropouts, but they are written in a manner that they can be used at earlier levels. The students are encouraged to read and understand these lessons under the supervision of trained supervisors who have already completed these lessons. 

POLICY # 3: Each lesson is accompanied by a large number of exercise problems with answers provided for them.

All lessons of this math curriculum are supported by plenty of exercises with answers provided at the bottom. The student does these exercises to practice the concepts of that lesson, and then checks his or her answer. The correct answers reinforce the students’ confidence. The incorrect answer provides an opportunity to find and correct the error. The errors decline rapidly as the student becomes aware of how he made the error. 

POLICY # 4: The SLC course room provides access to course materials on electronic tablets.

The SLC course room is a single large space with tables and chairs, and a white board with markers and eraser for lecture purposes. All course materials are accessed through individual electronic tablets provided to the students. 

POLICY # 5: The course room may also provide pencil and paper and dictionaries.

Students may also be provided with pencil and paper for doing exercises, and dictionaries to clear up the meaning of words. Students are encouraged to utilize the resources available with care, so that there is enough for everybody.

POLICY # 6: The students teach themselves directly from their course materials, with the use of “Word Clearing”.

The students learn to use the procedure of Word Clearing to self-learn. They apply this procedure to their course materials.

POLICY # 7: The students are assisted in their self-learning by the “Word Clearers”. 

A Word Clearer is fully trained on word clearing, and is familiar with the courses being studied. He ensures that the students understand the procedure of word clearing and are applying it. He assists any student having difficulty in understanding their course materials by helping them find the word they don’t understand and clear up the area of confusion. NOTE: The senior students in the course room may act as “word clearers” for junior students.

POLICY # 8: The SLC course room is run by a “Course Supervisor”. 

The person in charge of the SLC course room is called the Course Supervisor. He (or she) is fully trained on all the courses that are being studied in that Course room. He manages the Course room and its supplies, and ensures that the students are making progress and completing courses.

POLICY # 9: New students are started with introductory lectures on their course and the word clearing procedure.

New students go through a lecture by the Course Supervisor that introduces them to the course room, the supplies, the use of electronic tablets to access their course materials and the word clearing procedure. Additionally, the new student may be given introductory lectures on the subject he is going to study, such as, the two lectures provided at the link for Level 1 Math. There are some Diagnostics too at that link, which the new student may do while waiting for the lectures. After the lectures, the student starts on the course.

POLICY # 10: Throughout the course the student is spot-checked intermittently for his understanding of the study materials.

The discipline of word clearing is vital for a self-learner and it is reinforced on the course. The Word Clearers in the course room randomly spot-check the students on the materials they have already studied. This check is for understanding and not for memory. The student is asked to demonstrate how a concept could be applied in a given situation, or how a word representing a certain concept could be used in a sentence. This gives the student feedback in real time on his comprehension of the materials. He also learns to improve his comprehension if it is lacking.

POLICY # 11: After completing a lesson, the student is examined by the Course Supervisor for his ability to apply its contents.

When the student has completed a lesson he goes to the Course Supervisor to be examined for his skills learned on that lesson.  If the Course Supervisor  finds some minor things missing he tutors the student on the spot and then verbally quizzes him again on the whole lesson. If major understanding is found to be missing, the student is sent back to restudy the lesson under closer supervision of a Word Clearer. The Word Clearer spot checks the student’s skills (especially in math) by giving exercises to do. The student must be able to do three exercises correctly in a row before he is sent to the Course Supervisor to be examined again. Upon passing, the student is recognized for this accomplishment in front of the class. He then moves to the next lesson. 

POLICY # 12: After completing a course, the student must pass a written examination 100%.

The written exam must be objective in testing the concepts and skills taught in that course. Basically, the student is being examined in his ability to think critically in that subject. All questions asked are on contents covered in that course. None of the questions should fall outside the course. If the student scores less than 100%, he must restudy what he missed and sit for another written exam. Upon passing the written exam, the student is awarded a certificate for course completion. The course completion is announced in the course room. 

POLICY # 13: The study materials for a subject may exist in the form of simple to complex  modules for different levels.

The study materials of a subject may be developed as a series of modules starting from introduction to fundamentals to advanced levels in a subject. Each module is then delivered as a course. Before one can start on a course module, he must have completed all earlier modules in that subject. The lower skills must be mastered before the student moves to learning higher skills. When a student has completed all available course modules in a subject, he may learn the tool of Subject Clearing to make further progress in that subject on his own using the data available on Internet and elsewhere.

POLICY # 14: The SLC’s focus is on High School dropouts, but anybody able to follow the discipline of word clearing may be enrolled.

If middle and primary school students want to enroll on SLC courses, they may do so if they can at least follow the discipline of word clearing. They all share the same space. Pre-K and Kindergarten level children may not be enrolled. Instead their parents may enroll themselves on Course Modules for Pre-K and Kindergarten levels so they can teach their young children on those levels at home.

POLICY # 15: There is no competition among students in the course room. The only contest is against ignorance.

The whole focus in the SLC course room is on overcoming one’s lack of knowledge. Students are not segregated by their age or level. The students on a course may be of any age. If a ten year old can handle calculus then so be it. And if an eighteen year old still needs to complete the course module on fractions, then he stays on that module until complete. There can be students studying different subjects in the same course room. Even on the same subject, the students may be on different modules. The students progress at their own pace. They are spot-checked, quizzed and examined individually for their understanding. The progress is strictly based on their knowledge and skill.

POLICY # 16: The product of an SLC is a student who is able to learn from materials by himself.

The student is encouraged at every step to apply word clearing. He is helped with troubleshooting his difficulties. When a hole becomes visible it is traced back to earlier holes in understanding until it is handled completely. The result of all this effort is that the student starts to get a first-hand experience of what it takes to be a self-learner. On top of this, if the student does the course on Subject Clearing, he is certified as a self-learner.

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The Postulates 31 … (old)

February 26, 2021 – 6:17 AM

Please refer to Course in Subject Clearing.

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When we apply the method of SUBJECT CLEARING to the general knowledge we inevitably end up with the following postulates. 

POSTULATE # 31: Underlying an anomaly there is fixation of attention.

COROLLARY: Fixed attention generates anomalies.

Most people have their attention fixated on the body and identity. This leads to fixations on survival and politics. All reactions, as in obsessive-compulsive behavior, are fixations. When you are trying to locate an anomaly, follow the trail of fixation of attention. When you are trying to resolve an anomaly, work out the anatomy of fixations involved. Illusions arise when there are fixations. When you recognize fixations for what they are, you free yourself from them.

Fixations on body appear in the belief that one is just the body. Such a person is fixated on taking care of the body. He rarely have “out-of-body” experiences. Attention gets centered on the body as new sensations are encountered; but when that attention is suppressed it gets fixated there. Attention definitely gets fixated on the body when there are shocks, accidents, and illnesses.

In Scientology, attention gets fixated on individuality when one makes an effort to resolve present and past identities. The attention naturally settles in exploring the environment. For remedies of fixated attention refer to the POSTULATES 26, 27 and 28.

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[To be continued…]

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