Just some quick thoughts here. Peter Elbow challenges the intellectual community to attack his notion that "good thinking" should be constituted by both doubting and believing and not just doubting. He points out that James Berlin accused him of being a Platonist who believes that knowledge is private... It seems to me that either Elbow misunderstood him, or Berlin is confused about what it means to be a Platonist.
Plato saw knowledge as innate, but not private. True knowledge did not come from inside one's self, but rather from seeing the higher realities in the world of forms. While self knowledge was part of the path to truth (the unexamined life is not worth living…), the social component was the key, in that one must participate in the dialectic process. If that process is solipsistic, the process fails. This is why Plato condemns writing. Writing is, at least in its creation, a solo flight. It may later be subject to the social meat grinder, but in its purest form it denies any voice but the writer’s. Thus, if the only attack we can make on Elbow’s epistemology is the one Berlin launched, we are in trouble!Back to Elbow... his challenge engages the very same doubt system he wants to challenge in order to test his ideas. If we were to agree with his epistemology and engage him on his own terms, we must not say what is wrong with his ideas, but to say what is more right with another epistemology. To be fair, he is not replacing doubting with believing; nevertheless, we can only "attack" his epistemology by believing him, and simultaneously posing yet another more attractive notion. What that new notion or epistemology would be now becomes our problem and not his.
So the problem (Elbow asked for "someone [who] would try using it [the doubting game] on my argument to see what we can learn) that we are to solve is: to find the error in his epistemology. His epistemology is that knowledge is available either through doubt or through belief. The easiest attack I can suggest is to divide and conquer. First I can take on doubt as a methodology.Epistemology based on doubt goes back to Descartes and Plato. For Plato, the Socratic method exposed all faulty systems to continual definition, rendering these systems and or statements derived from those systems either empty or contradictory. Of course, Plato never allows his own writing to be exposed to the same refining fire, at least not in his own text. As Jasper Neel points out in Plato, Derrida, and Writing, Plato steals writing from the rest of us and hogs it for himself...
Neel asks, “but why is Plato so reluctant to speak himself? Why does he always pretend not to be there? What is he hiding? And above all, why is he so careful as a writer to write what “looks” like speech?” Neel’s answer is “because behind it the man holding the pen is not concerned with the witty banter of two dead men but rather with the project of defining what counts as thinking…” Later, Neel says, “Plato, master writer that he is, has manipulated us without our realizing it…that is the evil of Phaedrus: its delightful surface turns those who look for the man with the pen into mean spirited cavilers. But there was a man with a pen…”(12).
The man with the pen proposed an epistemology based on innate knowledge tested through the use of reason and dialectic. When we examine Plato’s example of dialectic, it is no dialectic at all. It is a man with a pen. The interlocutors are fictive. Only Plato’s voice survives. Thus, Plato’s “soul writing” perhaps returns to Berlin’s critique- a voice in the desert claiming authority over writing.
This charade of Plato’s is the case in most uses of the doubting game that Elbow speaks of. For Descartes, his attempt at epistemological certainty (cogito ergo sum) fails despite his rigorous methodological skepticism. Like Plato, Descartes retreats into the individual perceptions of clear and distinct ideas which are supported by other clear and distinct ideas.
Okay, so doubt doesn’t lead to certainty. Can belief?
No comments:
Post a Comment