I haven’t had much to say lately because of my lack of readership, sadly. But a noteworthy moment in my book group meeting last night in which one of the men — a very immature young man whose contributions have been hit or miss — pretty clearly and in detail articulated Carnap’s diagnostic notion of external question as we found ourselves going around and around on how to confirm or disconfirm some of Berkeley’s claims about the nature of objects. (We are in the Second Dialogue between Hylas and Philonous.) And when pressed then hung some detail on it as a way of cutting off the circular debate. Very cool.

Not a word usually associated with prison, but last night’s meeting filled with happiness and laughter. The man in the book group with the longest bid — 29 years — who is also the longest continuing member of the group, had gotten news that morning that his parole application (if that’s the right word) had been granted. I also learned that at his August 18 hearing with the parole board they’d read my letter of support out loud. I was glad he got to hear it. The mood was celebratory.

I too am extremely happy for him. But my feelings are mixed, not because of the loss to the group (how selfish! — I’ll allow myself only the tiniest of twinges) so much as because life outside will have to be mind bogglingly different for him, and what are his opportunities for getting a job and fending for himself? Family and friends abandoned him long ago. He’s smart, and resourceful, and has his shit together — a well developed sense of self and agency — but having gone into prison as a young man of 28, and leaving it at close to 60, well, I simply can’t imagine what will be like for him and to him.

Several people also reported laughingly that my calling out and stopping DG in his Socratic tracks (a story in which the repartee makes him look good, even when being shut down) in our last meeting had been retold in the mess hall to the delight of listeners outside of our group.

Come to think of it, it’s more the norm than the exception for the group to have laugh out loud fun discussing our lofty works and ideas. And this is another way that the prison class is like my college classes: the pleasure that comes from sharing ideas, the slips of tongue, the jokes inspired by the texts, and the fancy verbal footwork that is the good philosophy students’ stock in trade. Those meetings/classes are the most successful: the full person engagement with the text and the other members of the group. And with me, of course, too.

“Alcibiades is an idiot and let me tell you why he’s an idiot.” And later the same person, eager to praise Diotima’s account of Love, asked me after I’d disagreed with him about the merits of one of her sub arguments: “Let me ask you, when you finished this part of her speech, what did it make you think?” He was clearly laying a Socratic trap for me, to the utter delight of us all. He was not imitating the Socratic method, but seamlessly taking it up, not even conscious at first that that was what he was doing.

All seven of the men in the meeting tonight wanted to talk about the last 30 pages of the dialogue, and in particular (Socrates’s report of) Diotima’s speech, and the closing pages detailing Alcibiades drunken party crash. The four people who had a chance to read and discuss their passages (I often ask everyone to bring in some passage they found wonderful or interesting or confusing or stupid, and to be prepared to say a little about why) made excellent choices, and read and commented with on them real feeling and insight. At one point, after someone had read a passage that in my view was the most important in the dialogue, and I started to excitedly agree with the choice and passage, the longest standing member of the group, RM, gently cut me off by asking what the reader had to say about why he chose the passage. RM was dead right, of course, and I not only yielded the floor, but was reminded in a vivid way, I hope, to have taken to heart always to give the men in the group as much time as they need to express their views. It’s one of the few places they have the opportunity to work them out, and to talk critically to each other about them, and doing so is a lot more important than hearing what I have to say about the material (usually :)).

When the next person asked to read his passage, and he gave the page number, someone asked him to give the Stephanus number of the text. It’s a little hard to explain why but it was clear that the question was not meant to show off the questioner’s knowledge, rather to help the reader make that leap into using the new term. I’d introduced that terminology last week, and, as is always the case, many seized on the new vocabulary and all the information packed into it — about the invention of that pagination, the practice of professional philosophers who do scholarship on Plato, and so on — and were eager to put the new term to use, in a community that likewise uses and understands it.

And finally, waiting in the entry room to the school while the men filed out through the metal detector (something I hate to be on the bench witnessing as I wait for the van to pick me up because it is embarrassing for them to have to take their belts and shoes off, have their pens and books taken from them and examined, and so on, in front of me) an inmate not in the group asked a man from the group, DG, standing near where I was on the bench what we were reading. DG showed him the book (cover: Plato on Love) to which he asked incredulously “What would we get out of a book like that?!” DG answered that he’d learned a lot of interesting things about what a great philosopher like Plato thought about love, but mainly it makes [them] figure out their own views. For once I was glad that van had taken so long to get to the school.

Though we started this week, our second, talking about the different conceptions of love emerging from the text, one person reminded the group that the professed aim of the text is to praise Love, not to figure out what Love is. We’ll come back to this topic at our next meeting later this week.

Under consideration this week was Pausanias’s account of Heavenly vs. Common Love. Many members of the group the previous week had expressed discomfort with the homoeroticism of the text, and especially the opening discussion of love of men for boys (and conversely). I’d suggested that we focus on the more themes of the speeches, for example, the idea that love elevates by making us care enough about the regard of the beloved that we act at our most virtuous. On reflection the men rejected, with good reason, the idea that we could evaluate that proposal’s merits without thinking about the nature of the power relationships among the partners. So they though they were not thrilled to have to think about those lovers they were interested in the meta questions about why the abstract principles about love and virtue might be more apt in some pairings than in others.

Pausanias goes on to argue just as drinking, singing, or having a conversation considered in themselves are neither good nor bad, honorable nor shameful, likewise with Love. And at 181a5 he proposes that Love is worthy of praise depending on “whether the sentiments he produces in us are themselves noble.”  (My italics.) The oldest member of the group, and longest timer too, who in the decade I’ve known him has become a wide and careful reader, compared this claim to Hamlet’s famous line:

We think not so, my lord.

Hamlet:
Why then ’tis none to you; for there is nothing either good or
bad, but thinking makes it so.

I should say that he contrasted these claims, which gave rise to a lively discussion about whether Shakespeare’s point was that value judgments are nothing more than projections (a version of some sort of relativism) or rather that, as they took Pausanias to be arguing, Love could be turned to very real good or bad purposes, or take very real good or bad forms.

A final astute observation from yet another member of the group: at 183d6, we get what looks like a warm up to a summary of the main points above about Love not being intrinsically honorable or a disgrace, and yet “– its character depends entirely on the behavior it gives rise to.” (My italics again.) They wonder whether we are supposed to notice the move from the sentiments produced in us and the behavior it gives rise to, which of course notoriously — hello, akrasia — do not always track. I introduced the concept, and promised a discussion of it at another time, with text with arguments about weakness of will in front of us. In the mean time, the pens flew across their papers noting the new word and concept.

We ended with the ideas of Love as essentially valueless, and awaiting value, which will come either from the feelings it produces in us, or the behavior it induces in us (or both). And what if those things don’t match? Does it make sense to think of Love itself as empty of value? And by this point, we are indeed no longer in the realm of the man/boy.

Up next: What you got for us, Eryximachus?

Observation: discussion this night was quite similar to any in a college class with a handful of good, engaged students. The main difference: as is usually the case feelings run high about the text, about having a chance to have their views heard by the group. And these men wonder urgently about how fair Plato is being to the speakers and arguments and theories, and how seriously Plato (and the dialogue’s various mouthpieces) takes the competing accounts: ever wary of straw men, ever wary of gamesmanship bullshit.

First, every time I open a text I’ve assigned for the prison book group (or rather that the prison book group has selected from a number of options I’ve recommended) and begin reading, I am immediately struck by features of the text I’m quite confident would be silent or invisible to me teaching in my regular job at a small college of traditionally aged students, by which I mean 18-22, which at this point in American life is no doubt the exception rather than the rule about the majority of college students. Of course I critically prepare texts to teach them in my day job, and I think a lot about what students are likely not to know about history, the philosophical context, the structure of the arguments, vocabulary, and so on, all of which rise to the surface and glitter in their complexity as I prepare to discuss the works in my prison book group. But many more things likewise come to the fore that I’d not otherwise think about at all: the presumptions of safety, non violence, material  comfort, choices about how to spend one’s time, family history, and of course not least crime history. Preparing for the prison book group also reminds me that even at my college my students come from many different backgrounds and experiences, and I should of course not presume to lump them all together under the heading of being the children of privilege either: for many students that way lies a constant struggle with double consciousness. And let me note here that the old joke that to hear the men tell it there are no guilty men in prison could not be farther from the truth, in my group at least. These men all cop to their crimes, in fact, are willing to talk about them in some case in ways that make me pretty uncomfortable; but more to the point, most of these men self identify as to the core, and first and last, Criminals, and our work on the world’s great religions and various theories of human nature have had a profound impact on some of their self images.

Okay, back to the main line of thought: the first general principle is that the audience for whom one is prepping to teach a text has a near miraculous effect on what one notices in the text, what becomes salient in the text. As I mentioned in my earlier post on this week’s meeting the importance this group of readers places on keeping it real, on honesty and integrity, could not have made the contrast with Socrates’s slipperiness in this dialogue any clearer. And that in turn put me in a tricky position: how far did I want to go to defend the Socrates (or Plato) of this dialogue? If you start any discussion by tearing down the work you risk alienating the audience from the text so totally that it’s hard to see why you had them take the time to read it and study it in the first place. On the other hand, if you defend the text (and persona who emerge in it) defensively, that too, can backfire. So — and here is where the prison group work converges with any classroom — the trick was to work together to show what is good and interesting about the text, including what we can learn from its weaknesses, and in this instance, because it is a weak dialogue, that required going to the blackboard for work on a critical reconstruction of the argument, thinking about the strategy, and finally stepping back to think about the takeaway points about, in this case, love and friendship. The analysis was quite empowering: first, because the group went from feeling tricked, confused, and frustrated, to being able to enter into the conversation to call out Socrates on some of his sleazy moves. Who among us hasn’t had those bad feelings about Socrates and even Plato? How do we respond to them? Acknowledge the limitations, learn the strategies, work on cultivating your own authentic agency. And what do we learn about love from Plato? More anon.

My new nickname — because a new lobby CO referred to me thus — was reported to me laughingly last night, amusing especially the group’s long time members. And they’d likewise clearly enjoyed setting her straight on my role as (do you know that she is a) philosophy professor at Hamilton College — and the implied lofty status the reading group they’re a part of enjoys. And yet our focus last night on how to read Plato, on the structure of the arguments, made the nickname more apt than the CO could ever have guessed.

We’ve just started the Hackett collection Plato on Love, with the not very interesting dialogue Lysis. The men began the discussion with mostly strongly negative, frustrated responses to the text, and to the introduction to the whole collection too, for that matter. They pointed out, quite legitimately, that the title suggested that the book is not just aimed at an audience of professional philosophers or academics, rather at the more general reader eager to hear what one of the great western philosophers would have to say about the timeless topic of love, yet the introduction is full of (undefined) technical terms and distinctions and references and allusions to other other texts that made it pretty useless to them — including to many of the men who are not even complete novices at this point in our long association. I had to agree, and regretted not having given them a better introduction to the collection, and even one as simple as how to read Platonic (and Socratic) dialogues, which we ended up spending most of our time on last night. In my defense, I’d only gotten the text the same night they had two weeks ago, and we’d not met again until last night, before I’d had a chance to read the introduction.

So much for the unhelpful intro. What about the text? Overwhelming agreement (from the seven men present) that the character of Socrates was arguing disingenuously in much of the piece, that he equivocated to make cheap points, and overall — one man’s actual term — that he was a sophist they did not like, and more important, did not trust. They did not believe that he had a positive goal in the dialogue, that he was instead mainly out to get his obviously less nimble interlocutors (the main one of whom was only a boy). I asked them for particular evidence from text to support their charges, and several men were happy to provide it — from extensive notes in their notebooks, and in their texts. Great critical analysis especially of many of Socrates’s analogies in the discussion of friendship, which are indeed problematic, if not outright weak. Impressive work, reminding me how crucially important authenticity — being straightforward, keeping it real — is to these readers. They come to these texts wanting to advance their views about perennially difficult topics, to find out what some great minds have had to say about them, not to sharpen their rhetorical skills for fun or profit. Still, they were quite eager to talk about the use of dilemmas, and reductio ad absurdum arguments (pens flying furiously), and the value of discovering (or being forced to see) the weaknesses or strange and surprising implications of views that may have the surface look of obvious common sense. Still, they did not buy the view that learning what’s wrong with views is particularly useful unless it propels to them to better alternatives, and not just to a despairing skepticism, which several members of the group came to identify as their real problem with the dialogue – they felt as if they’d ended it pretty much empty handed on the subjects of love and friendship, or at least with no clearer or deeper views than the ones they’d started with.

And what of love, by the way, which turned out to be less of a focus in the dialogue than friendship? We’ll take up those threads next week when we start discussing the Symposium. As so often happens when I opened the book to prepare earlier this week I was struck by my own naiveté in assigning a book that begins with a happy discussion of love in the context of not just the archaic Greek “pederasty” but indeed pedophilia, treated as (love) business as usual. Oy!

I have not posted for a long time because the book group has been running at best intermittently for a few months, with volunteers regularly (more regularly than usual, that is) turned away at the front desk, men not on the call outs (sometimes all, sometimes some), or arriving with the wrong book for the wrong group. Loss of continuity is demoralizing both personally and intellectually — an unexpected gap of four weeks instead of two of course throws everyone and everything off. But last night I had six men, regulars, all of whom had the book, and had read the book, and had lots of interesting things to say about the final chilling, overwhelming section of the novel. The novel led them to think hard about personhood, and human nature, freedom, and in particular the relationship in the self among the physical, the cognitive, and, the word they chose, the heart. At first some argued that the important differences were between the physical, and the physically manifested outward behavior, and the private, interior, and you could say, true self. The book, you may remember, spends a gruesome amount of time on the tortured realignment of the belief that 2+ 2 = 5. That phase of “treatment,” I mean treatment, requires the belief change to the party line be complete: deep and genuine. And this phase of the treatment works; Winston recovers physically, and gets stronger by the day. And yet he still awaits the shot to the back of the head, unexpected yet long expected. He is released back into the world a pure shell of a reasonably bodily healthy man. But when he contemplates that inevitable death at the hands of Big Brother, he can still say “To die hating them, that was freedom” (p. 281, Signet Classics edition), this, even after he has betrayed his beloved Julia, about whom he now feels less than nothing. But Orwell’s aim is true, and the men all agreed that Winston’s humanity depended on his freedom, and his freedom was not just private, nor was it after all (just) the freedom of thought, and fundamentally cognitive, rather it was the freedom of his heart, known to be lost finally and utterly (in the words of one man) in that final line: “He loved Big Brother.”

Speaking of feelings: the two matters over which feeling ran the highest though were the question raised by the newest member of the group of why, when the party could have exerted total behavioral control over Winston and others like him, they expended so much time and effort to control him, all the way down, so to speak. They could have just killed him (as so many of the great dictators in history have). One answer was that Winston’s treatment was a useful experiment regarding the depth and reach of party control. But the other (not incompatible) one was the self perpetuating intoxicating lure of power, satisfied only with total control of people. A couple of the men read some, er, powerful, passages about power from the book to support their views.

Second, regarding thought control, one man matter-of-factly repeated, no, read (p. 264) O’Brien’s declaration that “Power over matter – external reality, as you would call it – is not important. Already our control over matter is absolute.” We have talked quite a bit in this group over the years about defenses of conceptual and cultural relativism, and sympathetically looked at the case for truth’s dependence on language and conceptual schemes. And you could certainly say that one of Orwell’s aims here is to show a terrifying logical extension the world such a view envisions. A vigorous (an understatement) debate ensued about the metaphysical and epistemological questions of whether or to what extent such control over matter, and over reality, is possible, and if it is, whether social and political abuses like those envisioned by Orwell are inevitable. We’re reading Plato on love next – the books are in their hands – but next up next: Berkeley’s Three Dialogues Between Hylas and Philonous.

April 25, 2015

The only comparable experience I’ve had to prison bureaucracy irrationality is peri Glasnost Soviet Union, where the existence and enforcement of policies were head-spinningly unpredictable, and inconsistencies were adamantly explained and defended against all evidence to the contrary. Does the prison system want to keep volunteers out? Of course I can’t generalize about The Prison System. And I can’t know for sure anything about even the prison I work in. The men in the book group have no doubts whatsoever that the system wants to keep us out. But that is probably to be expected. And while there are wild differences in how particular COs treat the prisoners, and us volunteers, I have to agree that the men’s views are not paranoid.

Here’s the evidence. To get into the education building many things have to happen every time a volunteer shows up: At the minimum: 1. a gate clearance for the volunteer in the lobby guards’ book, 2. call outs for each of the men (in their dorms and a copy of same in the hands of the guards in the education building, 3. successful security clearance in the lobby, and 4. availability of a van and CO driver for safe transport to the education building; all reasonable measures. But the first two often fail to get logged or get lost or not put through in any given week with any given volunteer. Gate clearances are put through for particular volunteers for particular dates, usually covering a four month period. And inquiries about how on earth one month in there is no clearance suddenly are always met with a version of “I KNOW! It makes no sense: I have no idea what happened!” And god forbid you try to reschedule a meeting even weeks in advance and with complete reassurance from the coordinator that all is in place. I have never succeeded in getting in under such circumstances, so now if in spite of making it a high priority I can’t make a particular session I just cancel. Reluctantly, still, no point in trekking out and being turned away, which is all but guaranteed. Then sometimes the gate clearance is in place, but no call out — so you get to the ed building only to find your room empty. And finally there are the security clearance, and transport problems. We can’t bring anything in other than the book, and every once in awhile a particular guard who’s know you for years will insist that he can’t let you in without your drivers license even though we all have security clearance IDs hanging up right behind him in a cabinet. Then there is the hyper sensitive metal detector, and the CO’s latitude in wanding you if you should set it off even though you set it off in spite of having taken your shoes and glasses, etc. off. Some weeks the metal detector machine is not even turned on. Other weeks a guard will send you home invoking a rule that prohibits wanding, even though a few weeks earlier the same guard wanded you. But if you so much as say “Huh.” you risk a heightening of scrutiny for the foreseeable future that will keep you (or — same effect — the men) out. That’s why, deeply contrary to my contrarian nature, I keep my head down and never challenge the lobby CO on, well, anything, including staying silent when they make insulting remarks about the men in the group — the equivalent to solidarity testing racist jokes. So last week when I heard about a volunteer who for the millionth time had been kept from meeting with her group after having complained to a prison administrator about seemingly arbitrarily enforced security procedures I was surprised that several of the men defended her challenge, even though it had resulted in subverting her aims of not being arbitrarily prevented from getting in — her very own goal! When I argued that keeping your head down on an injustice in order to be able to meet a larger moral goal was not selling out your principles for mere expedience, rather it was putting aside some principles to meet a higher pragmatic (and moral, not but moral!) principle, they would have none of it. And they dug their heels in on that support for her: arguing that even if it meant that she never got in to her group again, she was doing the right thing to call him out on his wrongdoing. They do what they can, often at great personal risk, to hold authorities responsible for wrongdoing, and saw her action in solidarity with theirs. And they rejected the pragmatist “higher principle” line of argument. A truly thought provoking discussion, not least in connection with beginning the discussion of our text this week, 1984, a connection they were happy to point out to me.

Am I going to change my obsequious behavior? No. But I now wonder if it is somehow a selfish compromise.

The prisoners sign up purely out of interest; no credit, no parole bump, etc. attaches to attendance. There have been posters up advertising the groups (there are, at any given time 2 or 3 other book groups running other nights or weeks, none on philosophy though :)) but the main way people come into the group is through word of mouth. I aim for group continuity across each of the books — in other words I open up the enrollment to new people only when we are about to start a new book. A very imperfect system.

It is always a challenge to get the books into the members’ hands. I can’t bring anything into the meetings except my own copy of the book, and the way the books are distributed by the authorities in the prison bears at most a passing resemblance to the reality of who is in the group. So some men who haven’t been coming for a long time (say, because of a job conflict) are given copies, and new people get them mid way through the new book — or never. The call outs (sheets listing who can leave their dorms to come to the ed building, a necessary condition for being let into the building) are also usually laughably out of date — including men who have not come to meetings for a year, and several of whom had long ago been transferred. It is hard to get into the group, but nearly entirely bureaucratically so. When we meet weekly in the summer the group is generally at capacity of 12 (with about 10 showing up in any given week), but otherwise there is room.

Okay, back to group constitution: there are between 4 and 12 in any given meeting, and they range in age from 18 to 60. Education level likewise covers a huge range: some have failed the GED multiple times, some have had some college, and some — two — not at the same time, but two periods of about a year, have law degrees. About half the men are black, a couple are Jewish, some Christian, and some Muslim, and one committed Wiccan. Most of the men have been in prison for some time, even the younger men, and many of them are repeat offenders (more on that in a later post). Though I could easily find out what anyone in the group is in prison for, I have chosen not to be told by the prison, or the men, what they are in prison for, rather, I rely on the system not to allow anyone in the group who poses a threat to me. It’s a medium security prison, but many members of the group started out in max prisons, in particular, Attica.

The most committed member of the group, and probably the person I’ve seen the biggest transformation in, is in his late 50’s and has been in prison for 29 years (and has had two visitors in that time). Though he doesn’t seem to have any friends in prison either, he is clearly respected by the men in the group. He was a drug addict when I first met him — for one thing he has MS, and was on a range of drugs prescribed to him, including some, as they say, controlled substances — but he is now off everything.

I started doing the philosophy book group meetings at three upstate NY, mid level security, mens prisons in 2003. For three or four years I met with the groups a few times a year, always in the presence of a paid staff member from the facility, and the main order of business was a lecture on some assigned reading followed by a Question & Answer, followed by some discussion. I managed to scare up ten copies of the first text in question – The Trial and Death of Socrates – through libraries, distributed by the education coordinator for the system a few weeks before the meetings, and collected by me on the evenings of the meetings: an imperfect, seat-of-the-pants operation, run on a strictly volunteer basis (with no participation of my home institution then, Hamilton College). The first leap into a more regular, systematic schedule began in one of the prisons in which the librarian took over recruiting for and organizing the group in 2005. I then started volunteering in that prison only, meeting with my group every other week around the same times that other Hamilton faculty started volunteering to do other topics with other groups, and the college gave us an official budget line for book purchases (at around the same time that we volunteers had also gotten quite good at soliciting book donations from publishers). The librarian wanted the prison to keep the books on reserve for future book group use, but we faculty all felt strongly that it was more important to have the men own and be able to keep the books. Who won that battle? Hard to say — or rather it was a toss up – the librarian selectively repossessed a fair number of books, but many men have managed to have been able to keep their copies. It was gratifying to have interesting adults tuned in to and eager to exploit my expertise. But in many ways it was more personally than philosophically interesting. In spring 2012 at the facility I’d been regularly meeting (in the library) we managed to convince the Deputy Superintendent of Programs to move the operation into the (prison) school building where we could meet as often as once a week, and with no supervising staff. The removal of staff turned out to have a huge, good effect on the group’s willingness to speak because – I learned – many of the men were afraid of the librarian, thought she engaged in favoritism, and did not in general trust her. From that point forward I began meeting with the group with no official institutional presence in a school building classroom down the hall from the nearest Correctional Officer, and also meeting weekly during the summer months. Finally we were working on philosophy together; we were doing philosophy together.