Beyond Socrates’ Dia-Logos

Luigi Giannachi

Beyond Socrates’ Dia-Logos

The locations of mind

Original title: Oltre il Dia-logos di Socrates

Translated by: Francesca Tramontana

Publisher: Tektime

In the time crystal, by which our present existence is characterized, where each of us tends to draw on knowledge through inner reflections and light refraction around us, in a society where real and virtual boundaries are continually lost and confused, it’s on you, my dear reader, to establish how false or true is the document signed by the great Socrates that my friend Ghìgnos Kairòn sent me with his memories and his philosophical scenes. I, for one, merely wrote the letter for him, which you’ll find at the end of philosophical scenes, right after index.

“You and I believe that knowledge belongs to everybody, irrespective of race, color or creed. Plato does not address himself to one ethnic group alone, nor does Shakespeare appeal to one religion only. The teachings of Gandhi and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. do not apply just to Indians or African-Americans. Like cognitive science, theoretical physics or algebra, the creations and philosophical ideas of the ages are part of our collective heritage and human memory. We all learn from the same masters.” (E.Wiesel)

I don’t exist...

I realized, sailing up the time, what you could do without your body. Nevertheless, I don’t want to say that the spirit can live in a vacuum, standing on ideas fantasies, without any toil of everyday living. It might look good, but it isn’t feasible.

I can do without my body’s needs...

The endless passing of time could suggest that body’s needs tend to run out with age, but it isn’t. Until the last moment of our existence, we strive to satisfy even the smallest desire appeared in our mind trails (htor), not to say in our entrails (htron). There must be some kind of connection between these two body parts. Whenever our ego requires attention and concentration, for an act of will (thumòs) dictated by thought (fren) to mind (noos), is necessary an act of inner purification, which involves every part of our body. Thereby, frenes can contain emotions, the kradie can give them its rhythm and the thumòs can give the required energy to flow freely, without leaving anything to chance. Even the waste disposal from our body seems a precondition to idea formation in our mind. Over and over, I consider how the body’s needs should be combined with soul, before I joined a banquet to which I was invited, so that the needs didn’t confuse soul in its flourishing.

I can distract my personal need to give myself to other’s fulfilment...

… for other I mean who is beside me in silence, or who is going to confront myself with dialogue, or even a community of people looking for a way to coexist without stepping on anybody's toes. Such research can only rely on a solid base, stronger than the base of a column, the truth.

SOCRATES

Dear friend,

You passed near my small town lying on sea in 1980. You maybe wouldn’t even had slept over for a week in my town if you only had known what would be happened during your stay, but fate wouldn’t have had it any other way. Is fate perhaps the king of the world, the god of all time? I sometimes think so, but I know that this goes beyond your rational thought.

However, you and your family slept over in my house. You were about to finish classical studies, which allowed you to know classical Greek, my ancestors language. Your curiosity for any archaeological finding, though small and futile, was unlimited, so I was happy to guide you in Olympia archaeological site. For me, it was the home where my ancestors have celebrated competitions between the most important athletes and poets of the time. Do you remember? I pointed out to you, how that was a place where not only bodies’ strength and agility to win a competition were celebrated, but even musicians’ memory and art in creating and reviving emotions.

We talked in English between us, because school taught us this language to speak with strangers. After all, we were nothing more than strangers when we met, before started playing beach soccer. English was the language that allowed us to communicate without gesticulating. You were disappointed to see your knowledge of Greek vanished when you discovered that the language spoken now is very different to that of Homer! On your visit to the museum, you were still looking for any trace of a distant meaning or any particular sign to connect with the myth. Just you, coming from another country, wondered how philosophy was born among the temples of Acropolis and the Ionian colonies, among oracles places and competitions in the name of the gods, among Delphi, Olympia, Miletus and Athens.

I must admit, your questions seemed to me meaningless in those days. I don’t know what happened since then. I had a family, as everyone else, I had children, a beautiful wife, a job that gave everything for my family. Those questions were still unanswered. Technology has made huge footsteps since then, so that I don’t know how those gadgets, with which children and grandchildren spend most of their time without a moment of respite, work. Ten years ago, I started looking for some of those answers on Internet, but, to my surprise, there wasn’t solution to those questions.

Will you ask why ten years ago?

Perhaps, you remember that while we were playing soccer in our home yard, at some point you smashed a column chalk base belonged to my family from many generations. That episode was a cataclysm for our families’ relations, because within 24 hours everyone ended up arguing, my parents with yours, your parents’ friends with mine, even my older brothers argued among themselves because they blamed on who had allowed us to play in the backyard, where even they never could play. Only we were be able to say goodbye as friends. Actually, we have been able to keep an epistolary relationship over the years, sometimes without writing for a long time.

Everyone had sent the episode into time oblivion, not time of eternity, Plotinus’ Aiòn so to speak, not the time of opportunity, the Kairòn of my name, but rather in Xronos, the time that leaves inexorably without memories.

Instead, the fate has played another dirty trick on us. Ten years ago, someone from the cemetery called me to let me know that, within a few days, should destroyed the grave of my distant ancestor. I started to ask various cousins who was this distant relative, whose existence I didn’t even remember. At last, my fourth degree cousin let me know, after discussing with her still-living grandmother, that the ancestor had been present in the works on Acropolis made by British people during Turkish rule, when they had stolen a caryatid from Erechtheum with some parts of Parthenon’s pediments. In the end, it seems that he had taken as dowry the chalk base for the participation in those works, which he had then lodged in his home yard. Of course, it can’t be said that the base was there in accordance with the law, but maybe was it right that parts of our old constructions would come out of Greece? According to my ancestor obviously no. Therefore, that self-commissioned theft was an act of protest towards who was heading the works.

This is where you come in. Yes, because you destroyed with a ball, like Franco Causio1, that chalk base which was in our backyard, in a kind of remembrance of yesteryear. Do you remember? We had given you that nickname while playing beach soccer in front of the sea at sunset, when the heat gave us a break. Only that we wanted to keep doing our goal kicks even when the game on beach was finished. The base was just one of the goal posts in our two players’ game. What we ever care about what could have represented that copy exported from Acropolis at night time by an ancestor who, moreover, I haven’t even had the pleasure of meeting? However, he was one of my distant relatives, part of the family. You know how much is sacred the family for us.

I remember it as if it were yesterday. I assist reluctantly my ancestor’s tomb opening, because they had converged the remains into a common grave. They make me sign a document to consent the opening and the remains’ transfer, then they ask me if I can prove the full right to be a direct descendant of that archaeologist, so they ask me if I want bring with me some kind of memento. I wasn’t in my right mind. I can’t understand where they were going with this. I was just leaving when a small bag appeared next to the skeleton, similar to those used for maps and rifle bullets. They asked me if he was a hunter. I said that he was rather a strange archaeologist, for all I knew. They give me reluctantly the bag, from which I realized that they are bound to do so, but whatever. They are funeral company workers, authorized by Local Administration to legalize ancient disused graves. They could never have imagined what they were to deliver.

Surprise, surprise! Do you want to know what was inside? Two paper things, very darkened and wasted by sand. One was an artistic drawing represented a column base. A copy in chalk to be kept in the museum, almost a perpetual memory of Greece greatness. I recognized immediately the base, which in that case wouldn’t be in a museum, but in my home yard, until you destroyed it with the ball. All this stuff was for them only ancient papers left besides a skeleton for trivial and indeterminable reasons. It was for me a memory lane of a life lived many years ago, when two kids played soccer as if they were two players in the stadium. Moreover, you didn’t scoring, that shot had badly ended up in goalpost, pushed there by your destructive power.

As I learned in philosophy, any destructive power can be solved in a creative power, if well directed and managed in its explosive power. The other sheet, extracted from the bag, was even more interesting, so that I was crossed by a shiver just seeing the signature at the bottom of the time wasted sheet, older than the first one. I kept that moment of epiphany hidden for me, because I could feel funeral workers’ eyes on me, so I tried to divert my interest from that sheet and acted as if nothing had happened. I shook my head as for communicate my indifference for those old papers and they didn’t notice anything in my behaviour. I thus resolved to verify the accuracy of that signature and the authenticity of that written text when I was in my home, maybe with someone who knew classical Greek more than me.

It took me 10 years to realize if it was true or not what I had glimpsed that afternoon. I did evaluate that old paper by not one, but at least twenty professors from the best European and American universities, until their judgement was unanimous. Their translation is the one I sent to you. The signature at the bottom of that single page is in fact the only original text with that signature. I couldn’t believe in this fortune. I had become the owner of an original writing of the greatest philosopher of the ancient world! It was he who, according to the knowledge so far, had left nothing written! That little sheet darkened by time could maybe change the history of philosophy, but certainly not the flourishing of ideas in the coming time.

So I imagined to do a personal journey in the history of philosophy, beginning with my land and philosophers who here started to ride with their minds the space and time around them, without ever losing sight of the minds of those surrounding them and after them. However, you told me of other philosophers, who in some way had continued the work of Greek philosophers. I have thus been looking for the characters you told. I remembered the divine poet who lived in your born region, to whom some Greek philosophy’s text had come through Arab masters. Then, in the mist of my memories, laid a philosopher unfairly punished by the Church for his free thought. On the same way, another philosopher died in 1900 when the most modern philosophy intertwined with psychoanalysis. I spent the last 10 years of my life searching for the characters you told me about, like a kind of personal initiation in the complex world of philosophy, changing house in the meantime, sometimes forgetting what I was discovering and rediscovering from time to time.

Then, I magically found some comments, amongst thousand notes strewn on the house floor during a removal, which seemed appropriate to explain why these surreal dialogues were born. I don’t know when I wrote them, but they were there, ready to be used, written, who knows how long, with a typewriter, to deliver an apparent meaningless jumble of ideas.

It may be important getting something useful to achieve own objectives (and sometimes it is), as well as learning a method to be used in that activity, but this can’t be the only hope. It needs to be accompanied by the intention of transmit knowledge to a multitude of people or possibly even to one, in order to have a result from our efforts.

It isn’t enough that the best works came from authors inner depths, it’s necessary that from the beginning they are surrounded by an universal breath, in terms of accepting whole population’s ambitions or at least the people who try to live retracing own roots or looking for a developmental point of view for tomorrow’s humanity, rather than to be simply satisfied to survive for the money.

I think that, rediscovering man’s universal and biological history, we can face a new future, defining new foundations for a less opportunistic and more universally decent life. Ultimately, I don’t think that we are made for “licking devil’s excrements” (money was so defined in medieval times). Power and money, like everything else, should be used for acting in the name of all living beings.

It wasn’t the first time I went into a whirl of considerations about a society that increasingly disregarded my expectations, but it was maybe the first time that I saw a glint of light at the end of the path. That magic allows you to not give up, my friend, it gives you the strength to keep looking ahead, to search, to try, to create a new begin.

Fear is the first thought that covers mind in a so nagging manner as to envelop it as it was inside a gloomy wood. About what? Of not to be able to express our potential once we understand we weren’t invincible. If we all, sooner or later, understand that we are vulnerable, everyone reacts to this fear in a different way: some people prefer to escape from their destiny, others think to be able to control the world and others set out on self-discovery journey. Yes, I know, but it’s useless to say it, we are constantly afraid of death.

Worldly repute is but a breath of wind.

When we think on our body, we are afraid of losing it and, at the same time, we can’t advance it, to make it evolve. Death really permeates us conceptually, just because we attach an exaggerated relevance to our physical body, without thinking about our invisible part, even less about the invisible part of an entire population. If thought is the beating heart of a person, culture is the beating heart of a population. Thus, if you used thinking only for the purpose to support your ego instead of contribute to universal culture enrichment, we have lost another opportunity to pulse humanity.

On the contrary, if we expand our point of view to the Earth we live in, death becomes one of the smallest phenomena that have ever existed on this planet, I should say that the planet survives precisely because of beings’ death and rebirth whose live in its surface.

Fear and death are the two thoughts that have always influenced human work. How do we make sure they don’t influence us again?

Homo liber de nulla re minus, quam de morte cogitat, et eius sapientia non mortis, sed vitae meditatio est.2

In our society impoverished of contents, where appearance is more important than being, become immortal is now a biological need, as if we can’t leave our mark in some other way than preserve our body. Actually, there are potentially endless ways to become immortal, which have more to do with psyche and memory, or even the soul of a person. Immortality results from fulfilment capacity during our mortal existence. Paradoxically, we could become immortal during our mortal life, even if we see the effect of what we did only at a later stage.

Death isn’t something to be ashamed of, but rather a limit in our possibility to learn. Our possibility to teach in distance doesn’t end with death, to people we will never know, but inevitably they will keep us in their heart, if they have seen sincerity and passion in our teaching.

However, I think that has never been taken into account how great is the man’s ability to learn and evolve, and how much this ability depends on the relationship with the other, with those around us, with those who make us feel good, but even with those who try to oppose us. In trying to survive to himself and to the world, the individual suffers constant metamorphosis to which he’s exposed, because he intentionally agrees to participate in the research of a motor and spiritual equilibrium. Body gradually ceases, wastes away over the years, but the spiritual growth should, at the same time, be able to proceed indefinitely. However, if man made so much progress in technology, his adaptability and learning ability from every situation deserves credit, regardless how he came to find out something.

It isn’t new that some discoveries were made by necessity during war periods or that discoveries can happen randomly, pursuing other objectives considered ex-post less worthy. This doesn’t mean that war or serendipity are useful in that connection, it’s rather remarkable that man can sometimes make a virtue of necessity.

Lost in the whirlwind of the huge and frightening amount of information that daily comes from every planet corner, man risks to lose his ability, unique in animal world, to select information, from every source, and to make them useful for the common good and for his knowledge application. If it’s true that every individual has infinite potential at birth to prune during lifetime, with the choices that have been made during his personal evolution, what outcome can ever have choices no longer dictated by his own experience or social logic but conditioned from the mass media grapevine visited without a constructive criticism? In a kind of existential impasse the fake news, the wickedness from an already determined fate, the selfish actions of overbearing people are going to prevail in the collective imagination, as if there wasn’t any alternative.

The greatest danger, in which we may end up, is to arouse fears towards the other and the different, increasing conflicts between schools of thought and between religions, giving more importance to errors and sins’ negative valence, forgetting virtues’ enrichment capacity and the potential of living beings.

A little magic light, found in the whirl of thoughts, spurred me to start a journey to plumb the multiple learning capacity that humanity has produced in activities sometimes distant between them, but with a focal common ground: human mind.

Like every good traveller, I also have a fear that I could got lost without your help. I would even say: after the terror of death, the fear of getting lost, without any reference point, ends up becoming the greater anguish able to oppress our ambitions. There is no son, in his destiny realization, who may forget to thank at least once his father, the one who saw him born or grow up. There is no poet, musician or painter who, in the childhood of their being artists, can forget the emotion of the first time at reading that poem, listening that music or viewing that painting. Contingent references of our mortal life render immortal the memory transmitted to others.

The family, that I’m going to surround myself to make this journey, are the adventure companions you have shown me, at times they will get lost with me in the windings of the human mind, at other times they will be the propitiators of concepts and philosophical figures intended to be developed in the future, perhaps by readers who are still waiting to born.

They will lead me through these secrets, in the turning point of these dialogues, to know characters who have given a push for humanity with their actions and their writings. The unexpected look of these encounters will be the simplicity with which I have discovered their invention of the world and the dullness with which the world has noticed them.

Just as illness sometimes arises from the inability of mind to clean up the past dejections and troubles getting the knowledge up the streets of experience, so we can maybe find solutions for social malaise accepting the inheritance of philosophical discoveries left behind but still available for getting up the social development.

N1 He’s an Italian, World Cup winning former footballer who played for Juventus for many years in the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s. Regarded as one of Italy's greatest ever wingers, throughout his career, he was give the nickname "The Baron", because of his stylish moves on the pitch, as well as his well-educate

N2 A free man thinks of death least of all things; and his wisdom is a meditation not of death but of life. B. Spinoza, The Ethics, Part IV, Prop. LXVII.

1. Open-mindedness

Even this, like every journey, started without any notice or forewarning.

«Maybe we would like to get some help at birth, but the awareness of living, in that moment, is so far away that be able to breathe is more important, crying and yelling» I heard his voice, which I had never heard, whispering to me like a brotherly friend.

At 49 years old, just when I would have been, in a handful of months, in the half way through the journey of our life (even supposing that life ended at 100 years old) I found that I was in a wood of thoughts, so confused was the way to take for the knowledge of myself and for the depth human cognition. I couldn’t tell when the poet stood before me to cheer me up, but he was there in a moment without being requested...

...Then quieted a little was the fear, which in the lake-depths of my heart had lasted...

I didn’t immediately realize who I had by my side

so full of slumber was I at the moment,

but in the escape from barbarism, that it is usual nowadays, I looked back for a moment realizing what I feared, what I was leaving behind,

to look again upon the step which was never permitted anyone alive.

I, only then, had the awareness that, if I hadn’t broke step, I would have risk to die: not physical death, but the spiritual one, surely worst and, however, often prior to body’s death. I realized inside myself, at the same time, how important was life. You don’t know it until facing fear and labours are going to become bigger, ‘til you almost have the feelings it gets out of hand, that you can’t control it, but that you can get inside like a tiny little element of nature, like a canoe on the river.

Some time had now from early morn elapsed, and with those very stars, that in his escort were, the sun was rising, when Love Divine in the beginning moved those beauteous things.

It was spring when God gave the first movement to sun and stars, it was the right season to start a never done journey.

The wild beasts that I had to beat not far from where the ascent began weren’t any easier as the Leopard, the Lion and the she-Wolf, if they were transferred in today’s time. They were the fake profit, the petty cunning and the exploitation of media and laws brought to such a vile acts, that I lost the hope I had of winning to the top.