Welcome

I would really like to answer your question if I could understand it. For me though it's the simpleton's approach which means simply hoping for the best!

Let me try to explain. If I wanted to understand the fundamental nature of music, I wouldn’t begin by looking at the works of Mahler, Mozart or the Beatles, and peruse how they used linguistic devices like metaphor, inversion, juxtaposition etc. nor would it be of any value to note ‘quotations’ and ‘references’ each make with regard to what went before them. Instead I would look into the nature of sound itself, the octave; and the mystery that surrounds such a study would surely be leading me towards agathos. Just as agathos underpins the Forms, number and proportion underpin the laws of harmony which must exist before all ‘individual essays’ springing forth from their common soil, as it were. This understood, the world is my lobster. I would then proceed ‘safely’ knowing that each step has been secured. It’s knowing what comes first, what is second, and what follows on from those two that the dialectic is founded upon. It is method allied to an intuition for the truth. Perhaps there is an intuition for deception also, yet if you deceive knowingly, perhaps you already know something of the truth, and this I believe answers your question as well as this being of low voltage could possibly hope to achieve. But I'll blunder on.

Surely the most important part of the dialectic is the finding and the revealing in itself. But in dialectic concerning first philosophy (matters of Being) we can never be satisfied with ‘what is found and revealed’, which strangely fall back into doxa. This is truth’s insurance policy ensuring she doesn’t get stuck in what may merely be seen and known (explanation follows). In other studies of the kind Aristotle calls second philosophy, such as physics etc, results count, and can be relied upon. First philosophy doesn’t deal in matter and nothing tangible is searched for.

Note I have avoided all talk of forensic devices, such as division, collection and the usual suspects as anyone can find all this in a tediously tall pyre of books and articles written on the subject. Here is my simple and safe approach.

You’ll notice the intriguing passage in Sophist (236 approx.) where the Stranger discusses the eidolon (image or image maker). He differentiates between likeness (eikastike) and phantom, (phantastike). In the first case the artist gets the proportions right and there is a truthfulness in the depiction. In the second, the artist manipulates proportion in order to satisfy sense perception. The first is akin to a true opinion whereas the second is the door through which the sophist slips to weave his pseudos (as per last section of Sophist). This, by the way, is what I mean by pseudos/deception, where the image ‘deforms’ the imaged and produces false opinion in the witness.

Now, returning to my earlier theme, the eidolon is a ‘solidifier’ of eidos, and as such even if it's a true or proportionate representation, it is like rice that has been cooked, no longer containing the life of eidos; and if the fruit of the dialectic is merely to unearth truthful representations, then the dialectic itself cannot be true. For when a question of Being arises such a dialectic would merely refer one back to what was revealed in some other dialectic on some other occasion, which would be an eidolon, a likeness, albeit a truthful likeness; in other words it would be merely inviting one into doxa (opinion). That’s why I say that the dialectic is a revealer, never what is revealed. The revelation is it’s own truth, and because it takes a safe path guided by intuition or insight, it must be, as you say, ‘of goodness’. I don’t see how physical sciences can truly use this method because there would be too much tendency obtain a result and such a result whose validity can be tested at will and be seen to be true (e.g. the force of gravity). Justice, according to such a method would merely be the physical weighing on the scales, and Beauty the simple mechanical adherence to fixed proportions.

Perhaps this is more than I wanted to say but it’s all I can do to make sense of your questions. The dialectic, carried out in the way I have described, must lead to something ‘good’ but to answer your rider, it is the form not the result that is good and as such it cannot be ill used. But I suspect you may not agree, from what you said earlier.

Peter Blumsom
3:48pm, 15th May 2012