“Someone is speaking but she doesn’t know he’s there.” —Here, There, and Everywhere, The Beatles
The great Renaissance genius Leonardo da Vinci said truth is what we see with our own two eyes.
The Renaissance (aprox. 1400—1600) was a great and remarkable time because it threw off the fake, hearsay wisdom of Aristotle, and trusted simple looking.
But why did it take so long to chuck Aristotle? His authority lasted for hundreds and hundreds of years.
Because hearsay is how highly complex groups communicate, think and live.
Yes, reader. Hearsay is how you think. You have no choice. What else do you have? Do you think you know everything?
Love happens in the eyes.
Seduction and false love happens with words.
Words are hearsay. Professors and journalists and authors may not want to hear this, but all words, not just some, all words, all combinations of words, are hearsay.
Because we read something in the New York Times, or we hear our professor say it, we believe it to be true.
It is not that “it” does not have a very good chance for a certain amount of time to seem true; what matters is that it is an “it,” a thing of words, and what is not included in “its” carefully chosen arrangement contradicts “it,” (if the words don’t contradict themselves, which they often do).
What the “wise” words do not mention is real, but unknown.
All we get is the “it,” the words, what may possibly be believed and what easily can be believed, and this “it” is hearsay—not partially, but entirely. The writer or speaker is not necessarily lying. And if we don’t find an evidence of an outright lie, this may lull us into a false belief that it is not hearsay. But it is. Because it is made of words. Whether it offends or not, it is hearsay.
Da Vinci was right.
And when we see the hearsay repeated—if what we read in the New York Times, is seen again in the New Yorker, the Atlantic, the Economist, the Nation, the Times of India, ABC News and Fox News, we think this is somehow proof that it cannot be hearsay.
We think the repeating makes the hearsay legitimate.
But hearsay does not escape being hearsay if it repeats.
The very opposite is true. As they say, lies travel with lighter wings.
The “fixed stars” of Aristotle was a “truth” for hundreds and hundreds of years.
But hearsay didn’t die out with Aristotle.
Today—dear reader, what do you know about the stars?
Hearsay is not necessarily a lie; it’s merely an incomplete assertion—and often it is not innocently incomplete.
True knowledge is impossible.
Ambition is not.
Hearsay is not avoided by the ambitious. It is embraced.
Since the world is vast and complex—so much so that it cannot be grasped—-it is easy for an educated but bad person to believe that all ideas must be incomplete, since knowledge is limited—and so bad behavior is excused by the knowledge that there is finally no knowledge.
We should listen to da Vinci. We should look.
Our lives depend on it.
The president condemns violent protest. The paper which reviles him says the president opposes all protest. Those who oppose the president read and believe the president opposes all protest. Hearsay exists when anyone, on any topic, speaks and is heard. The speaker and listener—wherever speech is present—live in hearsay.
Because all speech is hearsay, all public dialogue finds both sides are always wrong, and always right—depending on feelings.
“But the president condemned violent protest!” say the president’s defenders.
“No. We know what the president really meant: to oppose enthusiastic protest against himself and his friends!”
And on it goes.
“Enthusiastic” protest is justified, everything enthusiastic is justified, because hearsay needs to be enthusiastic to sell, to have wings, to make us feel emotional and alive.
Emotion is real. And hearsay, which is not real, becomes real, simply by wearing emotion.
Emotion, needing to be fed, begins to actively seek out greater and greater hearsay. Lies are believed—just so we can feel. Feeling, in the absence of true knowledge, is all we’ve got.
Hearsay is not merely empty talk; it does great harm—as poetry. Yes, poetry. This is why Plato is famous for faulting it.
Emotion persuades through hearsay; emotion and hearsay make a potent mixture.
Emotion is the frightening noise of the animal—but emotional hearsay is elegantly and insidiously human.
Fear needs an object, and hearsay provides it: fear makes hearsay more effective because the blindness of fear feeds the blindness of hearsay.
Socrates, in his case against Homer in Plato’s Republic, quotes beautiful passages by the great poet Homer—which depict the Homeric gods as sorrowful and weak. Socrates complains this is a bad example for children—on a very simple level, Socrates objects to low morale; with the wisdom of the child, Socrates condemns reproduced unhappiness, or to put it more simply, unhappiness.
Plato objects to Homer and most poetry, not because it is hearsay (though it certainly is) but because it is unhappy.
We know very little. But we should know, at the least, even in the face of hearsay, that to be unhappy is bad.
Poetry is bad for very simple reasons. Socrates makes an exception to his banning of poetry in the Republic—he permits, (in his imaginary, poetic Republic) the kind of poetry which praises and depicts heroic behavior.
Hearsay with a good result is good.
It finally comes down to bravery and morale.
Aristotle claimed literary tragedy is purgative—fear stirred up by fiction somehow causes less fear. Plato felt Aristotle’s scientific justification of unhappy poetry was—hearsay.
Plato and Aristotle rarely agree. A diligent comparison of these two is the beginning of wisdom.
The criminal, looking to advance criminality, will rejoice in poetry of fear and low morale. Producers of drama which terrify and demoralize inject criminality into art; this was Plato’s moral view.
Shakespeare’s tragedies are not good because they are filled with horror; they are good because the poetry and the plot defeat the horror. Shakespeare’s plays are like Platonic Dialogues. Good poetry defeats bad poetry. It’s confusing, It’s why Shakespeare and Plato are so good.
Hearsay also belongs to libel and slander, the real-life, legal counterpart to the kind of poetry Socrates wants to ban.
What is slander, but a fictional condemnation? What is libel, but bad poetry?
Bad poetry and hearsay are present in mere folly. But hearsay and bad poetry are also present in the worst kinds of crime, and the worst sorts of sentiments which lead to crime.
Poetry is serious business.
This brings us back to da Vinci and actual proof—great art looks—it uses perspective to escape the blindness of hearsay and fearful emotion.
Love, beauty, and the heroic are seen in ways just enough to be loving, beautiful, and heroic—they do not live in hearsay—which Plato and Shakespeare (slander is condemned often in the Sonnets) both believed was the greatest threat to human happiness.
Socrates invokes the simple wisdom of the child against sophistical reasoning. And further, the worth of Homer’s poetry (for poetry does have worth) emerges with greater interest and understanding in the hyper-critical testing of Homer by Socrates—who certainly understood that banning increases interest in something. Banned, poetry will be loved all the more, and the higher critical lens developed by Plato is worthy in itself, increasing the value of poetry, and the value of seeing poetry—which is seen for what it is. Criticism and poetry both need each other.
Just as the visual arts belong to the geometrical science of the world as a whole, (painting, according to da Vinci, belongs to astronomy) poetry is best judged in the same way—by how it sees (which in poetry is not very much!) and by how it dispels hearsay in a manner which constantly keeps hearsay in view. This is why the best poets secretly write against poetry.
Hearsay is hasty in its conclusions.
Science, graceful and slow, even where things are quick, is not.
Hasty is unkind.
Haste is not efficiency. Efficiency is a thousand times faster than rude and ignorant haste.
Science is slow, like love.
If you don’t have the patience for the philosopher Plato, hearsay will likely be your god.
You will weep. Because you don’t hear Socrates. But do not weep.
Happy Thanksgiving! —Scarriet Editors November 21st 2018