> Yup. I'm on a slippery slope I know. But in one of the Dialogues
> Socrates compares a dialectician to a carver -- the good carver divides
> the meat at the joints rather than splintering the bones.
Adorno wrote about this moment, pp 53-54 "Negative Dialectics" (note that the Greek terms and titles are a hash):
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"Plato, the first to inaugurate mathematics as a methodological model, powerfully expressed the qualitative moment of the ratio at the beginning of the European philosophy of reason, in that he put sunagoge^ [to advocate, support] next to diairesis [a dividing] with equal rights. They follow the commandment, that consciousness ought, in keeping with the Socratic and Sophistic separation of phusei [nature, natural constitution] and thesei [thesis], snuggle up to the nature of things, instead of proceeding with them arbitrarily. The qualitative distinction is thereby not only absorbed by the Platonic dialectic, into its doctrine of thinking, but interpreted as a corrective to the violence of quantification run amok. A parable from the Phaedros in unambiguous on this score. In it, the thought which organizes and non-violence are balanced. One should, so runs the argument, in the inversion of the conceptual movement on the synthesis, "have the capacity, to divide into species corresponding to its nature, to carry out the cut according to the joints, and not attempt, after the manner of a bad cook, to shatter every member".12 That qualitative moment is preserved as a substrate of what is quantified in all quantification, which as Plato cautions should not be smashed to pieces, else the ratio, by damaging the object which it was supposed to reach, recoil into unreason. In the second reflection, the rational operation accompanies the quality as the moment of the antidote, as it were, which the limited first reflection of science withheld from philosophy, as suborned to this latter as it is estranged from it."
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-- Dennis