Philosopher of the Week

[LMNO]

Yeahm I figured.  Just wanted to give him a fair shake.


So, what about his apparent contradictions, like welcoming divine madness, but forbidding theater and music in his utopian state?

[Cain]

A copy of The Republic can be downloaded here http://www.filepedia.org/node/4

From what I can recall, and a quick scan, it has to do with Plato's theory of knowledge.  Poetry and other forms of art are imitation, and the problem with imitation is that the people involved in it show the world as it is not, in short that free men can pretend to be slaves, that men can appear to women etc etc  Poetry is OK, but only so long as it serves the function of promoting virtue - as narration, and little else.

And therefore when any one of these pantomimic gentlemen, who are so clever that they can imitate anything, comes to us, and makes a proposal to exhibit himself and his poetry, we will fall down and worship him as a sweet and holy and wonderful being; but we must also inform him that in our State such as he are not permitted to exist; the law will not allow them. And so when we have anointed him with myrrh, and set a garland of wool upon his head, we shall send him away to another city. For we mean to employ for our souls' health the rougher and severer poet or story-teller, who will imitate the style of the virtuous only, and will follow those models which we prescribed at first when we began the education of our soldiers

In short, Plato is very concerned with upholding the consensus reality.

[LMNO]

Hmmm... I wonder what a Platonist would say if asked where Divine Madness fits in with the Republic.

Or how the idea of Knowledge being recollection as opposed to empirical observation aligns with the so-called "Socratic Method" of asking shitloads of questions.

[Cain]

I'm sure a Platonist would claim that Divine Madness can only portray the true virtues, and that otherwise it would be a common malady of the mind.  Circular reasoning and so on.

As for knowledge, it depends on whether you think Plato was trying to successfully portray Socrates views, or use him as a vehicle for his own theories in that particular dialogue.

[LMNO]

Here's a question I often had in Philosophy 101, oh so many years ago:

In the last 20-100 years, has anyone come up with some new insight into any of the Ancient Greek/Roman philosophies?

I mean, it often seems as if the angles have been completely covered, and there's nothing new to say about them.

[Cain]

I'm sure they have...people would be unable to get PhDs otherwise.  The thing, they are usually so minute and unnoticed by the causal philosophy reader, and only published in peer-reviewed journals, so no-one notices.

[LMNO]

So, the main thrust remains the same: Plato and Aristotle pretty much fucked the Western mindset into duality and monoculture.

[Friar Puck]

If and only if there is one cave.

[Requia ☣]

I knew you were going to do Plato, you kindof have to, but I still hate you for it, and wish that Plato would be forgotten.   

[Cain]

Believe me, I hate myself.  But when you get down to people like Nietzsche and Hegel, who tried to react against Plato, its sometimes useful to know why they reacted in the first place.

[Chairman Risus]

Why do people hate Plato?

[Requia ☣]

Honestly?  Mostly because other people think to much of him, when he only contributed a little thats useful, or for that matter, not completely crazy.  If he were some relatively obscure person who hadn't corrupted the minds of two and a half millennia of scholars, then I'd probably not be nearly as bitter about him.

[fomenter]

also hated because philosophy professors love to argue minutia about Plato till your ears bleed with no connection to the real world (unless arguing minutia gets you tenure)

[Honey]

Too bad the allegory of the cave was connected to his political ideology?    I think we are all the product of the (self) analysis of our times though.  I think the allegory of the cave could be seen (this is how I first saw it) as a metaphor for Life.  When you start to look around & find yourself limited by your family, culture, government, your own thoughts about these things, etc.  What do you do?  You find yourself imprisoned (perhaps in some cave-like place?) with others.  You want to escape?  You do.  You find yourself outside the cave with others.  After much study, adventures, observations, experiences, etc. you find you are not free from the cave, but just outside its periphery.  You want to escape that too.  You do.  After much study, adventures, observations, experiences, etc. you find you are still not free.  You repeat the above steps.  & so on.  You could replace the metaphor of the cave with the metaphor of the prison, ie. you're not free but just outside in the prison yard, then after escaping the prison yard, you find yourself in the community existing right outside the prison walls & so on.   

It is impossible to NOT contradict yourself as you move through these escapes.  If you hold on to your pre-conceived notions about these things, you'll never get past them.  You will remain consistent though if that's what you want.  No one will accuse you of being inconsistent but you will not be able to escape.  It more depends upon what it is you desire to do.

Anyway, off on a tangent I guess.  The pursuit of freedom seems (to me) to be a solitary endeavor.  When you want to bring others along with you on your adventures (we are social creatures I think) is when the problems arise.  The allegory becomes political ideology.  The sacred stories or myths or philosophies become not a jumping board to freedom but an institutionalized or organized way to convince others to join you at a certain point in the road.  & to remain there.   

Do I contradict myself? Very well, then I contradict myself, I am large, I contain multitudes.

Speech is the twin of my vision, it is unequal to measure itself, it provokes me forever, it says sarcastically, Walt you contain enough, why don't you let it out then?

I say that democracy can never prove itself beyond cavil, until it founds and luxuriantly grows its own forms of art, poems, schools, theology, displacing all that exists, or that has been produced anywhere in the past, under opposite influences.
-Walt Whitman

[Cain]

Here is some more, from the Routledge History of Philosophy:


The Republic will set out a different picture of the soul, which holds that reason is only one source of desire. This allows the soul a complexity like that of the body. When the Gorgias, a dialogue of transition which pioneers an anatomy of the soul, actually calls injustice a 'sickness' of the soul (480b1), the term is taking on an extended sense that is more than metaphorical. Plato must now provide more complex and less Socratic answers to the following questions: in what way are justice and injustice fundamentally inner states with decisive implications for the happiness of the individual? What is their relation to other virtues and vices that narrows our options to two: being virtuous and happy, or vicious and unhappy? And how do they connect with the moral action that we demand of one another?

[...]

Plato calls his famous demand that philosophers be rulers and rulers philosophers 'the greatest wave' (Republic V.473c6–7). We must not forget that he was writing under a democracy, and one whose values, even within his parody (VIII. 557a9–558c7), we too must find congenial. And yet he makes his conception of a class of guardians selected and trained for devotion to the city still more remarkable in its concrete elaboration.

Socrates assumes that aptitude for guardianship is genetically determined. He notoriously embodies this assumption in a 'noble fiction' that is to be instilled into all citizens (III.414b9–c2): everyone contains a trace of gold, silver, or iron and copper that marks him as a natural guardian, auxiliary, or artisan (415a4–7).  Children commonly resemble their parents, but exceptions are to be demoted or promoted (a7–b3, cf. IV.423c6–d2). How and when the traces are to be detected is largely unspecified. Artisans will presumably receive some physical and mental training, in addition to the 'noble fiction', to prepare them for temperance; but it is not said what, nor whether it precedes or follows their assignment to that class. (In recent English educational terms, one might think of them as failing the eleven-plus.) Guardians and auxiliaries only divide in middle age when the former advance from mathematics and administration to philosophy and government. Relegation may occur at any time as occasion justifies: cowards in battle become artisans (V.468a5–7). Late promotion is more problematic, as it may be too late to catch up on education; parallel to demotion here is not promotion (as at III.415b2–3, IV.423d1–2), but public honour and private gratification (V.468b2–c4). Yet Plato's human stratification is a meritocracy, and not a caste-system.

In one respect Plato is millenia in advance of his time. He accepts that his principle of specialization applies also to women, but rejects an application that would justify the status quo. Different natures should indeed have different functions within the city, but to infer that men and women should play different roles would be like permitting bald men to be cobblers but not men with hair, or vice versa; for most purposes it is irrelevant that the female bears and the male begets (453e2–454e4). Recent writers, tired of debating whether Plato avoids fascism, debate tirelessly whether he achieves feminism. Julia Annas has two complaints that rest, I think, rather upon prejudice than upon perception. First, she declares that Plato 'sees women merely as a huge untapped pool of resources', and that his 'only' objection to the subjection of women is that 'under ideal conditions it constitutes an irrational waste of resources' ([11.1], 183). She implies that, although concerned about 'production of the common good' ([11.1], 181), Plato views half the population exclusively as providers and not
receivers, as means and not as ends. This should not easily be believed.

[...]

On the other hand, he remains too slackly within the limits of his own experience when he has Glaucon remark that, broadly speaking, women are in everything 'far outdone' by men, and Socrates agree: 'In all occupations the woman is weaker than the man' (V. 455d2–e2). Admittedly, the force of this is unclear, and has to be consistent with the reservation 'Many women are better than many men at many things' (d3–4, where the repetition of 'many' increases the rhetorical emphasis even as it reduces the logical content). It might imply a scarcity of female guardians, which would be inconvenient. It might just mean that men possess more energy and stamina in exercising the same abilities, which is one way of making sense of the summing-up: 'So man and woman have the same nature as guardians of the city, except that it is stronger in men and weaker in women' (456a10–11). But a passage that challenges prejudice should not take refuge in ambiguities. Plato has some, but not all, of the courage and imagination needed to flesh out his picture of a class of rulers unlike any rulers he knew.

In reaction to Thrasymachus' assertion that all rule is for the benefit of the rulers (I.338e1–339a4), Socrates claims that some 'compulsion and penalty' must be applied to the good if they are to be willing to rule; the greatest penalty is being ruled by someone worse (347b9–c5). Later he still accepts the principle, 'The city in which those who are to rule are least eager to do so must needs be the best and least divisively administered' (VII.520d2–4). It is only fair that philosopher-kings should be forbidden to linger among their own contemplations, and 'compelled' to rule, each in turn, in return for an education that, exceptionally, they owe to their city (a6–c3).

This risks disappointing Glaucon, who wanted to hear justice praised for its own sake (II.358d1–2), for ruling reluctantly in payment of a debt might have no value in itself other than that, which is being questioned and cannot be presupposed, of justice itself; and even that value might be cancelled by the compulsion. However, the word 'compelled' carries no implication of the intrinsically unchoiceworthy: philosophers are also 'compelled' to gain a vision of the Form of the Good (VII.519c8–d1, 540a7–9). When Socrates remarks that philosopher-kings will practise ruling 'not as something fine but as something necessary' (b4–5), the thought must be that they will be obliged to rule, and not that they will get nothing out of it. Yet the emphasis is unhelpful: we have to look around for hints of what ruling offers rulers in itself that makes them willing though not enthusiastic. And we cannot extract an answer from sections II–III above: truant philosophizing, so long as it is pursued for the sake of truth and not for fun or out of one-upmanship, is hardly fattening the lion of spirit or the Cerberus of appetite. Philosophers, like Martians, escape the common costs of injustice.