I've been listening to an series of lectures on Plato's(/socrates').
It's just infuriating listening to him harrangue the "sophists" for their tricks of language when his entire project of The Forms was the most basic form of mistaken language. Plato's brain broke later in life when he realized that language was not a media of perfect fidelity, and he wrote a bunch of weird mythological attempts to justify his belief that everyone should live the way he dictates, even if he has no basis for his beliefs. He became an wanna-be legislator, but wasted his chance to build up any honor by spending his life insulting democracy and political leaders. If he hadn't had the good luck of instructing Aristotle, the forms wouldn't have been remembered any better than any pre-socratic physics.
I can't really say that much about the interim revivals of platonism, but from my experience with them, they seem to be less robust than the revivals of the thoughts his and Socrates' rivals present in the Dialogues.
The professor that delivers the lectures generally has a very high opinion of Plato (as does nearly everyone else), which I think gives me a better picture than I'd get if I actually reread everything. I have meant to "get plato over with" for a long time, and this about does it for me.
(I don't hate or disrespect him that much, really. I just can't help but react to the lecturer's overly-forgiving attitude. That and I'm a little disappointed to have learned a lot more about the dialogues without having learned anything that helps me understand modern junk like Zizek or even Heidegger, who refers to plato allzuoften.)
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socrates uses tricks of language all the time in the dialogues. he was just more clever at it than the sophists. and he had an ethical agenda, so everyone figures he has to be the holy cow.
the dialogues are witty, playful and ironic. plato-reception turns him into a boring purist without faults. people even go so far to take the anamnesis for face value, when it was obviously meant as a joke.
it's like they slid plato in at the beginning of undergrad so that you didn't have time to reflect too much on him, beyond just trying to understand what he's saying. then they hurried us on to other things.
you lucky mittel europeans get so much better an education courtesy of the state. meanwhile John Q. America Jr. can't be taught about the controvesial topic of evolution. my jealousy knows no bounds.
i'm spending a whole semester on the "menon" and "gorgias" right now. and i'm taking a class on walter benjamin on top of that, who can't leave the ideenlehre alone either.
i do remember my american chemistry prof introducing the idea of evolution with the careful phrase "after all it is JUST a theory"
- the class was about genetics!!
(which makes me wonder, would creationists refuse cancer-treatment because it precludes the existence of dna?)
In the penultimate chapter, the plato lecturer ads that "if you don't like plato, there is something wrong with you". He also insists that oedipus had the tragic flaw of hubris.
I disagree on both counts.
I don't remember the menon so well, but the gorgias actually is a lot of fun, maybe my favorite dialogue. In his usual way, plato cows his opponent by writing his own story, but he does actually give some respect to the adversary for a change. He's usually such an ass.
Are the two really thematically related?
i will save this question for when i have finished the gorgias. which should hopefully be some time tonight if i don't distract myself with other people's blogs much longer.
my brother told me once: "if you don't like hip hop you don't understand hip hop."
I bet your brother understood hip hop. White countryside germans have a special connection to the urban culture of american blacks.
yes, that's what i was referring to.
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