Notes on Plato
by Schwartz wuz here

Captain Spaulding

Tiny F***ed A Stump!

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xcuse me, . . but hey, I'm not done here with this here page yet. So you best go away now, while I continue my typing . . . . OK? . . . Hey! I got things to do here! . . . Now Scat !!

I think I'll type here this Plato stuff right over here . . Well, look at that, that darn fool can't write anyway, why it's just another one of them there book reviews . . . .

You still here ?!?! . . . Now Scat, You Fool !!

Summary of The Republic of Plato

This translation of Cornford is the best one that I've found for clarity and understanding. The translation itself is not exact or literal, as I find strict coherence to the literal as corrupting the clarity with exactitude and awkwardness. No doubt if you rather a more exact translation then you must look perhaps to Allan Bloom's, which is totally a good one, and much more so it's the 100+ page interpretive essay of Bloom that makes his book totally worthwhile.

Cornford further divides "The Republic of Plato" into 6 Parts with multiple chapters in each part! And to top if off with an introduction in italics before each new topic that he has divided into separate chapters. This is extremely helpful to piece all the thoughts together and I find it a hell of lot more helpful then the traditional 10 books/divisions found in Bloom's translation, and most others.

You can't help but admire Socrates how he reasons so well how truth is always a paradox and not one-sided, as in that of justice verses injustice, how Thrasymachus argues the stronger are the ones who control and benefit, while Socrates argues the weaker are that ones that benefit from requiring the need of the stronger's art of practicing justice in order to receive the injustice he dominates from the weaker. It's an incredible paradox and argument. Of course when the stronger becomes less strong and the weaker less weak a balance of justice occurs but not with radical equalitarian methods of communism or totalitarianism, but rather with wise Philosopher Kings and the Guardians that protect the society, although this is questionable.

Socrates government has some totalitarian attributes, as in the sharing children and censorship, while other aspects, such as the training of the Guardians, the Philosopher kings, and most assuredly, his analysis of comparison of oligarchy, democracy, timocracy and despotism, including the nature of individuals in such systems makes this highly interesting material. And none of Socrates words in Plato’s writing and Cornford's translation are obscure and overly abstract. There is no Immanuel Kant language, or Hegel, here.

What a great thinker Socrates was. It may be more accurate to say what a great thinker Plato was in his description of Socrates. His continual quest for truth, virtue and in the case of Plato’s Republic, justice. At first his idea of justice is very noble and always intriguing, thought provoking and honorable. However, what begins as an intellectual idea of what justice is, ends up being a logically formed government that intellectually, or scientifically, measures, analyzes and controls the creativity of man, a government that epitomizes what centuries later labeled as the Enlightenment, which demystified the artistic man into a pragmatic and positivist being. While democracy based on a rational system of “rights” developed from the likes of Hobbes, Locke and Mill, what ultimately resulted was a Marxist censorship government of control that emulated itself much in line with this Plato’s Republic, the extreme rule built on scientific and rational means of communism and totalitarianism.

It becomes utterly frightening to hear Socrates speak so eloquently and intelligibly on what reads as good common sense of a cities justice, training, rule and protection that history has revealed as governmental experiments that were tried, tested, enforced, controlled and in turn, destroyed the chaotic, non-rational elements of creative value producing ability in human society. The results of such totalitarian and authoritarian regimes, all built on the seemingly rational and coherent science of common rule and radical equalitarianism have proved themselves horrendously disastrous.

Some examples are: the youth should be trained as soldiers for the city. All scripture, the stories of Homer and the gods, must be censored and altered to shine only a positive or molded light that conforms to the leaders decision. The leaders, while only those of older age would be qualified, would receive a life carefully censored, trained and observed from youth, and would supposedly then become completely wise as philosophers kings, and in this way cannot bring injustice to their rulership. In addition, all music, poetry, art is censored. People who need lifetime medical attention should not receive such and die, (their much better off this way!) as they are nonproductive to the growth and science of what constitutes an ideal and perfect city.

Socrates/Plato’s descriptions of the two world view and the allegory of the cave are in themselves absolute masterpieces and have literally shaped Western civilization as we know it and are truly behind the majority of ideas and teachings we currently believe and are raised in.

Ultimately, I found Socrates argument on Philosophy verses Poetry amazing and understand why Nietzsche completely rebelled and attacked Socrates. I then venture to the East as in the Vigyan Bhairav Tantra and Osho's commentary on such, as in some of Krishnamurti, Buddha, Krishna, Mahriavara and the idea of something beyond the mind/Apollonian/head rationalism of Socrates and the heart/Dionysus/emotion irrationalism of Nietzsche. To Socrates the mind and reason are superior to the emotions and feelings. To Nietzsche it is in the realm of emotions, in the passions of irrationalism and the art of creativity where the superior strength of man exists. To the East it is neither, but the mind and heart act as instruments of something of a Higher realm, the Consciousness or the Self, which exists outside the mind. Here I will agree with all three modes of thought: that fundamentalism and one-sided truths are bogus and for lower and ignorant thinkers. However, it was Socrates who failed to understand the depth of significance in the irrational, while Nietzsche recognized the foolishness and stupidity of biblical literalism and morality codes based on fundamental reasoning.

The irrational is what molds the rational, while the rational chisels it's form. It's the passiveness of Yin and the tension of Yang, which when let go and surrender are simply the Tao.

The ending of the Republic is worth the read. It is here Socrates supports immortality of the soul and reincarnation and it's amazing how you can see this is the precursor of the bible. The last book or account is symbolic and mythological on the pattern of the universe, the same as the book of Revelation is in the bible with its judgments of the just and unjust and depiction of a heavenly Jerusalem. Socrates also speaks of the winner of a race receiving the crown and the idea of Tartarus after death, as repeated in the letters of St. Paul. The men who wrote the bible and decided it's cannon are no doubt imitating the Republic of Plato, not to mention Dante and others who were heavily influenced by this book. And what a book it is!

Summary of Plato's Symposium

Plato's "Symposium" is the story of a dinner party, Agathon's dinner party, where conversation takes place with a small group of men, who recline, eat and drink around a table offering their views on Love. Now these Greek dinner parties had set rules beforehand. And since Socrates decided to stand outside in one of his damn trances, he entered while the meal was almost half over. So instead of the pipe players and girls, it was decided for each person to give a speech on what love is. Interesting, each man portrayed an amazing account of intelligence from so different a culture than our society today.

Each speaker had this most amazing ability to tell multiple stories at the very same time, a creative artistic movement of what love 'is' in each and every story. applying both an interpretation, and simultaneously, metaphorically. intertwining a cultural, mythological story of the gods, giving far deeper meaning. Now this style of telling a story of a subject and metaphorically inventing another story of the gods tied in with it is very similiar to Jewish Midrashic writing, the style of the gospels. That thesis consists of a man Jesus who metaphorically fed a multitude on a few loafs of bread, transfigured himself and other events, not in one iota literal, but in symbolism in line with the liturgical Sabbath readings according to the Jewish luner calendar. And it can be compared to such ideas on love symbolically incorporated into such stories of the gods, all invented on the night of the dinner party, except the attempt on the "truth" of what love is by Socrates.

In addition to this, the love relationships of homosexuality and affectionate male bonding of these men also permeate the entire Greek cultural feel to the story, enveloping a radical differentiation from our de-mystified and de-enchanted modern world, back into what was once an existing world of substantial meaning and profundity.

Now the first speaker, Phaedrus, speaks briefly on how love is the oldest of the gods and is the greatest good, the beautiful, is shameful of ugly things and how only lovers are willing to die for one another.

The second speaker, Pausanias, applies two types of love, one Aphrodite, a common base love working solely for sensual gratification with men's feelings, for money, for loving physical bodies, boys, men and women. The second type of love does not rule out sensual gratification but puts the motive behind such on the emphasis of homosexuality with the affection of the mind with virtue and wisdom. This type of love being .from a much younger goddess, being a higher type, the heavenly.

Aristophanes has the hiccups, so it is Eryximachus, a doctor, who speaks third, applying the idea of love as a double love in faulty technical terms, He relates health and disease with the healing art of love, "for bodily health and disease are by common consent different things and unlike, and what is unlike desires and loves things unlike." p.82 The god of art was said to implant love as a healing art, all such love guided by this god. His idea is, mechanical, and misinterpreting the pre-socratic Grecian Heraclitus in the idea of music, as Eryzimachus states: "It is quite illogical to say that a harmony is at variance with itself or is made up of notes still at variance." "So love as a whole has great and mighty power, or in a word, omnipotence "

Aristophanes, the comic writer, then gives a moving account of Love as a absolute human need, a desire for completion. He then metaphorically describes the human desire for love to the point of each person once being shaped differently and subsequently cut in half, taking by the gods to our current shape. Thus we are in need of our other halves to complete the whole of what we once were. "For first there were three sexes, not two as at present, male and female, but also a third having both together," and they were violent, strong and forceful and would even attack the gods. So Zeus and the other gods held a meeting and decided to cut them in halves to make them weaker. From then on, they were sexually drawn to one another, both heterosexual and homosexual, reasons all due to the way of the cutting of the halves.Lesbianism was the result of two women halves, homosexuals were the result of two men halves and by far the most superior and higher form of love. In addition, boy to man love is freely spoken of and justified according to this story of the gods.

The fifth speaker, apparently a dashing, young and handsome man, Agathon, gives a moving, poetical, extravagant and elegant speech on the beauty and virtue of love. It is both cold and superficial and according to Socrates, fictionally, only beneficial in the sense of romanticism admiration of what love should be and what we wish to believe it to be. "For all the gods are happy . . and love is the happiest of them all being the most beautiful and best . . the youngest of gods." In Agathon's speech, love is every thing good, virtuosos and beautiful and is moving on the point of beauty and virtue of love.

Yet according to Socrates, this perfect beauty and virtue of love was only true in the sense of romanticism and fictional idolatrous admiration. For this was not what love really is, but rather what it should be. Socrates found that love does not contain all the beauty and good.

Socrates, actually dropped out of this contest in describing love in such poetic and laudatory language, instead requesting that his words contain an inquiry for the "truth" of what love really is, as he found much of the explanations of meaning and romantic explanation to be simply elegant linguistics, for what desires good, virtue and wisdom is only something that lacks such, and therefore desires such things. Love is neither beautiful nor ugly, desires what it lacks; beauty. “To have the right opinion without being able to give reason is neither to understand (how could an unreasoned thing be understanding?) nor is it ignorance (for how can ignorance hit the truth?) . Right opinion is no doubt something between knowledge and ignorance.” Since love the object of love is beauty and the good, love can be neither, as it only desires what it lacks. Love is always the consciousness of a need for a good not yet acquired or possessed. The ultimate object of love is the vision of absolute beauty which man's soul once enjoyed before it was incarnate.

It is so interesting how common and free sexuality and homosexuality were, how each man present commented on the beauty of the young men in their glory of youth. Alcibiades, with others, later crash the party. Alcibiades jealous of Agathon, also a young beautiful male, and his desire to have Socrates attention, later joins the party, making a moving speech how Socrates refused his love and how other like young men, also were moved and drawn to him with his amazing mental strength, wisdom and prose. Thus Plato describes Socrates a man of a higher love and wisdom, the man who puts the love of intellectual beauty and wisdom of another male first, above all else.

While women are generally discounted, and the bonding of affection in male love was considered a higher love by Pausanias. Homosexual love was assumed without argument to be the highest and noblest aspirations, as the love of a man and a woman was considered inferior. However, the highest form of love was a non-physical bonding of males, of affection, virtue, wisdom and goodness. And yet, Socrates explanation of love, by far the most profound, was one he received from a woman named Diotima. Here, as another reviewer has stated, shows Plato’s the egalitarianism and wisdom, like that of the beauty and ultimate goal of Love.

Later another group of men crash the party and the drinking really gets started. Some leave, while Socrates stays all night, never loosing integrity from his drinking and leaves with all his integrity.

Plato's Meno

Can Virtue Be Taught?
.
For such a short story, so much is said. Reading Plato answers many questions and exposes the framework of so many later writers of history, a classic that should be read and contemplated. Spending the time reading on Plato's Meno reaps much, far more valuable than vast amounts of mediocre writers. Can you imagine if the masses spent as much time reading Plato as they do their shod journalism!

Actually this idea of virtue has the basics of all philosophical thought, the direction of the whole or the overall purpose always direct the thoughts. Virtue acts as the driving force of the empirical observation and technical craft. Virtue is the purpose, the why, as opposed to the what. And so, it has been determined from the conversation of Socrates and Meno, that virtue is not knowledge, it is not the "what" but rather it is that which moves the direction behind knowledge and therefore cannot be taught. And if it is not knowledge then it can be observed by example, yet Socrates determined that virtue is from a divine source, the inspiration that is behind all knowledge.

Plato's Ion

In ION, Socrates says ION, a reciter of Homer, is not an artist but argues that his skill is that which is inspired by a larger source. That he is not an artist, but rather conveying the source as a magnet strings along a series of conductors, a chain of rings, so to speak, from the divine to the inspired ION to the audience that is moved by his recitals of Homer. And that ION's recital of Homer is just a carrier of such divine inspiration, transmitter of force, that he can not know more about driving than a true charioteer, or fishing than a true fisherman and medicine than a true doctor, the characters he depicts in his recitals.

What Socrates appears to miss in his inquiry, is the idea that ION is an artist, or as Nietzsche and Max Weber have illustrated, a value-producer and self-creator. He may not have the art of the fisherman, the doctor and the charioteer, which he so vividly depicts, but he does have his own perception and imagination coupled with his own ability to both self-create and act. Inspired yes, yet the creation of his realty. All humans filter realty and project their own image, either from a collective consciousness or that of their own individual autonomous self, however such value producing autonomy remains to those with such amazing and profound ability, as Christ, Krishna, Buddha and so forth. ION therefore is not depicting a true doctor, fisherman, nor the literal and actual essence of Homer's Illiad and Odyssey, but he is creating from himself something new. He is a producer, a creator in using his imagination, his acting skills.

Yet for Socrates, he is only a magnetic conductor of divinely inspired source information. This is perhaps what Socrates fails to ascertain.

Plato's Republic

What a great thinker Socrates was. It may be more acurrate to say what a great thinker Plato was in his description of Socrates. His continual quest for truth, virtue and in the case of Plato’s Republic, justice. At first his idea of justice is very noble and always intriguing, thought provoking and honorable. However, what begins as an intellectual idea of what justice is, ends up being a logically formed government that intellectually, or scientifically, measures, analyzes and controls the creativity of man, a government that epitomizes what centuries later labeled as the Enlightenment, which demystified the artistic man into a pragmatic and positivist being. While democracy based on a rational system of “rights” developed from the likes of Hobbes, Locke and Mill, what ultimately resulted was a Marxist censorship government of control that emulated itself much in line with this Plato’s Republic, the extreme rule built on scientific and rational means of communism and totalitarianism.

It becomes utterly frightening to hear Socrates speak so eloquently and intelligibly on what reads as good common sense of a cities justice, training, rule and protection that history has revealed as governmental experiments that were tried, tested, enforced, controlled and in turn, destroyed the chaotic, non-rational elements of creative value producing ability in human society. The results of such totalitarian and authoritarian regimes, all built on the seemingly rational and coherent science of common rule and radical equalitarianism have proved themselves horrendously disastrous.

Some examples are: the youth should be trained as soldiers for the city. All scripture, the stories of Homer and the gods, must be censored and altered to shine only a positive or molded light that conforms to the leaders decision. The leaders,, while only those of older age would be qualified, would receive a life carefully censored, trained and observed from youth, and would supposedly then become completely wise as philosophers kings, and in this way cannot bring injustice to their rulership. In addition, all music, poetry, art is censored. People who need lifetime medical attention should not receive such and die, (their much better off this way!) as they are nonproductive to the growth and science of what constitutes an ideal and perfect city.

You still here ?!?! . . . Now Scat, You Fool !! I'm a still working on this here thing, now get the heppers out of here!