Footnotes to Plato

Good thing you weren’t using examples about pastry-making or horse training — who knows what would have happened then.

That’s what happens when you try to cobble something together in such a slipshod manner.

I happen to be married to the great-granddaughter of a Swedish shoemaker, an incredible example of whose work (vintage 1870) we still possess. Shoemaking is my favorite counter-example to the palaver of the Brad DeLongs of this world about how WalMart has enable us prols to survive by buying cheap consumer goods. Unfortunately they’re cheap in both senses of the word, and I doubt most of us are better off. Of course the argument holds for consumer electronics.

End of rant.

Can we limit the use of palaver to once per post, comments included?

So we’re waiting for the other shoe to drop…how’d the talk go?

Of course, there’s always the really short Quentin Tarantino version.

http://web.mit.edu/afs/athena.mit.edu/user/d/r/dryfoo/www/Funny-pages/republic-dogs.html

Snark aside, since when is The Republic not relevant to the modern world? It’s the template for the Permanent Republican Majority. As a model for the totalitarian state, it has its principles have informed not only Lenin and Karl Rove, but the Lee family of Singapore and Shintaro Ishihara, governor of Tokyo, a weather-vane for the ruling “Liberal Democratic” Party (I put the “Liberal Democratic” in quotes because the party is neither).

I don’t know what all the fuss is about: isn’t a common interpretive strain just that which argues that The Republic is a parable of the sole?

I don’t know what all the fuss is about: isn’t a common interpretive strain just that which argues that The Republic is a parable of the sole?

I always thought it was parable of the halibut.

And don’t forget Genghis Kahn, Kahless the Vulcan, and Col. Green!

Kahless was a Klingon, not a Vulcan. Surak was the Vulcan in that episode, and was one of the good guys, along with Abe Lincoln.

Geez, get it right.

When lecturing on Plato, shouldn’t one wear sandals?

Actually, it’s not about the harmony between the sole and the city, it’s the fact that the ideal city is the sole writ large, so as to better illustrate the ideal structure of the sole. I suppose in that case everything hinges upon what kind of shoe you were wearing such that the appetitive part could separate from the rational and spirited parts.

notjonathon: The ideal polis is a ‘city of words’ in a nonpejorative utopian sense and was therefore never intended as any sort of blueprint for political action.

Yes, and the Noble Lie is the Guccis really are better shoes.

Jim,

That might be said to fairly capture the view of Thrasymachus (at least with regard to justice, but by implication…) but clearly is not the view of either Socrates and Plato.

Yep, that’s why I wrote about the Conservative version of the Republic. I don’t understand it that way myself.

On a vulgar-Straussian reading, Thrasymachus can be said to voice the true, esoteric message of the dialogue while the stuff about the forms put out by Socrates is just the middlebrow version of the holy fiction that underlies the state. The error of Thrasymachus lies in not recognizing the need to maintain the illusion of decency. It isn’t enough to dare to be brutal and selfish. You’ve got to dare to be a hypocrite and liar while your at.