... Simon Blackburn considers Plato's Republic: Voices of reason. (Hat tip, Rus Bowden.)
A couple of observations:
First, I think that Plato's indirect, dialectical presentation has much in common with Zen, itself a marriage of Buddhism and Taoism. The Tao that can be named is not the Tao. What is fundamentally true is one's authentic, living encounter with reality and that can never be fully, adequately put into words. To borrow from Eliot, "there is only the trying," we must grasp at hints and make, as best we can, guesses.
Second, I think that Plato's Republic is an example of sustained irony. We say we want a perfectly run society - and he describes one - and it is nothing any humane person could possibly desire. The point, in other words, is that we must put up with the mess and imprecision of life and society because the alternative is the prison of despotism.
Hi Frank,
ReplyDeleteYou and I are of the same mind on the irony. A big tip-off is that poets would be banished--this would include the likes of Plato, who wrote dialogue.
So, his The Republic is funny in a sense. It would be as if you wrote a dialogue showing an ideal society, and how book review editors should be banished for pawning untruths off on the general public, along with a bunch of other non-ideal things.
Your out, though, is that you would be one of the founders of the state. It would be all the other book review editors that should be banished.
The serious side to this is what we see in the world all the time, with journalists and poets being censored, imprisoned, banished, and with fatwas issued against them. Plato must have see this in Athens, as we see it in the US, when there is a call to censorship--the point being: even here--not just in China and with the Taliban and so forth--but in nations with the most freedom, poets and journalists become, by nature, too radical for any state to tolerate.
Because there will never be an ideal political system, there will always be poets and journalists who will call the powers-that-be on their boneheadedness, tyranny, folly, and so forth.
Your,
Rus
In one of his letters - I will have to look it up to get the exact quote - Plato says that he has striven to conceal his doctrines and that no one will ever know what Plato really thinks. He then asks his correspondent to destroy the letter - which he obviously didn't. Plato did maintain that he was simply passing along an ancient wisdom that had been entrusted to him. He did not claim (interestingly enough) to be an original thinker. I don't think that poets amd journalists have any corner on the truth, actually. Neruda wrote an ode to Stalin, Wallace Stevens said some terribly racist things, and Pound gave the Fascist salute as he left the US for Italy after being freed from St. Elizabeth's. The point of philosophy is not to subscribe to some doctrine, but to think through, by yourself and for yourself, as best you can, the perennial problems that being presents us with.
ReplyDeleteWhen you mention Taoism I thought about my Online book: "A Personal Tao" and how I try to reconcile the differences between society and personal freedom.
ReplyDeleteAnd in your point about Plato. I have to agree. In my journey's I have discovered that the baseline for good government is acceptance. Where one must allow for people to make a mess of things , while not always fun it does promote change, and within that change is the fire of life.
Peace I hope I didn't ramble too far off topic.