Justin Schwartz wrote:
>
> (The _Republic_ is still my favorite book -- but there is
> >no doubt it is by The Enemy.)
> >
> Do tell, why is it your favorite book? I used to teach it, but haven't read
> it now for 15, maybe 17 years (gaak). And I have to confess that it reading
> The Apology of Socrates that got my interested in philosophy in the first
> place. But in my more recent incarnations, I thought that Plato was inferior
> to Aristotle; and I wouldn't take the whole of Plato's moral philosophyt, so
> fara s I understand it, for two pages of the Nicomachean Ethics. I wouldn't
> list any work of either either as my fav even in philosophy and social
> theory, certainly not while Hegel's Phenomenology, Marx's Capital, or
> Lukacs' HCC are around. On beyond philosophy of social theory: more favorite
> than Milton or Shakespeare or Goethe or Dante or Chaucer or Homer? I mean
> let's get real here.
>
>
Well, uh. First, I grant your point about Aristotle vs Plato. Someone on some list a few years ago said that Marx was Aristotle with an attitude -- and I think that was illuminating of both.
But now the _Republic_. For three decades (including the 15 years when I characterized my position as that of a Tenured Temp) I taught an undergraduate class in "ancient literature," and I gradually came to organize it around three texts: _Odyssey_, _Oresteia_, & _Republic_ (in Cornford's translation). And I posed the question for the class roughly as follows (a bit different every semester, depending partly on how my depression waxed and waned): One _could_ say that the _Odyssey_ is about what Kingship is. But could one imagine Odysseus, Menelatus, a couple of others sitting around a table and saying "What does it mean to be a King?" Of course not! Despite the intellectual sophistication of both _Iliad_ & _Odyssey_, and despite the fact that the whole of the latter is grounded in the story of _many-minded_ Odysseus, raising such a question would have been unthinkable. And yet just a few centuries later exactly that sort of thing forms the action which Plato's _Republic_ imitates. What happened? From there, the course would wander around down whatever alley appealed to me or student response suggested (and again depending on the waxing & waning of depression), but that was a point I could always come back to and depart from.
And in each step deeper into Marx I could measure my progress by the way it could change my way of looking at the _Republic_.
And does not Socrates' lie of the three metals wonderfully prefigure evolutionary psychology? :-)
Carrol