joanna bujes wrote:
>
> I actually read the "Ion" in Greek, and I'm only showing off because it was
> so fucking hard.
>
> Here's the thing: I appreciate the fact that Plato is held up as one of the
> great craniums. I used to teach the Symposium in my freshman comp
> classes...so the old guy is useful. But, there's certain things that simply
> leap out at one and convince me that though he was smart, he was not wise
> and that he applied his huge intellect mostly to rationalize his own
> privileges.
This is correct -- and it is precisely why I get so much enjoyment out of the _Republic_. Mao liked to quote an ancient Chinese general who proclaimed, Know your Enemy and Know yourself and you can fight a 1000 battles without a defeat. The _Republic_ incarnates The Enemy. Look at Thrasymachus, for example, as the Aristocrat's deliberate distortion of _his_ enemy (i.e., us). Given your description of Plato (which I think is essentially accurate, it becomes of great interest to ask why he should have been so anxious to smash the doctrine that "Justice is the Interest of the Stronger."
>
> There's first his insistence that the only creative act that matters is
> that of the intellectual man:
True. And he is wrong. But one does not judge writers by whether they are right or wrong, good or evil, but by how powerful is their representation -- their making visible -- of human potential. And though it was clearly not Plato's intention to "expose" the internal workings of ruling class thought and feeling, he did that very powerfully in the _Republic_ .
> he dismisses the creation and nurturing of
> life (women's work), he dismisses the value of work and of artistic
> creation by arguing that they are second- or third-hand imitations, and
> overall, he dedicates his entire work to the worship of a thin universe of
> forms, which are superior precisely because they not connected with labor
> -- I find no deeper idea here. His writings are invaluable in understanding
> Greek culture and history, but as a mentor to consciousness he is
> worthless. He urged us to know ourselves, but neglected to take his own advice.
Don't read him as a mentor to consciousness. Read him as making visible the world view of the enemy. For example on that matter of "Know Yourself." Look again at the _Republic_ -- in its world to "Know oneself" means to "Know one's place"! It is a political rather than a psychological principle. (And hence the _Republic_ can raise interesting questions re what, if anything, "Know yourself" means or should mean today.)
Perhaps more later. Heres a passage from Wood's _Democracy against Capitalism_ that I typed out for a post on the Milton list, in a discussion there of Plato and the Sophists.
*********
Plato versus Protagoras on Rulers and Producers
In his dialogue, _Protagoras_, Plato sets the agenda for much of his later philosophical work. Here, he raises questions about virtue, knowledge and the art of politics which will preoccupy him in his later works, most notably in the _Republic_; and the context in which those questions are raised tells us a great deal about the centrality of labour in the political discourse of the democracy. In this dialogue, perhaps for the last time in his work, Plato gives the opposition a reasonably fair hearing, presenting the sophist Protagoras in a more or less sympathetic light as he constructs a defense of the democracy, the only systematic argument for democracy to have survived from antiquity. [NOTA BENE: The _only_ such account, and essential to the destruction of all the other accounts was the slander of the Sophists which you echo here.] Plato spent the rest of his career implicitly refuting Protagoras's case.
The _Protagoras_ has to do with the nature of virtue and whether it can be taught. The question is raised in an explicitly political context, as Socrates sets the terms of the debate:
Now when we meet in the Assembly, then if the State is faced with some building project, I observe that the architects are sent for and consulted about the proposed structure, and when it is a matter of shipbuilding, the naval designers, and so on with everything which the Assembly regards as a subject for learning and teaching. If anyone tries to give advice, whom they do not consider an expert, however handsome or wealthy or nobly-born he may be, it makes no difference: the members reject him noisily and with contempt [. . .] That is how they behave over matters they consider technical. But when it is something to do with the government of the country that is to be debated, the man who gets up to to advise them may be a builder or equally well a blacksmith or a shoemaker, merchant or shipowner, rich or poor, of good family or none. No one brings it up against any of these, as against those I have just mentioned, that here is a man who without any technical qualifications, unable to point to anybody as his teacher, is yet trying to give advice. The reason must be that they do not think that this is a subject that can be taught. [_Protagoras_, 319b-d.]
In reply to Socrates, Protagoras sets out to demonstrate that "your countrymen act reasonably in accepting the advice of smith and shoemaker on political matters." [324d] And so the fundamental epistemological and ethical questions that form the basis of Greek philosophy, and indeed of the whole Western philosophical tradition, are situated in an explicitly political context, having to do with the democratic practice of allowing shoemakers and smiths to make political judgments.
Protagoras's argument proceeds, first, by way of an allegory intended to demonstrate that political society, without which men cannot benefit from the arts and skills that are their only distinctive gift from the gods, cannot survive unless civic virtue that qualifies people for citizenship is a universal quality. He then goes on to show how virtue can be a universal quality without being innate, a quality that can and must be taught. Everyone who lives in a civilized community, especially a polis, is from birth exposed to the learning process that imparts civic virtue, in the home, in school, through admonition and punishment, and above all through the city's customs and laws, its _nomoi_. Civic virtue is both learned and universal in much the same way as one's mother tongue. The sophist who, like Protagoras himself, claims to teach virtue can only perfect this continuous and universal process, and a man can possess the qualities of good citizenship without the benefits of the sophist's expert instruction.
Protagoras's emphasis on the universality of virtue is, of course, critical to his defence of democracy. But equally important is his conception of the process by which moral and political knowledge is transmitted. Virtue is certainly taught, but the model of learning is not so much scholarship as _apprenticeship_. Apprenticeship, in so-called "traditional" societies, is more than a means of learning technical skills. "It is also," to quote a distinguished historian of eighteenth-century England, "the mechanism of inter-generational transmission," the means by which people are both initiated into adult skills or particular practical arts and at the same time inducted "into the social experience and common wisdom of the community" [E.P. Thompson, _Customs in Common_ (London, 1991), p. 7.]. . . .
The principle invoked by Socrates against Protagoras -- at this stage, still rather tentatively and unsystematically -- is that virtue is knowledge. This principle was to become the basis of Plato's attack on democracy, especially in _The Statesman_ and _The Republic_. In Plato's hands the, it represents the replacement of Protagoras's moral and political apprenticeship with a more exalted conception of virtue as philosophic knowledge, not the conventional assimilation of the community's customs and values but a privileged access to higher universal and absolute truths. [Wood, pp. 192-194]********
Carrol
>
> Joanna