>Don't read him as a mentor to consciousness.
Agreed. But there are three reasons to read a philosopher: 1) as a mentor to consciousness (like Krishnamurti) 2) for a critique of received social/academic ideas/values, which actually supports point 1 (like Marx or Wittgenstein) and 3) as the clearest expositor of false consciousness and therefore as a useful touchstone for examining the "values" of a particular culture. It is only in the third sense that I want to read Plato and that I think it is important to teach his works to others.
Thank you also for your usual crystalline discussion of the debate with Protagoras. One thing though,
> 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]********
Yes, and here is where he fails absolutely as a Philosopher: he argues against conditioned/unconscious life (the cave) but cannot offer anything better than the much more insidious conditioning of mental conceit. He fails to see that there is a process of "assimilating the community's customs and values" that transcends the limitations of unconscious, blind obedience.
Joanna