[lbo-talk] Re: Know your enemy

[andie nachgeborenen]

As I stated in a part of the note that Shane missed (more illiterate PhDs), the rulers are also a target of the noble lie. I happen to agree with Shane that in the Republic, they are its main target. I wasn't, however, engaged in Plato exegis for its own sake.  Shane doesn't seem to get my point, which was not offered as an interpretation of Plato -- the passage is actually extremely difficult, and its purpose and logic is not clear, so it is absurd to say summarily that the interpretation offered is "completely false" -- but an interpretation of Straussianism, where the idea of the esoteric meaning is refracted through the interpretation of the Noble Lie (the standard translation) set forth here without endorsement by me. The Straussians use the passage in the way I indicated.  Bloom is one of the few Plato scholars to discuss it. When I was in grad school, I wrote a paper on it, asked Nick White, then Michigan's house classicist, about the topic, he said that analytically minded Plato scholars didn't think the passage interesting or important. Bloom's comments are helpful if predictably Straussian. Shane, read before shooting. jks

Shane Mage <shmage at pipeline.com> wrote:Justin wrote:
>
>...As Plato explains The Noble Lie in The Republic..., the Lie is 
>that social hierarchies are due to the varying "metalltic content" 
>(Gold, Silver, Copper) of kinds of people, who thereby get sorted 
>into different classes (Rulers, Guardians, Workers).

This is completely false. The *gennaios pseudos* (better translated
as "big whopper" by the way) has nothing to do with
"social hierarchies" in any real-world sense. Its sole
purpose is as Sokrates's ironic answer to the question
why the Guardians (by which Plato referred to the
"rational" and "emotional" parts of the *psyche*) should
accept what to most Greeks was a grossly *inferior* socvial
position--why, for instance, they should be deprived of
monetary wealth (not to mention every other form of
private property or family life). They should not seek
gold and silver because they already possessed them in
their very being.


>There is in reality no basis for this sorting because talent and 
>skilli is randomly distributed among all people, including women...

This must be a very hard, if not impossible, assertion to justify,
proclaiming as it does that *homo sapiens sapiens* is somehow
unique among living species (perhaps because it was created by
a God Who Likes To Play Dice) in that natural endowments are
random rather than correlated with the presence of like
endowments in ancestral stock. No Greek would have thought
the idea anything but ridiculous.

Shane Mage

"When we read on a printed page the doctrine of Pythagoras that all 
things are made of numbers, it seems mystical, mystifying, even 
downright silly.

When we read on a computer screen the doctrine of Pythagoras that all 
things are made of numbers, it seems self-evidently true." (N. 
Weiner)


>

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