Post by Ed CryerPost by Ed CryerPost by g***@gmail.comPost by Ed CryerOn Saturday, July 11, 2020 at 12:34:37 a.m. UTC-4, .com
Post by g***@gmail.comhttps://www.pe.com/2020/07/10/professing-faith-why-censorship-made-sense-to-plato/
Fascinating article ... and very topical conclusion.
RjlB
I've often wondered what Plato would have made of our modern
representative mass democracies; and in particular the modern Marxist
view of society and class. I'd put it to Plato that the different
classes need representatives from their midst; people who have grown up
in them. That class struggles tore the city-states of his age apart,
because class-views are dialectically endemic in them.
I can't recall ever seeing this question dealt with in any of his
writings, even though the tripartite division of his Republican citizens
appears to indicate that he was aware of it. Philosopher kings would be
educated way, way out of the purview of a proletariat.
Ed
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Class_conflict#Socrates
I think Plato believed in absolute Truth. Unlike Pontius Pilate after
his day.
Yes, without a doubt, Plato believed in absolute Truth. I call to
witness his mangling and laceration of "man is the measure of all
things" and the relativism of the sophists of his day.
That's the highway to bigotry; and it unfolds a view that human
understanding is a linear progression, from lower to higher, maybe
pulling up the ladder behind you.
And those who have ascended higher are more fit to rule, because they
can speak for all. They're older; a gerousia or senate.
Not so! That's what our modern understanding of society shouts at us.
Not so!
If the history of philosophy is mere footnotes to Plato, have I missed
something in his surviving works?
Ed
Thucydides, a modern day man from antiquity if ever there was one,
understood this. It's almost the major theme of his Histories; the war
between Athens and Sparta; democracy versus oligarchy (or was it
monarchy in Sparta?).
He tells us about the internal politics of Greek city-states during the
war, how they fluctuated between the Athenian hegemony and the Spartan
one. And the warring elements were political factions inside the cities.
Notice how the very rumour of a Spartan fleet in the area in the Aegean
provoked a right-wing revolt, away from the democratic Athenian league
to the Spartan style. And when Sparta finally defeated Athens they set
up an oligarchy there.
And the debates in the Assembly that he gives at length. It's all there.
Ed