/lit/ - Literature

It’s sustainable. Every civilization that has attempted to have power only come from the top has ended horribly and brutally.

Shut up. On the off chance this isnt just bait, I agree with the general idea you're "presenting" here. But that doesn't mean Plato was dumb, or that his dialogues are unimportant. This is really elementary, dismissive critique that always feels more like laziness. I think Plato and the Greeks are wildly overrated and their assigned status as the founders of "Western Civilization" is an ideological meme, but it is a self fulfilling one that has reified itself and now we live in a world where it is necessary to read the Greeks to understand many of the origins of western thought. Even putting that aside, their artificial, historically arbitrary status as founders doesnt make them any less fascinating or the many insights and methods they did pioneer any less valuable. They should just be placed in the proper historical context. Offhandedly dismissing the Greeks as just "wrong" or "irrelevant" is even worse than worshipping them uncritically, because at least with that worship you might learn something here or there.

So we all know it's necessary to practice and write and read all the time to improve as a writer, even if you're starting with the rare noticeable natural talent it needs to be honed or you could easily be surpassed by anyone really committed to improving.

But what did this practice look like for Tolstoy, Joyce, Woolf, Faulkner, Beckett, etc etc? Do we have the youthful, middling works of any great writers to look to for reference? Are these things purposely hidden by estates and publishers to deify valuable author legacies? Come on /lit/ let's please talk about this instead of more frogposting and racebaiting, I can't imagine I'm the only one curious about this.

Socrates DESTROYS ignorant sophist through DIALECTICAL ARGUMENT and REASON

>>9019373
Exactly this. I'm trying SO FUCKING HARD to PROVE people they are wrong 'bout it; not with Truths, but with Facts. No one listen. Literally sick of it.

If the 30 tyrants ordered Socrates to murder a random citizen, would Socrates be obliged to do it following the same social-contract between him and the government that he obeyed by for his sentence and punishment?