/lit/ - Literature

>>9202305


This. It embeds the work of taking stock of current knowledge and always adjusting predictions and projections accordingly. Not merely extrapolating from historical determinacy and propensity.

>>9042564
>>9044078
>>9044111

finally, and this is a personal reading, i think the most important line in the platonic ouvre in terms of politcal theory (not ethics or metaphysics, certainly) comes actually fairly early on in the republic, where plato stages the major thematic of the work as a subtle performative between socrates and the slave-owning son of celaphon, polemarchus. socrates is still at the piraeus, and polemarchus sends his slave to tug at socrates' sleave and have him wait. polemarchus approaches socrates--i will quote in full:

Pol.: 'It looks as if you;re all on your way back to the city, Socrates. You're not stating, then?'
Soc.: 'That's a pretty good guess,' I replied.
Pol.: 'Do you see how many of us there are?' he asked. [(note the allusion to democratic numbers!)]
Soc.: 'Yes.'
Pol.: 'Well, then,' he said, 'you must either get the better of all these people or else stay here.' [(note the allusion to the choice between democratic coercion--"get the better" of the masses--or submission to that coercion, thus foregrounding the problems of democratic tyranny that would define rousseau's "forced to be free" doctrine, and isaiah berlin/jacob talmon's critique of that doctrine)]
Soc. 'There is another possibility,' I said. 'We might persuade you that you would let us go.' [(note the allusion to convincing-via-rational-argument, the whole project of locke, and rawls/habermas' appropriations of kant)]
Pol. 'And do you really think you could persuade us, he said, 'if we refused to listen?'
(Plato, Rep. 327c)

those who "refuse to listen"--this, to me, is the central project of platonic political philosophy, to which the noble lie becomes the crucial answer. on a personal note, this is also what defines almost all of my own intellectual work: i grew up in a house with a fundamentalist christian/alt-righter, and the intransigence of this human agency has both fascinated me and determined much of how i see the world. the only thing i care about, whether it be religion, secular, in terms of business advertising, in terms of historical epochs, etc--is conversion, what it means to convert another, under what conditions that conversion is made effective/"just", etc. so to that end i think the lie, drawn from plato and nietzsche, stands as one of the most interesting contributions to this problem to date.

it seems to me that the platonic philosopher does not lie to the other philosophers--that they in the gold caste are somehow all "in" on the secret, that the audience of the lie are the bronze and silver. but do you think the same is true of the nietzschean overmen? is it fair to say that the ubermenschen lie to one another--or does their recognition of mutual myth-making somehow discount this, and mean that they lie--individually? collectively?--only to the final men? i am out on this point and would be eager to hear your opinion.