/lit/ - Literature

Straussian booger-eaters, this is your mindset

>>18691912
This isn't a Straussian interpretation, just common sense. There are plenty of examples of books being written layered in coded language, irony, satire, double meanings ect., in order to avoid trouble. Look at how info exposing the "elites" has to be released "anonymously" today

>>18691884
You don't think eugenics are a force for Truth?

not reading all that shit with reddit spacing . suck my ass OP

>>18691944
>reddit spacing
only newfags from reddit say this shit

>>18691941
Is Plato talking about natural selection? Or demented micromanagers playing a sick lottery game to micro-manage their sexual interactions?

>>18691884
Ok, you're right, now fuck off.

Look into Plato's genealogy

>>18691981
What will I find there?

>>18691955
He's talking about philosophers, or do you think that Plato's seekers of truth would tolerate the proliferation of down syndrome and other mental handicaps.

>>18691884
>Was Plato's Republic actually a warning against the NWO and how the ruling elites function?

I'd say it reads more like he is in favor of ruling elites but only if he gets to be one

>The book is full of contradictions on the nature of power and human nature. It would actually make sense that the book is condemning the delusional power of micro-managerial class and a crypotocracy who is running eugenic experiments on the population while giving them lies to live by.

Plato is quite a rambler. He tends to jump from topic to topic without much concern about continuity or coherence.
>Also
Most people on power trips or those who aspire to have a power to trip over don't care if the things they are saying make sense or outright say things they know are nonsense to confuse their detractors or flaunt how little they care about feedback

>For someone who was obsessed with the highest truth, why would Plato write that the population should be lied to (the gold, silver, bronze soul myth)?
In one of the few ideas in the text worth listening to, Socrates says that a society benefits from having a unified founding myth to bind it's people together. He further states that without a stable society, the pursuit of truth is impossible/irrelevant

>And have eugenic experiments run on them with a lottery? And he openly acknowledges anyone with philosophical enlightenment does NOT want to rule the society. They want to go away after realizing the reality of human nature.
Another smug windbag trying to build the grand utopia

>Thoughts?
You are reading into stuff that isn't there. Republic is a book mostly full of bad ideas. It's a better model of how NOT to construct a civilization than how to. Probably the best thing it has to offer is Socrates rhetorical techniques; HOW he conveyed his ideas and arguments rather than what the content of them actually were

>>18691989
Why would there be a proliferation of down syndrome and mental handicaps? Wtf are you talking about?

>We need philosophers to manage how people fuck or else they'll start making downies!!!
nobody is this stupid

>>18691986
He was around as elite as you could get in Athens.

>>18691994
>It's a better model of how NOT to construct a civilization than how to

This is my entire point. The Republic is an EXPLICIT book on insane ideas, most of which contradict his other writings.

Yes he claims society needs "noble lies" to hold it together, but if he believes in "Forms", where highest truth exists, why wouldn't a society just be founded on the highest truths?

I believe he is ironically and subtly saying that the current elites are delusional and ruling the society on "noble lies", when there exists an actual domain of highest truth

>>18691999
Why are there downies today? Because of free, unphilosophical sexual intercourse.

>>18692001
>He was around as elite as you could get in Athens.

Exactly, meaning he couldn't outright condemn them. He would get into trouble of some kind, or even worse.

>>18691884
>It is well known Plato was in the tradition of Pythagoras
He had read works written by Pythagoras. He was rejected admission into the Pythagorean academy.

>>18692008
>Yes he claims society needs "noble lies" to hold it together, but if he believes in "Forms", where highest truth exists, why wouldn't a society just be founded on the highest truths?
Because he doesn't believe in Forms. Socrates admits in "Symposium", that he heard all that shit about forms from "sophist" Diotima, who backed that up solely with "Just trussst me, dude"

"Forms" are just "noble lies" themselves to hold philosophers together. You know only that you don't know shit.

>>18692008
You know the Noble Lies are specifically for the elites to believe in, right

>>18692001
What? Elites disseminating disinformation to manipulate the masses?
Surely my beloved greeks would never.

>>18692408
>You know the Noble Lies are specifically for the elites to believe in, right

You mean like the concept of a "Noble Lie" is for the elites to believe in while the cryptocratic guardians above them have the "truth"?

>>18691884
Read Leo Strauss and his students. If you're interested in Plato, Seth Benardete might have something that you'll find useful. Start with Persecution and the Art of Writing.
>For someone who was obsessed with the highest truth, why would Plato write that the population should be lied to (the gold, silver, bronze soul myth)? And have eugenic experiments run on them with a lottery? And he openly acknowledges anyone with philosophical enlightenment does NOT want to rule the society. They want to go away after realizing the reality of human nature. But he thinks these philosophically enlightened people can be lured into ruling a state with "incentives". Obviously this is nonsense and he only wrote it satirically to get around the elites who were monitoring what he was saying.
You are right that there are problems in the text, but I think your interpretation is a little bit too focused on "elites." At the beginning of the text, how does Socrates react when his friends ask him to tell them what justice is? Does he not initially say that he cannot really help them with it? And does he not drop various hints as to his true position throughout the text?
The point of the contradictions you are seeing is that perfect justice cannot be achieved on Earth. Political life is inherently imperfect and unjust, and the refusal to acknowledge the limits of the political will result in untold horrors.

>>18692469
Dude, they're meant for the non-philosophic Guardians, the whole point is that everyone in the city is taught the Lies, but only the Guardians have the capacity of memory that entails their beliving it fervently, the plebs will just forget. Noble Lies are meant to make the elites less vicious.

>>18691884
>For someone who was obsessed with the highest truth, why would Plato write that the population should be lied to (the gold, silver, bronze soul myth)?
What makes you think loving the truth requires sharing it?

>>18692602
If the city and its organization were just, why would there be a need to lie about them?

>>18692654
The implicit lesson seems to be that the demand for a perfectly just city will end up requiring injustice in its formation. The philosopher-king after all just wants to keep philosophizing and has to be either compelled by force or persuaded to rule, against their private interest.

The lies in particular (namely, that the citizens inherit the land of the city through being born of the earth, and the metal souls that correspond to the class hierarchy) are meant to instill in the Guardians a sense of family with the other classes so that they don't just take advantage of them, and to compell them to stay within the bounds of the arts and way of life they're taught.

>>18691884
Picrel answers your questions.

>>18692923
Leo Strauss: May I ask you to let me know sometime what you think of Mr. Popper. He gave a lecture here, on the task of social philosophy, that was beneath contempt: it was the most washed-out, lifeless positivism trying to whistle in the dark, linked to a complete inability to think "rationally," although it passed itself off as "rationalism"--it was very bad. I cannot imagine reading, and yet it appears to be a professional duty to become familiar with his produtions. Could you say something to me about that--if you wish, I will keep it to myself.

(Cont.)

>>18692961
Dear Mr. Strauss, The opportunity to speak a few deeply felt words about Karl Popper to a kindred soul is too golden to endure a long delay. This Popper has been for years, not exactly a stone against which one stumbles, but a troublesome pebble that I must continually nudge from the path, in that he is constantly pushed upon me by people who insist that his work on the "open society and its enemies" is one of the social science masterpieces of our times. This insistence persuaded me to read the work even though I would otherwise not have touched it. You are quite right to say that it is a vocational duty to make ourselves familiar with the ideas of such a work when they lie in our field; I would hold out against this duty the other vocational duty, not to write and to publish such a work. In that Popper violated this elementary vocational duty and stole several hours of my lifetime, which I devoted in fulfilling my vocational duty, I feel completely justified in saying without reservation that this book is impudent, dilettantish crap. Every single sentence is a scandal, but it is still possible to lift out a few main annoyances.

1. The expressions "closed [society]" and "open society" are taken from Bergson'sDeux Sources.Without explaining the difficulties that induced Bergson to create these concepts, Popper takes the termsbecause they sound good to him[he] comments in passing that in Bergson they had a "religious" meaning, but that he will use the concept of the open society closer to Graham Walas's "great society" or that of Walter Lippmann. Perhaps I am oversensitive about such things, but I do not believe that respectable philosophers such as Bergson develop their concepts for the sole purpose that the coffeehouse scum might have something to botch. There also arises the relevant problem: if Bergson's theory of open society is philosphically and historically tenable (which I in fact believe), then Popper's idea of the open society is ideological rubbish . . .

2. The impertinent disregard for the achievements in his particular problem area, which makes itself evident with respect to Bergson, runs through the whole work. When one reads the deliberations on Plato or Hegel, one has the impression that Popper is quite unfamiliar with the literature on the subject--even though he occasionally cites an author. In some cases, as for example Hegel, I would believe that he has never seen a work like Rosenzweig'sHegel and the State. In other cases, where he cites works without appearing to have perceived their contents, another factor is added:

(Cont.)

>>18692965
3. Popper is philosophically so uncultured, so fully a primitive ideological brawler, that he is not able even approximately to reproduce correctly the contents of one page of Plato. Reading is of no use to him; he is too lacking in knowledge to understand what the author says. Through this emerge terrible things, as when he translates Hegel's "Germanic world" as "German world" and draws conclusions form this mistranslation regarding Hegel's German nationalist propaganda.

. . . Briefly and in sum: Popper's book is a scandal without extenuating circumstances; in its intellectual attitude it is the typical product of a failed intellectual; spiritually one would have to use expressions like rascally, impertinent, loutish; in terms of technical competence, as a piece in the history of thought, it is dilettantish, and as a result is worthless.

It would not be suitable to show this letter to the unqualified. Where it concerns its factual contents, I would see it as a violation of the vocational duty you identified, to support this scandal through silence.

>>18692970
All this to avoid reading 250 pages? Volume 1 is about Plato and answers OPs questions. Popper even addresses Bergson's views and corrects them in later chapters. Whatever he said about Hegel is in Volume 2 and irrelevant to the present discussion.

>>18693026
By all means, read Popper, but Popper doesn't know how to read either Plato or Hegel without ascribing views both would reject. Socrates in the Republic outright says on the last page of book 9 that the preceding discussion of the city ought be taken as a blueprint for the individual's soul, and not as a political blueprint, and that's before getting into all sorts of indications in the Republic that the city described may be Just but isn't Good (some examples: that the first city Socrates describes, called by Glaucon the "city of pigs" is called by Socrates "the city in truth"; the fact that a text like the Republic, which mixes narrative with mimicry, would be banned in book 3; that Socrates, when describing the democratic regime makes a point of saying that only in the democracy can they have the conversation they're having now; that Eros, that desire of the soul that characterizes philosophy in Symposium and Phaedrus, is reduced to mere appetite; that the philosopher-king has to be forced to turn away from philosophy to rule, something we can't imagine Socrates, who was demanded by the city to stop inquiring the way he does, would ever do). Popper notices none of this because he sat down to write his book with these conclusions already in mind.

>>18693084
Have you read the book?

>>18693314
Popper's Closing? Yes. Have you read the Republic?

(1/5)
Alitheia in Ancient Greek means not merely ”Truth” as we think of it in English. It means literally, un-covered, dis-covered, discovery, unveiled. Martin Heidegger saw the significance of this and went into it at length in his book, Parmenides. I want to go into it even more deeply.
In a time like the present where propaganda, disinformation and psy-ops are being constantly and heavily utilized to dupe the masses in America, Britain and Europe (throughout the entire English-speaking world), truth of government wrong-doing, abuse-of-power and do-it-yourself-false-flag-terrorism, is constantly covered-up and needs uncovered, alitheia. The English word, Truth, etymologically connects to the same root as trust, which implies hypnotic states, conditioning and belief. In English, truth is merely what people firmly believe, have faith in. In the English-speaking world, whatever people believe without question, without inquiry and investigation, is supposed to be “Truth”. This is the underlying sociolinguistic tendency. The very meaning of “Truth” in English is whatever the stupid masses are manipulated to believe by their government so their government can successfully cover-up, litheia, with lies.
In Ancient Greece, the Truth, Alitheia, is the Truth-That-Comes-Out, the Uncovered Truth, as a result of successful investigation of the cover-up, the lies and illusions of the time. Truth, Alitheia, is finding out what is really going on, what has really happened. Truth, Alitheia, in Ancient Greece, is a disillusionment, an awakening from common mass belief. But in the modern world of government cover-up, Truth-That-Uncovers-The-Facts is always called a “Conspiracy Theory” in the sense of a “crank belief of people who want to disrupt society”. This is the tendency in Ancient Greece which itself culminated in the martyrdom of Socrates. Socrates, like Parmenides, was a devotee of Alitheia, the Goddess of Truth, the Goddess of Uncovering Real Truth. It was not merely Socrates who was martyred in Athens, but Alitheia, the Goddess of Uncovering, of Discovery. The present governments of America and Britain are working very hard to kill Alitheia, Uncovered Truth, yet again and again.

>>18694178
(2/3***)When a pattern of belief, a worldview or paradigm, is socially constructed as a “reality” in the human brain, it will reject unpleasant facts that do not fit the constructed pseudo-reality. Learning happens when through investigation the constructed pseudo-reality pattern in the cognitive system is broken down into its elements, which can then be reconfigured to include previously rejected unpleasant facts, which leads to a new paradigm. Periodic paradigm-shifting from time to time, even from the new paradigm to the new new paradigm, is the learning process as opposed to the mere cumulative effort of only building up the present paradigm with reinforcing facts that seem to fit the current belief.
Philosophical expressions that do not entail paradigm-shifting through extensive and profound inquiry and investigation, which is a manifested learning process, are false philosophy. Any rigid belief or disbelief in the name of “philosophy” is a farce, an actual failure to philosophize. Real questioning of a belief or disbelief is the resurrection of Alitheia, the Ancient-Greek-Goddess-of-Dynamic-Truth-as- Discovery-and-Real-Learning.
Real philosophy is a very rare thing on the Earth at this time because it has become equated with cynical post-modern scientific materialism as a mediocre anti-metaphysical position, a rigid paradigm, a disbelief system. These modern pseudo-philosophers are the new priesthood of what Robert Anton Wilson calls, The New Inquisition. Take a look around you. Who do you know who really questions the obvious cover-ups and lies of the government and the mass-media? Who do you know who really thinks, who has genuine philosophical inquiry, who has a real learning process, who wants to renew cosmological and ontological metaphysics beyond beliefs and disbeliefs?

>>18694188Take a look around you. Really look. Who is not brain-dead, just mindlessly staring in a dreamy state of anxious hedonism without depth, without inquiry or higher human development of awareness, intuition and extrasensory perception? Who do you know who is searching for the real history of Earth and humanity or the full cosmic facts of extraterrestrial humanities? Take a real look at the hypnotized zombies all around you, including those you are personally attached to. Have you not painfully noticed how flat and boring, superficial and gossipy, most of your family, friends and associates are? It is like they all want to be assimilated by the Borg so as to avoid even the possibility of waking-up real thinking, individuality and spiritual evolution. They are conformist biological robots who are happily allowing their unused “civil liberties” to be removed by their criminally insane government for the sake of collective pseudo-security on a planet destined to suffer catastrophic loss of petrol/gasoline coupled with runaway global warming.
Everywhere all around us is a numb and thoughtless humanity drifting stupidly and heedlessly into mass destruction at the hands of government and the mass media. Philosophy is dying; originary thinking is not being attempted. Anxious, tense and blind materialistic selfishness is everywhere lurching into chaos and destruction. Good thinking and good work are being replaced by nastiness, resentment and corrupt escapism. The average person is losing it, losing whatever was there of intelligence and Spirit. Neurotic and psychotic behavior are on the increase.
The Ancient Greek meaning of Truth as Alitheia, the Uncovered, naked Goddess of Truth, is about a passionate inquiry into the real trends of human life and consciousness. Wake it up in yourself with total intensity or you will just go increasingly into the meaningless hell of the stupid masses. If you have enough going for you to read my words, why not take the greater step you now need to take?

calling people who challenge the status quo conspiracy theorists makes you worthless human slime

.

>>18692014
This just doesn't make sense

>>18692014
This makes perfect sense

>>18694178
>>18694188
>>18694194
All well and good, but Heidegger's recovery of the character of aletheia has nothing to do with the everyday character of political contrivances, but of Being, i.e., the horizon against which beings have intelligibility and the values through which we try to understand them.

The Greeks won't help you here; even as Plato has Socrates loudly announce the Noble Lies, he hooks you along with other poetic inventions, such as the Forms. Only those with the kind of courage Nietzsche calls for in loving the truth will get past that.

>>18694521
Fair enough. That's not even my own writing, just from some obscure blog I like and found relevant to this. What I think that writer was doing was an analogy between Heidegger's analysis of aletheia as literally "uncovering," "unveiling," "discovering," or what you will, and how today, the truth behind what the mainstream media is telling us has to be unveiled, discovered.

I'm not a scholar and only have a passing undergrad's knowledge of philosophy but I think this is also analogous of course to Heidegger's analysis of the they-self (which would of course believe in everything the news says, for instance), or Das man. Basically, "I believe in this because it's what EVERYONE believes, it's what 'They' say is true and normal to believe."

>>18691884
He is raising a single point which Socrates doesn't answer and outright rejects. Everything else is just extremly well crafted noise that aligns partly with other parts of his work like the soul theory

Perhaps it is important to note, that Plato starts from actuality and tries to lift it up into ideality.
This is counter towards the academic approach to ethics which dominates most of earnest ethical discussion, which starts and ends with ideality, and refuses to acknowledge actuality at all.
Maybe this will be of value.

>>18691884
Plato' Academy was not only a society of science, but people from outside were interested in their theories about politics. His works about political science "The Republic" and "The Laws" are more like blueprints of some exaggerate ideas
>For someone who was obsessed with the highest truth, why would Plato write that the population should be lied to (the gold, silver, bronze soul myth)?
Here, for example, if you look at the development of Sparta's political system. You will sometimes see that they attributed the later change in laws to Lycurgus. I think about lying to people is from this and from mythology. Because there are a lot of themes in myths, but poets freely changes some details (for example difference about the same character in the tragedians). And in these works of Plato, the state take the role as guardian of up keeping the myths.

>>18695906
>His works about political science "The Republic" and "The Laws" are more like blueprints of some exaggerate ideas
In the case of the Laws, everything has to be considered in light of the fact that the main speaker, the *Athenian* stranger, is talking to a *Cretan* and *Spartan* who both initially don't trust him. The Athenian's suggestions have to be viewed carefully and not as some straightforward recommendation, and the work isn't political sciencebut political philosophy; Plato, if he wanted to, could write a treatise, and if he didn't feel safe publishing under his own name, he could've done so under a pseudonym. If the work seems somehow more dogmatic than Plato's other dialogues, that ought to be chalked up to the subject of law requiring a careful approach, since behind the accusation against Socrates was concern that he was undermining the city's laws by inquiring into them and their origin.

As for the Republic, the end of book 9 explicitly says the city isn't a blueprint for actually existing cities, but rather a blueprint for the soul.

>Here, for example, if you look at the development of Sparta's political system. You will sometimes see that they attributed the later change in laws to Lycurgus. I think about lying to people is from this and from mythology.
You're certainly right about the freedom the poets take in describing myths anew as they see fit, but the Noble Lie isn't based on that or the Spartan's traditions, but on an argument requiring that each person stay in their lane according to assumptions Glaucon and Adeimantus make (and the assumptions that lead to the Noble Lie come from Thrasymachus).