Re Plato essay

[Bled Welder]

That was odd.  I got your mail right after I sent mine, to you.  Like I
sent mine, to you, about you and the West, and then I clicked my inbox, and
there is or was your mail.

It's just strange shit that means nothing.  Probably.

On Mon, Jan 21, 2013 at 9:33 PM, Ian Livingston <igrlivingston at gmail.com>wrote:

> Well, I still consider the Republic an exercise rather than a
> prescription. Plato again shows how dialectic follows the course of
> divisions in search of universals and the greatest good. I'd have to look
> in his eyes and hear him say he wanted to keep the women and children
> separate from the men to actually believe he meant that as a prescription.
> Then there is his ranking of vocations, in which politicians are ranked
> somewhere below the outhouse seating. In all, I think he successfully
> showed that pure reason leads both to absurdity and to valuable insight.
>
>
> On Mon, Jan 21, 2013 at 1:34 PM, Markekohut <markekohut at yahoo.com> wrote:
>
>> Plato is worth a lot of words. but some of them MUST be that he was a
>> crypto-fascist ( or worse) in The Republic and he wanted to banish writers
>> and other artists cause they made citizens think, roiled emotions and
>> otherwise brought chaos to that Republic.
>>
>>
>> Sent from my iPad
>>
>> On Jan 21, 2013, at 1:41 PM, alice wellintown <alicewellintown at gmail.com>
>> wrote:
>>
>> > How do we or how should we read Plato?
>> > As a younger lady, I read Plato and thought that Socrates was just the
>> > badest badass of all the philosophers. He has nija moves and can punch
>> > holes in a locamotive faster than a falling building in a single
>> > bound.
>> >
>> > Of course, I hadn't even studied a handful, when I became convinced
>> > that Aristotle was, as the famous phrase sez, "the philosophers
>> > pholosopher."  And, when I discovered that the "Socrates" of Plato's
>> > dialogues was but a shadow of the real philsopher, the great old greek
>> > with the buff physic, with the bumps and lumps and pecs of an American
>> > footballer, pointing to the heavens under the brass lamp hangind in
>> > the museum down the block, well...and when I discovered that
>> > Aristotle, who actually cared about getting the ideas of others in the
>> > history of ohilosophy right, unlike Plato, who distorted and reduced
>> > their ideas to punchingbags, well, but then, I began to see that logic
>> > was riddled with problems and that often itz driving force is getting
>> > things right, or winning the day....and I decided that success was not
>> > a very good way of going about evaluating what was valid....and that
>> > what follows from beginning, or in the beginning, and moves to the
>> > heavens often involves a great Fall, and, as I was raised by
>> > Jesuits...I began to think that what comes at the end of days may
>> > make valid what we put away as childish things, though these will be
>> > valid enough in their time, for everything there is, of course a time,
>> > the whole determining the parts or the other way about. But this, even
>> > though I always suspected those Jesuits, for who didn't suspect them,
>> > of putting to much on a transcendence they, half-agnostically preached
>> > bu did not care to calculate the graces of...and anyway, a unified
>> > theory or theories smacks of conspiracy...and so, after losing my
>> > cherry, I decided to consider the preterit again, so back to
>> > Aristotle, sort of, only this time I would focus on the losers. Yes,
>> > dialctic is certainly Not about winning the day, in fact, itz not even
>> > against the day, but about losing, losing one's position, one's
>> > struggle against the other by taking turns at talk. Or better song.
>> > The battle of songs or poems.
>> >
>> > I hope that the President and the Congress will try a little Plato in
>> > the coming years. But first, they shall need to surrender the idea
>> > that winning is a win, that a win-win is about dialogue. The pragmatic
>> > American, however, is essentially a student of Aristotle. So were all
>> > our Metaphysical Club members, pragmatists, but, there is, in the very
>> > Principles of the American, something Creative. This nis something
>> > Plato would ban and Aristotle would turn into a vocational school for
>> > the Booker T Boyz in the hood, but this Creativity is what makes of
>> > us, we the people, we Americans, the most innovative people in
>> > history.
>> >
>> > Now if only we can elect someone who believes this is more than mere
>> rhetoric.
>> >
>> > Did enjoy that poem, though a halmark ripp-off of Walt.
>> >
>> >
>> >> Mm. Ages since I read Pirsig. Interesting idea for an argument,
>> though, I
>> >> admit. It was my impression that Pirsig mostly got Plato pretty wrong,
>> in
>> >> that Plato, like his teacher, was all about the nature of dialectic
>> and what
>> >> might be gained in terms of human understanding through mastering the
>> >> method. Was writing down those examples of dialectic inquiry useful in
>> >> expanding human understanding? Was it useful in expanding the
>> manipulation
>> >> of human understanding? Was it to posterity a gift and a bane alike?
>> Maybe
>> >> it depends on who reads Plato, and how.
>>
>
>
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