There was a months long gap between books 1 & 2 and now only a 3 day, I think, gap between 2 & 3. I guess I can skip the standard preliminaries but I am trying today to make paragraphs using periods to indent. WordPress deletes spaces I use to try and indent So I’ll try periods. Maybe I’ll also try a single period with spaces. Ok, I tried it with one period followed by space and freaking WordPress deleted those spaces as well. WTF?
…….The book starts with the line “About gods, then.” so I guess we’re doing more religion talk today.
386A: This part has been rough to understand. Socrates keeps using “he” for the other speaker but I don’t know who the “he” is since it’s a new chapter and I took a small break between reading chapters. I’m just gonna copy paste the first paragraph so you can see how philosophers, lovers of wisdom, are not very good teachers.
…….”‘About gods, then,’ I said, ‘such, it seems, are the things that should and should not be heard, from childhood on, by men who would honor gods and ancestors and not take lightly their friendship with each other.'”
…….I had just been telling my mom that this book wasn’t that hard to follow but damn Plato, help a brother out a little. Let’s see… 1 sentence, 5 commas, “should and should not”, and all this nonsense is to start a new section of the book? It’s no wonder that people say Greek Philosophers purposely tried to make their writing so complicated so that poor people couldn’t understand them. I’ve heard claims that Plato and all them wanted to keep their ideas among the educated, for whatever reason. That might be true but I’ll be able to say more definitively after reading the rest of this book.
387C: I think what Socrates is trying to say is that when people fear hell more than they fear death they are more likely to give in and surrender anything it takes to stay alive. As an example he says that a soldier can’t be his strongest if he is more willing to become a slave than to die. This is an interesting point of Sociological criticism that I’ve never thought about. Our fear of death leads us to accept a lot of things that we probably shouldn’t but at the same time I’m not convinced that a fear of death can be removed simply by taking out descriptions of hell form our culture.
…….I’m not even sure that’s what Socrates is trying say. This section is confusing me. I could finish it and come back to write this summary but I think recording my confusion is more interesting.
…….Socrates claims that a man who doesn’t fear death is most capable of being independent and handling misfortune in life.
391C: I think what makes this section so confusing for me is the heavy use of ancient Greek mythology stories and references. Maybe that’s just a small addition throwing me off cause I do think this book has been more confusingly written. Sometimes Socrates will make a claim and ask if his conversation partner agrees. Then, when his conversation partner does agree Socrates will just move on to the next thing without helping ME come to agreement. Why does he think that “Illiberality accompanying love of money” is opposite to “Arrogant disdain for gods and human beings”?
392C: Ok, let me try and see where I’m at here. It seems like Socrates has been making an argument this whole time in support of some sort of censorship system. So far he only seems concerned with mythology. He claims that regular citizens shouldn’t hear about how the Gods do bad things like rape and betrayal and hatred. Socrates claims that they should cut all tales about those sorts of things but keep tales that highlight endurance of hardships and good determination.
…….He also talks about lying in a way that is kind scary. He claims that it’s ok for a leader to lie to subjects. The analogy he uses is that the crewman of a ship must never keep truth from the shipwright who is in charge of the ship’s maintenance but it’s ok for the Shipwright to lie to the crew. I think Socrates, at least on the surface, believes that it’s possible for the Public Man, the man in the know, to control the Private Man, the commoner type man, with self control and honor.
…….Does he think that people can be trusted to lead a city with the mentality that the subjects are like beloved children that should be moderated by the knowing adult? He seems, so far, to be suggesting a system where people like him are left in total charge of everything the commoner even knows about.
…….I know I’ve heard before that this is exactly what Socrates believes but, again, I’ll reserve judgment at this point. I can’t just discount the idea that he might be speaking more esoterically. To be honest it wouldn’t surprise me if half the book was esoteric lies and double truths while another half is actually what the man thinks. There seem to be little jokes now and then make me think that it’s possible Socrates would rather just get rid of Greek mythology as a whole.
…….For example, when he talks about how we can’t teach kids all the fucked up stuff Zeus has done and asks if his conversation partner agrees his conversation partner says “No, by Zeus. It doesn’t look fit to me.” That looks almost like a joke to me since Zeus is the one they’re deriding. It’s like a statement on how deeply the character is entrenched in Greek society despite everyone knowing that he isn’t exactly a great guy.
…….I’m not saying that this necessarily is the correct interpretation or that this proves that Socrates is being facetious for the entire book so far regarding censorship. It just seems like Socrates is the kind of guy that would completely fine letting someone think he believes something that he doesn’t agree with. Obviously, that makes for a hard guy to understand.
For me censorship is a grey area. I know alot of people nowadays get offended at the idea of censorship as a good thing. I’m right there with them. I want to be allowed to come to my own conclusions on things. I think that for me the problem is that even when information is freely available, like it mostly is in modern times with the internet, most people do not go out of their way to get all the information. They might not even have the time to hear information from more than one source. If Fox news and CNN are primary sources of information for people they might have the freedom to go and find other sources but, for the most part, they won’t. Most people do not have the means to explore all the information or they simply don’t know how because sources in America are financially incentivized to keeping you with only them.
……If you, as someone who has all the means in the world, see that everyone else is essentially wasting their freedom to know everything by focusing entirely on only one side of things at a time, would you still support total freedom for information to come from anywhere? If you wanted to get your idea of the truth to people you would have to start your own information source but that would be in direct financial competition with the millions of other information sources out there.
…….I don’t have a good idea of what a solution to this freedom of information problem would be. I can see a world where an independent third party news source is supported by the ruling system of the country but how in the hell do you run it without it being turned into something less than absolutely pure? If it can’t stay absolutely pure in its journalism and reporting than what does that do to the country? Humanity has proved thousands and thousands of times that something started with the right intention cannot be trusted to maintain itself. So many times a person has risen to power with the intention of creating a better world only to have that same person turn around and start destroying things.
If Socrates makes arguments for a sort of Benevolent Dictator system then I can’t really agree with him. Even if you found the perfect person and gave them all the power that person will eventually die and other people will be given their power.
……Jesus and the church is a good example of exactly that. Christianity reportedly had the most benevolent leader of all time but the Church is responsible for some incredibly horrible actions in it’s history. It has facilitated ideas and practices that directly contradict Jesus. You see, even if we go all out and admit that Jesus really was as amazing and inscrutable as anyone can possibly imagine the system of Benevolent Dictator still couldn’t have worked.
I’ll end this post here even though I’m only 8 pages into Book 3. I’m anxious to hear what Socrates has to say further. I’m willing and able to keep an open mind and try to look at things from Socrates perspective. I excited to try and parse through what he has to say but it won’t be easy or simple.
The Mind of Joshypoo 