Usually I use this blog to take notes, citing exact lines to comment on and what not. When I read book 3 however, I was on a car ride so this post will be a little different. I think I mostly want to go over how I approach those parts of the book, and anything in life really, that I disagree with and challenge my own ideas going into reading it. For example, if I have claimed to be a fan of Socrates and then he goes and says some shit I disagree with, how do I reconcile that conflict. I think clarification on that is good to get out of the way before I go back to more focused discussion.
It’s been so long since I read books 1 & 2 that I don’t exactly remember the finer details in those but Book 3 was pretty different to me, at least in how I felt responding to it. The book is primarily focused on the education/upbringing of the people in this hypothetical ideal city. Plato, via the character of Socrates, talks about the kinds of stories that should be told to children, the kinds of mythologies to support or to censor, and the general strategies involved in making sure that the population is given, from the start of their individual lives, the “best” possible education in every aspect of the word.
Alot of what Plato discusses in this book would be immediately seen as negative by our current society, U.S.A. specifically, and while I often criticize our society I’d have to agree with it on this one. Obviously, Plato talks about many different sorts of ideas and strategies, not all inherently “bad” so to speak, but he does do quite alot of casual mass censorship to the point that it could be called brainwashing.
There are two main aspects to this book that make it pretty hard to find a solid idea of how much of it is ethical or unethical, right or wrong, wise or foolish. Two main things that make a real understanding of Plato and his mind difficult. The first aspect is the obvious one; it was written like 2396 years ago. Certain parts of human history happened so long ago that I think the human mind has a hard time really grasping that it did actually happened here, on Earth, the same place we live now. The Roman Empire, for example, always feels like it occupies the same vague section of my brain that fictional stories do. Obviously, they aren’t the same and we all know that but… well… maybe this is hard to describe. The point is that this book was written when Rome was still just a small part of the Italian peninsula, controlling an area only about 280 miles long from Naples to Lake Bolsena. Things were obviously alot different back then so trying to keep that in mind and to understand the context of life from such a long time ago is going to make things more difficult.
The second aspect of the book, at least in my opinion and the opinion of many others, that makes it really difficult, approaching impossible even, to actually pin down the author’s exact opinions and ideas is that Plato is going well out of his way. He is specifically to be hard to pin down. There are probably alot of reasons for him to do this. One obvious reason would be that Socrates, who was Plato’s teacher and is the main character in this book, was forced to commit suicide by the authorities of the time because of his ideas. That usually makes people a little more careful with how they use the art of rhetoric. Mixing in Plato’s actual ideas or criticisms with outlandish statements or with contradictory statements is probably something he made an effort to do.
Another reason for his esotericism could be that he wants to make sure that each ideas in the book is examined by the reader on a more even playing field. I think these philosophers had an idea, one way to get someone to actually consider each posited idea based on it’s own merits, to get the reader to use their own mind independent of what they think of the author. The more you use your mind the stronger it becomes. The more you think for yourself the more you can add to the thoughts of others. The more time you spend thinking of your own mind/ideas as separate from your favorite philosopher the better you become at avoiding the manipulations of the unjust. If you can get better at that skill you therefore become more experienced using that technique later in life. I personally think this ability is one thing Plato and Socrates were always trying to imbue on the people around them. The strategy they seem to have come up with is to keep the reader from ever really knowing which ideas should be considered real, or as the real opinions of the actual writer, who was quite famous at the time, fame being a notorious source of bias responses. It’s kind of a fascinating idea and I think it’s implemented really deeply into this book.
Now, you might start saying that I’ve just done some crazy mental gymnastics to rationalize the ideas in the book to the point that Plato could literally make any claim he wants, no matter how idiotic or unethical, and using my mental gymnastic routine I can explain it away as being actually genius. With this routine I can fall into the trap of assuming that all the things Plato posits that I disagree with are the things Plato disagrees with as well, he’s just saying them as satire or whatever and he can never be wrong. Plato has transcended the mortal realm of flaws and we can all now worship him as a god.
I fully understand that the… “addiction” to rationalization strategies like this one are a real danger. I see people, writers, politicians, friends, enemies, and people all over the place use these types of mental gymnastics to rationalize everything from war, hatred, and murder, even love. I can only ask you to trust me when I say that I have worked very hard, my whole life, at avoiding traps like this. My #1 priority in life has always been, for better or worse, to learn. One of the most vital parts of learning is making sure you never assume that you are done learning anything ever about anything. All I can do with this book, and to a greater extent my life, is to make sure that I myself look at each individual idea presented to me with an unbiased examination, and to analyze each at an individual level as well as, but less so, at a macro level in the context of all my past analyses of ideas from the same source or otherwise.
I can only ask you to trust that I will never let my own psychological desires to know the capital T, Truth affect my willingness to admit that I’m wrong. So many people are so committed to their beliefs and so afraid of being wrong that they simply reject even the possible concept of being wrong. Our society treats being wrong like a massive weakness. Our education system literally ranks us by how good we are at being perfectly correct at regurgitating knowledge. I have not fallen into that pattern. The best way to avoid drowning is to avoid the ocean, and I have avoided that ocean of blindness at all costs. I believe that a commitment to, and acceptance of, being in a permanent state of knowledge-inadequacy is vital to the efficient accumulation of real knowledge and real wisdom.
The Mind of Joshypoo 