Category Archives: Art

Plato and Christianity

January 11, 2022 – 9:33 pm

Index to this series

This post uses work of Hannah Arendt, Augustine, R. G. Collingwood, Tom Holland, Somerset Maugham, and Ved Mehta.

Elevated highway, way above city streets

Ortaköy, December 27, 2021

In the first post of this series, I gave some reasons to read the Republic, and one of them was the problem of how our political leaders were not always the best. Plato had not solved that problem, since we still had it; but that meant nobody else had solved it either. Plato had at least taught us that people with great worldly power could nonetheless be more miserable than their subjects. In the Republic, Plato has Socrates teach that lesson

  • to Thrasymachus, in the latter part of Book I;
  • to Glaucon, who concludes at the end of Book IV that if having an unhealthy body is bad, having a vicious soul is worse;
  • in Book IX, with the account of the tyrant;
  • with the Myth of Er in Book X.

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By David Pierce | Also posted in Collingwood, Maugham, Plato | Tagged , , , , | Comments (2)

On Reading Plato’s Republic

December 28, 2021 – 2:00 pm

Index to this series

In adolescence, when I started visiting art museums in Washington for my own pleasure, I would visit also the museum shops, hoping to be able to take home a souvenir. Eventually, my own memories were enough to take home.

That is what I remember observing about myself, perhaps around the time when my body stopped growing taller. That time may be used to demarcate adulthood, although in kindergarten, it had made no sense to me that our bodies could ever stop growing.

Cycad with seeds
Cycads outside Selenium Twins
in the valley above Ihlamur Kasırları
on the way to Beşiktaş
December 27, 2021

I have not been to a museum since the advent of Covid-19, but I often want a souvenir when I am reading now. The souvenir may be in the form of pencil marks in a book, or pen marks in a magazine, or various interventions in an electronic file. To be able to make such interventions, I save webpages, usually with a browser’s print function or with Print Friendly.

I may also respond to what I read by writing blog posts. This is why I now have eighteen of those on Plato’s Republic: one for each of the fourteen parts in which the dialogue was divided for an online discussion, and four more for when I had an abundance of ideas.

Where has all of that left me?

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By David Pierce | Also posted in Collingwood, Maugham, Plato | Tagged , , , , , | Comments (3)

On Plato’s Republic, 14

December 13, 2021 – 6:48 pm

Index to this series

In the tenth and final book of Plato’s Republic (Stephanus 595–621), with the help of Glaucon, Socrates does three things:

  1. Confirm and strengthen the ban on imitative poetry carried out in Book III.
  2. Prove the immortality of the soul.
  3. Tell the Myth of Er about how best to make use of that immortality.


Bernard Picart
Glaucus Turned into a Sea-God, 1731
“Just as those who catch sight of the sea Glaucus would no longer easily see his original nature because some of the old parts of his body have been broken off and the others have been ground down and thoroughly maimed by the waves at the same time as other things have grown on him – shells, seaweed, and rocks – so that he resembles any beast rather than what he was by nature, so, too, we see the soul in such a condition because of countless evils” – Republic 611d

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By David Pierce | Also posted in Aristotle, Collingwood, Contradiction, Philosophy, Plato, Poetry | Tagged , , | Comments (3)

Figs

November 16, 2021 – 2:16 pm

This is about figs, because the opening of “The Sixth Elegy” of the Duino Elegies of Rainer Maria Rilke is about them, and I turn out to live among them.

Fig trees growing like weeds on Ayşecik Sokağı
Fulya, Şişli
November 15, 2021

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By David Pierce | Also posted in Collingwood, Istanbul, Poetry | Tagged , , , , , , , , | Comments (1)

The Divided Line

October 31, 2021 – 6:26 pm

Index to this series

We are still in the latter part of Book VI of Plato’s Republic, where Socrates undertakes to explain the education of the philosopher kings (502c–d). They are not literally so called, as we noted last time. They are going to need to “be able to bear the greatest studies” (503e), and “the idea of the good is the greatest study” (505a). People are confused about what the good is: many say it is pleasure; a few, knowledge (505b). It rather makes it possible to have knowledge (508d), and perhaps even pleasure (509a), as the sun makes seeing possible (508b–d). We looked at that much last time.

Sun through the leaves of planes
Dünya Barış Parkı 2021.10.30

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By David Pierce | Also posted in absolute presuppositions, Harper’s, Philosophy, Plato | Tagged , , | Comments (3)

On Plato’s Republic, 8

October 18, 2021 – 4:39 pm

Index to this series

Plato is somehow quite challenging in the present reading, which is the first part (Stephanus 484–502d) of Book VI of the Republic. Socrates tries to work out the third wave from the previous reading. Significant features are several analogies or figures:

  • city as ship whose sailors neither know how to sail nor want to know;
  • people and sophist as beast and zoologist or zookeeper;
  • ruler as painter who compares a canvas with what the mind’s eye sees;
  • philosopher as seed that needs good soil, lest it become a noxious weed.

I concurrently discuss the Republic readings in a group formed through the Catherine Project, which now has the website just linked to. The same was true for Pascal in the winter and Chaucer in the summer.

Bookshelves in morning sun
Ayşecik Sokağı, Fulya, Şişli, İstanbul, October 14, 2021.
The order of the books on the shelves of the cases being like that of words on the lines of pages of an individual book, the ordering is chronological, by birth date of author, editor, or personal subject. The youngest author for now is Sally Rooney, and Zena Hitz is on the same shelf. Plato is on the opposite wall.

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By David Pierce | Also posted in Collingwood, Philosophy, Plato | Tagged , , , | Comments (5)

Nature

October 8, 2021 – 10:29 am

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Can Socrates really “find a natural support for justice,” as Allan Bloom says he must? It is strictly impossible, I say in “Bloom, Badiou, Ryle, Shorey.” Inevitably there is more that can be said, and I shall try to get some of it said here.

Sand, sea, mountains, sky
Anatolian sand, Aegean sea, Lesbian mountains
Uranus over all
Profesörler Sitesi, Altınova, Balıkesir, Turkey
September 24, 2021

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By David Pierce | Also posted in absolute presuppositions, Aristotle, Collingwood, Homer, Leo Strauss, Midgley, Plato | Tagged , , , , , | Comments (7)

On Plato’s Republic, 5

September 26, 2021 – 9:35 am

Index to this series

Our fifth scheduled reading in the Republic is Book IV (Stephanus pages 419–45). Socrates speaks

  • with Adeimantus, through the completion of the construction of the city in speech;
  • with Glaucon, after he insists (427d) that Socrates join in the search for justice in the city; they find it and map it back to the individual.


Intellect, spirit, and appetite
Profesörler Sitesi, Altınova, Balıkesir, Turkey
September 13, 2021

Before proposing a general summary, I shall note the following highlights of the reading. At the end I make some further remarks on one of these, the Law of Contradiction.

Highlights

  1. Common [they are,] the things of friends, κοινὰ τὰ [τῶν] φίλων (424a). Aristotle refers to this in Book II, Chapter 1 of the Politics, 1260b–1a:

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By David Pierce | Also posted in Aristotle, Collingwood, Contradiction, Homer, Philosophy, Pirsig, Plato, Thoreau | Tagged , , , , , , , | Comments (13)

Politics

September 24, 2021 – 5:10 pm

Index to this series

This is mostly about avoiding things. An early theme of Plato’s Republic is avoiding the deprivations of solitary life through politics. Some of us would rather just avoid politics. Such persons include Henry David Thoreau, Gilbert Ryle, and the inventor of the h-index (he is a physicist called Jorge E. Hirsch, but I know nothing else about him). I mentioned these persons in my last Plato post, “Badiou, Bloom, Ryle, Shorey.” I have some more to say about them here. In “Civil Disobedience” (1848) for example, Thoreau writes, “it is, after all, with men and not with parchment that I quarrel”; but measures like the h-index are used to hide the human factor in the equations used to judge us.

Regarding Thoreau, I shall be looking in addition at Thoreau’s essays “Walking” and “Slavery in Massachusetts.” Other sources for this post will include

  • R. G. Collingwood, Speculum Mentis and An Autobiography;
  • 101 Zen Stories;
  • Somerset Maugham, The Gentleman in the Parlour;
  • Robert Wright, “Ending war via algorithm”;
  • Danielle Carr, “The Politics of Viruses”;
  • Patricia Fara, “It leads to everything.”


All photos are from Profesörler Sitesi, Altınova, Balıkesir, Turkey
September 21–3, 2021

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By David Pierce | Also posted in Collingwood, Contradiction, Maugham, Thoreau | Tagged , , , , , , , , | Comments (4)

Badiou, Bloom, Ryle, Shorey

September 19, 2021 – 9:57 am

Index to this series

The discussion having been postponed for our fifth reading in the Republic, I give here some remarks that started out as part of my commentary on Book IV. The remarks concern

  • the translations of the Republic that I have been reading, mainly those of
    • Alain Badiou (b. 1937), translated in turn from the French by Susan Spitzer;
    • Allan Bloom (1930–92);
    • Paul Shorey (1857–1934);
  • the “Interpretive Essay” that accompanies Bloom’s translation;
  • a 1969 review of Bloom’s translation and essay by Gilbert Ryle (1900–76), who embarrasses the profession of philosophy (if it be a profession).

I quote also Christopher Hitchens, Daryl H. Rice, Agnes Callard, Martha Nussbaum, and Henry David Thoreau.


Palm trimmed
Profesörler Sitesi, Altınova, Balıkesir, Turkey
September 13, 2021

Here’s a table of contents:

Shorey

In the preface of his own translation, Bloom says Shorey’s is one of the two best English translations. The other is A. D. Lindsay’s, but I know nothing about him or it.

Being part of the Loeb Classical Library, Shorey’s translation is

  • convenient for

    • including the Greek, so that one can see that Shorey makes “the principle of doing one’s own business” (433b) from τὸ τὰ αὑτοῦ πράττειν (Bloom has “the practice of minding one’s own business”);
    • using footnotes rather than endnotes;

  • inconvenient for having

    • two volumes;
    • small thin pages, so that leafing through to find the passage you want is hard.


Palm bearded
Profesörler Sitesi, Altınova, Balıkesir, Turkey
September 12, 2021

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By David Pierce | Also posted in Hitchens, Homer, Philosophy, Plato, Thoreau | Tagged , , , , , , | Comments (3)