Aw, thank you for this. And your emphasis on including nuance and highlighting the importance of wonder. Been thinking a lot of wonder, delight and wilderness and Ross Gay. 🧡
Thanks, Sarah, for responding to my comments. Now I’m REALLY eager to read your book, as I hope others will after Courtney’s insightful and inspiring interview. Let’s continue this exchange of ideas with a deep dive! DD
"When you care for others, and when you begin to see others as a part of yourself, that makes it much harder to draw a hard line between your needs and needs the rest of the world." Love that.
Thanks CM, for being a student and teacher with all of us. For publicly getting lost in this wild world and pointing out beautiful things for us to gaze upon in silent wonder. For illuminating dots we might not have otherwise noticed and connecting to them in imaginative ways.
I often worry that my comments are too pedantic, but this time there's an excuse because Courtney is generous enough to mention my name as her former prof., and then Sarah Viren discusses her analysis of Plato. So, whether intended or not, I take this as an invitation to engage in my favorite subject of political theory, that Courtney and I studied at Barnard. This naturally included Plato's Republic, to which I devoted more lectures than any other single text.
Of course, I immediately ordered Sarah Viren's book, so I can't really make an intelligent comment on it, merely pose questions.
First, Plato's allegory of the cave has always been for me the heart of what political philosophy is about, i.e., the distinction between illusion (shadows on wall of cave that deceive us, as naive, unenlightened observers); and Reality (the world outside of ultimate Truth that only a few wise seekers like Socrates can discover). So, after I read her book, I'll be interested to see how Sarah Viren interprets this classic allegory, but if she has any explanations now for our readers, I'm sure that they would be welcome.
Second, apart from this crucial allegory, Plato earlier in the Republic distinguished between "true falsehoods...a thing that all gods and men abominate", and "spoken falsehoods...as a sort of medicine to avert some fit of folly or madness that might make a friend attempt some mischief..." These may be termed "legends" or "myths" and therefore, "we can make our fiction as good an embodiment of truth as possible." (II.381-82, quoted from the F.M. Cornford trans., pp.74-5 that Courtney and I used; but also in the G.M.A. Grube trans.,, pp.58-9) I don't know if Courtney ever agreed with my interpretation of this, but I tried to characterize the distinction between "black lies of the heart", and "white lies, as in fables, or even, as Plato conceived of them "useful" deceptions that are permissible to save lives. Plato totally rejected the former, but justified the latter.
Remember, I didn't dare to write a book on this, merely tried to explain Plato to highly critical and brilliant students like Courtney. So I yield to Sarah who has published on it.
Finally, there's an interesting op ed in today's NY Times by David Brooks, entitled "Romney Has Given Us A Gift"(9/15, p. A.23). Whatever one thinks of Brooks' politics (too conservative for me), he does try to reason carefully, having written books about political theory.
In this column, he asserts that Romney's "gift" is to reveal "that the Republican Party has become a party of fakers, that its congressional leaders laugh at Donald Trump contemptuously behind his back while swooning over him before the cameras." He claims that" Mitch McConnell is the tragic figure in Romney's tale."
What intrigued me is that Brooks doesn't immediately identify these "fakers" as liars. He waits until the last part to say this clearly: "Many others joined the general fakery. You start by lying about yourself, and pretty soon you're lying to yourself."
This is a harsh indictment of most of the GOP. It seems that he gradually makes it seem worse by sliding from "fakery" to "lying to yourself." I think that perhaps Plato might excuse "fakery" as a sort of "white lie", but definitely not "lying to yourself." Brooks doesn't make such a distinction (it's only a brief op ed), but, even without reading Sarah's book, I wonder what she would think of how Plato would respond to respond to the GOP's deception?
Excuse my verbosity, and if this seems irrelevant, don't bother to respond. Thanks for your patience. DD
I love this! The book isn't really *about* Plato's Republic, but it's definitely in conversation with that dialogue. There is also a section near the end of my book where I talk about Hannah Arendt's idea of the dialogue of the self with the self, and how people who lack that self-dialogue (like Adolf Eichmann) are in essence lying to themselves about themselves, which feels somewhat connected to your thoughts here. Thanks for getting a copy of the book. I'd love to hear what you think once you've read it.
This book looks amazing. Ordering ⚡️💕
Aw, thank you for this. And your emphasis on including nuance and highlighting the importance of wonder. Been thinking a lot of wonder, delight and wilderness and Ross Gay. 🧡
Thanks, Sarah, for responding to my comments. Now I’m REALLY eager to read your book, as I hope others will after Courtney’s insightful and inspiring interview. Let’s continue this exchange of ideas with a deep dive! DD
"When you care for others, and when you begin to see others as a part of yourself, that makes it much harder to draw a hard line between your needs and needs the rest of the world." Love that.
Thanks CM, for being a student and teacher with all of us. For publicly getting lost in this wild world and pointing out beautiful things for us to gaze upon in silent wonder. For illuminating dots we might not have otherwise noticed and connecting to them in imaginative ways.
I often worry that my comments are too pedantic, but this time there's an excuse because Courtney is generous enough to mention my name as her former prof., and then Sarah Viren discusses her analysis of Plato. So, whether intended or not, I take this as an invitation to engage in my favorite subject of political theory, that Courtney and I studied at Barnard. This naturally included Plato's Republic, to which I devoted more lectures than any other single text.
Of course, I immediately ordered Sarah Viren's book, so I can't really make an intelligent comment on it, merely pose questions.
First, Plato's allegory of the cave has always been for me the heart of what political philosophy is about, i.e., the distinction between illusion (shadows on wall of cave that deceive us, as naive, unenlightened observers); and Reality (the world outside of ultimate Truth that only a few wise seekers like Socrates can discover). So, after I read her book, I'll be interested to see how Sarah Viren interprets this classic allegory, but if she has any explanations now for our readers, I'm sure that they would be welcome.
Second, apart from this crucial allegory, Plato earlier in the Republic distinguished between "true falsehoods...a thing that all gods and men abominate", and "spoken falsehoods...as a sort of medicine to avert some fit of folly or madness that might make a friend attempt some mischief..." These may be termed "legends" or "myths" and therefore, "we can make our fiction as good an embodiment of truth as possible." (II.381-82, quoted from the F.M. Cornford trans., pp.74-5 that Courtney and I used; but also in the G.M.A. Grube trans.,, pp.58-9) I don't know if Courtney ever agreed with my interpretation of this, but I tried to characterize the distinction between "black lies of the heart", and "white lies, as in fables, or even, as Plato conceived of them "useful" deceptions that are permissible to save lives. Plato totally rejected the former, but justified the latter.
Remember, I didn't dare to write a book on this, merely tried to explain Plato to highly critical and brilliant students like Courtney. So I yield to Sarah who has published on it.
Finally, there's an interesting op ed in today's NY Times by David Brooks, entitled "Romney Has Given Us A Gift"(9/15, p. A.23). Whatever one thinks of Brooks' politics (too conservative for me), he does try to reason carefully, having written books about political theory.
In this column, he asserts that Romney's "gift" is to reveal "that the Republican Party has become a party of fakers, that its congressional leaders laugh at Donald Trump contemptuously behind his back while swooning over him before the cameras." He claims that" Mitch McConnell is the tragic figure in Romney's tale."
What intrigued me is that Brooks doesn't immediately identify these "fakers" as liars. He waits until the last part to say this clearly: "Many others joined the general fakery. You start by lying about yourself, and pretty soon you're lying to yourself."
This is a harsh indictment of most of the GOP. It seems that he gradually makes it seem worse by sliding from "fakery" to "lying to yourself." I think that perhaps Plato might excuse "fakery" as a sort of "white lie", but definitely not "lying to yourself." Brooks doesn't make such a distinction (it's only a brief op ed), but, even without reading Sarah's book, I wonder what she would think of how Plato would respond to respond to the GOP's deception?
Excuse my verbosity, and if this seems irrelevant, don't bother to respond. Thanks for your patience. DD
I love this! The book isn't really *about* Plato's Republic, but it's definitely in conversation with that dialogue. There is also a section near the end of my book where I talk about Hannah Arendt's idea of the dialogue of the self with the self, and how people who lack that self-dialogue (like Adolf Eichmann) are in essence lying to themselves about themselves, which feels somewhat connected to your thoughts here. Thanks for getting a copy of the book. I'd love to hear what you think once you've read it.