superfluidity

A syphilitic Friedrich Nietzsche in the chapter of Ecce Homo titled “Why I am so Clever,” though I should add that this is an example of an idea -amor fati- not without its value despite the increasing dementia of its author.

(via mills)

I’ve always thought that his idea of the eternal recurrance, with which this is intimately bound, was much better advice than living every day “as if it were your last.” Instead, live each day as if you would have to repeat all days over and over eternally.

Although Ecce Homo was written in the last part of his life, this idea had been formulated in his earlier works, as early as the Gay Science, and more clearly in Zarathustra, so I don’t think we have to worry about advanced states of dementia.

Plato savvily pulled a bait and switch, distracting us with his protagonist Socrates, the man of dialectic, while offering us a new form of poetry, a mythopoetic representation of thought. It was only later that we grew beholden to the idea that philosophy and poetry were opposing countries in a war for truth.

(via tragos and mills)

Thanks to Tragos for making this all-important point about Plato’s discourse with Homer. I think he’s absolutely right, and, in fact, I think that Plato’s Socrates is meant to be a new type of hero, distinct from, but ultimately based on, the epic heroes of Homer. We could even press the issue and find allusions to small “odysseys” of Socrates around the city, and his choice of heroic (or perhaps now noble) death over an extended but diminished life, in the manner of Achilles.

I’ve also struggled with the question about the impossibility of the ideal state. I’m not entirely sure that Socrates (or Plato) is claiming here in book nine that it is impossible. In book six (499c-d) he says that although it is difficult, he is not speaking of impossibilities. I, too, get the sense that he is more pessimistic in book nine than in book six, but I’m not sure how much his position has changed.

I have mentioned this paragraph at the conclusion of Book IX of Plato’s Republic (trans. by Jowett) before, but I remain curious: what is the traditional accounting for these sentences, which taken on their face seem to at least hint at an intended metaphorical reading of the entire work?

Note too that such a reading is quite a lot more interesting than the ordinary and unhappy literal examination of his implausible ideas about governance, with their implied historicism and teleology. What would it mean to “live after the manner” of the city Plato describes?

(via mills)

As usual I think Mills is spot on in his reading of this passage. This has long been recognized by acute readers, but in my undergraduate experience it was also ignored, which is the more curious because there are other hints scattered throughout the work to suggest this. In the early part of the work, somewhere in book two I think, Socrates suggests that we use the example of the city’s justice to examine the justice of an individual man, in the same way that we might use larger letters to read smaller versions of the same thing. It is also important to keep in mind that although this is clearly Plato, he is attributing the words to Socrates. When he writes the Laws later, he deliberately uses an anonymous Athenian rather than Socrates, which I think suggests a different intention, namely that the Republic is to be understood primarily as an ethical investigation rather than one of political science.

We are told that early in his life Plato wrote tragedies, and considered himself an artist, and he must always be read, in my opinion, as an artist, otherwise we risk misreading him, in the same way that we must read Nietzsche, which is different from, say, Spinoza or Kant. That said, however, I think it is also true that for both Plato and Socrates, the distinction between philosophy and political life wasn’t as distinct as it typically is for us. When he talks famously about kings being philosophers, he says that it is not an impossibility. It is hard to say that Plato did not believe that what he was suggesting for the individual would not also be prudent for the city.

Incidentally, I think of these three translations, Bloom’s is the best, and better than Jowett’s in a few places. Plato seems to say that the man will “found a city in himself,” and it will be based on what he sees (rather than awkwardly repeating the subject of “beholding” twice). As regards “living after the manner” of the city, the verb πράσσω can have several different meanings. Jowett isn’t necessarily wrong to suggest “living”, since it can mean “pass over, experience”, but I like Bloom’s “mind the things of this city”, or better yet “to manage” or “to study”, which is the business of a philosopher. In trying to understand what he means, I think it is useful to keep in mind the example of the death of Socrates. Rather than play the political game which was expected of him, he insisted on his ideal notion of politics (in the sense of “being a citizen”) and affirmed the city’s decision even though it meant his own end. I think the lines immediately preceding these offer some support for that.