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Review of Plato's Works

5 months ago
I've been struck with a desire to read some of Plato's works after looking to get into Philosophy and coming across a collection with most of his works in the library. Most of them are dialogues and most of them are pretty short, and the long ones are broken into smaller pieces, so they should be fun if anyone else wants to read them and give their take on the story at hand. I've never read anything like these before, so I believe reviewing them will be educational for me. Especially because, as I found out after reading one of them, if I want to have meaningful thoughts on them, I'm forced to do research as to what others think about them. These will be less about how entertaining the actual dialouge is and more about what the message seems to be and my thoughts on the message. It also won't be a summary of events, especially because they're so short, I'm going to assume that readers have read the dialogue or are taking for granted that my interpretations are correct. I don't intend to justify my interpretations in the review, but I will defend them if challenged on them.

Review of Plato's Works: Ion

5 months ago
This work by Plato his shortest, only 4k words, and his only dialouge solely about the arts It's about the nature of poetry and where the creative impulse comes from, as well as the merit of the critic. I thought this would be a fun one to start out with due to its subject matter and its length. - Ion: This was a really hard piece of literature to understand. It wasn’t the hardest thing to read, or even understand the base arguments, but it was hard to wrap my head around what exact assertions Plato is making through Socrates in this dialogue. So, I will attempt to lay out some assertions that I believe were made through this work, then discuss my thoughts on them. Firstly, the idea that the world is divided into “arts”, or subjects in which one may be an expert in. Some examples are the art of medicine or the art of charioteering. The expert can apply their knowledge in the art and, since they know the rules of the of their art, they can judge others’ applications of that art. An expert painter can both paint expertly and are the perfect judge of other painters. Second, he applies this first assertion to both critics and to poets. Poets write about many things in which they aren’t an expert, and the rhapsody, an interpreter of the poet’s works, isn’t a good judge of poems, because he isn’t an expert in the many arts in which the poet writes about. Third, since poets and rhapsodies don’t have any expertise in any of the fields of knowledge in which they write, they must be relying on something outside themselves, which he asserts to be divine intervention. All poets know how to do is arouse emotion, and if their expertise in this matter comes from divine intervention, then really, they have no expertise at all. Fourth, this is an irrational thing. Instead of seeking knowledge rationally, poets and rhapsodies encourage people to rely on their emotions. He seems to conclude that there aren’t any objective measures in which to judge literature, and that a critic of literature speaks with “no art or knowledge”, it is merely a passive channeling of the gods. I am going to operate under the assumption that these things are the assertions that were presented by this work. These assumptions come from my interpretation of the writing as well as what I could find online from others analyzing it. I will point out that some scholars believe that this dialogue is partly in jest, as these arguments aren’t entirely sound. I will now give my thoughts on these assertions. On the first assertion, I believe that this is a fair outlook to have on the world. A related phrase would be the adage that the man in the arena, the person doing the action, is far superior to the critic, who is just watching the man in the arena and talking of every misstep the man in the arena makes. To be a critic is worthless, and the only people fit to judge if someone has any skill in an art are the practitioners of that art themselves. I wouldn’t quite go that far; you can tell good from bad even when you have no skill. But there is some truth to the fact that the best judges are often skilled in their own right. The second assertion, I believe, misses the point of poetry. The fact that neither the poet or the critic has knowledge of medicine, or charioteering, or even war, don’t matter. The point of being a poet isn’t in distilling information, it’s purely about how the art makes you feel. And, something Plato would appreciate more, how it makes you think on things or change your perspective. Poets are experts in this area, the art of poetry. One question I have, why is a painter different? What value does a painter bring outside of emotions? One person’s analysis of Ion puts this rather beautifully, “Plato wants to judge poems as catalogues of endorsed facts, and loses poetry in the process.” The big thing with the third assertion is the idea that divine intervention is where creativity comes from. There’s some nuance to this in how you define God but as a whole I believe it’s a ridiculous claim. And there isn’t much to say about it really. As for the fourth I believe I’ve already tackled that in my second assertion paragraph. Poetry has an innate value outside of rationality that isn’t being acknowledged here. Apparently, Plato speaks more on artists in some of his later works like The Republic, so I’m interested to see what else he has to say. As for this piece, I found it very interesting and hard to wrap my head around. I still don’t know that I fully understand it, but I hope that in time I will understand it more.

Review of Plato's Works

5 months ago
You might try Phaedrus next, it also has a lot to do with divine inspiration and emotion versus logic, and how the way these things are framed affects the listener. All while making you confront the emotion vs logic of gleaning wisdom from a society of pedophiles.

You probably are going to have to come to terms with the way the divine was viewed and discussed or you're going to be dismissing a lot of things as ridiculous though and probably missing the deeper points.

Or maybe you should just read Euthyphro, it might be a little more up your alley with all those facts and logic.

Review of Plato's Works

5 months ago
I'm not dismissing the divine as something ridiculous itself, but the arguement that poetic works are the work of the divine and not a craft in and of themselves seems, really strange. And why doesn't that same view apply to painting? Creativity being divine is more of an abstract thing and might depend on how you define God? Which I expect Plato to have interesting thoughts about, but even still. I do like his analogy with the magnets quite a lot though. Apparently in The Republic, which I believe is Plato's attempt at describing the perfect society, he goes a bit further about his thoughts on art, though I don't know if they're his own or if he's just making a case he doesn't believe in. One source gives this summary of his thoughts on art in The Republic. "In the Republic, Plato argues that all arts and in particular epic poetry is imitation of reality and the artist (poets) imitators of reality. Being mimesis, art is at two removed from True Reality (the transcendent world of the eternal Forms), or in other words, art is just a copy of a copy, and therefore it is necessarily untrue and cannot but have a bad moral effect on the public. It is on the basis of the above that Plato dismisses art and artists as useless. For him, art adds nothing to our knowledge of the world nor to society. Art for Plato is aimed at deception, and this aim is achieved when the spectator mistook an imitation for realiy." Which is an interesting take, and I'm interested as to why he singles out epic poetry there as being espically bad, which fits with Ion where he singles out them only, even using painting as an example of a "real art". I might try Phaedrus next, orginally I was going to do Symposium. I've heard that Euthyphro is part of the four works regarding Socrates and that after it I should read Apology, Crito, and Phaedao, though I think Euthyphro is just more of a prolouge to the ideas than an actual part of the story of those. E: I will say, dispite not quite getting much real wisdom from Ion, I really enjoyed reading it. It was entertaining and thought provoking, and the style of the dialouges is really fun.

Review of Plato's Works

5 months ago
Commended by hetero_malk on 6/25/2024 2:04:03 PM
>>>Creativity being divine is more of an abstract thing and might depend on how you define God?

And I'm saying it might be useful to do some more reading on the Muses and how the culture viewed oratory inspiration. Because that's a thing pretty integral to the worldview, especially when it comes to philosophers and that's the POV you're getting here.

You're going to be encountering it a lot and you're going to be confused by it a lot. (Just the fact you keep bringing up capital G God suggests to me already you ain't really approaching these trying to think like a Greek.) When it's just "Plato is having this character he wrote argue that skill in poetry comes from the gods and I disagree", that's not really looking into the aspect of "why was this viewed as a matter for serious debate in the first place" which might be the really more historically interesting thing there.

And when you're reading stuff that's thousands of years old from a dramatically different culture, there usually are some extra steps that need taking to help understand the mindset. They just conceptualized certain things very differently in ways that can seem pretty alien to us, and it's not often spelled out because of course their intended audience already understood and didn't need it explained.

Anyway, in regards to Ion, I'm not sure if the intent was mainly to dunk on poets, when Ion was specifically not a poet in the first place but a performer of the work of poets. (I'm assuming as a matter of course though that there's been reams of actual analysus written and some kind of consensus reached about it all that I could probably just google or something, but nah.)

The iron ring analogy is legit though, we've heard the same thing described many times in relation to someone like, let's say Tolkien. Who was inspired by diverse sources to write these books that may as well be holy script for many, and then there was this whole wave of imitation that became the D&D style fantasy standard, and then other subgenres and artists inspired by THAT. Although it's a lot more work to find anything good in the five times removed piles of imitative mush at this point of course.

Review of Plato's Works

5 months ago
(And as long as I'm bringing up Tolkien, anyone managing to sit through the posts in this thread might be better off giving fluttershy's new game a shot.)

Review of Plato's Works

5 months ago
I do agree, it is helpful to view these works with a bit more context. Which is why I've been trying to find other people talking about Ion, but surpisingly not many people seem to care about this one of his works. There's a few people talking about it, but far less than I was expecting. Maybe that's because it really does just boil down to "Plato was questioning the authority of poets, who were seen as people with a lot of wisdom to give on many topics." Maybe I shouldn't expect there to be 10's of thousands analyzing the interpertations of a 4k word story, even if it was written by Plato.

Review of Plato's Works

5 months ago
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/plato-aesthetics

This has a section on it as part of a wider overview that looks generally pretty interesting.

Review of Plato's Works

5 months ago
Commended by Mizal on 6/25/2024 3:06:26 PM

Because Plato considers poetry and painting to be two different categories of activity. You're imagining painting as a highly emotive process because you have a lot of baggage as a Westerner in 2024 and therefore you privilege painting as a kind of heightened, almost romantic activity. You're picturing Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog or something like it. Plato is not. 

Most Greek painting in Classical Antiquity was pottery adornment or painted directly on a wall or floor as a fresco. That's a fairly practical, mundane activity. The transcendent, the emotional, and the sublime are not associated with this activity, in Plato's imagination. Your claim that painting is just as emotional as poetry recitation would therefore probably strike him as absurd. It would be like if I said to you: "Why do you say that painting is beautiful and emotive, but not laying down bathroom tiles?" 

Also, Plato has a generalized contempt for image-makers in general, because of a particularity in the way he arranges his metaphysics. To Plato, things we encounter in the world are, in a sense, representational of a truer thing. A bed you encounter has the property of being in the form of Bed: the truest bed, of which all beds are an imperfect copy. If I were to paint the same bed, I've created a copy of a copy, and taken us further away from the true form of Bed. 

Review of Plato's Works

5 months ago
I expected you to post in this thread, but I had assumed it would just be, "shut up, fatty".

Review of Plato's Works

5 months ago
If any of our kids are following this thread, just a helpful PSA that here is the enclopedia Britannica's overview of Greek literature which is a good starting point with a lot of links to follow up on. Since I know they don't exactly teach anything on this or even touch on it (or basic literacy) in most schools anymore.
Of the literature of ancient Greece only a relatively small proportion survives. Yet it remains important, not only because much of it is of supreme quality but also because until the mid-19th century the greater part of the literature of the Western world was produced by writers who were familiar with the Greek tradition, either directly or through the medium of Latin, who were conscious that the forms they used were mostly of Greek invention, and who took for granted in their readers some familiarity with Classical literature.
You've basically got the body of surviving Greek lit, and the Bible as the pool of references and shared cultural touchstones that much else of what you might read drew its inspiration from. Keep in mind that when people came to settle in America and then started moving West, families were having to make hard choices in what they could carry, and the Bible and classical Greek works were largely the books that made the cut as bulky as they were, because that shit is integral to civilization as we know it. (And if you wonder where ideas like "a democratic republic" had their roots, well...yeah.) (And well of course as long as we're going over old and necessary literature there's Beowulf too. Tolkien was a big fan.) You're all likely reading Shakespeare at some point, and Shakespeare is obviously another one of very often referenced and assumed to have been read touchstones by other authors--and guess what, his stuff is chock full of references to Greek mythology and three Bible! Just adding another layer to what will go over your head without the right kind of context. Anyway, I'm not saying anybody expects you to fully dedicate yourself to reading all this stuff, there is a lot and it can be a struggle at times, there's a lot that I never got around to either. But at least being passingly familiar with the subjects and skimming a wiki page on Greek mythology or something is required to not be a retard. While to become really familiar means that perhaps you'd be approaching a fraction of the education level of a 13 year old from a century or two ago.

Review of Plato's Works

5 months ago
Ace: nine days later, in the process of realizing he should've just read the Odyssey instead.

Review of Plato's Works

5 months ago
If I read all the stuff I want to have read, I'd be much smarter. Instead, I've had Crime and Punishment sitting on my bookself for over a year now.

Review of Plato's Works

5 months ago

I think you should leave it on your bookshelf.  I don't particularly care for it, and I think you'll have much more fun reading Tolstoy, or if you want something shorter but still Russian, Dead Souls (if you want funny) or Fathers and Sons (if you want not funny). 

Review of Plato's Works

5 months ago
Really? It's been kind of *the* classic literary work I've been wanting to read for a long time now. Along with Dostoevsky's other works. I haven't really seen anyone say he's anything less than the best author ever, so it's interesting to get your view on it. Of course, War and Peace might be more famous, if only because it was forced on people more in school? I'm not sure, I mean I never had to read anything challenging in school. I guess I did read "The Importance of Being Earnest", though I'm not sure how much that counts.

Review of Plato's Works

5 months ago
Just curious, what's the most recent book you read for your own enjoyment and not because it was on a list of "classic literary works"?

Review of Plato's Works

5 months ago
an anime light novel... But really I have two modes of reading. When I read genre fiction I immerse myself in the world, and it's really easy to read. But when I read literary fiction, like Kim, I find I read in a different way, a way that makes reading harder. Not to say I don't enjoy it, but it's more in a fufilling way than an enjoyment way. Wheel of time is a good example of an older genre fiction book that I read like it was genre fiction. I don't think age plays a role, I think it's just the difference between reading genre fiction and literary fiction, I find I have really different reading expierences when I read each.

Review of Plato's Works

5 months ago
I might be a little unsure about what you classify as "literary fiction" still. Is it just fiction that doesn't have sci fi or fantasy elements?

Or just books with more grounded and serious plots? Because I guess it may also be also that I'm not sure why sci fi or fantasy would bar a story from being considered "literary". And a lot of what we consider significant works today were just consumed as popular media for entertainment when released.

Anyway, I don't think "literary" and "genre" are black and white things to toggle through, but this does make me wonder which side you'd place dystopic fiction on.

Review of Plato's Works

5 months ago
Sorry, forgot to respond to this. The prose just feels different to me. I mean I read Enternal and the Bible completely differently. I just feel like I fly through "genre fiction" and most "literary fiction" I read carefully. Instead of immersing myself in the story I'm reading it with an analytical lense, really thinking instead of just reading. I felt a mix of both with Call of the Wild, but I was writting a review on that, so that might've been part of it. But I think I was reading it more like "literary fiction"? I would classify it as such, but who knows really. As far as dystopic fiction goes, the thing that comes to mind is 1984. I haven't read it, but if I did I bet I'd place it on the side of liteary fiction. Maybe it's some kind of importantance I place on the book myself. I read "important" books analytically, so I don't immerse in them. But still, Wheel of Time feels like it's written so much differently than something like Kim. Kim feels like it has things it's supposed to be saying on life, whereas Wheel of Time is just an epic story I can expierence. I guess I'd say that liteary fiction is fiction that is written with to convey a message or theme. That's it's main goal. Though that'd exclude Call of the Wild I think. Most genre fiction has a message and theme, but it's primary purpose is to entertain. But this definition has a lot of holes in it I feel like. Shakespeare comes to mind, I think his work was very explicitly about entertainment. Disclaimer: I have not finished Kim, I read a few chapters for the book club, but never actually finished it.

Review of Plato's Works

5 months ago
Jesse, what the fuck are you talking about?

Review of Plato's Works

5 months ago

The Bible is not literary fiction, it's ancient Near Eastern sacred text. 

Review of Plato's Works

5 months ago
Sure, that's fair enough. I was just using it as a mode of comparison, since I read it similarly to literary fiction.

Review of Plato's Works

4 months ago

I guess, but why though? There's plenty there to immerse yourself in, it's written by such an eccentric cast of people from all over history in this little corner of the world. It's an incredible document where you get to kind of hear the voices of cultures themselves as people of different backgrounds all write down songs and poetry, folklore and mythology, philosophy, public service announcements, long and short-term political propaganda, actual jokes, history based on collective memory and best-guesses, and the occasional legal document. Once you know some of the surrounding context, the bible really comes alive as a document of guys trying their level best to explain what happened and what people should do about it in a way that makes sense to them and everyone involved. I'm sure it's not quite as lively as people from 2000-3000 years ago actually telling you all this out loud, but, frankly, this is the best we got.

Review of Plato's Works

5 months ago
Enternal

Review of Plato's Works

5 months ago

"Dostoyevsky is not a great writer, but a rather mediocre one - with flashes of excellent humor, but, alas, with wastelands of literary platitudes in between," wrote Nabokov.   But go ahead and read it and see what you think. 

I would start with a shorter Tolstoy piece.  Read "The Death of Ivan Ilyich" if you want some Tolstoy.  It's superb and short.  

Review of Plato's Works

4 months ago

I actually used to have a book of the complete works of Plato, although I gave it to a co-worker who was showing interest in philosophy. It was probably a really good decision, and he seems to be looking after it. For me, the coolest plato piece was probably phado. I found that really cool, as it gives cool arguments to talking points that are generally considered impossible to defend in a modern setting (reincarnation and the immortality of the soul). 

My personal favourite philosopher is probably Barcuch Spinoza, though. One of the quotes in his works has always stuck with me: "That which exists, must exist within itself, or within something else." For instance, I exist within the world; the world exists in the solar system; the solar system exists in the galaxy; and so on and so on. It comes to the point where we must find something existing within itself, "infinity," as Spinoza called it. Everything was then therefore this one infinite thing, in different expressions, Pretty cool read! heavy, though Descartes was nice and easy in comparison. 

I think David hume has probably been the most impactful in how i choose to critically think, though. Laws of parsimony and causation has lead to rely on the past to inform future decisions very much so, despite their inherent philosophical uncertainty. 

another cool quote! "once i believed myself to be a person expericing the universe, now i realise im the universe experiencing what its like to be a person. "

Review of Plato's Works

4 months ago
I've never read Plato and I don't read much philosophy but I would recommend Marcus Aurelius's Meditations as a fairly easy one to read because you can open it on any page and just read a little motivational quote to boost you through the day (I read it from cover to cover during covid lockdown) and get in touch with your inner Stoic.

Following on from what someone was saying earlier about Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy, coincidentally I'm reading Crime and Punishment and War and Peace (which I've been reading a chapter a day since the start of the year). I prefer Dostoyevsky because his realism reminds me of Dickens, in that his writing about the poor and desperate is based on experience, though the main character is like a Russian version of Hamlet (both crazy killers and students). War and Peace, which is about 80% Peace, is more of a leisure novel about the rich and powerful but it's immersive and relaxing, though you'd need a lot of free time (like being retired or unemployed) to read it.

Review of Plato's Works

4 months ago

If you like Marcus Aurelius you should also have a look into Seneca! Personally I typically prefer more ontological philosophy as opposed to moral philosophy, since to know what is good for the self we must first throughly define and know what the self is. So I think moral philosophy for that reason is typically secondary to me until I figure out the ontological first. Although I still have a strict conscience! Very rough on myself especially. 

 

But if we really think about it, most people have a very fuzzy and vague concept of self when you ask them to define who and what they really are. 

Review of Plato's Works

4 months ago
Tbh, maybe the self is fuzzy and vague and open to frequent change and transformation :D And thanks, I'll keep an eye out for his works the next time I hit up a book shop.

Review of Plato's Works

4 months ago

Yeah! That's a good way to look at it. I personally believe the self is largely very likely to be illusionary and that it only exists as a container for our consciousness. To use an example: if I look at a book, my eyes can peer away from said book, and see more than the book -meaning my consciousness is more than the book. My consciousness can likewise transcend everything else even the concept of my current "self" And become a new "self" In this manner. Largely I believe consciousness to likely be the infinite and uncontainable, in an obscure sense, it's infinite. Although I'm explaining it poorly and rudimentary! The only thing it cannot transcend is infinity. 

Review of Plato's Works

4 months ago
Take your consciousness and get off my lawn!

Review of Plato's Works

4 months ago
Meditations is actually on my list! And having read a little of crime and punishment, I have to say it is really, really good. It actually is making me rethink the idea that I can't lose myself in a liteary fiction book, maybe it just had to be the right book. Because I can sit down and lose myself in it.