I'm not, I'm not, I'm NOT a Derridean.
But I'm beginning to feel like one as I find myself taking apart Plato's Republic. I keep landing on my mistake-as-trope fancy, and that's apparently ridiculously Derridean. I still haven't read enough Derrida. Which means hardly any. Gawain is much better.
Questions and dichotomies I'm finding so far in the Republic:
In the quatrain from Pindar, hope is key -- but since hope is an emotion, and Socrates entirely leaves out emotions in his discussion of justice (which bases itself on the treatment of people who are useful to you, rather than those you love), where does it fit in?
331c: A brief reference to sanity and insanity, which implies that we can easily tell the difference between the two.
331d: What's the significance of the sacrifice that Cephalus leaves to attend to? My inherently Christian take on justice involves a gap between human and divine justice, and tends to assume that punitive justice is a divine responsibility. I can set that aside for the purposes of reading this dialogue, but what about the religious transition that Nick, my prof, has said was in progress at that time. (Other people have said this too, not just Nick).
332d: The Hippocratic Oath may or may not have been in place for this dialogue; Hippocrates was a contemporary of Plato, but it's impossible to set dates to these things. I bring it up because of these lines:
And who is most capable of treating friends well and enemies badly in matters of disease and health?
A doctor.
Is Socrates just ignoring the Hippocratic Oath, which of course stipulates that a doctor ought not try to harm anyone, friend or enemy?
333b: A just person [is] a better partner ... in money matters
So once again we come back to wealth, which was discussed at the beginning. My instinct is to look for the tie between these two things, and my hypothesis is that they're tied together by the fact that both of them hinge upon one's fortune/fate (No, I'm not assuming that fortune and fate are the same things). What to make of this...
333e: Is the person with the best offense necessarily the person who also has the best defense? Socrates uses this sort of argument over and over again; I'm not certain it's true. Or if it is, then its relation to concrete and abstract situations may need to be further delineated.
334b: At this point, I think that Socrates' argument could be rephrased as "Justice is to exert one's will most fully" or "To thine own self be true." Surely this is accurate if it is a question of dealing with one's friends and enemies.
I don't fully understand the relation between justice and morality. Does anyone else understand it? Do we have anything to go on? What the hell happened to the knowledge that came with my Classics major?
334c: I'm noting this passage because it's where the effect of a mistake first comes up.
336a: Once again, wealth comes into the dialogue: it's suggested that the idea that someone wealthy is responsible for the idea that it is just to harm your enemies, which Socrates et al are rejecting.
More later...
Questions and dichotomies I'm finding so far in the Republic:
In the quatrain from Pindar, hope is key -- but since hope is an emotion, and Socrates entirely leaves out emotions in his discussion of justice (which bases itself on the treatment of people who are useful to you, rather than those you love), where does it fit in?
331c: A brief reference to sanity and insanity, which implies that we can easily tell the difference between the two.
331d: What's the significance of the sacrifice that Cephalus leaves to attend to? My inherently Christian take on justice involves a gap between human and divine justice, and tends to assume that punitive justice is a divine responsibility. I can set that aside for the purposes of reading this dialogue, but what about the religious transition that Nick, my prof, has said was in progress at that time. (Other people have said this too, not just Nick).
332d: The Hippocratic Oath may or may not have been in place for this dialogue; Hippocrates was a contemporary of Plato, but it's impossible to set dates to these things. I bring it up because of these lines:
And who is most capable of treating friends well and enemies badly in matters of disease and health?
A doctor.
Is Socrates just ignoring the Hippocratic Oath, which of course stipulates that a doctor ought not try to harm anyone, friend or enemy?
333b: A just person [is] a better partner ... in money matters
So once again we come back to wealth, which was discussed at the beginning. My instinct is to look for the tie between these two things, and my hypothesis is that they're tied together by the fact that both of them hinge upon one's fortune/fate (No, I'm not assuming that fortune and fate are the same things). What to make of this...
333e: Is the person with the best offense necessarily the person who also has the best defense? Socrates uses this sort of argument over and over again; I'm not certain it's true. Or if it is, then its relation to concrete and abstract situations may need to be further delineated.
334b: At this point, I think that Socrates' argument could be rephrased as "Justice is to exert one's will most fully" or "To thine own self be true." Surely this is accurate if it is a question of dealing with one's friends and enemies.
I don't fully understand the relation between justice and morality. Does anyone else understand it? Do we have anything to go on? What the hell happened to the knowledge that came with my Classics major?
334c: I'm noting this passage because it's where the effect of a mistake first comes up.
336a: Once again, wealth comes into the dialogue: it's suggested that the idea that someone wealthy is responsible for the idea that it is just to harm your enemies, which Socrates et al are rejecting.
More later...