Mark Vernon published his concluding article about Plato in the Guardian – Plato’s Dialogues, part 3: Philosophy as a way of life. Mark argues that:
“…it is entirely wrong to see Plato as some kind of totalitarian, an association that became fixed in the 20th century when Karl Popper made Plato the chief enemy of the “open society”, not least for the political philosophy of the Republic – with its ban on poets and the like. It’s worth remembering that it is only relatively recently that scholars have read the Republic in such a programmatic way. Before the 19th century, it was treated as a kind of fantasy politics, an experiment much like Thomas More’s Utopia; it was not a set of policies but a myth that sought to illuminate various features of the human condition. To put it another way, reading the Republic as if it were a manifesto is like reading the Timaeus as if it were a route map to the lost city of Atlantis…”
What ultimately matters is not how Mark Vernon or Karl Popper spun the Republic but that Ayatullah Khomeini indeed took it as a manifesto and fashioned the Iranian Republic AKA Veleyat-e Faqih on Plato. And this brings me to the point that Plato opened the gates to the recording of human conversations and although the temptation is understandable, the result inevitably is not what was intended by the people who are recorded in the dialogues. This is true for Plato, Talmud and countless similar edifices. Just serves to highlight my previous post on How Books Killed Everything. I believe even Mark Vernon acknowledges this point:
“Today, scholars try to place the Dialogues in chronological order, and thereby discern something of Plato’s development. However, the ancient world made no such attempt. Instead, they were read according to their content and the aptitude of the reader. This is, perhaps, closer to Plato’s own intention.”
Further Reading:
Khomeini’s Veleyat-e Faqih Iran as Plato’s Republic
Philip Roth- “against all those screens a book couldn’t measure up”
“websites are like rosary beads perpetually clicking through our fingers”
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the good news about this web site is that I can write any nonsense I like and since people only look at the pictures, these leaves all the text just for me. This is great because ultimately I write as a way of thinking about things so I don't particularly care if people read it or not.