Orion's Cold Fire

When I was an undergraduate, I participated in an intensive summer program in Classical Greek language and one of the sections of the course was to read one of Plato’s dialogs (Ion) and sections from the Republic.  And that was interesting because after having read a bunch of Plato in translation I always wondered if maybe it lost something in translation.  It seemed that the stuff Socrates said was a bunch of nonsense.  Maybe if read in the original it would seem less silly.  But that summer I was disabused of that hope.  Nothing was lost in translation.  It was goofy stuff.

All of Socrates intellectual opponents in these dialogs are straw men who are set up to allow Plato to go through his dialectical arguments proving that no one knows anything but Socrates and therefore the world should be ruled by philosopher-kings that have been trained by Plato and his fellow philosophers at the Academy.

Okay, I’m pretty dismissive of the father of Western philosophy.  But there really is no other position I can see.  But by the same token he is also the man who attracted Aristotle to Athens and thereby brought him to the attention of the world.  So, building the first western university did have many positive effects.  After all Aristotle was Alexander the Great’s tutor and Alexander is responsible for building Alexandria in Egypt and Alexandria became a great center for learning and science under Ptolemy; one of Alexander’s successors.  So, good for you Plato.

Having never systematically studied Plato’s life I read this book to see what incites might be hidden there.  Unfortunately, there is not much esoteric knowledge that a scholar can add to the corpus of Plato’s work.  Most of what’s there is the common legend and what’s added by conjecture doesn’t really matter to anyone but possibly a specialist who wants to speculate whether the Republic was written in which range of years and before or after some other dialog such as Gorgias.

What I did enjoy was the sections of the book that reviewed the history of Athens and other parts of the Hellenic world in Plato’s time.  Plato lived during the end of the Peloponnesian War and the defeat of Athens.  He lived under the reign of the Thirty Tyrants.  In fact, several of his family members belonged to that regime which he eventually denounced.  Of course, the following regime that restored democracy to Athens also condemned his mentor and friend Socrates to death so Plato’s political and partisan feelings were early on buffeted by harsh reality.  But the facts of the times are interesting and useful for consideration.  Plato’s later dabbling with practical politics when he attempted to convert the notorious tyrant Dionysus II of Syracuse into a philosopher-king is almost farcically unrealistic.  The fallout from this attempt should have been enough to single-handedly destroy Plato’s reputation as a practical philosopher but time heals all wounds.

I guess I’m of two minds as to how to recommend this book.  If someone is interested in Plato’s work and his philosophical ideas then this book will be of interest.  If someone is interested in the very important time period after the end of the Peloponnesian War until right before Alexander the Great there is some interesting insights here.  But unless both apply, I think most readers will have to pick and choose through the sections of the book.

For instance, I find Plato’s Theory of Forms utter nonsense.  The idea that there is an ideal form of a tree or a shoemaker or a door seems to me the working of the mind of a doofus.  Even the idea of the ideal of a geometric shape like a sphere or a cube seems an unnecessary addition to reality.  So, the section on this doctrine holds no interest for me.  And in fact, I find most of Plato’s philosophical doctrines not very useful for human life.  But that’s how I’ve judged most of philosophy.  Although Aristotle seemed to have had a more practical view of the world and the things in it.  Maybe I should have looked for a new biography of Aristotle.  Oh well.