MSTU4016-08/Discuss 6
From Studyplace
October 8
Interrogating the Past III: Plato and Reasoned Identity
- Discussion Question
- Is preparing a person to lead an examined life a feasible educational objective? What claim on educational practice should it have?
- Here are a few thoughts about preparing for a discussion of Plato. We are now taking up the work of someone whose surviving writings are very extensive, subject to multiple interpretations, and extraordinarily influential. The Apology is a relatively "early" dialog, providing Plato's report of Socrates trial and a powerful defense of Socrates's conduct and convictions. It established Socrates's conduct and convictions as an enduring goal for a formative education leading to the pursuit of an examined life. The Republic, a "mature" dialog, a masterpiece of artistry and thought, examined the importance of the Socratice goal for formative education for both the person and the polity. A reading of the Republic that would do justice to the work requires sustained study over multiple weeks. Of the ten "Books" that comprise the Republic, we are sampling the seventh, which deals with the formation of a rational intellect through which one might aspire to conduct one's life with appetites and emotions guided by the light of reason.
Plato's educational goals and his reflections about how to attain them were by no means uncontested in his time. As I suggested during our last class discussion, two opposing groups were significant — a conservative group, well represented by Socrates's accusers in the Apology, and an avant-guard group, which we have encountered as the Sophists and rhetoricians. Plato largely has had the better of the argument with them, if for no other reason that most of what we know about their positions comes to us filtered through Plato's dialogs like Protagoras and Gorgias. The practice of ancient Greek higher education was nevertheless deeply influenced by Plato's sophistic opponents, along with the more "academic" practice of Plato and Aristotle. Hence educational practice is often sophistic in practice no matter how much educators believe themselves to be Socratic in principle. Ideally, in addition to the excerpt from the Republic, we would read the Apology and Protagoras in the Supplemental Readings.
In Preface to Plato, Eric A. Havelock addressed Plato's critique of the place Homeric poetry had in the culture of his time. Havelock's analysis is both difficult and controversial. It turns on an interpretation of the intellectual history of Greece from Homer through Plato. Put simply, to start with, in the pre-literate Greek world, people whose formative education occurred through immersion in the affordances offered by oral epic performance lacked the resources of abstract reasoning. Consequently their responses to the vicissitudes of experience were mediated through their emotions and appetites as these were shaped within the Homeric ethos of oral epic performance. The introduction of alphabetic literacy into that culture slowly generated new forms of thought and conduct through a complex adaptive process evident in pre-Socratic through, drama, and lyric poetry. In Plato, the affordances of abstract reasoning, made possible by the thoughtful engagement in literate communication, emerged into full awareness, which he articulated as a new, improved goal for formative education, namely achieving the capacity to conduct one's life in a way in which emotions and appetites were coordinated and guided by rational reflection. The Republic can be read as the manifesto of this new formative education.
Here we meet the central question implicit in all we touch on in this course: — What capacities for thinking about the problems of life have arisen through emergent developments in the prevailing means of communications and how have people used these capacities, with what effects on the character and quality of their historical experience?
- Here are a few thoughts about preparing for a discussion of Plato. We are now taking up the work of someone whose surviving writings are very extensive, subject to multiple interpretations, and extraordinarily influential. The Apology is a relatively "early" dialog, providing Plato's report of Socrates trial and a powerful defense of Socrates's conduct and convictions. It established Socrates's conduct and convictions as an enduring goal for a formative education leading to the pursuit of an examined life. The Republic, a "mature" dialog, a masterpiece of artistry and thought, examined the importance of the Socratice goal for formative education for both the person and the polity. A reading of the Republic that would do justice to the work requires sustained study over multiple weeks. Of the ten "Books" that comprise the Republic, we are sampling the seventh, which deals with the formation of a rational intellect through which one might aspire to conduct one's life with appetites and emotions guided by the light of reason.
- Discussion leader: Robbie McClintock
- Required Readings
- Plato, Republic, Reeve, trans., Synopsis & Book VII. Read
- Supplemental Reading
- Plato, Apology, Grube, trans. Read
- Plato, Protagoras, Lombardo-Bell, trans. Read
- Eric Havelock, Preface to Plato (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1963), Chapters 1 & 11, pp. 3-19, 197-214. Read
