Prudes, Perverts, and Tyrants by Tarnopolsky Christina H

Author:Tarnopolsky, Christina H.
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Published: 2014-04-11T04:00:00+00:00

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1 See Dodds (1959), 30–34; and Kahn (1996), 52. As Dodds (1959, 32) puts it, “Apart from some short passages in the Laws, nowhere else in the dialogues has Plato told us directly what he thought of the institutions and achievements of his native city.” Dodds attributes this notion of a Platonic “Apology” to Friedrich Schleiermacher in the introduction to his translation of the dialogue. Plato’s own account of his disillusionment with Athenian politics in the wake of the restored democracy’s condemnation of Socrates is famously recorded in his Seventh Letter.

2 The idea that shame and free or frank speech are opposed for Plato is held by Allan Bloom (1968) who reads Plato as revealing the flaws in any democratic political system, and by Arlene Saxonhouse (2006) who reads Plato as a democratic thinker who is concerned to combat the imperialistic tendencies of democratic Athens. In his commentary on the Republic (which for him reveals the same Platonic teaching as the Gorgias), Bloom (1968, 336) argues that Thrasymachus’ blush reveals his shame and thus the fact that “he has no true freedom of mind, because he is attached to prestige, to the applause of the multitude and hence their thought.” Bloom’s interpretation associates shame with a conformist enslavement to convention in opposition to the truth. Similarly for Saxonhouse (2006, 76), “It is the philosophers’ stripping away that which we desire to hide from the gaze of others that brings on shame and it is the playwrights’ casting aside the shame that would inhibit their uncovering of the nature of our existence who can reveal, hē alētheia, that which is true. It is in this sense that shame opposes Socratic philosophy, for instance, in the activity dedicated to the pursuit of truth.” See also Saxonhouse (2006), 193, 212. Her interpretation associates shame (aidōs) with a kind of covering, and parrhēsia or shamelessness with a kind of uncovering or exposing. This, however, overlooks the fact that while the older term, aidōs, is linked to the notion of a covering mantle (Konstan, 2006, 296 n.17), the more classical and democratic term, aischunē, (especially in its connotations of dishonor or disgrace), is closer to the very notion of uncovering that she wants to link to parrhēsia and even to truth (alētheia). In this chapter I contest this opposition between shame and truthful speaking, and with it the suggestion by both Bloom and Saxonhouse that Socrates is shameless.

3 Cf. Bloom (1968), 336. According to Bloom, it is the philosopher alone who is truly shameless because his way of life involves questioning all laws and conventions. As I show in this book, while it is certainly true that flattering shame ties one to conventions and is at the heart of a dangerous kind of conformity, it is not true that all types of shame are slavishly linked to convention and opposed to the truth.

4 Kahn (1983), 115.

5 For Benardete (1991) and Stauffer (2006, 121, 182), the true philosopher would see beyond the noble and

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