Plato's Fable by Mitchell Joshua; George Robert P. ;

Author:Mitchell, Joshua; George, Robert P. ;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Published: 2009-04-05T04:00:00+00:00

1 Plato, Republic, Book VI, 492b–e (emphasis added).

2 Plato, Republic, Book I, 331e. The beginning of justice is debt. On this matter Plato and Nietzsche are in accord. See Nietzsche, Genealogy of Morals, Second Essay, sec. 4, pp. 62–63.

3 For the divided soul (about which more in due course), Plato’s claim remains unprovable. Not having been illuminated by the Good, such a soul remains in the shadow world of the Cave (Republic, Book VII, 514a–517a), and so possesses no evidence of the sort that can be called knowledge. Absent such knowledge, Plato must resort to myths, salutary tales, which, at best, point to the Good. Short of being illuminated by the Good, all that mortal man has is hypothesis. See ibid., Book VI, 511b–d.

4 Plato, Republic, Book I, 331b.

5 Ibid., 329c. The words are Sophocles’, but Cephalus cites their wisdom and applicability to himself.

6 Ibid., 329c–d.

7 Ibid., 331b (emphasis added).

8 Ibid., 331d. Here, attending to the sacrifices is a diversion from philosophy. Even though Cephalus has “more frequent sightings of an approaching end” (ibid., 330e) and purports to have adjusted his thinking to take cognizance of death (ibid., 330d–331a), his evasion of Socrates’ question suggests that he has yet to accept the kind of death about which Socrates is most concerned in the Republic.

9 See Plato, Phaedo, trans. G.M.A. Grube, in Plato: Complete Works, 64a. Only by facing the death of what is purportedly known can there be the knowing ignorance, if you will, that is philosophy. “The one aim of those who practice philosophy in the proper manner,” Socrates says, “is to practice death and dying.”

10 Plato, Republic, Bk. I, 328e.

11 Ibid., 331d.

12 Ibid., 327c: “But could you persuade us if we don’t listen?”

13 There can be no truth without death: This is a venerable theme in the Republic. In Book III (405d–407e), Plato criticizes doctors who follow Herodicus because they make life the highest good, rather than the Good itself. Asclepius, the doctor who “did not think it worthwhile to treat a man incapable of living a normal life” (407e), understood that survival is not the highest good. See also Rousseau, Emile, Book I, p. 53: “I am not able to teach living to one who thinks of nothing but how to keep himself from dying.” Hegel, too, has this motif in his own writing. The “slaughter bench” about which he writes (see G.W.F. Hegel, Reason in History, trans. Robert S. Hartman [Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1953], p. 27) is made necessary because of the enduring power, yet inadequacy, of the forms that arise in history and that obstruct Spirit coming to know itself as itself. Geist reveals itself to itself only on the slaughter bench of history. Theologically, habit forms a world that must (and can) be annulled by dying to “the world” through the Spirit. See also Hegel, Phenomenology , Preface, para. 32, p. 19: “[The life of Spirit] wins its truth only when, in utter dismemberment, it finds itself.”

14 Plato, Republic, Bk. I, 334b.

15 Ibid., 332d.

16 Ibid., 332e; see also 333e.

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