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High today, here: -2. Dewpoint then: -5. High dewpoint: -5.
High today in TO: 1. Dewpoint then: -8. High dewpoint: -8.
Low today on the balcony: -4.4. High: -2.4. Currently: -3.9.
Another tale of two questions, two polls down the pipe from angus-reid.com today:
1. "Should U.S. president George W. Bush be censured for approving the NSA wiretapping program?" 38% yes, 45% no.
2. "Do you favour or oppose the United States Senate passing a resolution censuring U.S. president George W. Bush for authorizing wiretaps of Americans within the United States without obtaining court orders?" 46% favour, 44% oppose. (Same poll has 42% favouring impeachment, 49% opposing.)
Of course, what I wonder is, how many people polled know what "censure" means? I mean, generally speaking. I'm not sure myself what it means for the Senate to pass a motion of censure. My guess, however, would be nothing.
Every time I read the Republic, it seems longer than I'd thought--I've been at it all week, and I'm only through Book V. And every time I read it, it's a different book. Heidegger, every time I read a piece, I get something more, but the thing I dreaded all the way through the diss--that one day I'd read something, and it would become something else entirely--never happened. With Plato, though, it happens constantly. (It's largely because of the dialogue form. It's like a play: two different directors, two different plays. (Once, at Queen's, I saw Albee's Zoo Story performed back-to-back with the two actors switching roles. That was probably the most interesting bit of theatre I've seen.))
And that's even once you get past the translation issues. Another telling footnote from Shorey, when Socrates is about to say that victorious warriors should, as a prize, be able to "kiss" (the word is phileo, and the sense is surely "make love to") whomever they want: "The deplorable facetiousness of the following recalls the vulgarity of Xenophon's guard-house conversations. It is almost the only passage in Plato that one would wish to blot."
I'm still vexed by the question whether or to what extent the "fevered" city is really "purged". (That's what the business with the flutes was about. Socrates announces the city has been purged after they've agreed to ban flutes; Shorey's "flute-girls" are in the list of things that Socrates says their "fevered" city will have. Who knows, maybe there's still a subtle semantic connection there.) It seems like it can only be a joke when Socrates says it is, and logically, it just doesn't add up: as long as there are luxuries in your city, and as long as there are warriors to secure them, your city is fevered, according to the original argument.
The one way I'm beginning to see out of this, though, is something that comes up in a few of Shorey's notes, in which he says that Plato mistakenly says that some condition should apply to the city when he really means that it should apply to the guardians. Personally, I think it's the best policy to suppose, as long as possible, that Plato doesn't make mistakes. If the conditions he imposes on the guardians really were imposed on the city as a whole, then the city as a whole really would be purged--it really would be the ideal city again. But then there would no longer be any need to have guardians, as such, and you'd lose the city-soul analogy which is the whole point of the exercise. Maybe not mistakes, but rather a tangle....
(I often wonder how in the world you could not get yourself into a tangle writing a long manuscript by hand--and in Plato's case, in a written language with no capitalization, word breaks, or punctuation! You have to wonder if, at times, he wasn't sure himself what he'd meant by what he wrote (and same goes, of course, for the biblical scriptures. I heard an aside, once, in a talk, that--so the story goes--the lack of spaces and punctuation in ancient Hebrew is what enabled Moses to write the Torah, as dictated by Yahweh, without knowing how it turned out, i.e., with his own death. To see what it means--from the very beginning, it wasn't evident what it meant--you had to study it--which, just maybe, might speak, again, to the scholarly liberalism of Judaism.)...)
Something else that's standing out for me on this reading, which I've already mentioned pertaining to the guardian-as-dog image: the recurring friend/enemy theme. Particularly, in Book V, the suggestion that all Greeks are naturally friends, that they can't, properly speaking, make war against each other, and when they fight, they properly ought to be be looking for reconciliation rather than triumph and vengeance. He doesn't go so far as to say that the Greeks and barbarians are naturally enemies, but the barbarians are outsiders, and not entitled to the same consideration. This is, really, very hard to rationalize, but it does seem, again, like a gesture toward redeeming the suggestion that one owes friends something good and enemies something bad. (And, of course, I wonder what, if anything, Strauss has to say about this, given his association (about which I actually know basically nothing) with Carl Schmitt and given that the friend/enemy dichotomy is supposed to be Schmitt's big thing.)
I think there may have been something else I meant to say, but it's now deeply buried behind half an hour of Wikipediaing Carl Schmitt, Leo Strauss, Telos (journal), and God knows what else at this point. (Oh, now I remember. Well, tomorrow, maybe. It'd be kinda nice not to go over 1000 words two days in a row.)
High today in TO: 1. Dewpoint then: -8. High dewpoint: -8.
Low today on the balcony: -4.4. High: -2.4. Currently: -3.9.
Another tale of two questions, two polls down the pipe from angus-reid.com today:
1. "Should U.S. president George W. Bush be censured for approving the NSA wiretapping program?" 38% yes, 45% no.
2. "Do you favour or oppose the United States Senate passing a resolution censuring U.S. president George W. Bush for authorizing wiretaps of Americans within the United States without obtaining court orders?" 46% favour, 44% oppose. (Same poll has 42% favouring impeachment, 49% opposing.)
Of course, what I wonder is, how many people polled know what "censure" means? I mean, generally speaking. I'm not sure myself what it means for the Senate to pass a motion of censure. My guess, however, would be nothing.
Every time I read the Republic, it seems longer than I'd thought--I've been at it all week, and I'm only through Book V. And every time I read it, it's a different book. Heidegger, every time I read a piece, I get something more, but the thing I dreaded all the way through the diss--that one day I'd read something, and it would become something else entirely--never happened. With Plato, though, it happens constantly. (It's largely because of the dialogue form. It's like a play: two different directors, two different plays. (Once, at Queen's, I saw Albee's Zoo Story performed back-to-back with the two actors switching roles. That was probably the most interesting bit of theatre I've seen.))
And that's even once you get past the translation issues. Another telling footnote from Shorey, when Socrates is about to say that victorious warriors should, as a prize, be able to "kiss" (the word is phileo, and the sense is surely "make love to") whomever they want: "The deplorable facetiousness of the following recalls the vulgarity of Xenophon's guard-house conversations. It is almost the only passage in Plato that one would wish to blot."
I'm still vexed by the question whether or to what extent the "fevered" city is really "purged". (That's what the business with the flutes was about. Socrates announces the city has been purged after they've agreed to ban flutes; Shorey's "flute-girls" are in the list of things that Socrates says their "fevered" city will have. Who knows, maybe there's still a subtle semantic connection there.) It seems like it can only be a joke when Socrates says it is, and logically, it just doesn't add up: as long as there are luxuries in your city, and as long as there are warriors to secure them, your city is fevered, according to the original argument.
The one way I'm beginning to see out of this, though, is something that comes up in a few of Shorey's notes, in which he says that Plato mistakenly says that some condition should apply to the city when he really means that it should apply to the guardians. Personally, I think it's the best policy to suppose, as long as possible, that Plato doesn't make mistakes. If the conditions he imposes on the guardians really were imposed on the city as a whole, then the city as a whole really would be purged--it really would be the ideal city again. But then there would no longer be any need to have guardians, as such, and you'd lose the city-soul analogy which is the whole point of the exercise. Maybe not mistakes, but rather a tangle....
(I often wonder how in the world you could not get yourself into a tangle writing a long manuscript by hand--and in Plato's case, in a written language with no capitalization, word breaks, or punctuation! You have to wonder if, at times, he wasn't sure himself what he'd meant by what he wrote (and same goes, of course, for the biblical scriptures. I heard an aside, once, in a talk, that--so the story goes--the lack of spaces and punctuation in ancient Hebrew is what enabled Moses to write the Torah, as dictated by Yahweh, without knowing how it turned out, i.e., with his own death. To see what it means--from the very beginning, it wasn't evident what it meant--you had to study it--which, just maybe, might speak, again, to the scholarly liberalism of Judaism.)...)
Something else that's standing out for me on this reading, which I've already mentioned pertaining to the guardian-as-dog image: the recurring friend/enemy theme. Particularly, in Book V, the suggestion that all Greeks are naturally friends, that they can't, properly speaking, make war against each other, and when they fight, they properly ought to be be looking for reconciliation rather than triumph and vengeance. He doesn't go so far as to say that the Greeks and barbarians are naturally enemies, but the barbarians are outsiders, and not entitled to the same consideration. This is, really, very hard to rationalize, but it does seem, again, like a gesture toward redeeming the suggestion that one owes friends something good and enemies something bad. (And, of course, I wonder what, if anything, Strauss has to say about this, given his association (about which I actually know basically nothing) with Carl Schmitt and given that the friend/enemy dichotomy is supposed to be Schmitt's big thing.)
I think there may have been something else I meant to say, but it's now deeply buried behind half an hour of Wikipediaing Carl Schmitt, Leo Strauss, Telos (journal), and God knows what else at this point. (Oh, now I remember. Well, tomorrow, maybe. It'd be kinda nice not to go over 1000 words two days in a row.)
