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High today, here: 11. Dewpoint then: -4. High dewpoint: -2.
High today in TO: 11. Dewpoint then: -3. High dewpoint: -3.
Low today on the balcony: 0.3. High: 10.8. Currently: 4.5.
Read some 50 pages of Strauss's commentary on the Republic in The City and Man ... it's a faithfully convoluted commentary for a convoluted book. It begins, after some generalities on Plato interpretation, with a bit that took my breath away, about the opening of the Republic, where Socrates and his friends meet Polemarchus and his friends on the road; Polemarchus says that Socrates's gang isn't allowed to go home, but has to come to his house, and if they're unwilling, his own gang is strong enough to make them; Glaucon says, what if we convince you to let us go?; Polemarchus says, you can't convince us if we won't listen; but then someone chimes in that there's going to be an excellent show that they ought to stick around for; and Socrates says, in that case, we'll go to your house. Strauss points out that what you have here is a mixture of force and reason that the Republic as a whole urges is the way to justice.
It is, in fact, something like that very idea about what the Republic as a whole is doing that led me to pack up my paper, which I decided was based on a fundamental misunderstanding, and pick up Bloom's book, of which I read the preface (which is mostly a spirited and, to me, absolutely bang-on defense of his literalism in translation), which ended by noting that his interpretive essay was largely based on Strauss's essay in The City and Man, which sent me to Strauss.
In the end, I think the misunderstanding is not so fundamental--it has to do with the idea that justice consists in doing your own work, which I briefly decided was wrong, but now I think it's only a specific interpretation of it that's wrong, namely (of all things) the interpretation according to which the "city of pigs" is the paradigm of a just city, against which the "purified" city falls short. The thing that's been nagging at me about the idea that the fleshed-out city isn't actually the just city is that the original city has no analogue to the spirited part of the soul--the city needs to be made "fevered" to introduce that, so that the city-soul analogy will work.
What bothers me now, though, is that the guardians are introduced to make war against external adversaries rather than to keep the rowdy luxury-loving rabble in line. Why? But there again, the friend-enemy, citizen-foreigner distinction--which Strauss does actually emphasize; he says that that definition of justice (doing good to your friends, and ill, or at least not-so-good, to your enemies) never really goes away in the Republic (and that, somehow, in the Cleitophon--which I've barely heard of, never mind read--that's Socrates's own definition of justice!).
High today in TO: 11. Dewpoint then: -3. High dewpoint: -3.
Low today on the balcony: 0.3. High: 10.8. Currently: 4.5.
Read some 50 pages of Strauss's commentary on the Republic in The City and Man ... it's a faithfully convoluted commentary for a convoluted book. It begins, after some generalities on Plato interpretation, with a bit that took my breath away, about the opening of the Republic, where Socrates and his friends meet Polemarchus and his friends on the road; Polemarchus says that Socrates's gang isn't allowed to go home, but has to come to his house, and if they're unwilling, his own gang is strong enough to make them; Glaucon says, what if we convince you to let us go?; Polemarchus says, you can't convince us if we won't listen; but then someone chimes in that there's going to be an excellent show that they ought to stick around for; and Socrates says, in that case, we'll go to your house. Strauss points out that what you have here is a mixture of force and reason that the Republic as a whole urges is the way to justice.
It is, in fact, something like that very idea about what the Republic as a whole is doing that led me to pack up my paper, which I decided was based on a fundamental misunderstanding, and pick up Bloom's book, of which I read the preface (which is mostly a spirited and, to me, absolutely bang-on defense of his literalism in translation), which ended by noting that his interpretive essay was largely based on Strauss's essay in The City and Man, which sent me to Strauss.
In the end, I think the misunderstanding is not so fundamental--it has to do with the idea that justice consists in doing your own work, which I briefly decided was wrong, but now I think it's only a specific interpretation of it that's wrong, namely (of all things) the interpretation according to which the "city of pigs" is the paradigm of a just city, against which the "purified" city falls short. The thing that's been nagging at me about the idea that the fleshed-out city isn't actually the just city is that the original city has no analogue to the spirited part of the soul--the city needs to be made "fevered" to introduce that, so that the city-soul analogy will work.
What bothers me now, though, is that the guardians are introduced to make war against external adversaries rather than to keep the rowdy luxury-loving rabble in line. Why? But there again, the friend-enemy, citizen-foreigner distinction--which Strauss does actually emphasize; he says that that definition of justice (doing good to your friends, and ill, or at least not-so-good, to your enemies) never really goes away in the Republic (and that, somehow, in the Cleitophon--which I've barely heard of, never mind read--that's Socrates's own definition of justice!).
