Thursday, December 25, 2008
Christmas eve
My Christmas eve activities included rolling dolmades and preparing the stuffing for a lamb roast for lunch with the Orphans on Christmas day. I listened to an audio book of Plato's Republic while I was rolling, folding and stuffing. At this season of enforced and often uncomfortable togetherness, it seemed a luxury to be indulging in such productive and fruitful aloneness -
The Republic is something that I have been thinking I want to read, it is a representation of conversation as method, conversation as a means of instruction or learning, after all. Somehow though, I just don't think that we are meant to learn by reading slabs of text.
What I hear here, is like a pre-echo of Wittgenstein's use of examples to address the questions of an skeptical interlocutor, —it has the same patience-barely-hiding-frustration, simplifying air of a school teacher addressing an idiot pupil—; a searching for metaphors in order to approach what he is trying to see (or lead us to to see) from different angles, to sneak up on truth as it were. It is the same as Heidegger's poetic method, leading the reader in circles around the central thought in an essay, J.A. Austin's "stalking horses" used to approach the problems of modern philosphy though literary surrealism or humour.
The Republic is something that I have been thinking I want to read, it is a representation of conversation as method, conversation as a means of instruction or learning, after all. Somehow though, I just don't think that we are meant to learn by reading slabs of text.
Now I've heard Part One read aloud, I feel like I've got a handle on something, a way into the text
Glaucon and the rest of them begged me to proceed and not let the argument drop, but try to find out what justice and injustice are and what is their real usefulness. So I began by saying, quite frankly, 'This is a very obscure subject that we're enquiring into, and I think it needs very keen sight. We aren't very clever, and so I think we had better proceed as follows. Let us suppose we are rather short-sighted men and are set to read a distant notice written in small letters; we the discover that the same notice is up elsewhere on a larger scale and in larger lettering: won't it be a godsend to us to be able to read the larger notice first and then compare it with the smaller to see if they are the same?'
What I hear here, is like a pre-echo of Wittgenstein's use of examples to address the questions of an skeptical interlocutor, —it has the same patience-barely-hiding-frustration, simplifying air of a school teacher addressing an idiot pupil—; a searching for metaphors in order to approach what he is trying to see (or lead us to to see) from different angles, to sneak up on truth as it were. It is the same as Heidegger's poetic method, leading the reader in circles around the central thought in an essay, J.A. Austin's "stalking horses" used to approach the problems of modern philosphy though literary surrealism or humour.
Labels: thesis
# posted by amcqu : 6:45 am
