Letters to the Editor
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Plato and Aristotle, and American Politics
To the Editor:
If I understand the conculsions of this article correctly, the conflict in U.S. politics today is between a two-dimensional Aristotellian approach and a two-dimensional Platonic Approach. Meaning that rational attention to statecraft based on the achievement of rational, reality-based results, is Aristotelian and uninspirational, which is what Bill Clinton was accused of, and worse, what the other politicans of his school are derogetorily called, "policy wonks." In other words, there is something wrong with being well versed and knowledgible about the politicy issues which face our country and our society and that somehow that this has to be visionless. "Vision" only means in the realm of the military so in this paradigm the realization of ideals such as eliminating poverty, guaranteed wages, universal health insurance coverage, are "wonkish" and thus without vision.
The two-dimentional Platonic approach emphasizes the rhetoric of vision but is not able to do the Aristotilian thing: think about how exactly and effectively one's vision could be resolved. In this paradigm history just needs a push, like the invasion of Iraq, and then the vision will be realized.
As long as the political culture is explained in this manner through the mainstream media, there really is no hopt. The Platonists will triumph in elections but fail in actual policy.
Sincerely yours,
Arthur C. Hurwitz
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What Nice Teeth You Have, Uncle Leo
GREAT ARTICLE! Someone finally described what this is all about: how the Bushies came to think that they're simply above the somewhat pedestrian Constitution that governs the rest of us. It must be OK for the Boy King to lie because they're NOBLE lies. Can’t you just see this ignoble band of pretenders sitting around, brows furrowed, with GW trying to remember where he’s been and the rest of them, in the mold of their mentor Leo Strauss, trying to forget?
I've written several times about the dark specter of Leo Strauss’ work at Chicago and his little collection of intellectual sidewinders, molting their moral and ethical impedimenta to evolve from bright to clever. They have all but stolen this country and its governance.
It’s easy to envision the seamless seduction of the Boy King who can scarcely follow the intellectual breadcrumbs through the woods to Grandma’s house much less survive the visit. What nice teeth you have, Uncle Leo! If GW hadn’t come along, the NeoCons would have had to invent him. I wonder if the President knows that HIS Oval Office has become the equivalent of the small table for the kids at Thanksgiving dinner.
How sad – just another stunted, patrician, entitled adolescent lacking the intellectual and moral architecture to do the job purchased for him by his family and board-member cronies. I hope GHWB doesn’t mourn that decision about not going to Baghdad - it was the right one even if little GW has become an embarrassment and international menace on the world stage.
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More than a little disconcerting...
...and disturbing that we continue to "celebrate" writings which attempt to dissect the motivations of this clearly murderous and out of control administration when what we should be doing is drafting articles of impeachment and/or criminal indictments!
When is enough evidence enough? Have we been numbed into submission?
If the people of this country (who are, after all, THE GOVERNMENT) don't care enough to get off their collective arses, we deserve what we get.
Quit writing the epitaphs and begin the indictments.
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Edmund Burke was smarter than Marx
Who was of course a dilettante. No, all successful revolutions arise out of the middle class not the poor. This was validated in 1848 when all the 'people's revolutions' in Europe. So if Bush, or the Saloniks for that matter want to rip a page from a philosopher who makes sense, read Burke. And save the Marx, Goldman and Bakunin for your bong. Plato? 999 out of 1000 people find Plato utterly unreadable. Plato is a guidepost of nothing.
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spinning sophistry...
Alas, m[r|s] Onassis, to whom i normally channel a large dollop of psychic cheer, is woefully unapplaudable in defence of the sophists.
I read and reread the suggestion that we should resurrect Sophistic rhetoric until it dawned on me that somehow, spin and rhetoric were divorced in Slackies mind. Heresome little character dressed in red prods with a pitchfork, repeating: "Spin, bad. Rhetoric, good!".
This wee figure is making enough noise, apparently, to drown out the facts. From wikipedia: eminent sophist thrasymachus is:
"noted for his unabashed, even reckless, defence of injustice"
...in other words, a kind of pre-Christian Fox News anchor.
Think Brit Hume + toga. Objectively, this is not what those on the LHS need or want. We are, after all, the reality-based community, aren't we?
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Plato and the Founders
Reading the interviews, I was reminded of something I read a few years ago:
"...this elaborate display of classical authors is deceptive. Often the learning behind it was superficial: often the citations appear to have been dragged in as 'window dressing with which to ornament a page or a speech and to increase the weight of an argument,' for classical quotation, as Dr. Johnson said, was 'the parole of literary men all over the world'. So Jonathan Mayhew casually lumped Plato with Demostehnes and Cicero as the ancients who in his youth had initiated him 'in the doctrines of civil liberty': Oxenbridge Thatcher too thought Plato had been a liberty-loving revolutionary, while Jefferson, who actually read the Dialogues, discovered in them only the 'sophisms, futilities, and incomprehensibilities' of a 'foggy mind' - an idea concurred in with relief by John Adams, who in 1774 had cited Plato as an advocate of equality and self-government but who was so shocked when he finally studied the philosophy that he concluded that the Republic must have been meant as a satire."
--From pages 24 - 25. Bernard Bailyn's "The Ideological Orgins of the American Revolution", 1967
I think this shows just how original the Founders were in their thinking, while also illustrating the tendency of people to not study philosophers, writers, thinkers, etc, but to decide just the same that they would support their position, and thus reference them for support. I think most are surprised when they actually go and read works they have always heard of, but never looked at themselves. That said, I agree that Plato was impractical in his outlook and ideas, but he should still be studied. After all, his philosophy has been of enormous influence on the intellectual evolution of the Western world. Its modified form of Neoplatonism was synthesized with Jewish and early Christian thought to produce medieval Christianity (indeed, there would be no doctrine of the Trinity without Neoplatonism to provide it with a philosophical structure). Until the re-discovery of Aristotle by the west (via the Islamic world that was deeply enamoured of him), Plato's philosophy and its children was the dominant philosophical strain in the west. After the rise of the Aristotelian synthesis in the later Middle ages, it was Platonism and Neoplatonism brought west by Byzantine scholars fleeing the Turkish invasion that led to the intellectual flowering that came to be the Renaissance.
Say what you will about Plato, but his work must be studied because our intellectual history, indeed, much of our history in general, doesn't make any sense without understanding it.