A Meeting in Oea, or Concerning Plato (1970) by Aleksander Krawczuk
Good Reads meta-data is 243 pages rated 3.38 by 21 litizens
Genre: fiction.
DNA: Ancient Greek.
Tagline: It’s a long (winded) way to Alexandria.
Verdict: All trip, no arrival
It is 150 A.D. when a near-sighted, round-shouldered, shuffling scholar leaves Carthage (Tunis) to go to the distant and fabled library at Alexandria, where he hopes to complete a biography of the divine Plato. The trip does not go smoothly and Scholar becomes stuck in Oea (near Tripoli). Travelling by the inland road he misses the shores of Tripoli.
In his trials and tribulations Scholar finds solace in passages from Plato’s works. He also describes some of Plato’s life, like the name of his mother, father, and sister, as well the brothers. We learn the back stories of some of the characters whom he chose to name in his dialogues like Cephalus and Polemarchus. Plato never married and sired no children it seems, though why is neither alleged nor suggested. Indeed, there as much basic biography in this book as in Robin Waterfield’s book on Plato subtitled ‘A Life.’
I needed a map and Wikipedia to follow his path.
Originally published in Poland in 1970 it might well have seemed to be social criticism then and there, though that is not immediately apparent to this reader.
It is largely expository with little dialogue and no action to speak of. The result is slow moving, but it does move, and at times is moving. Those with short-attention spans need not bother.
Aleksdander Krawczuk
The resident Mechanical Turk at Amazon struck again because I had earlier searched for a biography of Plato, as in the Waterfield reference above.
The author Polish was professor of Philosophy with other like titles.
Felicity Wood, Universities and the Occult Rituals of the Corporate World (2018).
Good Reads meta-data is 219 pages, rated by …. [It is listed without any readers’ reactions].
Genre: Polemic.
DNA: South Africa.
Tagline: ‘Dr Faustus will see you now.’
Verdict: Depressing.
Felicity Wood has long studied occult witchcraft and its allied practices in sub-Saharan Africa, and as she observed the evolution of the corporate university in the last decades she became aware of the similarities between the managerial practices that grew up in them and the rituals of myth and magic in the occult.
Amen, sister.
Superstition takes many forms, besides religion. The book offers to an increasingly depressed reader a detailed comparison of the metaphorical similarities of these two worlds.
She makes that case in good part by quoting from the maelstrom of mission statements, performance goals, impact declarations, management directives, justifications for near perpetual re-organisation, and so on issued by the managers of universities far and wide, not just South Africa. While a reader may not accept entirely her premise, still one nods in agreement very often with her comparisons and interpretations.
Just as witchdoctors never proffer evidence for the effectiveness of their ceremonies but instead offer explanations of why more witch-doctoring is always needed, so too managers. When managers managing does not spin gold that can only be because even more managers managing is required. And more.
If the words of university managers are taken as invocations of spirits, well, that makes as much sense as trying to take them literally since most of the rhetoric is hollow: excellence, quality, impact, and so on are intoned at every breath, yet no one knows what they mean. But like prayers, perhaps mouthing them pleases the unseen powers of market, economy, and the most high and mystical of all – money. Mammon is indeed our god, and few of us prove worthy of that deity.
A few quotations follow to sample the text.
#####
‘One respondent contended that one specific vampire tale was factual, saying, “It was a true story because it was known by many people and many people talked about it.” (Luise White, Speaking with Vampires: Rumor and History in Colonial Africa (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2000), p 31.) All too often, the corporate fabulation at restructured universities has been made to seem more convincing by this means. A mantra has been repeated so many times that it has become reality.’
‘Wholly fictive place called “the real world” is quite unlike the actual world you and I live in. .. . [T]his invented entity called “the real world” is inhabited exclusively by hard-faced robots who devote themselves single-mindedly to the task of making money.’ Rational calculators of material self-interest and nothing else.’ It is as false as reality television programming.
‘They also owe their prevalence to the fact that they have been utilised to reinforce a further, related piece of corporate folklore: the notion that private profit is synonymous with public good.’
‘In general, the fantasy seems to prevail that by imitating corporate models, imposing managerial chains of command and invoking the jargon of the corporate world, as well as some of the mythologies that emanate from it and reinforce its ethos, a magical transformation can be wrought, by means of which universities can be transmuted into more productive, accountable and efficient institutions, working for the greater public good. This state of affairs has come to pass as a result of a faith in the near-magical potency of the corporate world, fuelled by the vague belief that the corporate sector, situated as it is in local and global marketplaces, is closest to the sources of economic profit.’
‘This might be one reason emphasis has been on outward forms and ritual activity, rather than meaningful substance. Indeed, market-oriented institutions tend to be characterised by their ritualistic imitations of the corporate sector and their symbolic enactments of certain key qualities associated with this domain, such as excellence, quality, productivity and accountability.’
‘The voodoo-like potency of words include quality, excellence, mission, premier, benchmark, strategic, top rank, world-class, flagship, team-building, auditing, performance, accountability, and even ethics.’
‘Quality is a term laden with mystery and magic partly to compensate for the fact that, like excellence, it is essentially a vacuous term: a receptacle into which different meanings can be poured. As one of the principal words of power, the word quality is routinely uttered for purposes of ritual and enchantment, as if calling on this concept will cause it to manifest itself.’
Felicity Wood
‘Like quality the word mission has spiritual resonance evoking the image of a sacred quest.’
####
It is great fun to read, though hard-going, because even as the text ridicules the prolix jargon of corporatism, the book itself is riddled with an an opaque vocabulary of –isms , –itions, and –ites drawn from social science. Much of this vocabulary is as vacuous as that which it bewails. Sad, but true.
I had hoped for some reality testing for the mystical properties of business that make it efficient and effective. My experience of private business — large and small — has sometimes shown it to be incompetent, indifferent, confused, inconsistent, idiotic and the like. And yet successful. The volatility of businesses that come and go is likely to be due to these factors rather than to vigorous Darwinian competition. This is true in both large and small examples.
Check you Enron or Boeing share prices for evidence, or book a musical chairs seat on Qantas.
Good old days as she frequently notes were different but not better, but I have omitted those remarks since I know them so well.
Not a book likely to be reviewed in the higher education press and literature.
Good Reads meta-data is 272 pages, rated 3.56 by 488 litizens.
Genre: Sy Fy +
DNA: [See title.]
Tagline: Socrates did it!
Verdict: Tour de force kickoff return…fumbled!
A grad student is completing a PhD dissertation on the introduction of Ionic Greek in written form about 500 AD. She is an archive rat and burrows into files undisturbed, perhaps for centuries, she finds…a whomping great mystery. It is the year 2542 AD and the tech is even more techie than today but recognisable.
What she finds, well, in fact, it is given to her by a mystery man, seems to be a fragment from a hitherto unknown Socratic dialogue by Plato. It comes with several hallmarks that suggest authenticity. The papyrus fragment is a copy of that lost dialogue in Ionic Greek from 500 AD, so declares a carbon dating certificate in the same file. The Greek text certainly reads like Plato. Could it be? (By this time, I certainly wanted to know!)
Aside: There have been many spurious Platonic dialogue since the days of Aristotle. Forgers made them to sell to libraries and collectors. Intellectuals made them to pass off their ideas as Plato’s. Students made them to see if they could. Women made them to get published in a man’s-only world. These frauds, no doubt, continue to this day.
But, wait, there is more. SPOILER! The fragment is a conversation between Socrates and … a time traveller come to rescue him from the hemlock. Holy neurons!
That sets her off on a chase to find the rest of the dialogue. Authenticate it. Find the original. Trace the mystery man. Identify the time traveller. Six directions at once!
Now about that time travel. You sit in a chair in a secret room and use a remoter built-into the chair’s arm and whoosh. Well, no whoosh. You’re just there in the chair, but the calendar on the wall has changed. Back-and-forth they go through time. Aside: a time travelling sofa features in (T)Raumschiff Surprise – Periode 1 (2004).
After that whiz-bang start it descends into thriller mode, cutting back and forth, proliferating characters, and generally confusing me. The ease with which ancient Greeks, Egyptians, Nineteenth Century Americans, and others accept time travel undercut that plot line. The ease with which the time travellers surround themselves with minions and have plenty of money wherever they pop up likewise let the air out of the balloon. Oh, and one them, his frequent time traveller allowance depleted, sailed in a Greek trireme to the Americas.
Instead of dwelling on such matters as above, we have a hidden hand conspiracy that envelops one and all. Boring.
Paul Levinson
It is written as a thriller and that spares the author much and places all the responsibility on the reader to make sense of the to’ing and fro’ing, and this reader declined that onus.
Amazon’s Mechanical Turk’s suggested it, for which thanks.
P.S. I tried vol 2 and gave up: impossible to follow
Good Reads meta-data is 192 pages, rated 3.69 by 1664 litizens.
Genre: Krimi.
DNA: France; sub-species Simenon.
Tagline: In the beginning….
Verdict: Introspective.
A callow Jules Maigret and his blushing bride Louise have taken an apartment with his income as a police secretary at an arrondissement station. The job is largely clerical but one night when he is working late in his youthful zeal and the duty officer is out on a call he records the statement of a witness who reports a gunshot. Since it is what police officers do, Maigret takes it upon himself to investigate without waiting for a superior officer.
In so doing he enters a closed world of a very rich but strange bourgeois family in whose mansion the shot seemed to have been fired. Yet there is no evidence of such an occurrence when he rouses the household at 2 am to find out. Ooops!
Evidence or no, there is something odd about this place and these people and he worries away at it. When he reports all of this to his chief it seems absurd, but the chief with more than a touch of condescension encourages him to investigate, but softly, softly, perhaps to give him practice. Maigret does so with the patience and persistence that would mark all of his investigations.
When circumstances forced young Maigret (and it hard to picture a young and gangly Maigret) to leave medical school, the first job he could land to make money was with the police where his education and good handwriting fitted him to be a records officer. In this story he is posted to the fictitious Saint Georges station as secretary to the chief of this outpost, far from the Quai des Orfeves. Musing on the events that placed him there Maigret thinks the occupation he should have is part doctor and part priest:
‘People would have come to see him the way they consulted a doctor. He would have been a sort of mender of destinies.’ Not because he was clever but because could put himself into anyone’s shoes. Balzac
This is Maigret’s motif: to become one with those he investigates. This melding is beautifully realised in some of the novels.
The solemnity of that reflection was relieved when I laughed aloud at the following passage:
‘He hadn’t slept with his moustache net on and he had to straighten the tips…’
Moustache net! Great Movember’s Ghost! My efforts to find such a net for sale online have failed. Must chaps now do without such a useful accessory? See an example in use below.
This book is good evidence for not reading a series in publication order. While this is case Number One in Maigret’s career it is book number thirty (30) in the publication sequence.
There are occasional references to the future so the retrospective nature of the account is implicit, but this story is played out in a linear sequence.
Having finished a period krimi with steaming heaps of superfluous historical detail and a mob of characters, I wanted something clean and focussed. Enter Maigret.
Good Reads meta-data is 192 pages, rated 4.25 by 36 litizens
DNA: Academic.
Genre: History.
Tagline: They make the same mistakes every time.
Verdict: Chapeaux!
With the verve, energy, exuberance, and creativity characteristic of Athens its response to a stinging defeat by Sparta was to go on the offensive in 415 BC to far Sicily, there to subjugate its fellow democracy at Syracuse.
The primary source for these events comes from an involuntarily retired general, Thucydides, in his History of the Peloponnesian War. As with Machiavelli, Thucydides’ own meaning has largely been lost by contemporary writers seeking a classical authority for their own opinions who view it in a hall of distorting mirrors and see what they want to see in the text. A recent example is Graham Allison, Destined for War (2017). For an antidote try my essay of archeology in the Antioch Review (65 [2007]1: 173-185). Get clicking.
There are other sources, mostly fragmentary, and the ever increasing excavated evidence as more ground is dug up to build apartments around the Mediterranean Sea and relics are discovered, enriching the museum collections but putting the real estate developer out of business.
Matyszak mines these resources but in the main the book is a gloss on and homage to Thucydides. And that is good enough reason to read it.
Thucydides shows how men have acted under pressure and that predicts how we will act under a like pressure today or tomorrow. To predict the future learn the past. That’s why we read him – yesterday, today, and tomorrow is between the covers of a book.
Whereas Herodotus recorded any story he heard about dragons, sea monsters, three-legged men, talking dolphins, magic rings, flying trees.… Not so Thucydides who asserted nothing he could not confirm by evidence, reason, or both. He had a network of contacts in military and commercial life in Athens and its allies that extended to Sparta itself. These he used to research his book.
What is more remarkable to contemporary sensibility is that Thucydides kept his opinions to himself. He passes only one personal comment in his 500 plus pages when he wrote that Nicias, he least of all men, deserved the terrible fate that he suffered.
Thucydides quotes about 140 speeches; he himself heard some of them, and interviewed auditors who heard the others. But he also wrote what, after his research, he thought would have been said in many instances. Then there is that outlier, the dialogue on Melos. My take on that is in article cited above.
By the way we spent a few days on Melos once. I climbed to the top of the tallest point to look for the Athenian fleet, and later brought home a pebble from the beach where they could have landed.
After battles he visited several of the sites to see the terrain, sift through the remnants, and talk to local residents, if there were any. He acquired specimens of the weapons the soldiers of different cities used to assess their value. Thucydides tried living on the rations that besieged garrisons had to endure. He walked the ground armies travelled to test the conditions. Moreover, he visited Sparta to hear that side of the story. Some speculate that he also sailed to Sicily during this campaign to see for himself the city of Syracuse which is certainly described in a great detail in his text. More than once he does, indeed, sound like an eye witness. Several historians have inferred that he interviewed some of the opposing generals.
George Trevelyan made a similar hike to re-enact Garibaldi’s descent on Rome, see his Garibaldi and the Thousand (1909). He carried a pack and lived off the land as he went much the Red Shirts did.
The debacle at Syracuse is painful to read about because the drama always comes to the same climax. Leaving aside the complexities it is this: to conquer Syracuse Athens sent a force of 40,000 experienced veterans of citizen hoplites, mercenaries, and allies. To defend Syracuse Sparta sent one man. The Athenians lost as comprehensively as the Germans lost at Stalingrad. Some military advisor that one man! Read Thucydides for details.
When I read of the Sicilian expedition, I am remind of this passage about Gettysburg:
“It’s all now you see. Yesterday won’t be over until tomorrow and tomorrow began ten thousand years ago…. There is the instant when it’s still not yet two o’clock on that July afternoon in 1863…it hasn’t happened yet, it hasn’t even begun yet, it not only hasn’t begun yet but there is still time for it not to begin.’ William Faulkner, Intruder in the Dust (1948).
“The War that Never Ends” (1991) is a documentary film portrayal of the whole war. It is low key and spare with recitations of key passages, including Melos, and the debacle at Syracuse where Athenian democracy crashed with imperial and tyrannical overreach. See it on You Tube.
While I am assigning homework, see also Donald Kagan, The Peace of Nicias and the Sicilian Expedition (1991). It is accompanied by three volumes that chart the rise, maturity, and corruption of that empire. (There is a one-volume summary for the faint of heart.)
A theme in International Relations research which has influenced recent U.S. foreign policy has been that democracies do not go to war with each other. It follows in the seminar room that promoting democracy promotes peace. In this case both Athens and Syracuse were democracies and Athens went to war at the enthusiastic behest of its democratic majority, giving the lie to that generalisation. (It might be worth noting that Hitler rose to office in elections, whereas Churchill did not.)
The author has some very nice turns of phrase and offers a spritely prose that engages even a jaded reader like me. My efforts to put his name below the picture failed.
Good Reads meta data is 474 pages, rated 4.20 by 3254 litizens.
Genre: Historical fiction.
DNA: Garlic, oops, Gallic.
Tagline: It is worse than you think.
Verdict: I got lost in the backstabbing and betrayals.
That lady killer Giordano Bruno is at it for the fifth time, now in Paris of 1585. In addition to his harem he encounters a mountain of superfluous historical detail and a confusing cast of characters. Worse, he is inept, as usual, but gets away with it because this is a work of fiction.
Catherine d’ Medici is the villain-in-chief, and she cuts quite a figure. Her nearest rival is the Duke of Guise, who thinks he ought to be king since every mirror confirms that he is so damned kingly. Catherine’s son is King Henri III, and he occasionally, but rarely, acts kingly.
The wheels are turning for another religious ceremony of mutual slaughter since it has been so long since the last one in 1572. Check Saint Bartholomew’s CV for details. Along the way we get detailed descriptions of torture, not once but twice, and a recurrent emphasis on the smells of the city in those days before Pine-o-Scent.
I needed a score card to keep track of the characters, but the important ones are clearly differentiated: Catherine, Henri III, Guise, and, especially, Charles Paget, who plays all sides against the others. Also noteworthy was the anonymous doorman who wants no friends.
The tie-up to the plot is genetic. Catherine does what she does because she is a Medici. Why dig any deeper than the name? Very unsatisfactory.
IMDb meta-data is 1 hour and 34 minutes, rated 7.3 by 42 cinematizens.
DNA: Czechoslovak.
Genre: Sy Fy.
Tagline: Boom!
Verdict: Hard to find but well worth the effort.
A conscience stricken scientist lies in a coma as he recalls in nightmares his discovery of a powder with the explosive force of the volcano Krakatoa. The story was published by Karel Ćapek in 1938.
The cinematography is inventive and at one point our anti-hero watches on screen his own vain efforts to control his invention. There is a mystery woman who appears and disappears like a dream. Then there is an American agent (named Oppenheimer [just kidding]) who wants the formula. In between is a jealous and unscrupulous colleague whom we know is not to be trusted since he does not return library books when they are due. What a rat!
Relentlessly downbeat. Our scientist is doomed after an explosion of the Big K poisoned him and lies dying while the jumble of his thoughts retraces the steps (some real, others illusory) that brought him to his deathbed.
There are a number of remarkable scenes as his delirium is played out:
the wax works aristocrats in museum poses
the menacing D’Hémon with the satanic eyebrows
his mini-Krakatoa of sex
the melting face of the femme fatale
the police in German uniforms like ghosts
the assembly of beer hall hooligans in furs and diamonds.
the grasping of krakatit from a dead body
most of all is the anxiety and torment of the scientist who is eating himself up with guilt
Plato’s Letters: The Political Challenges of the Philosophic Life (2023) by Ariel Helfer.
Good Reads meta-data is 301 pages, rated 4.0 by 2 litizens.
Genre: Straussian.
Verdict: Never has so little been made into so much.
Tagline: If you don’t know you cannot be told and if you know you don’t need to be told.
Leo Strauss (1899-1973) educated a well defined cohort in political theory in his years at the University of Chicago. He himself published a series of books that spelled out and exemplified his approach to interpreting texts, and his acolytes, while competing among themselves with the usual academic undermining and backbiting, continue the tradition to this day.
The north star of Straussianism was that great thinkers hide their meaning from both the oppressors and the masses, and these two can be one and the same. Ergo: meaning is hidden in plain sight in the text.
It takes an Indiana Jones of the seminar room to find this meaning, and avoid the snares and blind alleys left for the unwary. To find the way Jones first must study the explicit words of the great mind. That means learning the language used: ancient Greek, Latin, Italian, German, or French, and so on. One must acquire this tool before proceeding.
Next one must enter into the psychic world of the author by studying the context within which he (yes, they are all men) wrote.
Accordingly, there is a long apprenticeship of devotion to the task to be performed.
While great minds may be prolific, everything they wrote forms, if properly decoded, a single text. Note that the process is decoding, not just reading what is on the page but sensing the context in which it was put on the page and – even more important – noting what is not on the page to find what is implicit. Yes, as in aboriginal astronomy the key often is what is not there. If a reader sees a mistake in the text, the fault is in the reader not the author. Think again. Why would a mistake be deliberately inserted? Is it a red herring to distract the unworthy? If something is not there, stop and think, and think again. If it should be there, there must be a deep and dark reason why it is not. Look for the clues. Absence may be evidence.
The single text is like an old dark house where a hidden sliding door set into a wall leads to passageways built into the fabric of the building that Jones using the light of a Straussian lamp navigates step-by-step. Legend has it that some of Leo Strauss seminars spent a semester of twenty plus class hours pondering, often in Quaker-meeting silence, a dozen lines from a Platonic text. Tin foil hats were optional.
If the coded passageways twist and turn that is not an accident or a compromise with the circumstances, still less a mistake, but profoundly intentional. Great minds do not make mistakes or have accidents. Homer did not nod. Everything that is there is meaningful, however specious it seems on the surface (to wit, many of the preliminary arguments in Platonic dialogues are not chaff, warm-ups, or false starts but may be the real message encrypted for Jones to fathom). Moreover, what is not there may be even more meaningful than what is there.
The pièce de résistance is the numerology. Word, page, chapter counts and numbers themselves bear significance in this approach. The seventh word in the seventh chapter must be interrogated with Gestapo thoroughness. An old favourite of this kind is Leo Strauss’s expressed amazement that Machiavelli’s Discourses has 142 chapters, exactly the same number as Livy’s History of Rome. Astonishing! Is it? The Discourses is a chapter-by-chapter commentary on Livy’s History so it almost has to have the same number of the chapters. Thus does the Straussian endow the mundane with mystery.
As regards Plato’s Letters the chief argument of this book is that the letters are to be taken together as a single text, not a scattering of remnants. This is partly proven by the fact that there is nothing in them to indicate that unity, no cross references, few if any continuities. It is a hidden single text that only an acolyte will detect. Likewise, the positioning of the letters in the count strikes another Straussian chord. There are thirteen letters. That cannot be an accident. The longest and most significant is number seven. Again no accident.
Ariel Helfer
This veneration of the text, one might think, is compromised in ancient authors like Plato because we have no original texts, but the Straussian thesis is that such genius as Plato’s prevails against the ravages of time and tide and translation from Ancient Greek into Arabic then Latin then later Greek then modern Greek then English for the masses. (Ancient Greek is to modern Greek as Old Norse is to contemporary English, I have been told.) Yes, the fog descends at this point but the momentum continues. For an outline of this approach I have tacked on at the end the notes I used to discuss this method with students in days of yore.
In most of the letters Plato is replying to someone who has asked his advice on what to do in a political situation. While the book runs to three hundred pages, its interpretation of Plato can be summarised this way: there is no point in offering advice because all existing polities are corrupt. This is true by definition because all that exists is frangible. Any advice would be corrupted and so serve no purpose. It takes 300-pages to air that less than nourishing conclusion.
Given the Straussian emphasis on context it is curious to note that in the discussion of the minute detail of Plato’s visits to Syracuse, the author makes no mention of the last time Athenians went to Syracuse in the Sicilian Expedition of 415 B.C.E. a generation earlier. It is all but certain that relatives of Plato’s took part in that debacle. But then Alcibiades, a leader of that expedition, is not mentioned in the text either, yet his name is on two alleged Platonic dialogues.
How do we explain spurious letters or other texts attributed to ancient writers like Plato? There was an incentive to forge letters in ancient world to sell to private collectors and to the libraries at Alexandria, Pergamon, and Byzantium and when these libraries fell down the memory hole, a quick and clever forger would turn out a letter that had allegedly been saved from the ruins and put it up for sale. Of course such creativity was not limited to letters. It may be the source for the spurious dialogues, essays, and plays attributed to Plato, Xenophon, and others. But short letters were the easiest to prepare and did not require much intellectual input. They sell on their provenance, not content.
….
How to read a book in the Straussian way.
Leo Strauss
First make explicit the assumptions naive readers make.
1. the text is accurate and complete as the author could make it.
2. the text conforms to the author’s intentions.
3. the author wrote freely, uncensored.
4. the unit of meaning is the chapter, paragraph, page, and line
5. the meaning is in the words used.
6. the author is trying to communicate with any and all readers.
7. errors, omissions, contradictions are errors, omissions, and contradictions. They may be explained but they have no meaning.
8. purpose of writing is to test arguments and propositions, and to persuade.
In contrast Straussian reading assumes:
1. There are Great Truths. The esoteric. Like the statue in the block of marble, they have to released.
But they cannot be explicitly spoken. Why not? Because they would infuriate both the elite and mass, because the elite is corrupt, and mass is inferior.
To speak the great truths would both shake the polity and so endanger the speaker.
2. Therefore the Great Truth sayers are always persecuted and censored. They react accordingly.
3. Great Minds know the Great Truths, and they know persecution prevails over Great Truths.
4. Great Minds elude persecution in writing Great Books.
Indeed, persecution is a necessary condition for writing a Great Book.
5. Great Books publicly deceive; they deceive censors and the censorious part of each reader.
Privately, between the lines, the Great Books carry a coded message to informed readers.
Great Books combine the advantages of general communication for being widely available but avoid the threat of censorship and danger with the advantages of private communication carrying a frank and important hidden message to select readers.
6. Great Books reveal themselves to Great Readers who:
– are careful for everything in a Great Book has meaning.
Everything. What is said and what is not said. What is there and what is not there.
– interpret not just each passage alone but each passage in the context of the work, and the life work of the Great Mind.
– read between the lines, giving meaning to silences, i.e., what is not there.
– realize that a Great Mind may repeatedly say A is B but mean by that repetition for the reader to conclude that A is not B.
– apparent errors, omissions, and contradictions are intended to encode the secret message.
– look for irony in things said but not meant. Thus is Plato’s repeated assertion that women equal men is dismissed as a joke.
Divine that brevity may be a form of emphasis.
perceive that the coding may be within the structure, the middle line, etc. Hence the numerology.
See Leo Strauss, ‘Persecution and the Art of Writing’ (1941) for details.
—
This lengthy addendum is one reason why I don’t often comment on vocational reading. I get carried way.
Plato of Athens: A Life in Philosophy (2023 ) by Robin Waterfield
Good Reads meta-data is 255 pages rated 4.21 by 73 litizens.
Genre: Biography.
DNA: Greek.
Tagline: A new bottle for old wine.
Verdict: Old News.
Amazon web page opens with this sentence. So I thought it was a biography. How silly can I get? See below for an answer.
‘The first ever biography of the founder of Western philosophy.’
An account of the life and work of Plato (of Athens) from go to gone. It was a common name and became more common after his death, though it hardly seems necessary to say ‘of Athens’ since most of us never heard of all those others. Needless pedantry some might say. Right, Sal. (You either get it or you don’t. There is no try.)
The book pulls together a mass of material and relies mainly on ancient sources rather than the army ants of academic commentators that live off Plato’s corpus. Guilty of that myself. That reliance on the fragmentary remnants of ancient sources makes the book distinctive, though it is rather like assembling an incomplete jigsaw puzzle.
But wait, those ancient authors were not his contemporaries, apart from a very few, ahem, mainly Aristotle. Most of the venerable ancients the author scours wrote, such shards as survive, 400 or 500 years after Plato’s death. Ancient does not mean contemporary to Plato, though it certainly means closer, but does proximity mean accuracy? The assumption is that they had access to sources now lost which sources they seldom name.
The author sifts this material because it is, of course, contradictory. Even then scholars strove to be different. He, for example, denies the authenticity of the Platonic epistles while Ariel Helfer, Plato’s Letters (2023) affirms them. We readers are left no wiser in this clash of footnotes. The reasons Waterfield cites to reject the authenticity of a letter are the very reasons Helfer uses to affirm its legitimacy. Though these two books appeared in the same year, I doubt the authors’ paths crossed. The Englishman Waterfield on his Greek island, and Yankee Helfer in his hometown Straussian cocoon would not mix.
I gave in to the temptation to read this book because Amazon offered it as a biography, and I wondered how one could write a biography of Plato, who himself was reticent and from whose time so little has survived. That answer came quickly: It is not. It a contextualization of Plato’s works. Indeed, the book is a serial interpretation of the Plato’s dialogues with reference to the social and historical context of the times. When I realised that I reached for a paraphrase of Thomas Carlyle: Biography is history, but history is not biography.
Since I have spent so much time in the last several years with the difficulties of a biography of a Sixteenth Century figure, I was primed for this exercise. (You know whom I mean.)
The most biographical part of the account is the one we all want to know more about, Plato’s three trips to Syracuse, and these are given due weight, but no revelations follow. That is asking too much. And despite denigrating the Platonic letters, much use is made of two since they are the main source for the visits.
Robin Waterfield, renowned.
Aside: I tried to read a biography of Plato many years ago, Ludwig Marcuse, Plato and Dionysius: A Double Biography (1947), written as a see-it-now novel in which Dionysius stands in for Hitler and Plato for Churchill. Not recommended.
A reader particularly interested in these insular adventures might do better to read Mary Renault’s novel The Mask of Apollo (1966). Surely banned in Florida for its casual acceptance of homosexuality. Indeed, most ancient Greek texts would have to be banned for the same reason. Thus does the world get smaller and smaller.
Good Reads meta-data is 408 pages, rated 3.77 by 31,854 litizens.
Genre: Krimi.
DNA: Yankee 1914.
Verdict: Pluck galore.
Tagline: Conny got her gun.
When in 1914 the arrogant and not very bright young company town mill manager, drives his new-fangled auto-mobile into Constance Kopp’s horse drawn carriage outside Paterson New Jersey, he meets a woman who fights back. Barely stopping he refuses to acknowledge fault or pay compensation, and buzzes off. Constance (Connie to me) doesn’t take ‘No’ for an answer and pursues him by fair means or foul for restitution.
He retaliates, so unaccustomed is he to being held responsible for his stupid actions as a rich man’s son, he ignores her and then turns even uglier. The town police have no interest in challenging the son of the owner of the town in all but name, but the county sheriff has his own reasons for taking up the case.
Escalation follows as the young man’s threats take the form of bricks and bullets, and the sheriff, seeing in Constance someone who is constant, gives her shooting lessons against the final solution.
In the course of digging into the owner’s many other misdeeds, Constance is reminded of one of her own. Ahem. Not all is as it seems among the three Kopp sisters living alone on a farm outside of town. There are a lot of back- and side-stories. [Yawn.]
Nonetheless, justice is done, though less because of the sheriff’s considerable efforts, and the dire risks Constance took, than the revulsion of the manager’s family at his criminal actions. Bit late in coming that. Without the family behind him, he was suddenly alone. Very neat but a long time in coming.
Amy Stewart
The time and place are well realised and the characters are differentiated from the repellent plutocrat to the cross-pressured sherif and the sisters themselves alike but different. First in a series: Miss Kopp Won’t Quit, Dear Miss Kopp, Kopp Sisters on the March, Miss Kopp’s Midnight Confessions, Lady Cop (Kopp) Makes Trouble, Miss Kopp Investigates, and counting.
