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SO_SUE_ME
March 13, 2022
From the golden age of "crookedtimber.org",
in Febrary 2016...
http://crookedtimber.org/2016/02/09/socrates-as-mary-sue/#comment-658419
Belle Warring, in "Socrates as Mary Sue": MARY_SUE
"Socrates is a giant Mary Sue philosopher
character for Plato. Lucky in his choice of
interlocutors, pleasantly unsurprised when he
elicits geometry from slave boys, the object of
unreturned sexual affection from the hottest
guy in Athens, an initiate into a variety of
mysteries he can only allude to because
reasons... like I say, he's a dream come
true. A dream Plato can conveniently claim came
true in such a way as to validate everything
Plato believes? Like many a young philosopher I
turned away from philosophy as an undergraduate
just because Socrates was so damn annoying."
Neville Morley on February 9, 2016:
"My reading, of Walton, Plato, Xenophon and
Renault, is that the wish-fulfillment is to be
acknowledged as a close companion, to get to
discuss philosophy with Socrates rather than to
be Socrates, to be allowed to travel with
him. Socrates is actually Gandalf."
(Feb 10, 2016)
burritoboy steps up to the defense:
"What this discussion shows is that Plato has
a different conception of philosophy than
analytic philosophers do. Worse, the analytic
philosophers don't understand that they are
themselves making a lot of assumptions about
what philosophy is. Many of the respondents
here don't seem to realize what your
assumptions are, and are faulting Plato (more
broadly, you guys are in truth faulting all
of, or much of, of classical philosophy)
without working to understand what philosophic
dialogues might be up to."
That makes a lot of assumptions of it's own.
That analytic philosophers are unaware of
their assumptions seems like a stretch, and
that the audience at crookedtimber is
unwilling to engage seriously with Plato
little more than an empty insult.
But the idea that there's some non-analytic
point to Plato I've missed sounds worth
pursuing so I perservered with "burritoboy":
Plato was writing something new: the dialogues
are something like plays, but at the same time
they are not plays.
Well, yeah.
That is, Plato's dialogues (and the rest of
the dialogue writers of the early Socratic
circle like Xenophon and Aeschines of
Sphettus) inhabit some sort of genre we still
really don't have a conception for.
Except that we've all read a bunch of Plato, and
our name for this genre is "philosophic dialog".
What this seems to indicate is that how
a Platonic dialogue operates is--
intentionally-- entirely different from
how a treatise or essay operates.
That most (but not all) of Socrates'
interlocutors advance mediocre to bad
arguments isn't Plato loading the deck
for Socrates. Much of the time Socrates
doesn't "win" anything, and only
sometimes offers a concrete conclusion
of his own.
Well yeah. Myself I find Socrates so slippery
he doesn't seem to have *said* very much.
And when he *does* present conclusions they
often seem ridiculous on the face of it. But then, maybe I'm
missing the funny part.
Then burritoboy goes on to remind that
Socrates faces a tragic end, unlike the
stereotypical Mary Sue.
Further, he makes the assertion:
The intellectual weakness of many of
Socrates' interlocutors isn't, I think, a
stacking of the deck against them. Their Socrates does indeed
intellectual weakness usually points to often seem to me like a
problems or flaws within their own prize-fighter continually
psychologies and characters that prevent set-up against little
them from being stronger adversaries. kids, a gun fighter
firing on plow boys.
The point of many of the dialogues seems
much less to convince us of some Plato was engaged
particular conclusion but rather to in a kind of
guide us into doing the work of hagiography,
philosophy ourselves alongside of the trying to keep the
written work. Lots of people have made memory of Socrates
this point before, but: the dialogue alive--
form forces the reader to think in ways
that are different than the treatise or
essay.
Dialogues where two philosophers (or
let's just say, two extremely adept
thinkers) converse would be beside
the point ...
(Oct 2024)
If the point is exposing psychological
flaws in the then current style of popular Whatever real figures
thinking, then yes, two adept thinkers Plato's opponents
dueling with each other might be besides might've been modeled on
the point. are largely lost to us.
The debate between two adept thinkers Hence the endless parade
however could serve other points. of what feels like straw
man arguments.
Getting at the Truth.
Pushing the limits of our understanding.
Recording the efforts of some of the
best to get better at what they do.
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