@@Ariannie272 Modern liberal interpretation of freedom has nothing in common with Platonic freedom in virtue. Freedom is too broad term to call them synonymous. You really think every lowly modern consumer is in position to exercise his freedom with virtue? Only "enlightened" leader is capable of guiding his community towards it. Post enlightenment interpretation of freedom is in antagonism to platonic freedom. It's like comparing Athenian democracy to modern Western democracy and calling the same thing.
Proto-fascist. You are skipping the whole part about the Myth of Metals in the Soul. The having "wives In common" and no private property are only meant for the Gold Soul leaders, which would only be a small minority who would live and rule in common, and not a by single person. The rest of society, the silver, bronze, and lead people could go about doing whatever they normally do. Then, the difference from today's leaders would not be technocrats, they would be Silver Soul people, the leaders would be more like a "Dalai Lama/Judge Judy". No one comes close today.
No fascist would be okay with wife-sharing among the upper classes, or anyone for that sort. That is an extreme barrier to social cohesion. I have no idea what ideology would condone that, some sort of shortsighted, liberal despotism I'm sure (like a kind of temporary government or late-stage Rome/America), but not Fascism (which is its own ideology with actual principles, tradition and the nuclear family being very important to them).
@@youtubeisdying929 Maybe polygamy like in Islam and Ghengis Khan or something akin to Sparta. I think Plato's Laws express his actual political views while in the Republic the city is conceived as an analogy of the soul. Wife-sharing can be seen as being detached from sense impressions, akin to Buddhism. In every society there is an official or unofficial caste system. It's important to read the earlier Plato in light of the later Plato.
Great video. What many people get wrong about Plato, especially his critics, but even some of his supporters, is that they treat them as didactic lectures rather than the dialogues that they really are. Just because a character - even Socrates - says something in a dialogue, that doesn't mean that Plato even thought that view was correct, much less that he was trying to preach that view. The Dialogues take the form that they do because they are first and foremost an exploration of ideas, not an exposition of them. The Republic is more of a thought experiment than it is a manifesto on how to build the ideal society.
This is actually far smarter and indeed funnier than one is used from your kind of people. (Although the fun bit - your juxtaposition of didactic, or di+da+ctic, vs dialogue, or dia+logue, was probably unintended. I did still like it tho. What would have been *chef's kiss* would be to also point out what aspects of Platonic dialogue are, or aren't, dia+lectic.)
Plato never defends the end of private property for all of society. There are profit-seeking merchants (of the national AND of the international kind), wage laborers (as the lowest class imaginable, mind you; so the work doesn't defend slavery either), the citizens are under great division of labor, they voluntarily sustain the Guardian class (the people who are actually property-less) by monetary means & so on. Both views are anachronistic and only hold truth to those who haven't read the work or who can't read it apart from the current climate. Plato seems to be prone to that kind of anachronistic misinterpretation; another example would be the view of those academics who understand the Atlantis myth in Timaeus to be a mere analogy about hubris, when Plato makes it explicit and clear as day that he believes it to be factual. Plato is Fascistic and Communistic in the sense that there cannot be a political or philosophical doctrine that can ignore his magnitude (pun intended). As C.S. Lewis said: "All theology of the liberal type involves at some point - and often involves throughout - the claim that the real behaviour and purpose and teaching of Christ came very rapidly to be misunderstood and misrepresented by his followers, and has been recovered or exhumed only by modern scholars. Now long before I became interested in theology I had met this kind of theory elsewhere. The tradition of Jowett still dominated the study of ancient philosophy when I was reading Greats. One was brought up to believe that the real meaning of Plato had been misunderstood by Aristotle and wildly travestied by the neo-platonists, only to be recovered by the moderns. When recovered, it turned out (most fortunately) that Plato had really all along been an english hegelian, rather like T. H. Green. I have met it a third time in my own professional studies; every week a clever undergraduate, every quarter a dull american don, discovers for the first time what some Shakespearean play really meant. But in this third instance I am a privileged person. The revolution in thought and sentiment which has occurred in my own lifetime is so great that I belong, mentally, to Shakespeare’s world far more than to that of these recent interpreters. I see - I feel it in my bones - I know beyond argument - that most of their interpretations are merely impossible; they involve a way of looking at things which was not known in 1914, much less in the Jacobean period. This daily confirms my suspicion of the same approach to Plato or the new testament. The idea that any man or writer should be opaque to those who lived in the same culture, spoke the same language, shared the same habitual imagery and unconscious assumptions, and yet be transparent to those who have none of these advantages, is in my opinion preposterous."
Excellent quote from Lewis. I have noticed the same tendency, but wasn't able to put it this clearly. Do you happen to know which work of his this quote is from?
Modern scholars are always relativizing everything with statements like, "in my opinion" and then demanding tolerance for it to emphasize how grateful they are that rulers give them permission to think or speak.
I think it would make more sense to say that plato is pre bourgeois, projecting post bourgeois politics onto him seems like a mistake because there are such significant differences in the epochs in which these politics exist, that even projecting notions of bourgeois property onto plato doesnt make sense because the ancients conceptions of the nature of property where different, plato contra locke, even the lack of the nuclear family is more a pre bourgeois notion of the family than it is a proto expression of communism
Jeans are fascist, Golfing is fascist, long walks in the park is fascist, wanting extra m&m’s in your McFlurry is fascist. Yeah, I’m sure Plato is a fascist also.
I think you should make a video on the Iron law of oligarchy. Plato would probably heavily agree with this theory and it's in my opinion absolutely key to understanding politics, society and "democracy".
I have been working through the Laws, slowly as that is all my poor Greek will allow, but I have to confess I have found it far more rewarding than the other Dialogues; is it because here we have the real Plato without the pretence of Socrates, and so while different topics are treated, we are left with answers rather than questions? Anyway life would seem to be more attractive under the Laws than in the Republic.
As you suggest, he's esoterically dystopian (if you will) in illustrating what certain ideal concepts taken to their extreme would look like in reality. He's an elitist of sorts in that it's clear that the best in terms of virtue and ability should rule. But it's the intellectual values and process on display in the dialogues which are so instructive and applicable to a range of forms of government, the presentation of human ideals as models to strive for if true attainment is nonetheless impractical.
If what qualifies Socrates as a philosopher is that he knows nothing, then a philosopher is not a technocrat to Plato. More like a shepherd tasked with preserving the clearing of truth, as Heidegger saw. Thanks for stimulating video.
As you said fascism and socialism has more in common with Plato's and Socrates ideas than a modern liberal conservative or a civic nationalist. But I think there was a regime in 30's which combined these ideas and made a regime which was closest to Plato's ideal state ;) And we should remember ancient Greeks weren't subjected to modern post-Christian morals.
Thanks for posting this; I found it very informative. My feeling about these attempts to interpret Plato's political thought as fascist or communist is that it is, for the most post, ill-informed about those ideologies. For example, a defining feature of fascist states is the merging of industrial leaders and corporations with the state. You don't find that in the Republic. // What the philosopher king in the Republic knows, their expertise, is the nature of the soul and an experiential understanding of the transcendental; that's why the allegory of the cave is in the Republic. The philosopher king is aware of this transcendental dimension and its relationship to the material world; it is this that informs the decisions of the rulers. I'm not saying that this is a practical solution, but I think that Plato is both pointing out what is necessary for a just society and at the same time why there are no just societies on earth. // Thanks again for the video.
Plato was a collectivist, communal and authoritarian which fits in both ideologies. He is the grandfather to totalitarianism, dictatorships and tyrants. He is followed by Rousseau, Kant, Hegel, Marx Gentile, Sorel…..
I’d love to hear more about Plato’s actual experience putting his ideas into practice. I thought he contributed to making a hash of things in Syracuse or somewhere. It seems to me this experience might reflect on his teachings but I confess I know little about the episode.
It's too old. Life was too different. It's like imagining what political party they'd belong to. Or if Socrates would prefer tiktok to Instagram. Coke or Pepsi? Like the Spartans. Their government system was so one of a kind as far as we know no one ever duplicated it. Is it fascist? It's extremely militaristic. Everything resolves around the military state. But this is thousands of years before modern bureaucracy existed. It was kind of a monarchy but had 2 kings at the same time. Also throwing away weak babies (literally). But is that eugenics? Also you did have individual farms, property etc. But young men before marriage are and spent most of their time in the barracks. Point is you simply can't use modern terms for them. A monarchy/military death cult/ individualistic/very communal/ slave owning/proto fascist / proto Communist/ proto eugenics/ literally did the purge every now and then. It defies our spectrums and paradigms
Neither. Prescribing modern ideological labels to ancient thinkers (an especially a philosopher, rather than a "system builder" - see: Voegelin) is an incredibly modernistic, simplistic and childlike thing to do.
People who think Plato was proto communist miss the irony of his writing. When he is laying out the ideal state the whole point is to demonstrate how ridiculous having an ideal state in an imperfect world would actually be. He is pointing out the discrepancy between the form of a perfect state and reality. Especially with his female examples considering Ancient Greece was patriarchal his representation of women would have been for comic effect. He relates the perfect state to the perfect individual in the Republic because man is fallible and will never be able to transcend human nature. Think of it more like Cervantes' Don Quixote than Marx.
One needs virtue and excellence to sustain Freedom among free people. One needs thinking to be able to judge, and being able to judge well to be responsable in sustaining a political community and it's institutional structure, Hannah Arendt might perhaps still want to say. But if we could substitute somehow your extreme question- terms on Plato onto a more radical terminology, the fundamental political choice remains the one between Freedom and equality. And I think one can maintain Freedom without enforcing equality but one cannot (in a late modern condition, that is) maintain equality without forcing Freedom out. So, in your terminological imposition, yes, give me then (all reductionist as this thus would be, as You rightly pointed out), yes give me Plato the proto fascist, as he would be closer to garantueeing Freedom for all, equal or not. But all of this is in reality here being said by a catholic steadfast believer in subsidiarity who likes to be able to think of justice in the Gandhian terms of localism and it's Stewardship and Swadeshi and Swaray calling for the virtue of Satyagraha, as tought by my very early master, the french poet-thinker-Arche Community founder Lanza del Vasto. A strange answer to a strange question, dear Michael.
Yes but some people hear that Plato was this or that as their first opinion about him and it is good to start where they are, gradually leading them from a confusing beginning to the end goal of greater clarity and understanding. That's the intention of this video. -MM
I find it peculiar that you equate the Philosopher King with a technocrat. You are free to view it as you like, but from my point of view, the Philosopher King would be quite repulsed by technocrats. The Philosopher King would be the wisest man--wise in the ways of Nature. (And of course human nature). The technocrat is just an asshole who makes money from propagating the religion of science and technology. Sure, the technocrat has technical knowledge, but he doesn't know or care about Nature. I realize you were using that to illustrate your point--it just set me off haha---I hate technocrats. Excellent channel!
Yes and no. He uses analysis of city politics as a metaphor for the human psyche: yes. That means you can Just ignore the political analysis: who told you that? Why do you believe it
Plato was neither. He wanted to find the absolute truth and reach the One, but he failed. Only christianity, as revealed truth, went further and helped the Greeks to find the absolute truth and reach the One. Plato was a philosopher who looks at us, closes his eye and says to us secretly ''Do you like a world as I described it in my Politeia? No, you do not. What does it mean? It means we humans are basically and deeply flawed and we can not build a paradise on earth. So, the only thing you can do is make yourself the better you''. Of course, christianity assures us that we can not do even this. Our salvation is ONLY Christ, by grace, in faith and baptism.
"Plato is simply a record-keeper - he has not a single idea of his own! He is a devoted lover of Socrates, and whatever Socrates says, he goes on recording it, writing it. Socrates has not written anything - just as no great master has ever written anything. And Plato is certainly a great writer; perhaps Socrates may not have been able to write so beautifully. Plato has made Socrates’ teachings as beautiful as possible, but he himself is no one. Now the same work can be done by a tape recorder. And Aristotle is merely an intellectual, with no understanding of being, or even a desire to search for it. These people are taught in the universities. I was constantly in a fight with my professors. When they started teaching Plato, I said, “This is absolute nonsense, because Plato has nothing to say of his own. It is better to teach about Socrates. Plato can be referred to - he has compiled it all. But Socrates’ name has become almost a fiction, and Plato has become the reality. . Plato’s allegory is of slaves who, working in a cave, see only their shadows on the walls and believe that what is happening on the walls is the only reality. They don’t know of any other reality except those shadows… they don’t even know that those shadows are their own. They know nothing about the outside world, outside their cave; it doesn’t exist for them. This is one of the most beautiful allegories - of tremendous importance. It is our allegory. Translated into our life, it means we are living in a certain cave and we are seeing shadows on a certain screen and we know nothing else about the screen. We know nothing about there being a world beyond the screen; we know nothing about these shadows on the screen, even that they are our own. Looked at rightly, it is the allegory of our mind. What do you know of the world? Just a small skull is your cave; and just the screen of your mind… and the things which you call thoughts, emotions, sentiments, feelings, are all shadows - they don’t have any substance in them. And you get angry, you get depressed, you are in anguish - because you have learned to be identified with those shadows. You are projecting them; they are your own shadows. It is your own anger that is projected on the screen of the mind. And then it becomes a vicious circle: that anger makes you more angry, more anger projects more anger, and so on and so forth. And we go on living our whole life without ever thinking that there is a world of reality beyond the mind, on the outside, and there is also a world of reality beyond all these sentiments, feelings, emotions - beyond your ego. That is your awareness. The whole art of meditation is to bring you out of the cave so that you can become aware that you are not those shadows but that you are a watcher. And the moment you become a watcher, a miracle happens: those shadows start disappearing. They feed on your identity; if you feel identified with them, then they are there. The more you identify with them, the more nourished they are. When you are just a watcher - just seeing, not judging, not condemning - slowly, slowly those shadows disappear, because now they don’t have any food. And then there is such a tremendous clarity, perceptivity, that you can see the world beyond - the world of sunrise and the world of clouds and the world of the stars; that is your outside. And you can become aware of your inside, which is far more mysterious. The outside world is so beautiful, but the inside world is a thousand fold more beautiful."
"Yes, please, both." Both fascism and communism place the collective over the individual. So did Plato, though his collectivism manifested as THEOCRACY.
Good talk. You are surely aware that when in the first few minutes you describe "fascism" you are in fact describing every Marxist regime past and present.
"Freedom is not taken as the ultimate goal; virtue or excellence is".
They are synonymous
@@Ariannie272 yes AND most people don’t make that connection. Also gaining freedom in the postmodern sense doesn’t guarantee virtue
@@Ariannie272 Not even close LOL
@@Ariannie272 Modern liberal interpretation of freedom has nothing in common with Platonic freedom in virtue. Freedom is too broad term to call them synonymous. You really think every lowly modern consumer is in position to exercise his freedom with virtue? Only "enlightened" leader is capable of guiding his community towards it. Post enlightenment interpretation of freedom is in antagonism to platonic freedom.
It's like comparing Athenian democracy to modern Western democracy and calling the same thing.
Virtue, according to those who believe in no God or rigid moral structure; Excellence, according to those who reject hierarchies of merit.
So many books, so little time.
Try Rudolf Vrba's I Cannot Forgive though. Always worth one's time.
Proto-fascist. You are skipping the whole part about the Myth of Metals in the Soul. The having "wives In common" and no private property are only meant for the Gold Soul leaders, which would only be a small minority who would live and rule in common, and not a by single person. The rest of society, the silver, bronze, and lead people could go about doing whatever they normally do. Then, the difference from today's leaders would not be technocrats, they would be Silver Soul people, the leaders would be more like a "Dalai Lama/Judge Judy". No one comes close today.
No fascist would be okay with wife-sharing among the upper classes, or anyone for that sort. That is an extreme barrier to social cohesion. I have no idea what ideology would condone that, some sort of shortsighted, liberal despotism I'm sure (like a kind of temporary government or late-stage Rome/America), but not Fascism (which is its own ideology with actual principles, tradition and the nuclear family being very important to them).
@@youtubeisdying929 Maybe polygamy like in Islam and Ghengis Khan or something akin to Sparta. I think Plato's Laws express his actual political views while in the Republic the city is conceived as an analogy of the soul. Wife-sharing can be seen as being detached from sense impressions, akin to Buddhism. In every society there is an official or unofficial caste system. It's important to read the earlier Plato in light of the later Plato.
@@youtubeisdying929try reading it first
Great video. What many people get wrong about Plato, especially his critics, but even some of his supporters, is that they treat them as didactic lectures rather than the dialogues that they really are.
Just because a character - even Socrates - says something in a dialogue, that doesn't mean that Plato even thought that view was correct, much less that he was trying to preach that view.
The Dialogues take the form that they do because they are first and foremost an exploration of ideas, not an exposition of them. The Republic is more of a thought experiment than it is a manifesto on how to build the ideal society.
This is actually far smarter and indeed funnier than one is used from your kind of people. (Although the fun bit - your juxtaposition of didactic, or di+da+ctic, vs dialogue, or dia+logue, was probably unintended. I did still like it tho. What would have been *chef's kiss* would be to also point out what aspects of Platonic dialogue are, or aren't, dia+lectic.)
Plato never defends the end of private property for all of society. There are profit-seeking merchants (of the national AND of the international kind), wage laborers (as the lowest class imaginable, mind you; so the work doesn't defend slavery either), the citizens are under great division of labor, they voluntarily sustain the Guardian class (the people who are actually property-less) by monetary means & so on. Both views are anachronistic and only hold truth to those who haven't read the work or who can't read it apart from the current climate. Plato seems to be prone to that kind of anachronistic misinterpretation; another example would be the view of those academics who understand the Atlantis myth in Timaeus to be a mere analogy about hubris, when Plato makes it explicit and clear as day that he believes it to be factual.
Plato is Fascistic and Communistic in the sense that there cannot be a political or philosophical doctrine that can ignore his magnitude (pun intended).
As C.S. Lewis said:
"All theology of the liberal type involves at some point - and often involves throughout - the claim that the real behaviour and purpose and teaching of Christ came very rapidly to be misunderstood and misrepresented by his followers, and has been recovered or exhumed only by modern scholars. Now long before I became interested in theology I had met this kind of theory elsewhere. The tradition of Jowett still dominated the study of ancient philosophy when I was reading Greats. One was brought up to believe that the real meaning of Plato had been misunderstood by Aristotle and wildly travestied by the neo-platonists, only to be recovered by the moderns. When recovered, it turned out (most fortunately) that Plato had really all along been an english hegelian, rather like T. H. Green. I have met it a third time in my own professional studies; every week a clever undergraduate, every quarter a dull american don, discovers for the first time what some Shakespearean play really meant. But in this third instance I am a privileged person. The revolution in thought and sentiment which has occurred in my own lifetime is so great that I belong, mentally, to Shakespeare’s world far more than to that of these recent interpreters. I see - I feel it in my bones - I know beyond argument - that most of their interpretations are merely impossible; they involve a way of looking at things which was not known in 1914, much less in the Jacobean period. This daily confirms my suspicion of the same approach to Plato or the new testament. The idea that any man or writer should be opaque to those who lived in the same culture, spoke the same language, shared the same habitual imagery and unconscious assumptions, and yet be transparent to those who have none of these advantages, is in my opinion preposterous."
Indeed! The hubris of the modern scholar knows no bounds.
Excellent quote from Lewis. I have noticed the same tendency, but wasn't able to put it this clearly. Do you happen to know which work of his this quote is from?
@@whitemakesright2177 it's from Fern Seed and Elephants
@@Bruh-el9js Thanks!
Modern scholars are always relativizing everything with statements like, "in my opinion" and then demanding tolerance for it to emphasize how grateful they are that rulers give them permission to think or speak.
I think it would make more sense to say that plato is pre bourgeois, projecting post bourgeois politics onto him seems like a mistake because there are such significant differences in the epochs in which these politics exist, that even projecting notions of bourgeois property onto plato doesnt make sense because the ancients conceptions of the nature of property where different, plato contra locke, even the lack of the nuclear family is more a pre bourgeois notion of the family than it is a proto expression of communism
Indeed.
Love the new intro!
Thank you 😊
Indeed, nice intro!
Jeans are fascist, Golfing is fascist, long walks in the park is fascist, wanting extra m&m’s in your McFlurry is fascist. Yeah, I’m sure Plato is a fascist also.
I think you should make a video on the Iron law of oligarchy. Plato would probably heavily agree with this theory and it's in my opinion absolutely key to understanding politics, society and "democracy".
Excellent video as always Michael.
Thank you
I have been working through the Laws, slowly as that is all my poor Greek will allow, but I have to confess I have found it far more rewarding than the other Dialogues; is it because here we have the real Plato without the pretence of Socrates, and so while different topics are treated, we are left with answers rather than questions? Anyway life would seem to be more attractive under the Laws than in the Republic.
The Laws is an amazing book. millermanschool.com/p/plato-laws-course
As you suggest, he's esoterically dystopian (if you will) in illustrating what certain ideal concepts taken to their extreme would look like in reality. He's an elitist of sorts in that it's clear that the best in terms of virtue and ability should rule. But it's the intellectual values and process on display in the dialogues which are so instructive and applicable to a range of forms of government, the presentation of human ideals as models to strive for if true attainment is nonetheless impractical.
If what qualifies Socrates as a philosopher is that he knows nothing, then a philosopher is not a technocrat to Plato. More like a shepherd tasked with preserving the clearing of truth, as Heidegger saw. Thanks for stimulating video.
[Nicholson Yes meme]
I am intrigued with your views about Technocracy. If you can delve more into the space would be fascinating.
Is The Republic as it is commonly called also the most accessible and most inscrutable?
Read it. Easy to Read
Yes
As you said fascism and socialism has more in common with Plato's and Socrates ideas than a modern liberal conservative or a civic nationalist. But I think there was a regime in 30's which combined these ideas and made a regime which was closest to Plato's ideal state ;)
And we should remember ancient Greeks weren't subjected to modern post-Christian morals.
Oy vey!
Yea? Which regime? Be specific. Are you hesitant or something?
Thanks for posting this; I found it very informative. My feeling about these attempts to interpret Plato's political thought as fascist or communist is that it is, for the most post, ill-informed about those ideologies. For example, a defining feature of fascist states is the merging of industrial leaders and corporations with the state. You don't find that in the Republic. // What the philosopher king in the Republic knows, their expertise, is the nature of the soul and an experiential understanding of the transcendental; that's why the allegory of the cave is in the Republic. The philosopher king is aware of this transcendental dimension and its relationship to the material world; it is this that informs the decisions of the rulers. I'm not saying that this is a practical solution, but I think that Plato is both pointing out what is necessary for a just society and at the same time why there are no just societies on earth. // Thanks again for the video.
Plato was a collectivist, communal and authoritarian which fits in both ideologies. He is the grandfather to totalitarianism, dictatorships and tyrants. He is followed by Rousseau, Kant, Hegel, Marx Gentile, Sorel…..
I’d love to hear more about Plato’s actual experience putting his ideas into practice. I thought he contributed to making a hash of things in Syracuse or somewhere. It seems to me this experience might reflect on his teachings but I confess I know little about the episode.
You might like this millermanschool.substack.com/p/platos-letters
For obvious reasons Plato wasn't a platonist. How about Aristotle, his pupil? A good cue is to think of him as the first critic of idealism.
perhaps for those who never encountered geometry those who are engaged in it appear like they are doing some kind of witchcraft or alchemy.
It's too old. Life was too different. It's like imagining what political party they'd belong to. Or if Socrates would prefer tiktok to Instagram. Coke or Pepsi?
Like the Spartans. Their government system was so one of a kind as far as we know no one ever duplicated it.
Is it fascist? It's extremely militaristic. Everything resolves around the military state.
But this is thousands of years before modern bureaucracy existed. It was kind of a monarchy but had 2 kings at the same time. Also throwing away weak babies (literally). But is that eugenics?
Also you did have individual farms, property etc. But young men before marriage are and spent most of their time in the barracks.
Point is you simply can't use modern terms for them. A monarchy/military death cult/ individualistic/very communal/ slave owning/proto fascist / proto Communist/ proto eugenics/ literally did the purge every now and then.
It defies our spectrums and paradigms
Is the political structure of the Roman Catholic church platonic? I hope that i used "platonic" in an accurate way.
It is a hybrid of the Academy and of Roman institutions.
Greek philosophers and Roman Law
Plato is saying that the ideal republic/polis can never be achieved but only exists in form.
Lost in translation but know only few understand.
I wouldn't put Plato in either of these boxes.
I wish i had more time to read.
Plato was a bore - Nietzsche
Neither. Prescribing modern ideological labels to ancient thinkers (an especially a philosopher, rather than a "system builder" - see: Voegelin) is an incredibly modernistic, simplistic and childlike thing to do.
Until a move away from it about a century ago, to be educated in the West meant to be educated about Plato. Thanks, John Dewey.
People who think Plato was proto communist miss the irony of his writing. When he is laying out the ideal state the whole point is to demonstrate how ridiculous having an ideal state in an imperfect world would actually be. He is pointing out the discrepancy between the form of a perfect state and reality. Especially with his female examples considering Ancient Greece was patriarchal his representation of women would have been for comic effect. He relates the perfect state to the perfect individual in the Republic because man is fallible and will never be able to transcend human nature. Think of it more like Cervantes' Don Quixote than Marx.
Neither of those concepts existed so im going to say neither
One needs virtue and excellence to sustain Freedom among free people. One needs thinking to be able to judge, and being able to judge well to be responsable in sustaining a political community and it's institutional structure, Hannah
Arendt might perhaps still want to say. But if we could substitute somehow your extreme question- terms on Plato onto a more radical terminology, the fundamental political choice remains the one between Freedom and equality. And I think one can maintain Freedom without enforcing equality but one cannot (in a late modern condition, that is) maintain equality without forcing Freedom out. So, in your terminological imposition, yes, give me then (all reductionist as this thus would be, as You rightly pointed out), yes give me Plato the proto fascist, as he would be closer to garantueeing Freedom for all, equal or not. But all of this is in reality here being said by a catholic steadfast believer in subsidiarity who likes to be able to think of justice in the Gandhian terms of localism and it's Stewardship and Swadeshi and Swaray calling for the virtue of Satyagraha, as tought by my very early master, the french poet-thinker-Arche Community founder Lanza del Vasto. A strange answer to a strange question, dear Michael.
He was neither and both...such questions confuse.
Yes but some people hear that Plato was this or that as their first opinion about him and it is good to start where they are, gradually leading them from a confusing beginning to the end goal of greater clarity and understanding. That's the intention of this video. -MM
So.... Plato was a Nazbol?
@@SerpMolot Yes and it's beautiful
There are no good answers to bad questions
I find it peculiar that you equate the Philosopher King with a technocrat. You are free to view it as you like, but from my point of view, the Philosopher King would be quite repulsed by technocrats. The Philosopher King would be the wisest man--wise in the ways of Nature. (And of course human nature). The technocrat is just an asshole who makes money from propagating the religion of science and technology. Sure, the technocrat has technical knowledge, but he doesn't know or care about Nature. I realize you were using that to illustrate your point--it just set me off haha---I hate technocrats. Excellent channel!
Plato is also a proto-Jesuit. When you are that influential and that far back in history, there is a little bit of you in everybody.
The Republic was an allegory, you know?
Trying to glean political theory from Plato is completely missing the mark.
Yes and no. He uses analysis of city politics as a metaphor for the human psyche: yes. That means you can Just ignore the political analysis: who told you that? Why do you believe it
It is kind of same thing.
national bolshevism
Plato was neither. He wanted to find the absolute truth and reach the One, but he failed. Only christianity, as revealed truth, went further and helped the Greeks to find the absolute truth and reach the One. Plato was a philosopher who looks at us, closes his eye and says to us secretly ''Do you like a world as I described it in my Politeia? No, you do not. What does it mean? It means we humans are basically and deeply flawed and we can not build a paradise on earth. So, the only thing you can do is make yourself the better you''. Of course, christianity assures us that we can not do even this. Our salvation is ONLY Christ, by grace, in faith and baptism.
He is neither and he is both. The same way a pre-historic fish is a proto-hypopotamus and a proto-human.
2:26 *Zion Williamson has entered the chat*
Stalin was a Platonist.
So, was he a socialist nationalist or socialist internationalist.
I'll tell you what he is...a waste of time,only confuses you in the end and contradicts himself,stick to other thinkers.
I thought he was an aristocrat.
"Plato is simply a record-keeper - he has not a single idea of his own! He is a devoted lover of Socrates, and whatever Socrates says, he goes on recording it, writing it. Socrates has not written anything - just as no great master has ever written anything. And Plato is certainly a great writer; perhaps Socrates may not have been able to write so beautifully. Plato has made Socrates’ teachings as beautiful as possible, but he himself is no one. Now the same work can be done by a tape recorder. And Aristotle is merely an intellectual, with no understanding of being, or even a desire to search for it. These people are taught in the universities. I was constantly in a fight with my professors. When they started teaching Plato, I said, “This is absolute nonsense, because Plato has nothing to say of his own. It is better to teach about Socrates. Plato can be referred to - he has compiled it all. But Socrates’ name has become almost a fiction, and Plato has become the reality.
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Plato’s allegory is of slaves who, working in a cave, see only their shadows on the walls and believe that what is happening on the walls is the only reality. They don’t know of any other reality except those shadows… they don’t even know that those shadows are their own. They know nothing about the outside world, outside their cave; it doesn’t exist for them. This is one of the most beautiful allegories - of tremendous importance. It is our allegory. Translated into our life, it means we are living in a certain cave and we are seeing shadows on a certain screen and we know nothing else about the screen. We know nothing about there being a world beyond the screen; we know nothing about these shadows on the screen, even that they are our own. Looked at rightly, it is the allegory of our mind.
What do you know of the world? Just a small skull is your cave; and just the screen of your mind… and the things which you call thoughts, emotions, sentiments, feelings, are all shadows - they don’t have any substance in them. And you get angry, you get depressed, you are in anguish - because you have learned to be identified with those shadows. You are projecting them; they are your own shadows. It is your own anger that is projected on the screen of the mind. And then it becomes a vicious circle: that anger makes you more angry, more anger projects more anger, and so on and so forth. And
we go on living our whole life without ever thinking that there is a world of reality beyond the mind, on the outside, and there is also a world of reality beyond all these sentiments, feelings, emotions - beyond your ego. That is your awareness.
The whole art of meditation is to bring you out of the cave so that you can become aware that you are not those shadows but that you are a watcher. And the moment you become a watcher, a miracle happens: those shadows start disappearing. They feed on your identity; if you feel identified with them, then they are there. The more you identify with them, the more nourished they are.
When you are just a watcher - just seeing, not judging, not condemning - slowly, slowly those shadows disappear, because now they don’t have any food. And then there is such a tremendous clarity, perceptivity, that you can see the world beyond - the world of sunrise and the world of clouds and the world of the stars; that is your outside. And you can become aware of your inside, which is far more mysterious.
The outside world is so beautiful, but the inside world is a thousand fold more beautiful."
is this a quotation? if so might I ask where from?
@@voxsvoxs4261 from talks by Osho
"Yes, please, both." Both fascism and communism place the collective over the individual. So did Plato, though his collectivism manifested as THEOCRACY.
Women are property, they’re just shared. Why is the host afraid to say that. Or are men equally women’s property or the property of women all women?
Good talk.
You are surely aware that when in the first few minutes you describe "fascism" you are in fact describing every Marxist regime past and present.
How about asking instead whether Communism or Fascism is Platonic?
Clickbait. This shouldn't even be a question.
Would plato prefer hitler or stalin?
Alexander, Caesar, or Augustus
I wonder about this question myself .Am I a fascist or communist. I believe in equality but also in sacred hierarchy. Plato is the great philosopher
It all depends on what/how/where the equality is applied and what/how/where the hierarchy is applied. Good on you for not being a liberal.
He was certainly baZed
Neither he cannot fit into any category because he created them all.
Strong state either way very centralized....Bakunin was right. I'll take anarchy