a utopic studio, first series

Athens as Educator

Reflections on Ignorance and Formative Justice in Classical Experience

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Plato 1 – Republic, Book 3-5

To present-day readers the way Plato discussed the education of the Guardians and criticized poetry are, contrary to appearances, among the most difficult parts of the Republic.  These sections seem obvious; and obviously objectionable; Q.E.D. — Plato is problematic and not worth the trouble.  Such reactions are commonplace and difficult to avoid because it is not easy to figure the alternative out.  What might Plato have meant other than what obviously he seems to have meant?  As scholars have tried to respond to this question, the late 20th-century linkage between the medium and the message has helped to open options for interpretation.  Quite possibly for Plato, the medium, poetry, was equivalent to the message, mythos, what people say in the spontaneous exchange of conventionally acceptable speech, and what they therefore thought, when they unreflectively voiced the poetic presence of their ethos.  We can hypothesize that living within the mythos was possibly something like living in a thought-world structured by all the brand names, stock opinions, and associated valuations and clichés sloshing over our awareness of the world.  But that would be too facile, and much scholarship of the last half century has has aimed to understand the sensibilities and pathologies characteristic the poetic mythos as people in classical Athens inherited it from the recent past and struggled to manage complex realities from within it.  Increasingly, interpreters hold that understanding this mythos may be, in the phrase of Eric A.  Havelock, an important "preface to Plato."  Here many of the studies listed for our 2nd session are significant, especially the following.