The desire to belong to something greater than one’s self is simply human, transcending time, place, and space. It’s as natural as our need to breathe. In this sense, Aristotle put it correctly when he noted that man is meant to live in community… When the polis of classical Greece collapsed brutally in the final [...]
A free government is only sustainable if citizens can govern themselves. Socrates patiently revealed, through conversations that held a mirror up to fellow citizens, that they did not sufficiently understand such basic concepts as justice, piety, virtue, truth, and goodness when applied to themselves. Yet they presumed to govern others? Author's Note: Following is my revised [...]
To engage in dialogue, we must be good listeners, seeking to hear an insight, perhaps fuzzily formulated and unclear even to the speaker, but nevertheless worthy of exploration. Every culture has its own conversational style that often inhibits genuine dialogue. In Japan, for instance, the division of scholars and scientists at universities and research institutes [...]
If you have an open mind and inquiring heart, you will recognize something incomparably wonderful in Plato’s writings, if only their profound resonance with Christian teachings. The Cave is a masterful metaphor for the soul trapped in sin. “All education is conversion” —Pierre Hadot I. Why Read Plato? We know as Catholics, from the Divine [...]
Tyrants—intelligent, charming men as they usually are—rush into politics without first examining their souls. Politics without wisdom is not politics. A recurring theme in Plato’s dialogues, including his Seventh Letter, describes the education of a young man who wants to achieve the highest things, which he considers to be achieved primarily through his ruling the [...]
Christians who live so that they are never contaminated are useless, and they are liars, because we are all contaminated more seriously than we can imagine if we have ever seen a human soul as it was meant to be. When first a more serious, idealistic Christian, I didn’t think this was even a possibility. [...]
Is “the knowing of what one knows and what one does not know that one does not know” ever possible? And what is the benefit of that knowledge? Profound Ignorance: Plato’s Charmides and the Saving of Wisdom by David Lawrence Levine (Lexington Books, 2016) Plato’s Charmides is not one of the more famous dialogues or [...]
Today’s offering in our Timeless Essay series affords readers the opportunity to join Fr. James Schall as he contemplates the similarities between the death of Plato and the death of one of Plato’s more recent scholars, Eric Voegelin. —W. Winston Elliott III, Publisher But there is another sort of old age too: the tranquil and [...]
Socrates in the Underworld: On Plato’s Gorgia, by Nalin Ranasinghe (192 pages, St. Augustine Press, 2009) Today’s offering in our Timeless Essay series affords readers the opportunity to join Peter Augustine Lawler as he reflects on how Socrates models both rightly-ordered eros and logos, in contrast to the Stoics and Sophists. —W. Winston Elliott III, Publisher [...]
1c-d. The activity of this higher logos, dialectic itself, is beyond Glaucon’s present reach and no part of the preliminary survey. To set out on the dialectical road would be to see “no longer an image… but the true itself” (533a3); the “most serious matters” are withheld from Glaucon, and so from any mere reader [...]
1a. After the cave image Socrates considers with Glaucon the actual education of the philosophers. He begins significantly: "Would you like now to see in what way such men will come to be born [in the city] and how one will lead them up into the light, just as some [e.g., Heracles[40]] are said to have [...]
Is rhetoric simply a fight, or is it part of a feast that is for the good of both the individual and the polis—as a feast is for the sustenance of ourselves, but more importantly, for the communion of a Body, of a community? Callicles says, “‘Too late for a share in the fight,’ so [...]
The cave image deals with the actual habitation of human nature, that is, of the embodied soul, and with the painful steps and stations of its slow ascent. 1. Book VII begins with this invitation to Glaucon: “Now, after this, liken our nature, as far as education and the lack of education is concerned, to [...]
4a. Let us return to the invitation to reflection that is extended to Glaucon by the sectioning of the realms “as if” they were a line; he must wonder why, as has been said, the Republic has no dialectical treatment either of the Good or of the eide under it. This missing logos is, however, absent [...]