Comment by DrStormyDaniels | Hacker News Reader

Comment by DrStormyDaniels | Hacker News Reader

DrStormyDaniels

In the ninth book of the Republic, Socrates casually describes the mass of human beings as things without even the dignity of animals, characteristically they are " bent over their tables, they feed like cattle with stooping heads and eyes fixed upon the ground; so they grow fat and breed, and in their greedy struggle they kick and butt one another to death (...) because they can never satisfy with unreal nourishment that part of themselves which is itself unreal and incapable of lasting satisfaction."

Contrary to the article, there is no doubt: Socrates would have no use for social media. His view is closer to Freud's, who remarked in a letter to Lou Andreas-Salomé : "In the depths of my heart I can’t help being convinced that my dear fellow men, with a few exceptions, are worthless." & Elsewhere "In my experience most of them are trash, no matter whether they publicly subscribe to this or that ethical doctrine or none at all ... If we are to talk of ethics, I subscribe to a high ideal from which most of the human beings I have come across depart most lamentably." - this is much the tone of Plato.

Walt Whitman I can imagine on Twitter.

> In the ninth book of the Republic, Socrates [...]

Note that this is “Socrates, the mouthpiece character created by Plato".

> Contrary to the article, there is no doubt: Socrates would have no use for social media.

Well, that may be the case for Plato, its less the case for Socrates, unless you mean the one Plato created and not the real one. The relationship between the two itself has much doubt.

It may well be that “Socrates, the mouthpiece character created by Plato" was more real, platonically speaking, than the historical entity that went by that name.

yeah, and even then, to call Socrates a mouthpiece character means you probably didn't understand Plato. Plato uses Socrates to cause trouble at least as much as he does to express verbatim opinions. probably a lot, lot more.

the best way to understand Socrates, in Plato, is not to say "if Socrates said it, Plato meant it," but instead to ask "why is the sarcastic questioner who never means what he says attacking this particular line of reasoning?"

which brings us to the central premise: would Plato tweet? Plato wrote a book where Socrates explained that inventing writing was a dangerous thing which would destroy human memory. of course he would tweet. he would probably tweet that Socrates told him tweeting was a bad idea.

I don't think you understand Plato. There's a spectrum of purely mouthpiece to actually what Socrates said/thought throughout Plato's dialogues. And generally the earlier the dialogue the more it's actually Socrates, but as Plato's own views developed it became more of a mouthpiece.

Since Republic is middle period, it's definitely not just the views of Socrates, and since it also included the theory of forms it's arguably mostly Plato speaking through the character of Socrates.

I don't think you understand Plato either.

Actually, even in that story "Socrates" isn't saying writing is a dangerous thing. "He" is claiming that the ancient Egyptians (who were a culture which already existed for thousands of years before the era of the classical Greeks) believed that.

> Well, that may be the case for Plato, its less the case for Socrates, unless you mean the one Plato created and not the real one. The relationship between the two itself has much doubt.

Plato wrote the Republic, which is what the poster had quoted.

I read something earlier this week which makes me think Whitman wouldn't necessarily be online. From Irving Howe's "The Idea of the Modern":

"Subjectivity becomes the typical condition of the modernist outlook. In its early stages, when it does not trouble to disguise its filial dependence on the Romantic poets, modernism declares itself an inflation of the self, a transcendental and orgiastic aggrandizement of matter and event in behalf of personal vitality. In the middle stages, the self begins to recoil from externality and now devotes itself, almost as if it were the world’s body, to a minute examination of its own inner dynamics: freedom, compulsion, caprice. In the late stages, there occurs an emptying-out of the self, a revulsion from the wearisomeness of both individuality and psychological gain. (Three writers as exemplars of these stages: Walt Whitman, Virginia Woolf, Samuel Beckett.) Modernism thereby keeps approaching–sometimes even penetrating–the limits of solipsism, the view expressed by Gottfried Benn when he writes that 'there is no outer reality, there is only human consciousness, constantly building, modifying, rebuilding new worlds out of its own creativity.'"

Those opinions of fellow humans, and the kinds of people who have them, are about a dime a dozen on Twitter.

For Freud to make those remarks is truly remarkable and a textbook example of megalomania and chutzpah. That man was an unscrupulous fraudster who preyed on rich patients (they were all rich at that time), a deviant with weird sexual appetites, and a charlatan[0]. Nephew Eddy didn't fall far from the tree.

Plato, whatever his faults (Aristotle is better), cannot be reasonably compared to Freud.

[0] Freud also covered his tracks: he burned his notes on more than one occasion. He drew on Weishaupt who drew from the Jesuits in Inglostadt who taught him. The Jesuits practiced a kind of examination of conscience which, of course, was for the purpose of _liberation_ from sin and vice vis-a-vis the sacrament of penance. Weishaupt turned this on its head and used it as a tool ("Seelenanalyse", from which we get the word "psychoanalysis") for exploiting these vices to control people. Enter Wilhelm Reich, second gen Freudian, who weaponized this stuff as "sexual revolution".

> Wilhelm Reich, second gen Freudian, who weaponized this stuff as "sexual revolution".

you are very funny LMAO

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