Was He Apollo’s Son?: Review of Plato of Athens | Hacker News Reader

Was He Apollo’s Son?: Review of Plato of Athens

literaryreview.co.uk

40 pointsdrdee13 comments

A discussion of ancient authors brings to mind CS Lewis's quote about reading the classics for yourself:

There is a strange idea abroad that in every subject the ancient books should be read only by the professionals, and that the amateur should content himself with the modern books. Thus I have found as a tutor in English Literature that if the average student wants to find out something about Platonism, the very last thing he thinks of doing is to take a translation of Plato off the library shelf and read the Symposium. He would rather read some dreary modern book ten times as long, all about “isms” and influences and only once in twelve pages telling him what Plato actually said.

The error is rather an amiable one, for it springs from humility. The student is half afraid to meet one of the great philosophers face to face. He feels himself inadequate and thinks he will not understand him. But if he only knew, the great man, just because of his greatness, is much more intelligible than his modern commentator.

The simplest student will be able to understand, if not all, yet a very great deal of what Plato said; but hardly anyone can understand some modern books on Platonism. It has always therefore been one of my main endeavours as a teacher to persuade the young that firsthand knowledge is not only more worth acquiring than secondhand knowledge, but is usually much easier and more delightful to acquire.

Thanks for sharing this quote, very inspiring!

Counterexample: Kant.

Better yet: Hegel.

Hegel could be said to be obscure. Kant is mostly very clear in what he says, but he writes overly long and unwieldy sentences and uses tons of obscure technical (and now out of use) terminology.

He was a real piss-ant, after all.

And very rarely stable.

Reading the originals is preferable, a translation is secondhand already.

Yes! The original text is so much more satisfying—and usually better written.

Even Hegel and Kant. Pro tip: don’t read linearly, use keyword search to find sections that selectively interest you.

I for one adore and cherish the works of Plato, and in general put him amongst the most important persons to have lived. Imaging that he could have been overseen, forgotten, or ridiculed fully, perhaps the proper question is: What can I, you, and we accomplish to remedy a norm where money & power override truth, where false beliefs aren't questioned no more. Not in the dumb sense, where some preconceptions of truth rules, but in a truly questioning, scientific style.

I wanted to quote Speusippus’ funeral speech where he explained why Plato was son of Apollo, but I just spent the past 20 minutes looking for original sources AND IT IS TOO DAMN DIFFICULT.

The classics are astonishingly inaccessible from a technical point of view. There are great efforts like the Perseus project and Loeb. But so much work remains. An incredible amount of material is not translated into English. And, when it is, it can be incredibly difficult to get the original.

There are massive projects to digitize the known corpora of works in Latin and Greek, the Thesaurus Linguæ Latinæ (https://thesaurus.badw.de/en/project.html) and Thesaurus Linguæ Græacæ (https://stephanus.tlg.uci.edu)

While, as the titles indicate, the objective is to be able to find all usages of particular words, this does have the side-effect of preserving the texts themselves, although neither project necessarily works as a good means of being able to access the texts directly.

On this question please check out the work of Peter Kingsley (like ‘Reality’)

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