I don’t know what you mean by politician, but the man says over and over again that that’s precisely what he was not. He was related to the Aristocrats, and a few of the tyrants, and still rejected any political power in Athens.
Plato was first and foremost an educator. He attempted what Xenophanes failed to achieve, i.e., to supplant Homer as the teacher of Greece. Greece was experiencing what 19th century Europe was experiencing: the death of God, by which I mean the loss of any moral foundation. Homer had died. Poetry itself as the mechanism for education had died. With homer and poetry, what also died was the old understanding of greatness. What it meant to be noble, to be the good man, to have lived the great life, was up for grabs. Plato was an optimist about reason and an advocate for philosophy. He thought philosophy could give to Greece what poetry had given them till then. If you want to call this politikin, then sure. I have no real qualms with that.
A politician wants the organised rule over groups of people by imposing his ideas on them. It’s interesting that you say ‘educator’. Like Jacob alludes to in previous post education is one of the most political issues. As a little digression, in my country every time reforms to the education system are proposed it invariably leads to some of the most heated political discussions. Last century there have been discussions about the until then held monopoly of the catholic church on education, about the primary language that should be taught in schools etc… last week there was again a heated political debated in all media about a proposal to include islamic education in the curicilum in catholic schools. Anyway, the idea is i suppose that the ones who controls what children are taught, controls to an extend what the next generation will believe (and in the end vote for or group they will want to belong to…).
So if we are to assume that havelock is correct in his analysis of the situation up to Socrates, then the poets (homer) allmost entirely controled education (which was a necessity because of the lack of written tradition etc…). He starts with the question why Plato was so firmly anti-poetry. This maybe has something to do with the fact that dialectics and poetry are just two different (non-compatible) tastes and Plato was more of the first taste… but like he says, that never quite explained the full extend of plato’s dismissal of poetry. Because if poetry was just something like what it is today, then you could very well hate it, but there’s really no reason to go further than that because most of what it amounts to is a little harmless entertainment now. If poetry was in fact what havelock says it was pre socrates, and Plato wanted to see his ideas gain influence, - like any good politician - one would have to break the spell of poetry.
This was one of the things that I took away form the book anyway. Someone says in a previous post, that it is kinda ironic that Plato was railing against poetry, and at the same time using poetry in his books. I’d say if you see it in the context of havelock’s thesis and Plato as a politician, it’s not ironic at all. If the predominant societal language was indeed poetry, then he would have to use poetry to convince people because it was the language they understood.
I need to think about your other post and what it exactly was Nietzsche proposed… some more. But yes, i agree that reëvaluation of pure mind/disregard for body is certainly a large part of it.
I have heard other politicians make the same claim. I’m not sure we should automatically accept what people say of themselves. Educator and politician are not mutually exclusive terms. Plato’s morality was always couched in terms of the state. Not the only way to go…
If we take ‘politics’ to mean any endeavor pursued for the sake of affecting the world at large, then is there any pursuit that doesn’t count as political? I said that I’m willing to count Plato’s attempt at restructuring education as political because by changing education he sought to re-rank the Grecian value ranking, but this is a different kind of politikin from the sort that wises up to the fact that by changing the curriculum, the canon, you can create a new constituency down the line and thus energize one of the few options already on the table. Plato sought to radically overthrow everything that came before him and to set in motion something new. If what he was doing was politics, then it was certainly politics on a grand scale–in much the same way that Homer, Moses, Paul, Mohammed engaged in politics…NOT politics of the sort that liberals engage in nowadays, i.e., opening the canon to minority and women writers in order to make more future liberals.
Poetry was religion. What Havelock says about the influence of poetry during the oral tradition on the Greek mind is much like the influence of Islamic prayer recited five times a day. It attunes the individual to a certain way of thinking. The figures in the book become categories of the understanding. You live and understand with/through those figures. Plato, like Nietzsche, was an advocate of philosophy and of the philosopher as ruling institutions. They advocated for philosophy by trying to undermine precisely the religious ruling caste. Nietzsche and Plato however did not seek to eliminate religion. It is rather transformed and then subsumed and put to good use within a philosopher’s regime. This is perfectly clear in the Laws and in the second and third book of Republic. You see N saying something very similar in BGE 61-62.
The philosopher sees his polis as his marble and himself as its demiurge. By means of his laws, his legislation, his institutions, he attempts to create a type of human being. One who values this but not that. One who is disposed to act in this but not in that way. One who honors this, but not that. One who feels in this but not in that way. In order to forge this type of man, the poets are tasked with coming up with stories that would solidify them. The guardians must not fear death, for example. To make this happen, the philosopher gets the poets to come up with stories in which the afterlife is depicted differently from the way that Achilles portrays it. It is no longer gloom and doom. It is rather, and Plato does this work himself with the Myth of Er, a place or rewards and punishment. In this way, philosophy becomes sovereign and rules over religion. The philosopher tells the poet what sorts of songs to sing instead of the other way around. In the middle ages, as I’ve pointed out above, religion was sovereign and it used philosophy as a way of solidifying church dogma.
Along the same lines, Nietzsche says in BGE 61 that “the philosopher will make use of religion for his breeding and education work.” This influence, he says
“can be exerted over selection and breeding with the help of religions […] varies according to the type of person who falls under their spell and protection. For people who are strong, independent, prepared, and predestined for command, people who come to embody the reason and art of governing race, religion is an additional means of overcoming resistances, of being able to rule. It binds the ruler together with the ruled, giving and handing the consciences of the ruled over to the rulers–which is to say: handing over their hidden and most interior aspect, and one which would very much like to escape obedience.”
The operative metaphor in Nietzsche is that of the coal and the diamond, but he also makes use of the stone and the sculptor. The sculptor’s hammer, what he uses to shape his marbe is his philosophy. Nietzsche tells us how to philosophize with a hammer in a couple of his books. What this means is that under certain pressures, the coal transforms into a diamond. This is where I think you can make sense of the overman. The overman is akin to the image that a sculptor, the philosopher, sees in his stone. It is his ideal for the stone. It is the meaning of the stone. The rough material that the philosopher begins working with is transformed into his ideal. In so doing, he creates new values and a new nobility. Look at how he expresses the effect that Christianity has had on Europe along these same lines when he says the following:
"Suppose we could contemplate the oddly painful and equally crude and subtle comedy of European Christianity with the mocking and aloof eyes of an Epicurean god, I think our amazement and laughter would never end: doesn’t it seem that a single will dominated Europe for eighteen centuries–to turn man into a sublime miscarriage? Anyone, however, who approached this almost deliberate degeneration and atrophy of man represented by the Christian European (pascal, for example), feeling the opposite kind of desire, not in an Epicurean spirit but rather with some divine hammer in his hand, would surely have to cry out in wrap, in pity, in horror: “O you dolts, you presumptuous, pitying dolts, what have you done! Was that work for your hands? How have you bungled and botched my beautiful stone!”
To hammer this point home, I’ll point out Plutarch’s account of Lycurgus and the influence he had on Sparta. The man took these four villages, this imperfect stone, and by means of the laws he enacted, the institutions he created, the religion that he sanctioned, etc., he transformed it into what we know it as. Leonidas is his diamond. Leonidas played a game whose rules Lycurgus created, and he won according to those rules. He was great, noble, as Lycurgus conceived greatness.
If you play Unreal Tournament, you know you also get UnrealEd. With the UED you can make your own game, create your own rules, your own standards for winning, and if people play your game, the world you created, and the rules you’ve put into place there, then they win or lose, they’re noble or base based on the values that you’ve created.
If there’s any doubt about Plato assimilating the poets under his philosophical regime even though they seem like the primary subjects of his criticism, consider this. In the first book of the Republic, after refuting Polemachus’ definition of justice which he bases on the words of the poets (Simonides in particular) Socrates does not say that they–the poets–are wrong, that they should consequently be abandoned, or that they are not wise.
Socrates says that the position he reaches by means of reason (not inspiration, i.e., divine revelation) is “the opposite of what [they] said Simonides meant” (334e) but note what he says after that. The mistake he says lies in the interpretation of Simonides’ words. The correct way to interpret the poets is by rendering them consistent with the dictates of reason (philosophy). The philosopher here establishes himself as the competent interpreter of the poets. Rather than speaking for themselves through their work, they are made to speak through philosophy. He says,
"You [Polemachus] and I will fight as partners, then, against anyone who tells us that Simonides, Bias, Pittacus, or any of our other wise and blessedly happy many said this (335e).
The poets are admitted to be wise, but in admitting this much, Socrates/Plato admits that their judgment as to what is good is valid. The wise, in Plato’s scheme (and in the ancient world in general) were the one’s whose judgment as to the worth of things–what should be considered good, noble, just, etc.,–is trusted and accepted.
Nietzsche confirms this with a little etymological argument in Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks, 3 He says:
the Greek word designating ‘sage’ [“weise”] is etymologically related to sapio, I taste, sapiens, he who tastes, sisyphos, the man of keenest taste. A sharp savoring and selecting, a meaningful discriminating, in other words, makes out the peculiar art of the philosopher, in the eyes of the people […] And so philosophy starts by legislating greatness. Part of this is a sort of name-giving. “This is a great thing,” says philosophy.
Those people we now call “philosophers” were originally named “sages” or “wise” by their contemporaries. The “wise one,” the “sage,” received that designation from the perspective of those who saw him as a competent judges of the worth of things. They were wise only in so far as their judgment, their “taste,” was accepted as legitimate. Their judgment was trusted, and because it was trusted, the people acquiesced to it. What the wise one estimated as noble or base is what the people also came to regard as worthwhile or worthless. Plato and Nietzsche task the genuine philosopher with legislation, and here we get the figurative way that they accomplish their legislation (Plato thinks the philosophy should literally legislate as well. This is not clear with Nietzsche, but I think he means that as well). When a philosopher is recognized as wise, i.e., when they’re recognized as philosophers by the people, they by that same token inscribe their judgment as to the worth of things into the tablet of the people’s hearts. The people come to value as the philosopher values.
[tab]I know my point becomes weak when it comes to these subsequent books, especially since Socrates becomes more daring in his confrontation with the poets, especially Homer, but the fact still remains that poetry is not tossed out altogether. It is rather put in service of the philosopher’s regime as one means among many of shaping the character of individuals, but only it can be interpreted as capable of doing that.
And I know I have to temper my above point and say that at least with regard to Homer and imitative poetry in general, Socrates is explicitly hostile. He does however leave open the possibility of someone presenting and argument–a philosophical, not poetic, defense of this sort of poetry (607a-d). This tells me that Homer and imitative poetry is not included within the philosopher’s regime only because Socrates/Plato admits his failure to assimilate it, i.e., to interpret it in such a way as to render it a useful tool for his breeding/cultivating scheme. He admits his failure to mold Homer for his purposes, but does not definitively close the book on Homer, because he knows that it might be possible for someone to offer such a philosophical interpretation. A door is left open even to Homer, but only on the condition that he first be molded by a philosopher’s hands.[/tab]