And an open soul. I have just read through the first chapter (on "Glaucon’s Republic") of the amiable Prof. Ranasinghe’s brilliant, challenging, and edifying The Soul of Socrates (Cornell 2000). (Well, it’s not new is it, but it is new to me, and maybe to you.) "My reading of Socrates," NR writes, "presents him as one who faced up resolutely to nihilistic challenges very similar to those that confront us today." And this statement of interpretive standpoint suggests why this reading of Plato might be of the greatest interest to us erotic postmoderns, for whom the impossibility of an adequate doctrinal statement of the glory and misery of the human condition is no reason not to keep talking (or poeticizing) about it:
"Through his experience of Socrates, Plato understood eros to be a state in which poros and penia , plenty and need, are in constant alternation . . . It was in a similar vein that Kierkegaard claimed that the human condition consists of our trying to express the eternal while remaining time-bound, individual, and finite. It will be through the infinite passion of our eros, rather than the rigor and quantity of our labors, that self-knowledge (concerning our tragicomic existence) comes." (xii)
In the chapter on the Republic, NR convinces me that the City in Speech is even more ironic than I had thought, even more an image of Glaucon’s corrupt ambition. "This ex nihilo method of statecraft is totally inconsistent with the Platonic methods of erotic midwifery and recollected discovery" — a discovery, the author points out (and italicizes), that seems to be available in principle to human beings, and not only a rare philosopher, as per the famous redefinition of education as per the allegory of the cave: " this power [of education] is in the soul of each . . . the instrument with which one learns . . . must be turned around . . . this art takes as given that sight is there, but not rightly turned nor looking at what one ought to look at." (22)
Highly recommended.
