Books to Read While the Algae Grow in Your Fur, June 2014

Attention conservation notice: I have no taste.

Plato, The Republic

I had a teacher in junior high who had the good idea, when I was bored, of making me read philosophers and political writers he thought I'd violently disagree with, and forcing me to explain why I thought they were wrong. The ones which stuck with me were Ayn Rand and Plato. I did indeed disagree furiously with both of them (I'd already imprinted on orcs), but they became part of the, as it were, invisible jury in my head I run things by.

Reading Drury on Strauss (below) drove me back to the Republic. (You couldn't pay me enough to revisit Rand.) As a grown-up, I find it such a deeply strange book as to sympathize with Strauss's position that it couldn't possibly be taken at face value.

For instance: the idea that justice is doing good to friends but bad to enemies is proposed in I 332d, and then rejected with downright sophistry. But it's then revived as a desideratum for the guardians (II 375), and argued to be psychologically realizable because pure-bred dogs show "love of learning and love of wisdom" (II 376).

Or again: the whole point of the book is supposedly to figure out what justice is. The ideal city was spun out because it's supposed to be easier to figure out what makes a just city than a just person. (No reason is given for why the justice of the just city has to resemble the justice of the just person any more than the beauty of a beautiful sunrise has to resemble the beauty of a beautiful poem.) Plato's answer is that the justice of the ideal city consists of the members of each class sticking to their duties and not getting above their station (IV 433). Socrates supposedly reaches this by a process of elimination, all the other features of city having been identified with other virtues (IV 428--432). I won't say that this is the worst train of reasoning ever (I've graded undergraduates), but how did it ever persuade anyone?

The whole thing is like that: a tissue of weak analogies, arbitrary assertions, eugenic numerology, and outright myths. Whatever you think about Plato's conclusions, there's hardly any rational argument for those conclusions to engage with. And yet this is the foundation-work of the western (as in, west-of-China) intellectual tradition which prizes itself on, precisely, devotion to reason!

Given how much better Plato could argue in works like Euthyphro and Meno, how moving the Apology is, how other dialogues show actual dialogue, etc., I am led to wonder whether our civilization has not managed to canonize one of the oldest surviving attacks of the brain eater.

ObLinkage: Jo Walton reviewing it as though it were SF.

Christopher Moore and Ian Corson with Jennyson Rosero, The Griff

Ted Naifeh, Courtney Crumrin and the Night Things

Nick Spencer and Joe Eisma, Morning Glories: For a Better Future

Brian K. Vaughan et al. Runaways, 2: Teenage Wasteland and 3: The Good Die Young

Comic book mind candy, assorted.

Shamini Flint, A Bali Conspiracy Most Foul

Mind candy. The intersection of dissipated ex-pat life with terrorism. (Previously.)

John Layman and Rob Guillory,