Ebook The Tragedy of Platonic Ethics and the Fall of Socrates
This paper considers the use of myth in the Platonic dialogues. It seeks to demonstrate that Plato takes up the task of rewriting the old myths, not in order to clarify the real truth about ancient tales, but to make those tales serve higher ethical—ends. Thus Plato makes a valiant effort to replace the old "truths" in order to displace and overcome ethically dangerous assumptions in the old tales. But I shall demonstrate that, despite the hanges in mythical content, the old tropes endure in the new form and the dangerous elements of myth persist. The elements of myth that I consider to be most dangerous are the motifs of "fallenness" (as characteristic of the human condition) and the irredeemably tragic dimension of earthly existence (configuring mortal life as a matter for despair).
These mythologems endure despite the new imagery that seeks to overcome them and they continue to breed a "nostalgia" of loss and tragic origins. This is the archaic infection that I see as the spawning ground of ritualistic patterns of human behaviour that are essentially violent. The infection is sublimated but carried along in new contextual forms in Platonic myth, concealed but dynamically present. The persistence of these dangerous elements, in my reading, signal the failure of the Platonic project of purification—a failure most clearly evidenced in the tragic character of Eros and in the impotence of the philosopher in the city—indeed in Socrates' being ever atopos (without or out of place) with regard to the city (in the Republic) and missing even from the lofty perches reserved for the philosopher (in the Theaetetus) and the lover (in the Symposium). There is no place for Socrates—for the truly just and good man—in the real cities down under the heavens. No place for him in the upper world of lofty contemplations. Without him, wealth and power and honour will ever rule the human scene and justice will be the ideal of simple fools. 1 That is the essential tragedy of the human condition as it re-emerges in the Platonic corpus.
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Ebook The Tragedy of Platonic Ethics and the Fall of Socrates
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