[HN Gopher] Would Plato tweet? The Ancient Greek guide to social...
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Would Plato tweet? The Ancient Greek guide to social media
Author : thdespou
Score : 39 points
Date : 2021-09-23 08:08 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.bbc.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.bbc.com)
| mt_ wrote:
| Comparing early philosophers to current influencers as the same.
| Just no.
| willcipriano wrote:
| Plato would demand to see the credentials of whomever disagreed
| with him and finding them lacking, dismiss anything they had to
| say out of hand due to them being fools looking at shadows on the
| wall of a cave.
|
| He would fit right in.
| bobthechef wrote:
| For tweet-length material, look to the Spartans. The Athenians
| were too wordy for this terse medium.
| DrStormyDaniels wrote:
| cf. etymology of laconic
| pvg wrote:
| Not really a problem - since Theseus, Athenians have been handy
| with the thread.
| [deleted]
| earthboundkid wrote:
| There's a good book called "What Confucius Really Said" that
| takes the Analects of Confucius and just puts it in a modern
| idiom. I think in general, the Analects comes off as more Tweet-
| like than anything in Plato. Plato is more of a playwright who
| characters go on unrealistically long digressions about whatever
| idea it is the author was interested in.
| jonesnc wrote:
| My answer is no.
|
| Twitter is for people to make up a guy to get mad at.
|
| Plato made up a guy to destroy people in debate.
| DrStormyDaniels wrote:
| In the ninth book of the Republic, Socrates casually describes
| the mass of human beings as things without even the dignity of
| animals, characteristically they are " bent over their tables,
| they feed like cattle with stooping heads and eyes fixed upon the
| ground; so they grow fat and breed, and in their greedy struggle
| they kick and butt one another to death (...) because they can
| never satisfy with unreal nourishment that part of themselves
| which is itself unreal and incapable of lasting satisfaction."
|
| Contrary to the article, there is no doubt: Socrates would have
| no use for social media. His view is closer to Freud's, who
| remarked in a letter to Lou Andreas-Salome : "In the depths of my
| heart I can't help being convinced that my dear fellow men, with
| a few exceptions, are worthless." & Elsewhere "In my experience
| most of them are trash, no matter whether they publicly subscribe
| to this or that ethical doctrine or none at all ... If we are to
| talk of ethics, I subscribe to a high ideal from which most of
| the human beings I have come across depart most lamentably." -
| this is much the tone of Plato.
|
| Walt Whitman I can imagine on Twitter.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > In the ninth book of the Republic, Socrates [...]
|
| Note that this is "Socrates, the mouthpiece character created
| by Plato".
|
| > Contrary to the article, there is no doubt: Socrates would
| have no use for social media.
|
| Well, that may be the case for _Plato_ , its less the case for
| Socrates, unless you mean the one Plato created and not the
| real one. The relationship between the two itself has much
| doubt.
| DrStormyDaniels wrote:
| It may well be that "Socrates, the mouthpiece character
| created by Plato" was more real, platonically speaking, than
| the historical entity that went by that name.
| IncRnd wrote:
| > Well, that may be the case for Plato, its less the case for
| Socrates, unless you mean the one Plato created and not the
| real one. The relationship between the two itself has much
| doubt.
|
| Plato wrote the Republic, which is what the poster had
| quoted.
| tessierashpool wrote:
| yeah, and even then, to call Socrates a mouthpiece character
| means you probably didn't understand Plato. Plato uses
| Socrates to cause trouble at least as much as he does to
| express verbatim opinions. probably a lot, lot more.
|
| the best way to understand Socrates, in Plato, is not to say
| "if Socrates said it, Plato meant it," but instead to ask
| "why is the sarcastic questioner who never means what he says
| attacking this particular line of reasoning?"
|
| which brings us to the central premise: would Plato tweet?
| Plato wrote a book where Socrates explained that inventing
| writing was a dangerous thing which would destroy human
| memory. of course he would tweet. he would probably tweet
| that Socrates told him tweeting was a bad idea.
| [deleted]
| jhbadger wrote:
| Actually, even in that story "Socrates" isn't saying
| writing is a dangerous thing. "He" is claiming that the
| ancient Egyptians (who were a culture which already existed
| for thousands of years before the era of the classical
| Greeks) believed that.
| oehtXRwMkIs wrote:
| I don't think you understand Plato. There's a spectrum of
| purely mouthpiece to actually what Socrates said/thought
| throughout Plato's dialogues. And generally the earlier the
| dialogue the more it's actually Socrates, but as Plato's
| own views developed it became more of a mouthpiece.
|
| Since Republic is middle period, it's definitely not just
| the views of Socrates, and since it also included the
| theory of forms it's arguably mostly Plato speaking through
| the character of Socrates.
| bobthechef wrote:
| For Freud to make those remarks is truly remarkable and a
| textbook example of megalomania and chutzpah. That man was an
| unscrupulous fraudster who preyed on rich patients (they were
| all rich at that time), a deviant with weird sexual appetites,
| and a charlatan[0]. Nephew Eddy didn't fall far from the tree.
|
| Plato, whatever his faults (Aristotle is better), cannot be
| reasonably compared to Freud.
|
| [0] Freud also covered his tracks: he burned his notes on more
| than one occasion. He drew on Weishaupt who drew from the
| Jesuits in Inglostadt who taught him. The Jesuits practiced a
| kind of examination of conscience which, of course, was for the
| purpose of _liberation_ from sin and vice vis-a-vis the
| sacrament of penance. Weishaupt turned this on its head and
| used it as a tool ("Seelenanalyse", from which we get the word
| "psychoanalysis") for exploiting these vices to control people.
| Enter Wilhelm Reich, second gen Freudian, who weaponized this
| stuff as "sexual revolution".
| gverrilla wrote:
| > Wilhelm Reich, second gen Freudian, who weaponized this
| stuff as "sexual revolution".
|
| you are very funny LMAO
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