The Daily Cartoon and Live Briefing: Monday, March 4, 2024

Notably: Every once in a while I struggle through one of Plato’s non-Republic dialogues, especially the more obscure ones, at least to see what I’m missing in What Must Always Be Known. Most of the time I come away disappointed, partly by my stupidity, because three quarter of the exchanges pass so far above my head that Fire Flight could catch them and fly them to Halifax hospital’s trauma unit, and partly by Socrates’ unbearableness: the guy really was a prick. There’s no way around it. A funny prick, a smart prick, a mind-twisting prick, but a prick nonetheless, and judging from the number of times his interlocutors call him a prick, if in not so many words (Plato being a prick and a prude), Plato knew it, and loved to point it out. Callicles calling him out in the Gorgias is priceless, so is Voltaire in his article “Angel,” in his Questions on the Encyclopedia: “Socrates, as we know, had a good angel. But it must’ve been the bad one that drove him. Only a very bad angel would have a philosopher running from house to house to tell people, by questions and answers, that the father and the mother, the tutor and the child, are all ignorants, are all imbeciles. The guardian angel then has all sorts of trouble keeping his ward from the hemlock.” So I’ve been trying to make my way through the Euthydemus, a very funny riff on sophists that really should be a pleasure to read especially in our ecology of Foxes and Carlsons. But I’ve had a rough time. So as I usually do when a book seems a bit more impenetrable than usual, I turn to Goodreads, that hyper-democracy of reading that would have driven Plato up his cave walls, and where I’m always rewarded. I found this, by one of the readers: “I fear other readers may also find this extended satire on Sophism longer than strictly necessary. In order to help busy people make better use of their time, I offer this new translation, where I have taken the liberty of abridging and modernizing the dialogue in a few places:

EUTHYDEMUS: My brother and I are the greatest philosophers in the world. Ask us anything.

CLEINAS: Like what?

EUTHYDEMUS: Okay, here’s your starter for ten. Is a thing the same as itself, or is it a different thing?

CLEINAS: Huh?

SOCRATES: [whispers] You’re supposed to say it’s the same as itself.

CLEINAS: Ah… it’s the same as itself.

EUTHYDEMUS: I shall demonstrate to you that you are wrong. Consider a door. Do you maintain that it is always a door?

CLEINAS: I do, of course.

EUTHYDEMUS: But what about when it is ajar?

[General applause for EUTHYDEMUS’s brilliant philosophical insight]

EUTHYDEMUS: I’ll let my brother do the next one.

DIONYSODORUS: Why do elephants paint their toenails red?

CLEINAS: I do not know.

DIONYSODORUS: It is so that they can hide in cherry trees.

CLEINAS: But, I have never seen an elephant in a cherry tree?

DIONYSODORUS: Proves it works then!

[More applause]

CRITO: Are these clowns real philosophers?

SOCRATES: Hey, you’re smarter than you look.

—P.T.

 

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They talked about the past, really always about the past.
Even the future seemed like something gone and done with when they spoke of it. It did not seem an extension of their past, but a repetition of it. They would agree that nothing remained of life as they had known it, the world was changing swiftly, but by the mysterious logic of hope they insisted that each change was probably the last; or if not, a series of changes might bring them, blessedly, back full-circle to the old ways they had known. Who knows why they loved their past? It had been bitter for them both, they had questioned the burdensome rule they lived by every day of their lives, but without rebellion and without expecting an answer. This unbroken thread of inquiry in their minds contained no doubt as to the utter rightness and justice of the basic laws of human existence, founded as they were on God’s plan; but they wondered per-petually, with only a hint now and then to each other of the un-casiness of their hearts, how so much suffering and confusion could have been built up and maintained on such a foundation.

—From Katherine Anne Porter’s “The Old Order” (1944).

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