Tag: Subpolítica

PREFACE

“In my youth I was drawn both by philosophy and journalism. I read the fragments of Heraclitus the summer after I graduated from high school. I majored in philosophy at college, but I was also working my way as a journalist full time when I dropped out in my junior year and made newspaper work my lifelong career.”

“I soon felt that I could not fully understand the English 17^th-century revolutions without a fuller knowledge of the Protestant Reformation, and the close connection between the struggle for religious liberty and the struggle for free expression.

To understand the Reformation it was necessary to go farther back again and probe into those premonitory stirrings and adventurous thinkers in the Middle Ages who sowed the seeds of free thought. This in turn was closely associated, of course, with the impact on Western Europe when Aristotle was rediscovered through Arabic and Hebrew translations and commentaries in the 12^th century.”

“When I first got back to ancient Athens, I thought in my ignorance that I would be able to do a cursory survey, based on standard sources, of free thought in classical antiquity. But I soon found that there were no standard sources. Almost every point in classical studies was engulfed in fierce controversy. Our knowledge resembles a giant jigsaw puzzle, many parts of which are forever lost. Scholars of equal eminence are able to fashion from the surviving fragments contradictory reconstructions of a vanished reality. These tend to reflect the preconceptions with which they began.

So I turned to the sources for myself. There I found that one could not make valid political or philosophical inferences from translations, not because the translators were incompetent but because the Greek terms were not fully congruent — as one would say in geometry — with their English equivalents.”

“To understand a Greek conceptual term, one had to learn at least enough Greek to grapple with it in the original, for only in the original could one grasp the full potential implications and color of the term.

How can one understand the word logos, for example, from any one English translation, when the definition of this famous term — in all its rich complexity and creative evolution — requires more than 5 full columns of small type in the massive unabridged Liddell-Scott-Jones Greek-English Lexicon?” Talvez não seja possível filosofar em inglês, e isso é tudo.

“In my day, even in a country high school, one had 4 years of Latin to prepare for college, and Catullus and Lucretius were among my early enthusiasms. But I had only one semester of Greek in college before I dropped out in my junior year.”

“I started on my own with a bilingual edition of the Gospel of St. John, then went to the first book of the Iliad. But the study of Greek soon led me far afield into the Greek poets and Greek literature generally. Their exploration continues to be a joy.”

Premissa completamente equivocada: Atenas não era livre, nem uma democracia.

PRELUDE

“The Socrates of Xenophon is rather platitudinous and banal, sometimes a downright philistine, capable even in one passage of Xenophon’s Memorabilia — his recollections of Socrates — of jokingly offering to act as a panderer [cafetão ou bajulador!] to a well-known Athenian courtesan.”

“It was Plato who created the Socrates of our imagination, and to this day no one can be sure how much of his portrait is the real Socrates and how much is the embellishing genius of Plato. The search for the historical Socrates, like the search for the historical Jesus, continues to generate an ever more enormous literature, a vast sea of speculation and learned controversy.

The debt of Socrates to Plato is, however, no greater than the debt of Plato to Socrates. It is to Plato’s literary genius that Socrates owes his preeminent position as a secular saint of Western civilization. And it is Socrates who keeps Plato on the best-seller lists. Plato is the only philosopher who turned metaphysics into drama. Without the enigmatic and engaging Socrates as the principal character of his dialogues, Plato would not be the only philosopher who continues to charm a wide audience in every generation. No one reads Aristotle or Aquinas or Kant as literature.” Nossa reverência católica mal-disfarçada tem de se referir a ele como São Tomás, enquanto os outros o chamam simplesmente de Aquino!

“The Platonic account is theater at its highest level. Socrates is as much a tragic hero as Oedipus or Hamlet.”

“How does a reporter cover a trial that was held almost 2,400 years ago?” “Scholar X attacks Scholar Y’s criticism of Scholar Z’s interpretation of an ancient text.” “Three contemporary portraits of Socrates have survived. In addition to the accounts by Plato and Xenophon, we also have the portrait that emerges from the comedies of his friend Aristophanes, a friendship attested by the Symposium of Plato.”

A VELHA FALA DO MEU PROFESSOR DE INICIAÇÃO CIENTÍFICA EM 2006 AINDA REPERCUTE: “Indeed, Aristotle and Plato may be read together as an ongoing philosophical and political debate; even in our own time, Platonists and Aristotelians are not always on speaking terms.”

“To study the voting procedures and rules of debate in the popular assemblies of the Roman Republic side by side with the Athenian assembly is to see clearly the contrast between the two political systems, the former a thinly disguised oligarchy, the other a full and direct democracy.” Mais ou menos…

PART I. SOCRATES AND ATHENS

1. THEIR BASIC DIFFERENCES

“Was it, as Greeks would have said, a polis — a free city? Or was it, as Socrates so often said, a herd?” “to oppose self-government was to be not just antidemocratic but antipolitical. This is how Socrates looked to most of his contemporaries. Socrates was neither an oligarch nor a democrat. He stood apart from either side.” Não creio que seja simples assim, Stone: republicanos ou democratas… haha

“In 5^th– and 4^th-century Athens, advocacy of kingship must have looked as quirky as a monarchist political party would in 20^th-century America — too quaint and eccentric even to be alarming.” Tudo bem TRINTA tiranos, mas UM, nem pensar!

“In the Memorabilia, Socrates set himself up as an opponent of all forms of existing government. He itemized — and rejected — them one by one.”

Uma bela versão alternativa da hierarquia de governos da República, só que dessa vez sem uma apresentação hierárquica, apenas negativa:

FORMAS OBSOLETAS DE GOVERNO

MONARQUIA rei – “cetro” como símbolo da transcendência – descendência de Zeus (Deus morreu há muito mais tempo do que costumamos pensar. Como ele é Deus e não está no tempo, a ele é facultado morrer antes mesmo de começar o seu reinado… Penso aqui no Zaratustra, é claro.)

DEMOCRACIA o favorito – povo – sufrágio universal e identidade absoluta entre representante e representados

??? sorteado – assembléia que sorteia os incumbidos de governar – uma para-democracia, quando muito.

TIRANIA tirano – força e astúcia

Sócrates refuta estas 4, sem dar pelas aristocracias, pelos critérios de plural ou singular, “bom” ou “ruim”, apenas para afirmar o mesmo que Platão: O SÁBIO.

“In Xenophon, Socrates defended his advocacy of absolute rule with analogies also familiar in the Platonic dialogues.”

“in spinning wool . . . the women govern the men because they know how to do it and men do not.”

ERROS FILOSÓFICOS 101: “Plato was a theorist, Aristotle a scientific observer.”

Um livro de 1988 não pode chamar a República de utopia, pelo amor de Zeus! Isso me desabona muito a continuar…

Talvez o anão que sempre volte seja Aristóteles: o rei-dos-burros, ineliminável na História… Obdurate imbeciles that know-what-they-know, but only that. The last that are.

“Antisthenes, the oldest disciple of Socrates, considered monarchy the ideal form of government and agreed with Xenophon that Cyrus was the ideal monarch. These views were presumably expressed in his lost dialogue, the Statesman, mentioned by Athenaeus.”

“Travel abroad was severely restricted to keep the community from ‘spiritual pollution’ [n’As Leis, que sabe-se lá por que diabos ele chama de ‘livro político mais moderado de Platão] — as the Chinese Communists now say — by foreign ideas. These Platonic innovations in thought-control went beyond any kingship the Greeks had ever known. They were in fact the first sketches of what we now call totalitarian societies.” Stone é mais um desses americanos idiotizados que falam em Jefferson e democracia sem entender nada a respeito. Mesmo discurso mccarthista de sempre.