plato in english
 

when reading Plato in English, one encounters the words "the gods" and "God," sometimes in close proximity. in many other places of course, myriad gods are mentioned by name.

in my best understanding the Athenians were polytheistic and would have no need for a word meaning "God," unless that is the proper name of a god.

is this a case of a translator proselytizing by inserting the notion of a Christian god into a text in which such a notion has no place? or is there some ancient Greek word which meant "a single omnipotent deity who oversaw everything" other than the name of Zeus, which as a proper name should be left untranslated?

__________________
evidence that the translator(s) may have been misguided or simply morons:

"For measurements, money, etc., the Greek terms have been substituted for modern equivalents (such as furlong and shilling)."

I would have guessed Athena, but what do I know?

*spits on shirt*

spitting > drooling

oh. what version are you using?
shit man, i need to go fetch my books. living in a library-less house stresses me the fuck out.

Plato in english means PLATE

Well if you read Aristotle, there is a concept of a singular force (the prime mover) that has been attributed as "God" that is fundamental to the basis of his metaphysics. So the concept was there, or at least a comparable one, in their time I would think. Though you would be better off asking an ancient Greek historian. My suspicion is that there really was no huge problem between speaking of one god or a multitude when it came to intellectual circles while the multiple gods were more public sphere.

ah fuck i believe i have the same one, but a blue cover.

GOD. i dont know about htis fucking plato though. he irks me.

as usual, google to the rescue

http://plato-dialogues.org/email/960211_1.htm

aristotle fucked everything up for 2000 years
we are still suffering through is yes/no duality logic. fucking greek asshole.
most answers in life turn out to be "maybe"

i haven't yet read Aristotle carefully... although i remember this "prime mover" thingie from hist. of phil.

thanks for the tip.


i agree with you... though it seems then it should be left with lower case when singular, i.e. "god"

...also phrases like "the providence of God" and "since God points out the way," start to seem suspect... though i'm sure the concepts were extant in ancient greece, the phrasing seem reliant on Christian cliche.

Well the way I read it, Plato's ideas generally amounted to a singular God-type entity. From what I understand, ancient Greek has a shitload of declension stuff, so I imagine they have a plural and singular for the word "gods". Also, in Hebrew the word "God" was technically plural. My guess is that he really did use a singular word for (or at least comparable to the Christian word for) God, but that the capitalization and representation of the word were pushed a little.

I have a friend who knows ancient Greek who I could ask, but he's out of the country and texting this kind of question would be obnoxious.

as i thought... fucking translators....

i knew i should have stuck to derrida....




...the thing that irks you about Plato might be that he has three arms, one of which holds a knife. also he whispers in the one armed man's ear everything he wants transcribed, attributing his own words to this supposed Socrates.


never trust a three armed man with a knife.

That could be more from the medieval translators than your copy. I don't see a translator credit across it.

True, most Athenians didn't, but Socrates, however, did. Such discussion of a singular God and Oneness is a primary reason why the wise man was convicted by the Council of 500 and executed by hemlock. Still, yours is an excellent question and the explanation may very well be a problem in the translation as you opine.

I'm on a laptop and not at home right now, so I can't look to see who translated my Plato.

I think that's essentially the case. The idea was the same, but the translators knew that a capitalized "God" would indicate Yahwe, which it was not.

Suspect Plato, eh? You just don't get it, noob.

its inside... 14 translators for the various dialogues... the one in question is named Hugh Tredennick.

who is this funny little man named alte190? when i google "alte," i am informed that my child appears to be dead.

Yeah, Aristotle's thought eventually led to Descartes and although both served their age fairly well, each bit off a little more than they could actually chew and led to many future misunderstandings.

Socrates was too wise to ever be so speculative and pretentious.

Socrates was too wise to have ever written anything down... so... Plato made him his little puppet bitch... so much for wisdom.

And it's better that way...the ideal remains intact because all we know of his life is mostly via Plato's loyal adoration.

Oh well, that's martyrdom in the ancient world for ya.

see... again with the messiah-Socrates!

i want a music-making-Socrates!!!!

i am not sure that socrates was so wise after all. maybe he was just a cross-eyed failed sculptor with a bitchy wife looking for a way out of life, you know? i mean, he trusted "ideas" over the senses-- im sure that attitude would get you immediately ran over by a cab in new york.

nietzsche blames socrates for fucking everything up with the logic... next thing you know we have a modernity that champions science over art. the new tragedy is needed... but not the apolline+dionysus=tragedy, the dionysus+socrates= new school stylee tragedy.

or so i think.

Santayana felt that Nietzsche was a "constitutional invalid" and "belated romantic" that embraced egotism and subjective truth and whose thought aspired that to commit all manner of crimes and survive is among life's highest virtues.

Nietszche once remarked that Dostoyevsky was the only "psychologist" from which he had anything to learn. Although Fyodor, aside from being an excellent analyst of human behavior, was at heart a Christian existentialist much like Kierkegaard.

And all three, Nietzsche, Dostoyevsky, and Kierkegaard are counted among the first "existentialist" thinkers. A common thread in each seems to be the influence of Schopenhauer (also Kant) who came before and a reaction to Hegel (and again, also the legacy of Kant), who was primarily viewed as the preeminent philosopher of the time. But whereas Schopenhauer formulated that the "will to live" was a prime motivator for the individual, Nietzsche developed his "will to power" as an, if you will, addendum. And although they are certainly Christians given to esoterica, Dostoyevsky and Kierkegaard, in retrospect, seem to be closer to a modern understanding that fear of death and the psychological denial of this primal fear determines much of human behavior.

Interestingly, Dostoyevsky, who notably corresponded with Poe in America, utilized an account of the beginning of Nietzsche's madness in Raskolnikov's first dream (the whipping of the horse) in Crime & Punishment. Nietzsche, by then an aged retired professor, had been arrested by a couple of officers in Turin for creating a disturbance when he rushed to protect a horse being flogged.
It is now a fairly well-known tenet of abnormal psychology that sociopaths often care more for animals than people. And, of course, for all those familiar, this episode is only the tip of the iceberg with Friedrich.

Tenpence:

pbradley speaks of Aristotle's teleos; the problem with talking about ancient Greeks at this point in history is that the dominant metaphysic since at least medieval times has been monotheistic, if not outright Christian.

By my understanding it's inappropriate to speak of Greece as 'polytheistic'. Their God system was heirarchichal (I'm tempted to say, like Adorno, that it's the model of capitalism) - you have your Euronyme, Gods are born and can die and can breed half-Gods and heroes, can become animals, can become human, can be cursed for eternity...

There's also the 'fact*' that 'Greek religion' strikes me as more akin to the folk religions (which so-called 'paganism', a 20th-century invention seeks to fetishise) - what we see in contemporary times is settled in a singular conceptual time-space, but in reality it's a gestalt bastardisation of snippets, fragments, a smidge of written records (your Homers and your Ovids (etc)) and several hundred years of stories passing from person-to-person, and with travel, from village to village. Robert Graves, in White Goddess, talks an awful lot about this, about the idea of Apollo as one iteration of a Jesus-like character, of how, over time, Zeus went from a minor God to the father-God, the stilted judge-God.

I've not looked into that many translations of Greek stuff (the stories interest me, the people's history/ religion less-so) but I think we could draw comparisons between Taoism or the religions of India which spring from the Vedas and Upinshads (Hinduism/ Buddhism). Where tao talks of the 'tao being the one that is in everything [terrible rendering, sorry]', this could be interpreted as what monotheistic religions sometimes call 'God', or it could, in Animism, be called 'nature', or another interpretation. By a different tack, you read English translations of the Vedas and there's a lot of talk of a singular force (which is nearly akin to the God of Genesis). By the time you get Kali, and Genesh and the like, the notion of God becomes different - you read one translation which will say that Hinduism is 'polytheistic' but that these different Gods are different manifestations of 'the true force', or Judaism's YHWH, or Christianity's God; another translation will insist that there is no singular 'God', only many Gods; another translation will insist on Kali as a sub-God (a hierarchy similar to my understanding of the Greek Gods).

Anyway, the point of all this is that the context which could decide the providence of Zeus, or Greek 'myth', or Greek 'religion' is entirely absent - moreso than the already-troublesome context for a dyed-in-the-wool Christian to understand Zazen or Mahayana. I'm of the opinion that we may observe, in ourselves, certain epistemic lacunae, but to try and pin down 'the correct answer' misses the point and is an effort to 'control' something which is beyond and behind (but also in front of) you.

Anyone saying 'X ruined thought forever' needs to sit down and think about their life.



* I parenthesise this because 'facts', as in truth-values, come fairly late in ancient-Greek history, by my understanding with Plato.

Although neither "ruined" anything "forever," it is still worth remarking that it took Einstein to expand upon (and, in a sense, largely refute) the bulwarks of Descartes and Newton.

Back on topic and for what it's worth (haha- not much), my The Works of Plato is translated by Benjamin Jowett. It's a Modern Library book (have quite a few by this publisher).

From what I have read, my English translations give the word "demiurge" in place of "God" with a capital G. This is probably a more accurate translation as it has connotations of work, possibly alluding to the concept of the cosmic rearranger/chemist who assigns the Forms to various particulars.

Didn't Plato once visit the Malagasy Republic?

i think that you are confusing amorality with immorality.

this is the exact mistake that the National Socialists make in appropriating Nietzsche's writings to justify something that Nietzsche COULD NOT HAVE and DID NOT support.

let us take by comparison the actions of Heidegger who DID have a choice, chose to join the National Socialist party, gave lectures supporting their actions and excused himself by claiming to be apolitical. THAT is immoral.

my (limited) understanding of Nietzsche's amorality as described in The Birth of Tragedy is that it seeks to make decisions about right and wrong based on aesthetics rather that a (christian) code of ethics.

pretty good summary.

nietzsche was dismayed at the replacement of classical values with christian ones.

of course this opens up a whole other can of worms, huh?

for one thing this sort of retroactive diagnosis is quite unfounded... for Nietzsche, or anyone else. who can say if Van Gogh had syphilis or lead poisoning or anything else without examining him? who can say Schreber was psychotic? how could Freud "analyse" Schreber by reading his book? He could not.

for another thing, Plato points out that madness is not necessarily bad, and that heaven-sent madness is superior to madness caused by human ailments.

so even IF one can say that Nietzsche was mad, which one cannot, one can still not say that he was necessarily evil.

I think every translation twist the sense of the original text.
Sometimes the translator do it on purpose ( but I can't say about the present case ).

Glice has ruined thought for the remainder of the day.

i refuse to sit down and think about my life.

I think I merely pointed to Santayana's known beliefs and implied that I am inclined to agree.

And yeah, Nietzsche, of course, denounced his Prussian citzenship. Much like K. and D. he felt the individual was important and that systems and institutions threatened the sanctity of the individual. What Friedrich tends to overlook in his categorical rejection of Christianity is that this very same concept is extremely integral to the New Covenant.

Also, I tried earlier to allude to the common ground that Nietzsche shares with Dostoyevsky and Kierkegaard, because, in actuality, they are not so far apart from each other. Each are counted among the first existentialist thinkers. Each are indebted to Schopenhauer and each reacted to the Germanic tradition of Kant and Hegel. In my view, N. never got too far away from this tradition, however, and tended to operate as an outsider on its fringes. His powerfully seductive thought largely amounts to only so much juvenile sand castle wrecking.

It's just that Soren used a Socratic dialectical method and wrote under pseudonyms to show the whole of the psyche, to soar to the heights and also plumb the depths.

And Fyodor, of course, authored several masterpieces where nihilism (amorality) is explored and a critique is implied through a process of negation. For instance, he gave us Stavrogin in The Possessed, Ivan in The Brothers Karamazov (as contrasted with Alyosha), and the ever-so-identifiable embittered basement dweller in Notes From Underground, the Underground Man. Most important to this discussion (even though this is not a thread about Nietzsche) is D.'s character of Raskolnikov in Crime & Punishment who assumes a Nietzschean Will To Power and commits his horrible crimes, but discovers to his transfigured amazement in the end that there is beautiful and abundant life outside of the spider-hole of his psyche.