Plato's Epistles (Outside Reading)

January 28th, 2022

I recently read Plato's 'Epistles', a collection of letters that Plato wrote to different people throughout his lifetime. This reading was for some independent research I've been doing on leadership through the context of Plato and his political philosophy. In these letters, I was struck by a strange portion of his philosophy that Plato claims he cannot write about. He talks about an ultimate truth or type of knowledge that is unable to be written about and that he never himself wrote about.

This section of Plato's Seventh Letter is fascinating to me for many reasons. First and foremost, I want to understand what this ultimate truth is that Plato isn't able to put into words. Second, though, and in relation to this class, I want to understand more deeply how this informs Plato's view of written word and the use of written word to communicate. Is Plato trying to suggest that there are serious limitations of the written word? Is he longing for the oral culture of the past that is no longer possible in Athens? How might Plato understand the differences between oral culture and written culture, especially given how influential he has been in the rise of written culture with his many dialogues.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Walter Ong (Assigned class reading)

 3/15  In Walter Ong's book, he talks about oral cultures and what sound means to them. The oral cultures that we have learned about from the reading and in class show that to them speech is the unifying force in their relationships and in their societies. In the reading, Ong says  "sound is a unifying  sense. " This quote really emphasizes the ability speech has in its ability to unify people.    I think it is interesting that we are able to be unified with people by our phones but also able to be separated and isolated. In the oral cultures, Ong describes it is clear that the use of speech and sound in their primarily oral cultures is an important tool and unifying force.
Read more

Blog 8 Black Robe Video

  Blog 8 Black Robe Video A good example of human-centered religions clashing against primordial nature-centered religions is cinematically depicted in the 1985 film Black Robe. The era of this film has its roots in colonialism set in present-day Canada. The plot consists of two Jesuits who are on a mission to relieve a dying priest in fever-stricken Huron settlements. They are guided by Algonquin natives who have superstitions about the presence of white Christian men. There is a lot of miscommunication, mistrust, and disagreements throughout the journey. The Algonquian had persisted for many years through passed down oral stories. Their practices and beliefs, such as the world of night and the power of dreams, clashed with their Christian counterparts, who believed water baptism through Christ was the only way to relieve suffering. Christianity was not a concept that could be understood through the natives, nor could the Christians accept and understand the natives fully. The way...
Read more

Orality and Literacy - class reading

     “In primary oral cultures, where there is no text, the narrative serves to bond thought more massively and permanently than other genres” (pg. 141). This quote from Walter Ong’s book reopened a topic of interest in my mind. I have always enjoyed reading fiction. When I was younger, I spent hours every night reading novels until I fell asleep - book in hand. I remember having some difficulties remembering what I was learning in school, but I was able to deeply summarize the stories I was reading in my free-time to my mom. Hardly a detail went unmentioned when I summarized the stories I was reading, but the information that I was learning at school that was not presented as a narrative was much more difficult to remember. I am really interested in Ong’s phrasing in this sentence. “Bond thought” is a captivating phrase. That phrase can be understood two ways, and it seems that Ong means it both ways. Narrative works to connect thoughts in each person's head, making them...
Read more