Couch City
Описание книги
Crowning six decades of literary, rhetorical, and historical scholarship, Harry Berger, Jr., offers readers another trenchant reading. Berger subverts the usual interpretations of Plato’s kalos kagathos , showing Socrates to be trapped in a double ventriloquism, tethered to his interlocutors’ speech acts even as they are tethered to his. Plato’s Republic and Protagoras both reserve a small but significant place for a poet who differs from Homer and Hesiod: the lyric poet Simonides of Ceos. In the Protagoras , Socrates takes apart a poem attributed to Simonides and uses this to finish off the famous and supposedly dangerous sophist, Protagoras. Couch City is a close reading of the comic procedures Socrates deploys against Protagoras as he reduces him to silence. But it also shows that Socrates takes the danger posed by Protagoras and his fellow sophists seriously. Even if they are represented as buffoons, sophists are among the charismatic authority figures—poets, rhapsodes, seers, orators, and lawgivers—who promote views harmful to Athenian democracy. Socrates uses Simonides’s poem to show how sophists not only practice misinterpretation but are unable to defend against it. Berger ports his roots as a pioneering literary theorist into this rhetorical discussion, balancing ideas such as speech-act theory with hard-nosed philology. The result is a provocative and counterintuitive reassessment of Plato’s engagement with democracy.
Оглавление
Harry Berger. Couch City
COUCH CITY
CONTENTS
Introduction: Speech Bonds
I
II
III
IV
1 / Couch City, or, The Discourse of the Couch
2 / Simonides, Part 1. 1
2
3
4
STROPHE 1
STROPHE 2
STROPHE 3
STROPHE 4
5
6
3 / Simonides, Part 2
Strophe 1
Strophe 2
Division I: Protagoras’s Attack. Argument 1: Sophistical Snippetotomy
Division II: Socrates’s Response
Argument 2: Socrates’s Correction
Argument 3: Protagoras
Argument 4: Socrates
Argument 5: Protagoras
Argument 6: Socrates
4 / Simonides, Part 3
Division III. Rhematic Warfare. 342a–343c
Commentary
Division IV. The Epanorthōsis of Simonides. 343c–344b
Division V. The Attack on Pittacus: Simonides Doctored. 344b–345c
5 / Simonides, Part 4
Division VI. Simonides Overthrown. 345c–346c
Microanalysis of 345d–e
Division VII. Socrates Overthrown. 346c–347a
6 / Macrological Mystification Protagoras’s Myth. Macrology
The Myth
7 / The Ethics of Etceteration
8 / The Parts of Gold and the Parts of Face. 1
2
3
9 / Sophistry as Safemindedness in the Protagoras
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
NOTES. Introduction: Speech Bonds
1 / Couch City, or, The Discourse of the Couch
2 / Simonides, Part 1
3 / Simonides, Part 2
4 / Simonides, Part 3
5 / Simonides, Part 4
6 / Macrological Mystification: Protagoras’s Myth
7 / The Ethics of Etceteration
8 / The Parts of Gold and the Parts of Face
9 / Sophistry as Safemindedness in the Protagoras
INDEX
Отрывок из книги
Socrates against Simonides
HARRY BERGER, JR.
.....
The sexual, dietary, and occupational restrictions required to keep Sow City internally peaceful make it all the more vulnerable to plunder. Glaucon’s mention in Book 10 of Homer’s companion, Creophylos (600b), supplies a deferred identification: Marauders of the Meat Tribe would descend on Sow City in search of a readymade lower class, a servile population of dēmiourgoi to satisfy their necessary as well as unnecessary desires, some of which call for swineherds and swine.
Strauss’s commentary on this section is excellent. “Glaucon is characterized by the fact that he cannot distinguish between his desire for dinner and his desire for virtue.” His rebellion against Sow City “was prompted by his desire for luxury, for ‘having more,’ for the thrills of war and destruction (cf. 47lb6–cl).” With the onset of the guardian proposals he is “compelled by Socrates to accept the complete divorce of the profession of arms from all luxury and gain.”6
.....