A Conversation with a (former) Student

A former graduate student, Danny Rodriquez, sent me this e-mail. I thought it belonged in the blog. 

Let us know how your own experiment listening to the dialogues goes, Danny. (By the way, I don't claim Plato/Socrates is an elitist because he claims to know the truth, but because rather than leading those in the cave out into the sunlight, he proposes teaching them in the darkness. That reading is, admittedly, unfair to Plato, and pushes his analogy way beyond what he intended. But, I'm not above a little sophism myself.)    

Danny's e-mail:

"I've been reading your blog but I'm starting from your older posts. One of your posts has my attention -- the one about listening to Plato. I want to put your claim to the test and listen to the Republic on audio. I'm convinced that there wouldn't be a difference but I will gladly admit when I'm wrong.

"Allan Bloom calls The Republic the true apology of Socrates, because it is a more detailed account of what Socrates was indicted for. I'm only on book 3 and I don't feel comfortable enough making any significant commentary on it except that the different turns of his argument make it rather easy to overlook its holes. I consult three different translations whenever I get stuck on something, which includes translations from Joe Sachs and Shorey. What surprised me was his willingness to censure books if they didn't meet a particular representation of the gods as to make the city better, and that any story that didn't meet this standard wouldn't be read by any youth. 

"I shook my head as I read your "Out of the Cave" post where you call Socrates elitist because he doesn't seem to claim to know truth. He concedes that he knows very little, but that very little is more than anyone else in Athens; truth, therefore, is an admission to knowing little at all and that admission becomes a starting point to strive to know more.

"But your comparison of the cave to running is sick!(sick being urban slang for fucking awesome). It's a shortcoming of language that it is devoid of sensory experience when received by the decoder despite the flood of sensory experience(from memory of course) that inhabits the encoder."