Footnote on Plato [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: > carrol in response to chuckster: > > > >Not a bad characterization. I'm woozy from the flu right now, but > >I intend to stumble some more. I want to complicate irony enough > >so that it can't be used as a slogan. Leaving aside dramatic irony, which does present special problems, the ironic tradition in the West begins with something close to deliberate distortion of an opponent -- I'm thinking in particularly of the debate between Thrasymachus and Socrates which begins my favorite book, Plato's *Republic*. The victory Plato arranges for Socrates in that debate (and "arranges" is almost too kind a word) depends on two violent distortions of what (had Thrasymachus or one of his fellow sophists been able to speak for himself) would have been the argument. Distortion 1 (and this can't be an honest mistake on Plato's part) is to individualize the argument, which in the first instance had been an argument about *class*, not individuals. Distortion 2 (perhaps honest, perhaps not) was to assume human perfectibility separately from practice, leading to the absurd conclusion (which Thrasymachus is made to accept) that a mathematician is not a mathematician when he is making a mistake. This leads to the conclusion that when a ruler makes a decision *not* in his own interest, justice consists in not obeying him. But this simply denies the corrigibility of ideas through practice and critique. None of Socrates' arguments holds water in the absence of these two fallacious premises. Irony as Plato (Socrates?) practiced it is essentially vicious in that it depends on the complete control of the ironist over the ironist's victim. In Plato's dialogues that control is guaranteed by the fact that they are fictions Plato himself controlled. But a professor of mine in grad school noted a second form of this control. Commenting on the frequent praise of the "Socratic Method" as a classroom strategy, he said: "The Socratic Method can be used by only one person" -- i.e., the professor exercising authoritarian power in the class room. (Sometimes, of course, the term "Socratic method" means merely discussion -- but it can be used in that sense only by people who have either never read Plato or have read him with utter lack of attention.) In only one of his works does Plato allow an opponent a fair statement. Otherwise they must always be distorted to allow the Socratic ironist to win the battle (i.e., humiliate his opponent). Carrol
