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/lit/ - Literature

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10484355 No.10484355 [Reply] [Original]

>tfw about to read Laws: Book I by Plato

I know it's only 23 pages but still.

What should I expect /lit/?

>> No.10484380

the dialogue of a broken man, in all frankness

>> No.10484427

That concepts such as right, left-wing, socialist, authoritarian etc. don't apply to Plato.

>> No.10484436

Probably Socrates saying some kind of faux-intelligent dialogues in front of a participant who is the mental equivalent of wooden post on a fence holding sheep.

>> No.10484728

>>10484355
Differently structured than Republic but inheriting while subduing some of its ideas. The more "realistic" of the two big works but obviously still in the platonic vein.

Would heavily recommend you follow up with at least the relevant section in AE Taylor's "plato the man and his work" (book length treatment of each treatise, one by one) and, if you're up for it, the cambridge critical guide to plato's laws. Solid essays that will help you dig into the text and relate it to the rest of the corpus, especially republic.

Oh and you should pay attention to the actual, enumerated laws for their own sake, but IMO far more important are the subsections/subsequent explanations, which method is I explained I think in book 1 but I could be totally wrong about that. If you're annotating, you don't need to note the actual laws, but try to stay aware of the underlying ideas from which the enumerated law at hand stems. I went in blind, willing to thoroughly annotate, and a big chunk of my notes is 100-some-odd laws about shit like not picking from other peoples' fruit trees when you're traveling.

Oh and keep an eye out for the religious shit in book X (I think), in particular the three heresies and their corresponding punishments. Laws can be boring as shit (see fruit trees mentioned above lmao) but book X is very interesting and very significant.

Cheers!

>> No.10484825

>>10484355
A deceivingly simple dialogue between a provocative (but cautious) Athenian and a Cretan and Spartan.

The Laws looks like the most obvious and straightforward Platonic dialogue, but there's so many difficulties to it. Read it to get familiar with it, feel free to dismiss it, and then re-read it alongside super weird commentaries like those of Farabi, Strauss, and Benardete to see how much there is in it.