Saturday, November 26, 2011
A Word of Wisdom Fitly Spoken
I remember Jacob Kline at St. John's College, Annapolis speaking about the first word of Plato's Republic, KATABAINEIN, Which means "I went down" or "I descended" ... it is Socrates saying Katabainein xthes (I went down yesterday) ... to the Piraeus, to a religious festival. Jacob Kline said that this one word, descent, contained the entire Republic in microcosm since in a sense the high-point (or low point) is the Myth of Er and the DESCENT into the underworld for a vision of karmic rebirth. Kline suspected that Plato had re-written page one of the Republic 50 times so that form would imitate content. Paul Valery calls Pascal's pense the "perfect poem" (I cant really spell from memory) 'Le silence eternel des ces espaces infinis m'effraie - The eternal silence of these infinite spaces frightens.” Two immensities, the silence and the spaces, balanced upon DES and the self, the I, which is frightened, is OUTSIDE of that structure and frightened because of said exclusion, alienation. So page 1 of Plato's Republic conformed to Leo Strauss's "Persecution and the Art of Writing" in that "A word of wisdom, fitly spoken, is like apples of gold in silver fittings." From a distance, it appears a silver apple, that is it appears to say one thing, but upon closer inspection, meditation, it reveals itself to the eye of the worthy beholder (not the hoi polloi) as a golden apple concealed in a fine silver mesh filigree.
