Esoteric Roman v. Greek Ranting (was Philosophers)

[Tichy]

And a game question: how successful are Oreiads at seduction? As good/better/worse than Succubi?

[noname]

I never meant to call you a Popperite. I apologize if I came across that way.

[Jazzepi]

What's a Popperite?

Jazzepi

[noname]

A Popperite a follower of Karl Popper, a writer who blasted Plato in his book "The Open Society and its Enemies", calling Plato a proponent of tyranny in spite of the fact that Plato considered tyranny to be the worst form of government. Of course, Popper's work is rather limited to science and his political philosophy is rather limited due to his distrust of historicism. Of course, Popper saw himself as a liberal, and yet his ideas on society were, if anything, degenerate and possibly Marxist.

[johan osterman]

Noname: Just curious, are you an objectivist noname?

[Tichy]

I can't envision a possible world in which Popper is a Marxist, the attack on historicism seems to preculde it. But I don't have any particular rancor about Popper's politics, and I haven't studied them carefully. I've always thought of him as a garden variety liberal. I just think his interpretation of Plato is one-sided.

Popper's best known as a philosopher of science. He coined the idea of 'falsification': that a scientific theory can only be legitimate if it is possible to be falsified (i.e. that it's possible for there to be concrete evidence *against* it).

In terms of his relation to Plato I've always thought of him as the opposite of Leo Strauss. Both point to the manipulative or elitist features of Plato's politics (rule by the 'best', the legitimacy of 'noble lies' told to the people by the leaders if they move society towards the Good, etc.) Strauss lauds these things in a roundabout way: he's a subtle (or subtilizing) reader, and doesn't treat the Republic as a blueprint for a state, but a meditation on politics more generally. Popper straightforwardly attacks them as the seeds of tyranny. I'm not a fan of either of them as readers of Plato.

[noname]

Plato once said that lies infected the soul with evil, and he didn't support the noble lies, as that kind of state was rejected as insufficient (to be fair, Plato rejected all existing states as insufficient.) Also, rule by the best doesn't mean rule by a few or by the rich; it means that those who can comprehend reality and morality best ought to be able to rule. Of course, a few people DO rule modern countries (a few hundred legislatures plus an executive and a supreme/constitutional court rule of states with many millions or even over a billion), and those people tend to be rich. So what I'm saying is, when people criticize Plato, they are really criticizing the world in which we live today, as Plato's philosophy and its ideals (republican government, rule of law, the social contract, etc) have defined the political landscape.

P.S. I called Popper a Marxist because, like Marx, he seems to be upset at the existence of a social contract, or that a state can be guided by an agreement between the government and its people, rather than a monolithic set of ideals as expounded by a single, all-powerful political party. Of course, a single party isn't 100% necessary for Popper, so how Marxist he is is indeed in question, to be fair.