Cȯsꭑọ ∴ ọꭑƨȯƆ @cosmiccitizen@schelling.pt

Plato's willing to rewrite ordinary language in this way because ordinary Greek is the source of so much sophistry in his eyes that even a "noble lie" is preferable to what is possible with intrinsic (entechnoi) rhetorical proof.

So what is to be made of the fact that Plato wrote in dialogues? That seems very sophist-ish. Rhetorical argument and such. There's a bunch of potential extraneous explanations, such as that it was simply the only form he knew, and so on.

In The Republic, Plato is famously willing to rewrite the eikon mythos so that the status-seeking (thymotic) part of humanity will be in an organic, supportive relationship with the rational part of the sovereign (whether psyche or polis).

Later on, in the thrall of the Pythagoreans, Plato was also willing to dispense with ordinary language in favor of abstract number as a purer handmaiden to the eikon logos. As he wrote, "He who is without mathematics shall not enter."

In The Republic, Plato's fundamentally laying out a holarchic parallel between sovereign psyche and sovereign polis.
Plato's interested in making an account of each as a self-contained, organic unity.
This will help him overturn presocratic sophists' views of the polis and psyche as being mutually constituted by the nomoi of common language.
Plato is willing to overturn common language in multiple ways to achieve this.

Shit, I'm being interrupted by a Person from Porlock. The universe is conspiring against me revealing secret Platonic mysteries!
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Person_from_Porlock>

(cont.) ... as the republic is a kind of sovereign that is comprised of human intellects, which are also sovereigns

So I think that the central conceit of The Republic, the holarchic
<https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/holarchy> comparison between the human psyche and the polis, is in some way a response to the way that the presocratic sophists' rhetoric was effective at both the private and public levels. And by providing this holarchy, Plato is also able to demonstrate an interesting case of nested organisms.

SO Plato wants to say that among the presocratics, the Sophists are especially reprehensible, because they view the human psyche as this public thing that can be trans/formed by dialectic. And the problem for Plato is that this is very visibly demonstrated every day in the Assembly and courts of Athens. So Plato needs to respond to this with an account that covers a few bases:
* the role of rhetoric/language as something that shapes the individual and public
* a republic's nested sovereingty

(Note: In this reading, I'm going to ascribe to Plato an understanding of psyche that I've rolled together from my reading of Aristotle's De Anima, but I also think you can eschew this if you don't like it. My reading from Aristotle is of the psyche as the sphere of ultimate recourse of potential, and potential-of-potential, and so on in infinitum.)

So following Whitehead, it's appropriate to think of Plato as a philosopher of Organism.

Specifically, Plato wants explanations to have recourse to actual things that have a self-contained, internally harmonious composition. This is distinctive in comparison to presocratics who accepted explanations with recourse to the tropes or myths of popular speech (neither actual nor self-contained), or to elemental ontologies (these are explanations about emergent character, & so aren't self-contained).

Curling is the sport of high human development countries because the fundamental activity of play requires a cultivation of fingerspitzengefuhl adequate to the chaotic interaction of micro-friction. Such a cultivation is time-intensive and emerges from environments that support similar fingerspitzengefuhl kinds of human development, such as open heart surgery or mastery of the violin.

Only the fully free and flourishing individual may truly respond to his or her fingertips' feeling.

I feel like I pierced through to some observations about Plato today that may be obvious to other people but which I was pretty pleased with.

"Thank you for expressing your engagement with our brand. We have not professionally contracted that particular influencer to connect with our products, but this is exactly the kind of organic, viral engagement that we see every day from across the web. People just love connecting with our brand, Terrorism™️."

When I was a child, I said I wouldn't learn to drive until EVs were introduced. And the grown-ups laughed at me. I said I was a silly monkey with a bongo butt, and they still laughed at me! Well now I'm in my 30s and I have a real bongo butt, so who's laughing now?

Biblically accurate angel.

7. Curling seems pretty receptive to mixed-gender competition. Tonight I played against a pregnant woman.

6. There is no dress code for curling, but shoes are probably a good idea.

5. I am not yet convinced that the sweeping does much of anything.

4. People will teach you curling if you show up, and they are nice.

3. Curling is the sport of high human development countries because of some reason I haven't finished making up yet.

2. The basic conflict engine for curling is derived from the obscure frictional effects of a technique applied to ice called pebbling. Pebbling is the application of fine water droplets to the ice in order to create minor, random imperfections.