Plato's Republic and Zombies

For books 7 and 8, we talked about the appearance of math in the curriculum of the philosophers, and looked at some of the strange things that are said about that--how Agamemnon couldn't have counted his own two feet, and how division is spoken of as multiplication by the adept to preserve the unity of one. Four of us were there: Paul, Rex, Steph, and I.

We wondered about this dialectic which seems to consist in going out of and returning down into to the cave; how analysis and unity are experienced in thought and practice; how war and violence relate to philosophy, to math, and to the other arts; about the new words that are coined (and the space where a word should be for the science of solids that precedes astronomy), like 'timocracy/timarchy' for a theoretical government based on love of honor; and how these governments are related to individuals, and whether they are mixed, or cyclical; we raised the mystery of unconscious thinking and intuition beside the emphasis on reason, as another possible interpretation of the relationship between the cave and the sunlight; we considered the case of a man without working memory, imprisoned in an eternal present...we might have thought of it a little like this, too?

I got started on the Idiot so I can talk to people back in the desert about that. But then also this week I finally started in on Mr Eppeldauer's book, ZWARM--highly recommended! We used to talk about it when I would go back to GHS and sub, and he would be typing away at it. Here are some thoughts so far:

The logotherapeutic quality of writing comes through strongly, the transgressive images of sex and violence overlapping with dreams of ordinary life from before the unstated catastrophe which has locked the characters up in the cave, in the dark--this terrible inversion of the Platonic image, where outside in the light is dramatic death, and the only way out is Dantean down.