Convalescent

Well, I'm writing under the, possibly very false, assumption that writing something is better than writing nothing. I had expected to have a free week with no classes, not very much that I had to rush to do, when I could spend days at a time reading whatever I chose... then I got hit with the worst illness I've had in years, and for days I was incapable of doing anything at all. As I started to recover I could watch movies on my computer - sometimes mostly listening to them with my eyes closed. I lost five days completely. Nw that the break is almost over, when I pick up a book I've been meaning to get around to, I read ten pages or so knowing that I can't really get into it, that there isn't time to read the whole thing or even half, and I don't concentrate all that well. I have a big presentation to prepare for next Thursday (on the Symposium), a pile of tests and papers to correct, and articles I'm supposed to be looking over.
The articles are translations into English for a Dictionary of philosophical untranslatable terms originally published in French. Some entries are words, word pairs or word groups that really only exist in one language, such as the difference between Vorhanden and Zuhanden, which is clearly mostly a Heidegger article, or Sein/ Sosein/ Aussersein, which is largely focused aroung Meinong. Some, like the entry on 'Object' are talking more about a term's absence in a ancient Greek and the way it is read back into classical texts, sometimes slightly distorting them. Some, like 'translation', are largely the history of a concept - once again, in ancient Greek there was a word 'to Hellenize' or 'to make Greek', but no word acknowledging two-way translation... various words are used in Latin for adopting Greek texts, and the various words that are used for translation as well as the use of the word 'translatio' are all bound up with various ideas of transmission, fidelity, betrayal, etc., and the whole fifty page article is actually pretty interesting. I have a badly-paid, occasionally unpaid side gig reading through translations and checking them against the original. It's mostly interesting, but it has been a massive time and energy drain this semester.

When I was reading through another article on the Phaedrus, I thought to look up a myth mentioned at the beginning of the dialogue in Robert Graves' 'Greek Myths'. At the end of the little entry on Boreas, Graves has a note which begins "Socrates, who had no understanding of myths, misses the point of Oreithyia's rape". I laughed when I read that - especially thinking back on Derrida's constant praise of Plato's myth-making in the same dialogue.

I'll be largely wrapped up in Plato for at least another week, despite my desire to start reading more modern stuff again as well. Not only that, but a large part of my Plato reading is going to have to continue centering around 'the Symposium'. One of the articles I read today was one I was kind of looking forward to reading because of its topic, though I was disappointed by how it was treated. The subject was the theatricality of the dialogue... what I was specifically looking for was an explanation of the fact that at the very end of the dialogue Socrates is talking to Agathon the tragedian and Aristophanes the comedian about the idea that the same person who can write a good tragedy should be able to write a good comedy. The whole symposium is in honor of Agathon's triumph as a playwright, and a crown is going to be awarded to the best encomium by Dionysus himself, and of course Alcibiades comes in at the end drunk as the living embodiment of Dionysus, wearing a crown of ivy and violet, and he gives the crown to Socrates (sort of), What is the importance of all the theatrical references? How should they reflect on everything else in the dialogue? What's with the whole comedy/ tragedy thing? It's often said that the comic elements in the symposium are evident (Aristodemus' awkward arrival without Socrates, Aristophanes' hiccups, etc.), and questioned whether there is a tragic element, and if so, what? This article was suggesting that the date of the events in the dialogue was the surest clue - 416, just a year before peace would once again be broken Alcibiades and Phaedrus would be accused of defacing Herms, Athens would lose a major battle and things would go to hell. Within a couple years of the Symposium, only Aristophanes and Socrates would still be left in the city. This particular article suggested that the very beginning of the dialogue would have taken place in 399, and this part sort of does interest me. No evidence is given here for the specific dating at 399, but it is supposed that the reason fact gathering is going on at the beginning about events belonging to the distant past is that Socrates has already been accused though not yet tried, and in this period before Socrates' death an attempt is being made to assemble Socratic Logoi as accurately as possible for posterity, particularly while facts can still be verified by Socrates himself. This would help to explain why Apolodorus is in such a foul mood at the beginning, and it also helps to explain why everything is at such a remove... it's always said that Socrates' couldn't decently repeat the praise that Alcibiades made of him, but this doesn't explain the stress on temporal distance, the fact checking and the fact that it isn't even a second-hand account.
Anyway, I realize that this is pedantry and not the voicing of ideas for us to discuss... which is also too bad, because I know I had ideas to discuss recently. Oh well. I hope things are well in England and you've been keeping yourself pleasantly occupied. Tell me if you have any ideas about the discussion of comedy and tragedy at the end of the Symposium and how it might fit into the dialogue as a whole. I would really like to have a convincing sense of why it needs to be there.