Being of their offspring the bigger poindexter, I've inherited my parents' books, and last night I spent some time with a hardback volume—paperbacks, unlike atomic bombs, belonging to the future—of some Platonic dialogues that had obviously been required for a college philosophy class my mom took in the mid-1950s. Maybe she would have been able to resell it if not for her copious underlining and highlighting. Jesus, mom, why not just paint the pages with a brush? Her marginalia is also interesting and put me in mind of the opening to chapter 6 of Vladimir Nabokov's Pnin (not his most notorious book but, I think, the most enjoyable one):
The 1954 Fall Term had begun. Again the marble neck of a homely Venus in the vestibule of Humanities Hall received the vermilion imprint, in applied lipstick, of a mimicked kiss. Again the Waindell Recorder discussed the Parking Problem. Again in the margins of library books earnest freshmen inscribed such helpful glosses as "Description of nature" or "Irony"; and in a pretty edition of Mallarme's poems an especially able scholiast had already underlined in violet ink the difficult word oiseaux and had scrawled above it "birds."
In her defense, mom's glosses were not inscribed in the margins of library books—rather, in volumes purchased with grandpa's money and then, after a brief period of active duty, hermetically sealed for more than 60 years till scanned by me last night.
It was fun to have a window cracked on my mom's mind about five years before I made her acquaintance. I'd have to read the words of Socrates, as set down by Plato and highlighted by her, to try and guess at the import she had discerned, or to make a connection between the text and her marginal notes. Before long I got at least as interested in the text as in mom's notes. The question of what students should study in school is part of the current culture war but I wonder whether the promoters of ancient Greek philosophy might be a little put off by the views of Socrates.
In the dialogue called Euthyphro, for example, the title character is one of these moral preeners who is sure the gods take his side of an ethical dispute. Socrates, occasionally exhibiting a touch of tart impatience, leads him to the question of whether the gods love things that are holy, or whether things are holy because they are loved by the gods. They agree that it must be the former. But in that case, says Socrates, you are supplying me with a mere attribute of piety (that it's loved by the gods) and not its essence (the reason the gods love it). By this point, Euthyphro has become less chatty and self-assured. He soon slinks off, and the dialogue ends without any neat resolution, but it seems an objection to the claim that morality depends upon religion has gone unanswered. For the implication is that "God commands X" doesn't answer the question "Why is X good?"
If the Platonic dialogues are accepted as a biography of Socrates, then it was within a couple of weeks of having advanced this argument that he was sentenced to death for corrupting the youth of Athens. That is the subject matter of the dialogue called Apology. Socrates has a reputation for something resembling modesty, as he famously admitted that he might be the wisest of all men only because at least he knew he knew nothing, but in the Apology, after he's been convicted and it's time to plead for his life, he says a just sentence would be, not death, not exile, but a state pension under the terms of which he would be maintained for life in the Prytaneum, "the public hall in which were entertained ambassadors, victorious generals, winners at the Olympic games, and other illustrious citizens." The picture above is of that page in the Apology from mom's book. The information about the Prytaneum that I've quoted is from the footnote at the bottom of the page.
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