Day 19 The Story Of Philosophy

Let us confess, too, that Plato has in sufficient abundance the qualifies which he condemns. He inveighs against poets and their myths, and proceeds to add one to the number of poets and hundreds to the number of myths. He complains of the priests (who go about preaching hell and offering redemption from it for a consideration -cf. The Republic, 364), but he himself is a priest, a theologian, a preacher, a supermoralist, a Savonaroia denouncing art and inviting vanities to the fire. He acknowledges, Shakespeare-like, that "comparisons are slippery" (Sophist, 231), but he slips out of one into another and another and another; he condemns the sophists as phrase-mongering disputants, but he himself is not above chopping logic like a sophomore. Faguet parodies him: "The whole is greater than the part?-Surely.-And the part is less than the whole?-Yes...Therefore, clearly, philosophers should rule the state?-What is that?-It is evident; let us go over it again."