Would Plato tweet? The Ancient Greek guide to social media
bbc.com
bbc.com
Contrary to the article, there is no doubt: Socrates would have no use for social media. His view is closer to Freud's, who remarked in a letter to Lou Andreas-Salomé : "In the depths of my heart I can’t help being convinced that my dear fellow men, with a few exceptions, are worthless." & Elsewhere "In my experience most of them are trash, no matter whether they publicly subscribe to this or that ethical doctrine or none at all ... If we are to talk of ethics, I subscribe to a high ideal from which most of the human beings I have come across depart most lamentably." - this is much the tone of Plato.
Walt Whitman I can imagine on Twitter.
Note that this is “Socrates, the mouthpiece character created by Plato".
> Contrary to the article, there is no doubt: Socrates would have no use for social media.
Well, that may be the case for Plato, its less the case for Socrates, unless you mean the one Plato created and not the real one. The relationship between the two itself has much doubt.
the best way to understand Socrates, in Plato, is not to say "if Socrates said it, Plato meant it," but instead to ask "why is the sarcastic questioner who never means what he says attacking this particular line of reasoning?"
which brings us to the central premise: would Plato tweet? Plato wrote a book where Socrates explained that inventing writing was a dangerous thing which would destroy human memory. of course he would tweet. he would probably tweet that Socrates told him tweeting was a bad idea.
Since Republic is middle period, it's definitely not just the views of Socrates, and since it also included the theory of forms it's arguably mostly Plato speaking through the character of Socrates.
Plato wrote the Republic, which is what the poster had quoted.
Plato, whatever his faults (Aristotle is better), cannot be reasonably compared to Freud.
[0] Freud also covered his tracks: he burned his notes on more than one occasion. He drew on Weishaupt who drew from the Jesuits in Inglostadt who taught him. The Jesuits practiced a kind of examination of conscience which, of course, was for the purpose of _liberation_ from sin and vice vis-a-vis the sacrament of penance. Weishaupt turned this on its head and used it as a tool ("Seelenanalyse", from which we get the word "psychoanalysis") for exploiting these vices to control people. Enter Wilhelm Reich, second gen Freudian, who weaponized this stuff as "sexual revolution".
you are very funny LMAO
"Subjectivity becomes the typical condition of the modernist outlook. In its early stages, when it does not trouble to disguise its filial dependence on the Romantic poets, modernism declares itself an inflation of the self, a transcendental and orgiastic aggrandizement of matter and event in behalf of personal vitality. In the middle stages, the self begins to recoil from externality and now devotes itself, almost as if it were the world’s body, to a minute examination of its own inner dynamics: freedom, compulsion, caprice. In the late stages, there occurs an emptying-out of the self, a revulsion from the wearisomeness of both individuality and psychological gain. (Three writers as exemplars of these stages: Walt Whitman, Virginia Woolf, Samuel Beckett.) Modernism thereby keeps approaching–sometimes even penetrating–the limits of solipsism, the view expressed by Gottfried Benn when he writes that 'there is no outer reality, there is only human consciousness, constantly building, modifying, rebuilding new worlds out of its own creativity.'"
The answer to the question is a clear and obvious "no".
Social media influencers are the spiritual and intellectual decedents of the Sophists, and Plato absolutely despised the Sophists
Twitter is for people to make up a guy to get mad at.
Plato made up a guy to destroy people in debate.
Also if you take the saying "power corrrupts" a little less literally then superior intellect also corrupts, if there are no counter-weight to them such as opposing intellects, which were rarer at the time.
He would fit right in.