Athens in Pieces: The Stench of the Academy

While I applaud the Times’ decision to publish non-ephemeral culture pieces like this, I have to wonder. Did any editor look over this before it was published? It is written in a lofty style that makes it inaccessible to anyone who doesn’t already know much about ancient Greece. What with name-dropping like “Dionysius I” and “Anniceris.” Is the average reader really expected to know who these people were? Where Critchley writes that “Plato had read the long-lost works of pre-Socratic thinkers like Heraclitus and Anaxagoras,” readers will be dumbfounded as to how Plato acquired them, unless they already know that Critchley means to say “the now long-lost works…” Again, are readers supposed to know what the author is talking about when he casually mentions the “plane-tree under which Socrates and Phaedrus sit and talk about eros”? Someone reading this article who isn’t already fascinated by Plato will spend the whole time wondering, “What’s the point of all this? Why should we care? Why am I reading this?” Critchley offers no answers. It is sad when the supposed guardians of classical learning are so out of touch that they cannot present the material to a general audience in a way that stirs even an inkling of interest.

Plato’s library possibly contained “the widely-read works of the atomists, like Democritus, whom Plato completely ignored, possibly out of envy.” Really? Plato and Democritus, enthusiasts both, were two of a kind—monomaniacally focused on opposing, one-sided principles of explanation. It took a cool, syncretic head like Aristotle to do justice to both philosophers’ insights.

Raphael's fresco "The School of Athens" has always been one of my favorite works of art, but I never knew where it was, as depicted. I thought it was merely a fantasy, with all the great artists and thinkers together in a perfect world.

Not quite sure how to react to this. The tone smacks of Shelley's "Ozymandias", with some seeming shade thrown at Plato for good measure. Perhaps I am just tired of all our world's negativity. And our apparent desire to dismiss great accomplishments by people in all fields and in every era by finding supposed character defects as measured by current standards or viewpoints. Any properly trained historian recognizes that too much history is anachronistic revisionism. Were we honest, we would measure people by the standards of their times. We would not devalue their contributions to the world by their personal failings in other aspects of their lives. Is the Declaration of Indepence less powerful because it's authot owned 600 slaves, including his "sex slave", Sally Hemmings? Or the works of Da Vinci or Michelangelo less profound or magnificent because they were gay, and subsidized by their 1%ers? Or those of Einstein, because he was a womanizer and maybe a bigot? At the age of 70, as I watch history majors drop precipitously in our colleges and universities, I pity our children and grandchild even more. I fear they will live in a world in thrall to technological immediacy, lacking any real depth or feeling for the long march of humanity, in all its aspects. In the time left to me I am trying to continue taking history entire, celebrating the great and good in human experience, and recognizing, rather than allowing, the base and negative to consume me.

In some ways, Socrates was to Plato as Jesus was to St. Paul. Socrates was a stone mason, Jesus was a carpenter. Neither working man wrote anything before they were executed by the state. Then their rich follower (Plato, Paul) wrote plenty & publicized what they claimed was the poor Founder's ideas. St. Paul came from a family that made tents for the Roman Army. Plato's family fortune was even more sinister, derived from the silver mines whose conditions were so brutal for the enslaved workers that they were almost always fatal . . . .

Dearest Simon, Ta for this!

Thanks for this piece. It's funny that you mention Plato's students wearing togas. That was Roman garb, and probably not worn very often in Athens, even in the first century, although there were certainly Romans studying there.

Professor Critchley, I understand your mission as a philosophy professor going to see Plato's Academy, and only wish you'd talked with the "angry protestors" near the site - giving us your perspective on them and their cause - which probably has a lot to do with the austerity budgets forced on Greece by the EU. What would Plato have thought of them, and their reasons for being there?

This just shows how once strong governments eventually fail - apathy. When we begin to take things for granted and don't believe we as individuals have a part to play in maintaining a lofty standard of excellence and intellect. With the way the Republican Party makes a mockery of intellect as if it's bad to be smart and highly educated...the same can happen to this country under its current leadership.

We Americans tend to view unkempt archaeological sites either as Romantic ruins or a disgrace. This article does a bit of both, giving it a certain charm. But of course we routinely tear down and pave over our own historical sites, few of which are old enough to generate any romance. All of Athens would have to be gated if the Greeks were to protect all their history--one must get on with living, and it's hard to live in a museum. The Academy was basically a park in Plato's day, and it is a park again, though the neighborhood has gone downhill, as neighborhoods can. Plato, who considered the material world to be but a pale reflection of eternal ideas, would not be particularly upset about any of this.

A story about the casual desecration of one of mankind's proudest moments is NOT what we need right now and it is NOT what we have to have right now. Do this guy a favor and put this out some other time.

I spent over a year in Greece in my youth, that lovely place where the sky seems bluer, the light from the sun seems brighter, and the red poppies in the countryside punctuate your every stumbling on some Ancient Greek ruin or another. When I was there in the early 70s, Papadopoulos was the dictator - he was soon removed. In spite of that awful era, the Greek people then still whispered quietly with each other about their extraordinary democratic promise, and, sure enough, it came about and the Greeks were themselves once again. It will happen yet again. These times are very, very rough on the Greeks, and they now may seem forever discouraged, but their heritage lives deep in their hearts. Those un-bordered, unkempt ruins may now apparently reflect their lives, but the Greeks will come back to themselves, given time.

No present-day fences, borders, or security cameras around the ruins of the Academy. The survival of Plato’s and Aristotle’s works. Is it just me, or is this juxtaposition somehow uncanny?

Thank-you for the subtext as well, an illumination of how far we have fallen. I had a similar emotional experience when I sought out and visited the site of the Athenian mystery cult of Demeter. It was located in a crude industrial area, basically unidentified as what should be a world heritage site, and unkempt. Yet, there were small shrines left by pilgrims--with half dead flowers. We have come a long way from Athens high civilization, the inspiration for the lodestones of the West: a democratic system of government and a society based upon knowledge.

The Plaka and surrounding areas has been a "bowery" equivalent for decades. Pass the ouzo.

The Parthenon was in fairly good repair until the 17th Century, when, while being used as a Turkish gunpowder magazine, it was hit by a Venetian mortar shell and left in the form we see today. The Colosseum was also a survivor into the Renaissance when it became a marble quarry for churches and palazzos. The bronze ceiling of the Pantheon was melted down for Bernini to use in St. Peter's baldacchino. And I don't feel too well myself.

Why the doubts about Socrates and they the repeated mentioning of one's doubts. As for Democritus, Plato had nothing to fear for Atoms cannot produce, let alone explain, the Mind.

I guess that Critchley believes that, in the vulgar imagination, Plato is confused with Socrates, who was executed for being a smart aleck.

It seems that neither Socrates nor Jesus are currently considered real. Itinerant rabbis and wandering, shabby-cloaked gadflies who saw Love and lauded its superiority over buildings whose stone-foundations persist rather than lose spiritual foundations continually subvert, would indeed be disruptive. Thus, better to hypothesize them out of existence. Unless.

It's certainly good that a modern philosopher respects the Greek origins of philosophy. It would be even better to know why.

I could be mistaken, but I am surprised to hear the reader was “agnostic.” He was called anagignostes, a noun derived from anagignosko “I read.” Anagignosko is from Ana-gignosko, literally an-(up) gignosko (know). It is therefore comparable to the English phrase “read up.” The “a” between an- and gignosko is not of the negating type (therefore not like agnostic). It is inserted anytime the prefix an is connected to a word which begins with a consonant for pronunciation reasons. I could be mistaken. On the one hand it makes some sense that the reader would be agnostic, and on the other hand it does not. Comments?