In all seriousness, I think I have just come to the conclusion that serious art criticism is for people whose emotional lives are not in shambles and can devote the brainspace to hearing about, I don't know, why Footwork is important, or something.
1. Socrates didn't WRITE anything, as previously mentioned, and the views she attributed to him would be Plato using him as a mouthpiece. Furthermore the first part of the quoted portion comes from a discussion in Book 5 of the Republic about how labor should be divided.
Socrates: Then let the wives of our guardians strip, for their virtue will be their robe, and let them share in the toils of war and the defense of their country; only in the distribution of labours the lighter are to be assigned to the women, who are the weaker natures, but in other respects their duties are to be the same.
Which can pretty easily be read as "women are, in general, less strong than men, physically" which is, you know, true.
2. She uses ellipsis to imply the next portion is right after the first portion. It's not. The only mention of anything remotely similar is in the Myth of Er, which, as the title implies, does not need to be read literally, alllll the way in Book 10 in this passage
There he saw the soul which had once been Orpheus choosing the life of a swan out of enmity to the race of women, hating to be born of a woman because they had been his murderers;
3. That is clearly not what she meant, so I did some digging and found out what she was referring to was in Timaeus an entirely different dialogue in which the speaking character is not even Socrates, but Timaeus, giving an account of cosmology that goes as follows:
He who lived well during his appointed time was to return and dwell in his native star, and there he would have a blessed and congenial existence. But if he failed in attaining this, at the second birth he would pass into a woman, and if, when in that state of being, he did not desist from evil, he would continually be changed into some brute who resembled him in the evil nature which he had acquired, and would not cease from his toils and transformations until he followed the revolution of the same and the like within him, and overcame by the help of reason the turbulent and irrational mob of later accretions, made up of fire and air and water and earth, and returned to the form of his first and better state.
This is, of course, very genuinely misogynistic. The Greeks were, of course, misogynistic and Plato and Aristotle were no exception. That doesn't change that she had no idea what she was talking about and just pulled passages off this less than completely reputable looking site
She could have said "Plato saw women as-" and a huge amount of problems would be dispelled, but she didn't bother to do a very basic amount of research and ugh.
When Kyle mentioned Hegel in a video and got some things wrong, it was actually way more forgivable because he said he was massively oversimplifying, and also he was accurately describing the way the director of Man With A Movie Camera understood Hegel which was the most important part for the purposes of the video.
Comments
I still don't think he's quite my thing, however, but it's harder to vocalize why that is.
were there any other mistakes?
Socrates: Then let the wives of our guardians strip, for their virtue will be their robe, and let them share in the toils of war and the defense of their country; only in the distribution of labours the lighter are to be assigned to the women, who are the weaker natures, but in other respects their duties are to be the same.
Which can pretty easily be read as "women are, in general, less strong than men, physically" which is, you know, true.
2. She uses ellipsis to imply the next portion is right after the first portion. It's not. The only mention of anything remotely similar is in the Myth of Er, which, as the title implies, does not need to be read literally, alllll the way in Book 10 in this passage
There he saw the soul which had once been Orpheus choosing the life of a swan out of enmity to the race of women, hating to be born of a woman because they had been his murderers;
thank you for the effortpost
so yeah she really should have done more research before sticking that in the video, definitely
She could have said "Plato saw women as-" and a huge amount of problems would be dispelled, but she didn't bother to do a very basic amount of research and ugh.
I just didn't see it earlier because of work.