something else about Plato

I think there’s a natural tendency to assume that anything ancient could have not been meant humorously. And this is yet another reason that Aristotle’s rare comic genius is often overlooked: things that are obviously hilarious are often treated instead as signs of the naivete of the times.

But I’m thinking of another example… Is it not utterly preoposterous that Plato included two of his own brothers as characters in the Republic?

Imagine that Being and Time, in its analyses of everydayness, kept using Fritz Heidegger as an example. That wouldn’t necessarily be funny, especially given Martin Heidegger’s own unusually poor sense of humor. But in the rights hands, it could have been hilarious. And Plato’s hands are generally the right hands in matters of literary style and wit.