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Statesman

Statesman

Statesman is a work by Plato (-360).

Core claims

  • The Statesman is not primarily a political dialogue but a phenomenology of Athenian consciousness — the archetypal mode by which the psyche normalizes, measures, and weaves the abnormal into the fabric of order, and Hillman’s reading reveals this as both its genius and its pathology.
  • Plato’s central metaphor of weaving in the Statesman is not decorative analogy but a precise image of psychic integration: the statesman’s art is Athene’s art, combining opposites (slaves to kings, compulsion to reason) into a whole fabric, making it the dialogue most explicitly concerned with how the soul constitutes itself through inclusion rather than transcendence.
  • The Stranger’s method of diaeresis — “dividing always and choosing one part only” (268d–e) — enacts the very senex compulsion to order that the dialogue thematizes, placing the reader inside the epistemological trap it simultaneously describes.
  • How does Hillman’s identification of the Statesman as “the child of Athene” in Mythic Figures reframe Peterson’s critique of Plato’s demotion of the thūmos in the Republic — are these two dialogues enacting fundamentally different archetypal structures of consciousness?
  • In what ways does the Statesman’s weaving metaphor anticipate or contradict Hillman’s account of pathologizing as “falling apart” in Re-Visioning Psychology — can normalization and disintegration serve the same soul-making function?
  • How does Edinger’s reading of Platonic eidos as a precursor to the Jungian archetype illuminate the Statesman’s obsession with correct division — is diaeresis an attempt to perceive the Forms, or a senex defense against their numinosity?

See also

  • Library page: /library/ancient-roots/plato-statesman/

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