{"id":1878,"date":"2017-11-04T02:34:45","date_gmt":"2017-11-03T23:34:45","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/kazuo-ishiguro.byzantinewalls.org\/?p=120"},"modified":"2021-03-24T11:46:25","modified_gmt":"2021-03-24T08:46:25","slug":"i-like-plato","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.ellopos.com\/blog\/1878\/i-like-plato\/","title":{"rendered":"Kazuo Ishiguro, I like Plato"},"content":{"rendered":"

Because I hadn\u2019t read a lot as a child, I needed a firm foundation. Charlotte Bront\u00eb of Villette and Jane Eyre; Dostoyevsky of those four big novels; Chekhov\u2019s short stories; Tolstoy of War and Peace. Bleak House. And at least five of the six Jane Austen novels. If you have read those, you have a very solid foundation. And I like Plato.<\/p>\n

<\/a><\/p>\n

In most of his Socratic dialogues, what happens is, some guy is walking along the street who thinks he knows it all, and Socrates sits down with him and demolishes him. This might seem destructive, but the idea is that the nature of what is good is elusive. Sometimes people base their whole lives on a sincerely held belief that could be wrong. That\u2019s what my early books are about: people who think they know. But there is no Socrates figure. They are their own Socrates.<\/p>\n

There\u2019s a passage in one of Plato\u2019s dialogues in which Socrates says that idealistic people often become misanthropic when they are let down two or three times. Plato suggests it can be like that with the search for the meaning of the good. You shouldn\u2019t get disillusioned when you get knocked back. All you\u2019ve discovered is that the search is difficult, and you still have a duty to keep on searching.<\/p>\n

From Kazuo's interview with Susannah Hunnewell at the Paris Review<\/a><\/pre>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Because I hadn\u2019t read a lot as a child, I needed a firm foundation. Charlotte Bront\u00eb of Villette and Jane Eyre; Dostoyevsky of those four big novels; Chekhov\u2019s short stories; Tolstoy of War and Peace. Bleak House. And at least five of the six Jane Austen novels. If you have read those, you have a […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_disable_autopaging":false},"categories":[4],"tags":[5683,44,4037],"class_list":["post-1878","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-plato","tag-plato","tag-socrates","tag-studying"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ellopos.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1878","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ellopos.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ellopos.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ellopos.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ellopos.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1878"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.ellopos.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1878\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ellopos.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1878"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ellopos.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1878"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ellopos.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1878"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}