I have been thinking of how to respond to Bernard’s expression of amazement — “Lance, how could you have Bloom as a teacher and not know this choice of him, which is a key option of his translation of the Republic,” (meaning Bloom’s practice of (almost) always translating a given Greek word by the same word in English). I guess I will have to admit that I was not a very good student when I studied with Bloom — and apparently I am not a very good student of Bloom even now.

When I studied with Bloom I was pretty young, and so was he. I was 21 and Bloom was 32. I was in my senior year at Yale and Bloom was a visiting professor from Cornell. In Bloom's classes, whenever I opened my mouth Bloom would say, "Mr. Fletcher, you don't know how to read! Just read the text!" And he wasn’t nice about it. From the beginning to the end of the year, Bloom treated me with what felt like undisguised contempt. This was unlike anything I had ever experienced from my other teachers. I was generally considered to be an advanced student, and all my other teachers always spoke to me with respect.

Strangely enough, my year of being abused by Allan Bloom turned out to be one of the most valuable experiences of my life. But I only learned one thing from him, and I was a very slow learner. Even at the end of the year I still didn't understand what Bloom meant when he said that I didn't know how to read. The only thing I learned was that if I wanted to learn how to read I would have to embrace the possibility that Bloom was right -- that I really didn't know how to read. So I spent the next few years reading almost nothing but Plato. A few years later, about 1965 or '66, I met Seth Benardete when he took over a course on Plato's Laws at the New School Graduate Faculty after Howard White had become ill. I think Benardete's opinion of me was not much different from Bloom's, but he was much nicer about it. I studied with Benardete for a long time, and it was from him that I finally began to learn something about how to read and developed the approach to texts that I call "slow reading.”(see http://freelance-academy.org/slowread.pdf.)

According to Benardete, Plato always provides clues which Benardete called “hooks”, that lead the slow reader to recognize the perplexities that reveal the deeper meanings of the text. And he said that there is always more than one hook, more than one point of access to the deeper meaning.

It took a long time for me to understand why there had to be multiple hooks. At first I thought it was just a matter of being sure that the detail in question was really intentional. Benardete was fond of quoting a line from the German philologist Wilamowitz-Moellendorff, who, speaking about how to treat manuscript variants, supposedly said, “Einmal nimmer, zweimal immer.” (once never, twice always.) So I thought that for Benardete the insistence on multiple hooks was mainly a practice for restraining the reader from indulging in wild speculation. Or maybe, I thought, it was intended as a kind of reassurance to the anxious reader: “Don’t worry too much, because, if you happen to miss one hook, there will always be another one.” But then I realized that the main reason for having multiple hooks is something that Leo Strauss pointed to — without using the word “hooks” — in Persecution and the Art of Writing. According to Strauss, when you encounter some inconsistency or contradiction within the work of an author of obvious intelligence this is often a sign that the author is “writing between the lines.” So noticing inconsistencies or contradictions requires making connections between different details in the text, and if we agree to call those details "hooks" it is obvious why a writer who is writing between the lines must offer the reader multiple hooks, since otherwise there would be no distinct details in the text for the reader to put together. (When we come to book 7 of the Republic we will find that Socrates says something like this in describing dialectic.)

The perplexity about “rightly” and “beautifully” that we have just now been discussing at some length is an example, in my opinion, of a pair of “hooks” and how, when put together, their joint consideration may give access to the deeper implication of the text. Since the details that I am calling hooks operate to give access to the deeper meaning of the text only when considered in connection to each other, it should not surprise you to find that in most cases it is not until you recognize the second hook as a hook that you will distinguish the first one as a hook. The second hook brings the first hook to light with itself. In the case of “rightly” and “beautifully,” for example, I did not take much note of “rightly” at first. It was only when I read the reply from Polemarchus in which he said that in his opinion Simonides had spoken beautifully and had the thought, “That’s odd,” which led me to re-read the previous sentence.

In the next section I will move on to another pair of hooks the first of which is the principle that Polemarchus attributes to Simonides — “that it’s just to give what’s owed to each person.” In this case we will see that the key question is, What does Polemarchus leave out here? And what does Socrates leave out when he makes his reply? I call this “the case of the two omissions.”

Lance