Seminar on Plato with Dr. Florian Pitschl from 20 to 28 November
Antiquity recognised in him its highest sage and, with Aristotle, praised his poetic power; early Christianity honoured the religious genius; the Renaissance rediscovered the state thinker and the leader in the round of friendship; the century of science worked out the specialist philosophical insights; in the twentieth, the outlook on the whole of Planton's gestalt and work and teaching opened up anew. «Everything he expresses», says Goethe of Plato, «refers to an eternal whole, good, true, beautiful, whose demand he strives to stir up in every bosom».
On Man and the State: It is the concern of the whole of Plato's life's work that is involved in these words. It is never the state per se, nor even the law per se, that is at stake for Plato, but the state as the expression and space of noble people, as the great form of the same justice that takes shape in the righteousness of the individual soul...
[from the afterword to the book: Von Mensch und Staat, Sammlung Klosterberg Europäische Reihe, by Benno Schwabe & Co., Klosterberg, Basel, 1942]