Manchmal neige ich zur wütenden Tirade,
möchte Unfug, Schwindel schonungslos sezieren.

Dear John,
I think, in regard of the content of a work of art or an essays, there are two kinds of error: assuming more content to be there than in fact is really present, or missing something that is indeed present, but hidden. In some ways, the second seems to be more a problem than the first one. If you discover something interesting, you discover something interesting, it may be your own invention or may have been hidden in the text we examine. If you miss something, you miss something. And your own reputation is hardly ever endangered if you discover too much; make as much shoutabout as possible, and you will have some reputation anyway.
So there is a professional attitude: find as much content, structure, symmetry, meaning and beauty in a work as possible. In some way, I think, this leads to a lack of critical view on the work of the ancient. It's not very funny to hear some young fool to claim that Plato was a fashist and should therefor never again be discussed on universities; on the other hand, it's also strange how some guys managed to be regarded as "great artists" or "great thinkers" for some centuries, untill today. Some kind of fame reproduces itself: if you are famous, you are discussed, and become therefor even more famous. I guess, if the lucky ones with more than two dozend surviving documents wouldn't have been Plato and Aristotle, but, say, Euthydemos and Hippias, than surely somebody would have said, the whole history of western philosophy to be nothing more than a footnote to the controversy of Euthydemos and Hippias.

Yours,
Sofia