The chairs still suck. For the kind of money they're charging you'd think they could provide better seating. But that's a small and petty thing, I forgive them. A bit ago I put up the post "A Disclaimer of Tuition" giving the reasons I have in times past deliberately avoided any formal exposure to the work of philosophers past. Having examined my own thoughts as a consequence of the ambition spoken of in many recent posts, having concluded that my own thoughts are sufficiently anchored as to be trustworthy I decided to reverse that position and investigate what academia might reveal of the philosophical roots of the culture. No matter the nature of the job at hand it's always a good idea to begin at the beginning.
Socrates got himself killed, no doubt of that. I'm wondering if we're going to be told the other side of the story, the side of the story the ancient Athenian's could sense but perhaps not set into words. Or perhaps Plato's words survived, and theirs' didn't. Who knows. Long and short of it is Socrates was indeed guilty of corrupting the youth, but not by intent. Of course the thing about the Gods was total bullshit. Had I been there I'd have voted for acquittal, and then bought the old man a draw of whatever they enjoyed and explained to him how to fix the subtle but deadly error in his manner of honoring his version of his God's request. I'd owe him the brew, I tread dangerously close to that same error myself at times.
His error was using his opponents examples as part of his arguments. He did such to demonstrate the errors in their conclusions, but never realized that if he didn't teach them how to build better examples (from which to question and debate) all he'd really done was enable a great many more erroneous conclusions in the future, those errors created by working from poorly constructed examples (those based on social protocal rather than logic), examples of the same sort he himself had validated using similar as negative examples in his arguments. They would remember he'd won the one argument, his conclusion proven, theirs unseated, but by what I've seen of what Plato recorded he never took the time to show them why he won, the headwater source of the common error he exploited.
Socrates told the truth at his trial, he wasn't a teacher. He left them thinking that next time they might prevail without ever showing them how, and in so doing sent them back to their lives with the potential for error even more expanded and entrenched than before. Yea, he was guilty, but not by intent. If he was the only one across the sweep of history to have been guilty of the same we'd be in great shape today.
But a trial for one's life is hardly the time nor event in which to change souls. Not even Jesus of Nazareth could lay down life lessons or new thought patterns at his trial. Fortunately, He had already done so on many occasions.
ReplyDeleteAnd where Jesus and Socrates both succeeded is in gathering a small group around them whose lives and thoughts were changed. Those first disciples then began to live the changes and amplify them. The risk, of course, is that with the founders absent, their followers might fall back into bad patterns, and often did...