How can I walk in the shoes of Socrates?

[coberst]

How can I walk in the shoes of Socrates?

The following is an attempt to develop a means for us to empathesize with Socrates.

Many decades ago a professor of philosophy told me that “philosophy is about radically critical self-consciousness”. It was thirty years later that this statement began to make sense to me.

To become critically self-conscious is to tread on the path to a philosophical frame of mind. If you treat this imaginary problem that I lay out here as more than thoughtless past time you might begin to comprehend what that philosophy professor thinks philosophy is about.

Imagine that you and a thousand other people live deep in the isolated and frozen interior of Alaska. Imagine further that every one of you had been born colorblind and none had any idea what color was. Imagine further that you are an exercise nut and discovered, quite by accident, that if you performed a certain sequence of exercises you developed color perception.

What would you do?

If you tried to tell the others what would they do? Would you be able to convince any one of them to follow your example? How would you explain to them what you had accomplished?

Would they eventually kill you like the Athenians did Socrates?

 

[Xander]

Depends upon how much of a pain in the ass you are. Take Jonny Rotten for example...

 

[Mole]

The Epochraphal Life and Death of Socrates

Each one of us in the West walks in the shoes of Socrates, knowingly or unbeknownst.

All we need to do is call the name of Socrates to recall the origin of the West in Greek philosophy.

We can watch Socrates journey through the last two and and a half millennia picking up two hitchhikers along the way, Judaism and Christianity.

But only recently Socrates has been able to relax, as for the first time in human history the West has overcome scarcity.

And this only since WW II. And in fact the tribal people of the Pacific were so impressed by the plenty of the cargo we brought with us, they set up the Cargo Cult.

And not knowing Socrates the tribal people of the Pacific could not grasp where the cargo came from.

So they started to practise pseudo science in the hope that cargo would arrive. But of course without Socrates, it was a vain hope.

And of course it was not only the tribal peoples of the Pacific who practised pseudo science, but for those who had never been introduced to Socrates, we have the Christian Science of Mary Baker Eddy, and the Scientologists, and the New Age.

And how natural pseudo science is. For not knowing Socrates, pseudo science seeks to gain power through magic by associating itself with the status of science.

And you can see that here with those who have never been introduced to Socrates. They seek to gain power over others by the pseudo science of astrology or the pseudo science of MBTI, flying in the face of actual scientists such as astronomers or psychometricians.

But when the confidence trick of pseudo science is exposed, the believers turn nasty with ad hominem attacks.

Just as the Athenians made one final fatal attack on Socrates, ad hominem.

But Socrates lives forever in the West, abet with the pseudos still trying to poison him.

Socrates' life and death are being enacted here on Typology Central in front of us.

Some of us walk in the shoes of Socrates and some of us are ready with the Hemlock.