As a practical matter; stones don't think and people do. Digital recorders and parrots can repeat what they hear without belief or knowing what the meaning is. People just existing as part of a social order may live without thinking much about why anything is the way it is either. Socrates wanted to stimulate people to think critically and to develop their own reasoning capacity, although it may have been because he was secretly symathetic to Sparta's form of government (much more like that of 'The Republic' than Athenian democracy. Free thought requires that one determine what is true or not for-oneself rather than blindly repeating what one has been told.
Subjectivity and truth are different concepts. Socrates sometimes found truth and subjectivity coinciding, sometimes not, perhaps. Modern philosophy makes retro-interpretation of Attic paradigms a little challenging. There wasn't a philosophical field of epistemology Socrates could use to compare and contrast his ideas..
Truth theory for example. There are many of them. I prefer the correspondence theory or the truth assignments practices of propositional logic. One may make up a truth table and assign various conditions such as true or false,being or nothingness to the sentence and clusters of sentences of it and test variables or constants of it for consistency etc.
I believe Socrates great contribution is that of being the founder of analytic philosophy along with Plato and Aristotle. Particulars and Universals in word and ideas, forms and a realm of forms; that was genius. Kierkeguaard's role in developing irony and subjectivity occurred in a different poltical-historical context yet is comparable favorably to that of Socrates-even more so as the political dangers were probably greater internationally. Kierkeguaard can't be credited with founding the practice of subjectivity for individuals yet he was modern popularizer of it. His writing such as Fear and Trembling and The Sickness Unto Death are I think, his great contributions.
On Socrates other notable features concerning subjectivity and individualism of which he is extolled so commonly ( I recall encountering that even in elementary school world history), I believe people don't regard his historical paradigm well enough. He was a combat veteran of the Peloponnese an war and might have had a little PTSD. He seemed more than a little stoic in the modern sense. The Republic described by Plato really resembles a philosophers ideal dream of Sparta transformed.
Supposedly Socrates twice saved the life of the brilliant Alcibiades during the wars. Before Alcibiades defected to the Spartan League he chiseled the noses off some of the Gods of Athens. The war ended only in 404 B.C. and Socrates was executed in 399. His efforts to corrupt youth exteded to seeking support for the restoration of oligarchy apparently. That is what is called sedition now days.
Socrates must have been a little torn by the comparative political systems of Sparta and Athens. His inner voice or Daimon might have been a deeper balancing thought speaking to him for clarification. Although Socrates evidently did believe in God, it was an unknown and transcendent God for him that Christians might identify with as being omnipresent.
A substantial part of the subjective-objective truth paradigm has been resolved by analytic philosophy (e.g. Kant (The Critique of Pure Reason) Strawson (Individuals), Quine (The Two Dogmas of Empiricism, Word and Object). Yet for Socrates and later Kierkegaard there was so much virgin philosophical turf to plow that it was more than a lifetime task developing the terms and paradigms for individuals and society. Sartre wrote that his Existentialism was a continuation of the French rationalism of Descartes insofar as it examined thought from first principles of cogitation and self-reflection. Yet the idea of criticizing social constructions and ossified praxis (Sartre's term) formally was virtually non-existent in Socrates day outside the writings of Hebrew prophets (i.e. Isaiah).
It is useful to have social roles that people can easily fit in. Socrates wrote that the unexamined life is not worth living though, and if one is to find Christ in a non-Christian culture that is certainly true. It is also true if one has an undesirable social role and wants to get out of the gutter as it were being exploited by Jobba the Hut. In the U.S.A. 11 million jobs in retail are expected to disappear to robots the next 10 years. The unemployed keep finding it harder to find anything meaningful to do for earning a living. Stability can be good, yet in ancient Athens the contrast between unchanging social forms and radical change that would be brought by Alexander, Macedonians and subsequent hordes of new pagan gods was like a calm between the past and the perfect storm and giant waves of the future.
No comments:
Post a Comment