How can I walk in the shoes of Socrates? - Historum

coberst · September 7th, 2009, 04:33 AM

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?

gus · September 7th, 2009, 06:20 AM

(get sandals)

Bobby · September 11th, 2009, 04:55 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by 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?

But Socrates killed himself! He was offered banishment, and his friends offered to Jail break him, but he chose death to set an example consistent with his beliefs. He took the hemlock to make a point, and the point remains to this day. Socrates walked the walk unlike many ideologues today who utter 'do as I say not as I do'.