From: zen@death.corp.sun.com (d)
Newsgroups: soc.bi
Subject: Re: Socrates and more of the same
Date: 30 Sep 92 04:02:55 GMT
	<1992Sep29.002123.10676@midway.uchicago.edu>
	<ZEN.92Sep29001349@death.corp.sun.com>
	<1992Sep29.231714.27490@mnemosyne.cs.du.edu>
Organization: savage hackers
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In-reply-to: tweaver@nyx.cs.du.edu's message of Tue, 29 Sep 92 23:17:14 GMT


  I'm certainly not a scholar of either plato or socrates, but I'll
continue thrashing around in the melee.  Also note that I'm not, nor
have I ever, advocating that we should all do what socrates did.  This
all started when mike said that he thought that socrates was "daft" for
doing what he did.  I disagree -- I personally wouldn't have done what
he did, but I strongly believe that what he did was a very valid option,
and he had as good reasons for doing what he did as anyone does for
doing just about anything (more on that below).

  Followups to soc.bi.philosophy :-)

In article <1992Sep29.231714.27490@mnemosyne.cs.du.edu> tweaver@nyx.cs.du.edu (T.C.Weaver) writes:
> zen@death.corp.sun.com (d) writes:
> >  Taking this analogy to socrates... the point was that he thought that
> >no matter where he went, the same persecution would follow.  There was
> >no place he could go to -- they were all worse than greece.
> Wrong, mostly.  Persecution was NOT going to follow him anywhere; his
> friends (many of them influential) could have made him welcome in any
> other Greek city.

> Read the CRITO if you're not convinced.

  Ok, I just did (really!)

  I wasn't talking about persecution as if the law would run after him --
I was referring to persecution for his ideas.  But reading crito it
seems that I should have been more literal; he said that if he went
elsewhere, that they would view him with suspicion as a "destroyer of
law and order", and that they would view him as an enemy to the
constitution.  So even if legally he might have been ok, he felt that
the societies would not accept him.

  What's more interesting is some of the other things that he said, that
shed more light on why he chose to die:

"The really important thing is not to live, but to live well."

  And:

"One must must not even do wrong when one is wronged, which
most people regard as the natural course."

  In some sense, he was behaving very much like jesus did when he was
killed; perhaps they had different motivations (*smile*); but they both
thought that they were acting under a higher power than themself.
Socrates felt that if he would leave that he would be doing grevious
injury to greece -- and that the country was, as a whole, much more
important than any individual.  Even if he was being unjustly put to
death, according to his credo (don't retaliate, even if attacked) he
could not attempt to escape, since that would harm the country, because
if citizens could go above the authority of the country, the society
would be meaningless/damaged/destroyed.

  Socrates felt strongly that the greek society was a great thing,
representing much (if not all?) of what he believed in himself.  Since
he had enjoyed all the benefits of the society and laws, that since he
had never left athens except during wartime, that he had made it clear
that that was where he wanted to be, and that that was what he
supported.  To suddenly go against it would be akin, to him, of jesus
suddenly saying "hold on a second.  Let me off the train -- I don't want
to be crucified."  He had to live well -- not to grasp onto a few measly
years as an old man -- but to show that he was a man of principle.  To
draw further parallels to jesus, his last words in crito were "let us
follow out this course, since God points out the way."

[...]
> Bother this "hide 
> his true nature" stuff; he died because he wanted to hold to his
> idealised version of the 'social contract' of participative democracy.
> Hiding his true nature (whatever that may have been) wasn't being    
> suggested, although his friends were keen that he take it somewhere 
> safer for a while...

  I disagree.  His friends wanted him to go against his true nature; to
throw away what he believed in.  They would have him live somewhere
else, in what he considered disgrace, in a place where he couldn't live
what he believed in.  What he believed in was greece, the society.  To
do anything else, to live anywhere else, would be a sham, a blow against
his nature, the state, and God.

  A final word or two.  Again, I'm not saying that his arguments will
hold true for anyone, just as they way that other people who died "noble
deaths" (whatever that means) show us that we should all endevor to
perish in some heroic or meaningful fashion.  But to call him daft for
believing and attempting to live in a fairly consistant set of beliefs
seems a bit... well, daft to me.

 -- d