Need Of Socrates In Modern World...

Socrates was a Greek philosopher from Athens who is credited as one of the founders of Western philosophy, and as being the first moral philosopher of the Western ethical tradition of thought. An enigmatic figure, he made no writings and is known chiefly through the accounts of classical writers writing after his lifetime, particularly his students Plato and Xenophon. Other sources include the contemporaneous Antisthenes, Aristippus, and Aeschines of Sphettos. Aristophanes, a playwright, is the main contemporary author to have written plays mentioning Socrates during Socrates' lifetime, though a fragment of Ion of Chios' Travel Journal provides important information about Socrates' youth.

Socrates, who lived from 470 to 399 B.C., is separated from us by nearly two and one-half millennia. This means that he had not in common with our progressive age the automobile, the airplane, the television, the computer, the telephone (whether cellular or regular), video games, virtual reality, etc. Can we, then, “relate” to him? Is he in any way relevant to our lives and our problems? Can we possibly learn from him and benefit from his teaching?

On the face of it, the answer is in the negative. The gap is too wide. Moreover, had his teaching been relevant, it would well have been absorbed during the many centuries which have elapsed since his times and incorporated in the civilization into which we were born and which we continue.

Yet, on second thought, such a categorical statement may be all too hasty and requires re-examination. Maybe the fault is in us, as in the process of cultural evolution we march all too energetically forward, and in our zeal for progress forget and neglect the foundations of our civilization, the great men of ages past who seems not to age, but loom large, impervious to the passage of time. Their teachings or artistic contributions stand out, irrespective of the vicissitudes of history and despite the advancement of science and technology. 

To be sure, lip service is paid to them and their names may even be engraved on the facade of a university building. But few delve into their works, and their writings collect dust in the dark recesses of libraries, as we are eager to discover the new answers to old problems and the recent recipes for salvation. This, perhaps, is most characteristic of America, a civilization oriented towards the future, but also older civilizations are affected by this trend.

This, in our judgment, is a mistaken approach. With all the significance of the advancement of knowledge and of new discoveries and innovations–and these must not be belittled in the sphere of science and technology–there is perennial wisdom in the heritage of mankind which is instructive and relevant in our time and place. There are individuals whose contributions to our civilization–in the good sense of the word–strike us as being of great worth and may prove seminal. Socrates is one such figure whose teaching is not dated and whose inspiration may greatly benefit us.

Let us, however, be more specific in justifying the relevance of Socrates to us. He lived and acted in a society which, for most of his life, was democratic, and which left us a testimony to his activity and personality. The democratic setting (despite some important differences between ancient and modern polity) forms a common substructure for our contact with Socrates. Another factor, of crucial importance, which made us choose Socrates was that he “communicated with his fellow-citizen–indeed, he communicated in a very peculiar and distinctive manner, which made him a profound communicator, a rank higher than that of a great communicator.

Socrates’s success in this role may well have been founded on the absence of the modern media of communication television, radio, and even newspapers. Without such means of addressing the masses, Socrates could choose to talk to people, and obviously to listen to their responses. True, ancient Athenians could be addressed en masse on various occasions of political assembly. Such an address was a precursor of modern media, which can reach much wider masses. Still, Socrates shunned such occasions and preferred to talk to one man at a time, though others could, and often did, listen. Thus, Socrates did not “interact” with any medium of communication, whatever such interaction may mean; he engaged in a dialogue, an exchange of ideas between two human beings.

The dialogue, as Socrates developed it, and as Plato was further to refine it, was not our interacting, for it focused not on information but on reflection, not on “useful” knowledge but on theoretical insight, not on a search of facts, important though they may often be, but on a quest of wisdom. Nor was the Socratic dialogue a mere exchange of gossip–technically a dialogue too–but a discussion aiming, at least as far as Socrates was concerned, at the clarification of truth and the exposure of falsehood, inconsistency, fallacy.

Living in a civilization in which people drive to work, concentrate on the job, relax before the television screen, we have little of the opportunity which Socrates had to take a walk through the streets of the city, encounter an occasional acquaintance and enter into a discussion which may lead to profound conclusions. This, seemingly incidental, the pursuit of wisdom is not open to us; at least, it is considerably restricted. Yet the fruits of the Socratic dialogues are available to date in extant Platonic works, in the form of dialogues as well (some of which may be genuinely Socratic, all of which are instructive). Due to the art of writing–in Aeschylus’s words, “the all-remembering skill”[1]–the reflections and the mode of the argument of Socrates can be communicated over the ages. We can, if we so choose, learn, and benefit from them.

Plato in his dialogues made Socrates the protagonist, without informing us when it was the historical Socrates who spoke and when it was Plato who spoke through his teacher’s mouth. There is a wide agreement, however, that the Apology is essentially authentic, if stylized, reproduction of the Socratic speech. Indeed, strictly speaking, it is not a dialogue, but a speech of Socrates in his own defense before an Athenian court, presenting his main concerns in life and the way he pursued them. The speech, which includes a few mini-dialogues, explains Socrates to us and contains much that is instructive and relevant. We shall, therefore, limit our exposition to this single work, picking out those issues which are most pertinent for our times and circumstances.

The Apology, as noted, is the speech for the defense which Socrates held, having been accused of corrupting the youth and introducing new deities by three Athenians when he was seventy years old. In truth, as Socrates argues, the charges were a mere pretext, and the true reason for bringing him to court was resentment against him in certain segments of the Athenian society. In Athens anybody could be taken to court by anyone else, and it was up to the court to decide on the guilt and the punishment. If the discretion of the court was rather wide, it has to be borne in mind that on such a serious charge, which could carry the death penalty, it was a popular court consisting of what we would call the peers of the accused that decided on the issue. The court, in this case, consisted of five hundred Athenians, appointed by lot for one year out of a list of citizens. The apparent idea was that the court had to represent the will of the people: it was the sizable sample, the limited time of office and the blind lot, that assured that the court was the embodiment of the Athenian citizenry. It was such a court that passed the iniquitous judgment on Socrates, 280 to 220, and then condemned him to death–not the only transgression of justice in the history of Athens. Clearly, the Athenian democracy deserved less than three cheers.

Our own jury system, democratic in its own way, is more carefully circumscribed by legal provisions, and less likely to engage in politically or publicly motivated trials. It needs no reminder that our modern system is not immune to trends in public opinion, and it may occasionally condemn the innocent and set the guilty free, under the spell of the public mood. The responsiveness of the jury to public opinion may be considered a democratic manifestation, as the jurors respond to or represent the wider society, but this need not coincide with objective justice–as it did not in the trial of Socrates. Still, modern democracy would not condemn Socrates to death, however unpopular he might have been.

Yet it must be remembered that, if the Athenian democracy stands accused of judicial murder, this must not be seen as a justification of, say, the Spartan regime, which was authoritarian and in some respects totalitarian. For in Sparta Socrates would not have been likely to pursue his avocation till the age of seventy. Indeed, he would be unlikely to be what he was in a society that hardly produced prominent men of reflection, writers, and artists. If in Athens the mills of injustice ground slowly, in Sparta they had no opportunity to encounter men of the free spirit.

For further more information contact us through 

teenparadise13@gmail.com

Follow Our Blog...

Comment your thoughts👇