uwot wrote: ↑Mon Aug 26, 2019 12:21 pm
You're not alone. Even in Ancient Greece there were plenty who thought Socrates was a joke. Aristophanes took the piss out of Socrates in his play 'The Clouds'.
I'm glad to hear you say it - I dont think they ever made their argument well enough, though - none of them was able to put the finger on the wound.
The theorizing of knowledge was young in those days and one didn't notice that Socrates uprooted knowledge from its ground, which is literally the ground, like if you drop a stone it will fall, and such matters - things animals learn just as we do.
He attributed knowledge to language, and therein concluded that it doesn't exist. And he is right, knowledge and language are not friends. Language is always representation, to but it bluntly, at best a well-meant "lie".
We can verify the unreliable nature of language when it comes to dealing with knowledge seeing that it provides plenty of opportunities for negating itself, such as in the statement "this statement is untrue".
Socrates went out of his way to tell good craftsmen that their ancestors legacy, the gift of the craft and the surrounding wealth of knowledge and derived contextual wisdoms, means nothing. And then he dares to presume he is wise for knowing he doesn't now how to make a bow and arrow or bake a vase. What a pest that man was. But I am laughing as I write this, dont worry Im not a fanatic. Its a real thing to be able to arouse someones temper thousands of years after you died.
And of course it is how he died that made his legacy. He showed his Greek minerals there, even if he also confessed that he said all he said because and to the point of demonstrating that it is better not to live.
I have a Nietzschean sensibility before all this, how the disregarding of empirical, nonlingual knowledge and style, the sensuality of the human animal, the aesthetics flowing forth from the senses, coincided with the physical decadence of city-life and Socrates as the proponent of this decay was most palpable, to the point of producing a near hallicunogetic theatrical genius and mercurial vivacity, in which the last remnants of the Greeks extraordinary and never surpassed vitality of sense and mind together were not wasted, but burned up in a giant spectacle-in-the-sky (re: Aristophanes) ; and indeed I do see the Platonic mode of thought as a memory of what was once understood. I do not take Plato for more than a boor with an interest in ancient wisdom - all he has glamorized was the echo of the utter misery of minds such as Euclides, Pythagoras.
There is nothing in Plato that isn't in Pythagorean philosophy yet what there is is made vague, misrepresented.
Pythagoras was a craftsman, worked with the ground. Most famously he strung strings, determining by the empirical measurement of length the harmonies of reverberation.
Of course this tradition continued, after Socrates there were plenty of empirical thinkers, such as Eratosthenes who proved that the Earth is round using only a stick. No knowledge-theory can hold a candle to such light. Discovery using the attributes on the ground, one has to be juicy in the marrow for that, so to speak.
barbarianhorde wrote: ↑Mon Aug 26, 2019 9:01 pm Pedant? Well, if you say so. There's not much evidence that Socrates was into pederasty. In fact it was his general contempt for sexual and in its widest sense physical preoccupations that morphed into Platonic relationships.
I believe this is a misreading of Plato's text. Or rather a failure to read content into given context and setting.
Really? Where do you think I am going wrong?
I cant find it online, I have my Republic in some Oxford volumes and not here, its in the introduction, for example, to the Thrasymachus meeting if I remember correctly. How the day starts, the setting of his awakening.
I believe Plato was clever enough to suggest plenty of the life around the dialogues, which are themselves so contextually perfectly formal and splendid in eloquence that is is almost a sin to not look for clues in the prosaic shrubbery around it.
barbarianhorde wrote: ↑Mon Aug 26, 2019 9:01 pm
That's the point. Socrates had plenty ideas, but he knew they were not solid.
That, to me, just means he wasn't a real thinker. He had all kinds of ideas of the world like all mammals do, sensuality ideas but he failed to recognize these as existent.
His refusal to acknowledge the great knowledges of science and poetic logic that his predecessors in Athens and abroad had come up with seems like avarice to me. If he had been noble, be would have kept silent. But he had to demonstrate how no one could withstand his scorn and going to his death a martyr ensured that his unhappy judgment was heard.
Im trying to be gentle here but there is so much wrong with him, it is a nexus of error.
Well yeah, everyone has a working knowledge - how to communicate, how to navigate our day to day business. We all know a truckload of that stuff. What we don't know is whether any of it is 'true'.
Rather, what does "true" mean if not the facts we know before we learn language?
We need to breathe in order to live. Language has no bearing on this
We don't know if there is a god. We don't know what 'beautiful' means in any way that everyone can accept.
Questionable, flowers are quite universally beautiful - that is because they need to attract positive attention to survive. There never was a telos - but what happened to survive is what happened to be perceived well - and this, in the case of flowers, and quite some other phenomena as well - came to be known as "beautiful" in the clumsy ways of language.
I believe beauty can be understood as function. I won't occupy you with that here, but it all plays to the effect that language is simply never a criterion for truth except when it expresses that very truth. "This is a lie" is the truth about language.
We don't know whether it is better to act according to a strict set of moral rules, or according to our conscience. Socrates's point was watch out for anyone who claims they do know - almost certainly they're an idiot.
Yes, like any artist or any lover, any builder of temples especially....
any poet, anyone who adores some work another made -
all of them are fools because... what? Socrates himself as ugly?
He is renowned to have been that, remarkably. His refusal to embrace the sensual as truth might be rooted in this very manifest decadence - we know fungi growing on rotting wood produce the most splendorous visions.