"Malditos sean todos los que se regocijan de ver a la ciudad en manos de un solo hombre, o bajo el yugo de unos cuantos! El titulo de hombre libre es el mas precioso de todos: poseerlo significa tener mucho, aun cuando se posea poco."
Euripides
Socrates, a quien debemos la apelacion
de los magnificos pre-Socraticos, nacio y vivio en Grecia del
469 al 399 antes de la definicion cristiana del calendario. Hijo
de escultor, hizo el aprendizaje de esa profesion, pero muy pronto
la abandono en favor de la busqueda insaciable de la verdad. Fue
soldado en las guerras del Peloponeso y aunque profesor a medias,
nunca dio clases formales. Dicen que su mujer era insoportable,
pero si tal fue el caso, nunca se quejo de ella. Cuentan que en
una de esas batallas le salvo la vida al griego mas bello y mas
volatil de la historia, Alcibiades. En retorno este amo a Socrates
indiscriminadamente. Se paso la mayor parte de su tiempo en el
agora de Atenas, desarrollando el metodo del elenchus (cuestionamiento
logico-dialectico) y animando a los jovenes a pensar claramente
y sin prejuicios. Se gano su mala reputacion desafiando a la hipocresia,
la ignorancia y la arrogancia. A los 70, los Atenienses en el
poder se hartaron de la jodedera y la ironia Socraticas. Acusado
de introducir nuevos dioses y de corromper a la juventud, Socrates
hizo su Apologia y, de seguro el tambien harto de estos griegos
irredentos, se tomo la cicuta de la vida eterna.
The growing power of Athens had frightened
other Greek states for years before the Peloponnesian War broke
out in 431. During the war, Pericles died in the plague of Athens
(429); fortunes of war varied until a truce was made in 421, but
this was never very stable and in 415 Athens was persuaded by
Alcibiades, a pupil of the Athenian
teacher, Socrates, to send a huge force to Sicily in an attempt
to take over some of the cities there. This expedition was destroyed
in 413. Nevertheless Athens continued the war. In 411 an oligarchy
("rule by a few") was instituted in Athens in an attempt
to secure financial support from Persia, but this did not work
out and the democracy was soon restored. In 405 the last Athenian
fleet was destroyed in the battle of Aegospotami by a Spartan
commander, and the city was besieged and forced to surrender in
404. Sparta set up an oligarchy of Athenian nobles (among them
Critias, a former associate of Socrates and a relative of Plato),
which because of its brutality became known as the Thirty Tyrants.
By 403 democracy was once again restored. Socrates was brought
to trial and executed in 399.
Socrates no escribio nada el mismo.
Lo poco que conocemos de el viene de los escritos de su discipulo
Platon (427-347), y del historiador Jenofontes.
The most accurate of Plato's writings
on Socrates is probably the The Apology. It is Plato's account
of Socrates's self-defense at his trial in 399 BC. This speech
can be seen as a justification for Socrates's life and his death.
In it, Plato outlines some of Socrates's most famous philosophical
ideas: the necessity of doing what one thinks is right even in
the face of universal opposition, and the "dialectical"
understanding of knowledge as an act of opposition to falsehood.
Socrates' method of philosophical inquiry consisted in questioning people on the positions they held fast to, logically pushing these positions into an examination of their contradictory nature. Socrates himself never takes a position; in The Apology he claims to know nothing at all except that he knows nothing. Socrates and Plato refer to this method of questioning as elenchus , which means something like "cross-examination" The Socratic elenchus eventually gave rise to dialectic, the idea that truth needs to be pursued by directly embracing the inner contradiction of every concept, and especially by opposing the dialectical flow of everything into its natural contrary, to the rigid oppositions and categories set up by "normal" or formal logic. It is this idea of the truth being pursued, rather than discovered, that characterizes Socratic thought and very little of our world view today.
Most Athenians, with the exception
of Plato, thought of Socrates as a Sophist, a designation
he seems to have bitterly resented. He was, however, very similar
in method if not in content to the Sophists. Like the Sophists,
he was unconcerned with physical or metaphysical questions; the
issue of primary importance was arete or virtue, living
a true life. But whereas the former were radical cynics who believed
that ultimately nothing was true, Socrates tears down every moral
and philosophical position he's confronted with, in order to reach
the kernel of truth contained in each.
But since we are in a Socratic mode, let's grant space to a very different point of view. There are, out there, people who think that
Fifth Century B.C. Athens was the world's first and most brilliant democracy. From being governed by kings, one of them the legendary hero Theseus, it had gradually opened the franchise from an oligarchy of nobles and rich landowners to where even poor men could serve on the Council of 500 or on the jury. Every citizen was expected to govern and perform military service for his city. Athens also had a middle class, the backbone of all democracies, who were expected to arm themselves and serve as hoplites, heavy infantrymen in a phalanx. This middle class carried arms and underwent military training, both to proctect their government and their rights.
Late in the sixth century, the Persians in trying to expand their empire came in contact with the Greeks. The Greeks, loving their freedom, helped their cousins living in Asia Minor resist the Persians. The Persians tried to conquer and punish the Athenians and Spartans who had interfered in their goals of empire.
Both the Athenians and the Spartans successfully resisted the Persians and in a number of battles on land and at sea eventually drove the Persians out of Europe and back to Asia Minor. Athens was not able to grow enough grain to feed her people. So the population grew olives and grapes and exported their wares and silver all over the known world. Thus Athens became a trading maritime, then a sea power.
Sparta, on the other hand, was a militaristic state, ruled by principles opposite to those of Athens. The land was fertile. The Spartans enslaved the non-Dorian population and made them grow food for the Spartans. In order to guard against slave revolts, Sparta became a police state, and the free citizens were trained in the arts of war from the age of seven. At 30, a Spartan citizen was allowed to live in his own house, but his male children belonged to the state, to train a new generation as soldiers.
Thus Sparta was not a trading state. Its coins were made of iron. Its soldiers were the best in Greece. Sparta did not produce a single poet, writer, or artist. In order to keep some of its slaves docile, no man could live free.
When the Athenians and Spartans faced a common enemy, they were allies. Once the Persians were driven from the scene, both city-states, unable to understand the other, became first rivals and then enemies. Out of alliances between the various city-states forged during the Persian wars, came the bloody fraternal conflict known as the Peloponnesian War (431-404 B.C.)
The Athenians were in charge of the naval organization known as the Delian League. The Spartans led the armies of Peloponnesian League. Picture the Peloppesian War as equivalent to a naval America in conflict with a land-based Russia, or a Great Britain at war with Germany. It would be an apt comparison, because that is the way the war was fought; politically, economically, and morally for 27 years.
And Socrates lived in Athens, was a citizen there, and in every utterance he is recorded to have said, openly preferred the tyranny of the Spartans over the democracy of the Athenians, much in the same way socialist "intellectuals" without intellect live among us today, sucking up to the notions of a dictatorship of the proletariat, a dictatorship that will make common cause with the intellectuals to rule the common herd of common man.
Socrates was a moral and intellectual traitor. He lived and died to destroy the country which gave him birth.
It took a while for easygoing Athens to get Socrates' number. Socrates was the town character, as mentioned in Aristophanes's "The Clouds." While a member of the middle class, he was on good terms with Pericles, the ruling aristocrat voted the first strategos (general) for over 30 years. Socrates, the perfect snob, surrounded himself with the gilded aristocratic youth of Athens.
But there is a limit to even the most patient of governments. When a legitimate government is strong, it can afford to ignore pinpricks of ridicule. But after Athens lost her empire by losing the Peloponnesian War and had undergone two oligarchic reigns of terror at the hands of the gilded, Socratified rich kids, her patience with Socrates ended.
Socrates was charged in 399 B.C. with "impiety against the gods of the city" and with "corrupting the young." He was guilty on all counts.
On the count of impiety against the gods of the city, the charges pertained not to bad-mouthing Zeus, but to Socrates' love for dictatorship and disdain for democracy. After having fought wars against tyrants -- foreign and domestic -- Athens felt that she had to protect herself from the contaminating sources of bloodshed, death, and poverty. And lest we condemn Athens, was it not Abraham Lincoln who protested against "shooting the 16 year old deserter" and then "not harming a hair on the head of the wily old agitator" who egged him on?
Socrates' basic premise of government -- according to Xenophon's "Memorabilia" -- was "that it is the business of the ruler to give orders and of the ruled to obey." So the ruler should have total, unaccounted power.
And who should the rulers be? "Kings and rulers are not those who hold the scepter." Scratch conventional monarchy. Certainly not "those who are chosen by the multitude." Ick, not nowhere near a democracy. Shudder, elitist shudder, to think of the "herd" trying to rule themselves. "Nor on those whom the lot falls." Athens chose by lot from out among the democratic herd those who served on the expediting committees of a given day. Socrates did not like Athenian democracy at all, not even when tempered by chance. "Nor those who owe their power to force or deception." So much for traditional musclebound tyrants. The best form of government is by "kings and rulers," "those who know how to rule."
After hearing this, it's not too difficult to figure out where Plato got his notions of rule by "philosopher-kings." Absolute rule by so-called intellectuals who know what is best for the rest of us, over we who are nothing but sheep to be used for the good of the elites who would rule us.
Socrates was the world's first killer intellectual, the world's first proponent of "dictatorship of the proletariat," the first apologist for for Leninism, and the first colonist of the nasty lot of moral squatters on free soil who infiltrate and destroy the social order of free men.
Athens would have spared herself a lot of trouble if she had bestirred herself to write Socrates' name on broken potsherds -- the ostracism -- branded the Spartan equivalent of the hammer-and-sickle and a swastica on his butt, and given him a no-expenses paid, free, ten-year trip to Sparta where he could have enjoyed the life of a menial helot under a system he supposedly admired.
But no, the Athenians, a relatively decent lot, got tricked into indulging Socrates' death wish, and Socratic intellectuals have been whining up the sad fate of this moral criminal ever since.
The second charge against Socrates, that he had corrupted the youth of Athens, was even more damning. The foremost examples of the gilded youth he led astray was Alcibiades and Critias, although Socrates' effect on the rich young aristocratic fops was already mentioned in Aristophanes' "The Birds," written in 414 B.C., fifteen years before he was called to account:
Why, till ye built this city in the air, _____ line 1280
All men had gone Laconian-mad; they went __ [Spartan-mad]
Long-haired, half-starved, unwashed, Socratified,
With scytales in their hands; but Oh the change!
They are all bird-mad now, and imitate ____ line 1284
Aristophanes made fun of the dandies with their Spartan habits, dress, and even carrying their little Spartan secret police short clubs about town, but this was before the rich kids turned mean. When he mentions the intellectual beliefs of the Athenian "Spur Posse" as being "Socratified" he refers to their instilled beliefs that they were better than everyone else and that the poor and middle class were disposable human beings they could use with impunity.
One rich kid named Alcibiades was a relative of Pericles and raised in Pericles' own household. Brilliant, handsome, rich, and of noble birth, Alcibiades had it all, except for a good character. As a general, he betrayed Athens, fled to Sparta, knocked up a Spartan king's wife and was kicked out of Sparta as a troublemaker, ran back to Athens, got elected general again, betrayed Athens again and was kicked out, then fled to Persia where he was killed upon the orders of another Athenian rich kid named Critias who set up a dictatorship backed by the Spartans. The Athenians loved Alcibiades, but nobody could trust him.
Alcibiades was Socrates' favorite pupil. Socrates saved his life on a battlefield. But the lesson Alcibiades learned from Socrates was that the rulers have no duty to their country; that their ambitions and desires come ahead of the common herd's well-being and lives. Alcibiades was a Socratified "superman."
The other pupil of Socrates mentioned in this indictment was Critias. Critias was Plato's uncle and Plato wrote a dialogue about him. In 411, an aristocratic over-throw of the Athenian democracy occurred and Athens lived in a state of terror for four months until they were able to restore a democracy. In 404, Athens lost the Peloponnesian war and the Spartans installed a puppet government of the aristocratic "Socratified" element.
The leader of The Thirty, Critias, was the Athenian Robespierre. He killed and murdered as many Athenians from the middle and poor classes as the Spartans had killed in battle over the last ten years of the war. The democratic element fled Athens and waged a civil war and retook the city the next year. To have it said that you had stayed in the city was thereafter a mark of reproach.
But a mark of reproach was all it was, because Athens did one thing not done before or since -- it forgave. An amnesty was offered. Even the aristocrats were offered amnesty without an acre of their lands being confiscated or a copper obol of their money seized. They were not loved, they were not respected, but they were allowed to live in peace.
Critias and another leader of The Thirty, Plato's uncle Charmides, a man Socrates urged to go into government, didn't live to see the armistice. Before they were overthrown, like Nazis seeking refuge in South America, the Thirty carved out a temporary refuge in the small village Eleusis, where they murdered 300 of the male citizens under color of law, having forced an Athenian assembly to vote in a death sentence without trial. Soon afterwards, Critias and Charmides were killed in battle and the amnesty declared.
The aristocrats left for Eleusis and used their money to buy mercenaries to attack Athens. The alarmed Athenians executed the ringleaders, but still extended the amnesty to the rest. Finally, in 401 B.C., two years before Socrates' trial and death, a weary, tired peace came to Athens, who had lost a war, her empire, and many of her citizens.
Socrates remained in Athens and kept his mouth shut when mildly threatened by his Socratified pupils of The Thirty.
Plato does not allude to these matters for some reason. He was 25 years old, military age, and was urged to share in his uncle's and first cousin's government, but like so many "intellectuals," he wussed out. He preferred government by "philosopher-kings" in a book, but never did anything to actually attain it.
So now Athens is as whupped as a cut dog. Her walls have been torn down by order of the victorious Spartans and she has no navy. A civil war between rich and poor has weakened her social cohesion and confidence among her populace. And here comes Socrates, an intellectual Bourbon having remembered everything and learning nothing, preaching the gospel and glories of Spartan style despotism and wanting to teach a new generation of rich kids to despise their elders and their social order.
Athens had had enough.
Athens put Socrates on trial in 399 B.C. when he was 70, a ripe old age considering the times. If Socrates had put on a defense of demanding that Athens live up to its high ideals, perhaps he might have only been ostracized for ten years, a fate that had happened to both good and bad men before him. But instead, in accordance with his wanting to destroy the moral legitimacy of a free government by using its judicial system to fulfill his death wish, he baited both the jury to find him guilty and to punish him with death.
Socrates, who always said that he knew nothing while he asked his destructively critical questions boasted about how the Oracle at Delphi declared that Socrates was the wisest, most free, just, and prudent man in the world. In other words, "I am a fool, but I know I'm a fool and that makes me smarter than you." The jury convicted him on both counts. Then Socrates asked that his penalty be that he be declared a civic hero and fed at the public table for life! That did not go over too well. The jury, incensed, gave out the death penalty.
One of Socrates' disciples suggested a jailbreak and escape, with the tacit connivance of the authorities who just wanted him gone, but Socrates refused. So he drank the hemlock while he put on the airs of a martyr. After all that he had done for democratic Athens, this is the thanks he got! Christ wept over Jerusalem, but Socrates shed not a tear for Athens.
Socrates' most famous pupil, Plato, figured out the heat was on, so he traveled abroad for 12 years, living on his inherited money. Then when the stink cleared, he gave up his notions of becoming a playwright and instead wrote up numerous books about his leading man, Socrates. He formed an academy, wherein his most gifted student, Aristotle, studied. Of course, Aristotle formed his own conclusions, most of which differed from Plato's.No philosopher kings for Aristotle! Aristotle's royal pupil was Alexander the Great.
Read Plato, Aristotle, Xenophon, Aristophanes yourself to judge how a man like Socrates acted upon the Athenian stage. Fifth century Athens was possibly the brightest and most beautiful civilization that ever graced this planet. Fourth century Athens did not shine as brightly, and afterwards Athens did not produce any more great men or institutions. Athenians became like the Mayans, living in stone huts outside the splendid ruins of their ancestors. Socrates should bear some of the blame for this.
Yes, cursed be Socrates, Plato, and
all the "intellectual" petty Hitlers, Stalins, FDRs
and other big-government butt kissers since.