Autonomies

Socrates: At the Egyptian city of Naucratis, there was a famous old god, whose name was Theuth; the bird which is called the Ibis is sacred to him, and he was the inventor of many arts, such as arithmetic and calculation and geometry and astronomy and draughts and dice, but his great discovery was the use of letters. Now in those days the god Thamus was the king of the whole country of Egypt; and he dwelt in that great city of Upper Egypt which the Hellenes call Egyptian Thebes, and the god himself is called by them Ammon. To him came Theuth and showed his inventions, desiring that the other Egyptians might be allowed to have the benefit of them; he enumerated them, and Thamus enquired about their several uses, and praised some of them and censured others, as he approved or disapproved of them. It would take a long time to repeat all that Thamus said to Theuth in praise or blame of the various arts. But when they came to letters, This, said Theuth, will make the Egyptians wiser and give them better memories; it is a specific both for the memory and for the wit. Thamus replied: O most ingenious Theuth, the parent or inventor of an art is not always the best judge of the utility or inutility of his own inventions to the users of them. And in this instance, you who are the father of letters, from a paternal love of your own children have been led to attribute to them a quality which they cannot have; for this discovery of yours will create forgetfulness in the learners’ souls, because they will not use their memories; they will trust to the external written characters and not remember of themselves. The specific which you have discovered is an aid not to memory, but to reminiscence, and you give your disciples not truth, but only the semblance of truth; they will be hearers of many things and will have learned nothing; they will appear to be omniscient and will generally know nothing; they will be tiresome company, having the show of wisdom without the reality.

Plato, Phaedrus

The figure of “Socrates”, after all, can go wherever he pleases, with his trial and his death, with the democratic Athens of 399 BC and the White House administration of 1989 AD, and the string of historical trifles with which executives and their wives, gossiping in front of the television or on their screens, amuse themselves on their journey towards death: who really loses sleep over the figure of Socrates and the political mechanisms of his execution? But Socrates’ voice—that which, thanks to and yet in spite of Plato and Xenophon, rises from the writings and resounds time and again—that is what captivates the young and the less educated time and again, opening their eyes and making their hearts beat with a passion for living reason. For the fact is that, at the very moment when the world expects them to accept the reality principle, to submit for their own future good to the ideas that their elders instil in them, a voice rings out which asks “What is it?” of each of those domineering ideas, and, reasoning gently, uncovers the contradictions and lies of which they are made, and that is like a breath of liberation in which their hearts flutter, even if only for a brief moment; and so it happens to them as described by Plato’s Alcibiades (Symposium 215 d–216 b), when he arrives at the banquet of Love at the end, half-drunk, saying that every time he heard Socrates, or Socrates’ arguments as recounted by someone else, his heart would dance and tears would spring to his eyes, and it seemed to him that he could not go on living as he was for a moment longer. Then the young men usually grow up, and in turn begin to believe in things—in the National-Syndicalist ideal or in Democracy, for example—and to take up their posts and destinies; and then that business with Socrates gets in their way, just as it did for that Alcibiades, whom Plato depicts at a juncture in his life when he is holding high office in the Democratic Administration of Athens, and who goes on in his speech to declare that what he must do now is to flee from Socrates and, like Ulysses with the sirens, cover his ears to his arguments, because he knows that, if he listens to them, what happened to him as a boy will happen again, and he will remain there until old age listening to them. Only, men do not usually admit so plainly to this necessary flight and deafness to Socrates that their adult state compels them; the usual thing is that they quickly stifle their contradictions, firmly believe in certain ideals or principles (in case the memory of Socrates continues to gnaw at them, they may, like Plato and Xenophon, attribute to Socrates the ideas they themselves hold, which they, in their old age, have come to believe), or rather do not even remember what Socrates sounded like, at least until one of the boys or girls they have raised for Heaven should by chance come to hear him and remind them of it bitterly. It is a pity that Socrates’ listeners must, for the most part, always be so inexperienced and young; and certainly, this business of successive generations—and the fact that, even though the voice continues to ring out, those young people must be different ones at every turn—is by no means a satisfactory arrangement, nor one with which one can be entirely content; but the system dictates it; and until something happens to disrupt it and put an end to these conditions, what we should note is that the main trick for nullifying or drowning out reason is to confuse the voice of Socrates with the historical figure of Socrates, and, in order not to hear it, to talk at length about the anecdotes of his trial, his conviction and his death under the pebbles of the black votes of the democratic majority of a jury in ancient Athens. Remember that this reduction of Socrates’ arguments to the historical and personal mask of Socrates and to his troubles with the political regime of the people to whom he happened to belong—that is the true process by which he is judged and condemned, time and again, to death.

Agustín García Calvo, “¡Viva Sócrates!”, El País, 10/04/1989

Socrates’ despair for us

Agustín García Calvo (Universidad de Barcelona. Facultad de Filosofía, 03/12/2007)

In history, the man sentenced to death by the Athenian jury in 399 BC, at the age of 70, accused of corrupting the youth and introducing gods other than those of the state.