Tag Archives: Plato

the Socratic Method

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From a recent post of Anonymous Conservative’s:

Second, I get the impression the site was done more professionally, and the story was crafted far more intelligently, and far more time was devoted to generating the massive amount of content, than I think one man would be capable of. And it is done well, interspersing rambling sections to make it seem extemporaneous, and with few if any, typos. It may also have been using boredom as a trance induction in places.

I thought of Socrates, in the earlier dialogues, which mostly run as follows: he meets some aristocratic teenage boys and grooms them for sex by asking them to clarify some concept, e.g. “fairness” or “knowledge”, and launches into totally pointless and tedious digressions:

Socrates: My dear dear boys. My lovely lovely fair boys. I am struck by your beauty! I am struck dumb and can only sit here amazed at your smooth thighs, not yet graced with hair, as the poet says. Surely, as the poet says, you will “be men of renown” if you achieve wisdom and are fortunate enough to be tutored by an older man. But you were arguing just now if it was fair for Krustus to take the winnings from the knuckle-bone game. What is fair? When we say it is a fair day, can it also be a day of thunderstorms, as the poet says, “darkening the sky over the plain”?

Boy: No, Socrates, we cannot.

Socrates: Exactly, my delicious boy! Exactly! Then storms mean unfairness?

Boy: Yes, Socrates.

Socrates: I see the aura of wisdom about you, you lovely peachy boy. Then when you make an agreement with a man, the agreement will be unfair if there is a stormcloud on the horizon, as the poet says, “on the plains, auguring rain later”.

Boy: Yes, Socrates.

Socrates: But, my lovely lovely boy! Does not the poet also say, “a good agreement can be made even at night or in the thunderstorm of the all-thundering Jove”?

Boy: Yes, Socrates.

Socrates: So it seems we must look elsewhere for fairness.

Boy: By Jove, Socrates, you are right!

This goes on for hours, with Socrates playing word games and presumably pawing at the boys and gushing over their “beauty”. This kind of thing, what Vox Day calls bafflegarble, exhausts the teenage boys, and eventually they enter a kind of trance state, and numbly submit to be “tutored” (sodomized) by Socrates.

Socrates ended up being executed by Athens for corrupting the young.

humour in Plato

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I was clearing out some old posts, on an old blog, and found this amusing excerpt from Plato’s Alcibiades. It is, I think, the only funny thing I’ve come across in Plato, though I’m unsure if he intended it so:

SOCRATES: I think we can be pretty sure that someone understands something when he can show that he has made someone else understand it.

ALCIBIADES: I agree.

SOCRATES: Well then, can you tell me who Pericles has made into an expert? Shall we start with his sons?

ALCIBIADES: But Socrates, both of his sons turned out to be idiots.

SOCRATES: What about Clinias, your brother?

ALCIBIADES: There’s no point talking about him – he’s a madman.

SOCRATES: Well then, since Clinias is mad and Pericles’ sons were idiots, what shall we say is the reason that he allowed you to be in the state you’re in?

ALCIBIADES: I suppose it’s because I didn’t really pay attention.

book report: Lysis

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I read Plato’s Lysis today, as part of the heroic ordeal which is Plato’s complete works. It’s a fairly typical early dialogue, which mostly run as follows:

Socrates is wandering around Athens looking for teenage boys to groom for sex.

He finds some aristocratic teenage boys and initiates a tiresome conversation about some topic, in this case friendship.

Almost nothing he says is sincere or logical. It is mostly sophistry. His favourite technique is a bait & switch, e.g. “we agree, do we not, my lovely boys, that people drink gin because they enjoy it? And enjoyment is a good. Therefore if we want to be good we must drink gin. Whisky is not gin, and what is not good but evil? Whisky, therefore, is evil.”

As he leads his victims down rhetorical rabbit holes they are reduced to baffled assent: to conclusions which, individually, seem fair enough, but which lead to insanity.

He then somehow leads things back to The Good and Wisdom and says the boys need a tutor to teach them about such things. They then beg Socrates to become their private tutors and the dialogue ends with them all agreeing to let Socrates do what he wants to them.

Lysis follows this course up to the ending, where Socrates is interrupted by the relatives and guardians of the boys he is trying to groom, and he is forced to scurry away like a paedophile at the playground.

The older I get, the harder it is for me to stomach Socrates. His sly, predatory manner around teenage boys, referring to them as “my beautiful boy!” and so on, and telling them how only an older man’s love can help them attain Wisdom and The Good, is almost as offputting as his sophistry and utter insincerity. He comes across as something between a paedophile and a used car salesman. In Vox Day’s terms, he is a gamma.

His tiresome “explorations” of e.g. friendship, seem designed to wear his victims down, so they numbly assent to being sodomized because they can’t understand anything and lose all faith in reason or logic and thus surrender to this leering old man.

It’s not all bad, mind you. Just reading a narrative from 2500 years ago is interesting, even if all modern translations make Socrates sound like a kind of Victorian parlour paedophile, full of “my good sir” and “by Jove!” and other incongruous idioms. And there are usually interesting moments, e.g.

“Look at it this way,” I said. “If someone smeared your blonde hair with white lead, would your hair then be white or appear white?”

An interesting question – that is, is there a difference between being and appearance when it comes to colour? But I was struck mostly that Lysis, like the Egyptian Pharoahs, is blonde. I’ve met several Greeks and they all look thoroughly Mediterranean, and when one looks at their dysfunctional corrupt nation it’s hard to reconcile with the Greece of Sophocles and Homer.

Unless – they are no longer the same genetic group, as the modern Egyptians are probably very different to those of yore. And then, perhaps there is a certain civilisational order which only appears in genetic groups liable to produce blondes, and these groups have lived as far afield as Egypt, Greece, modern Turkey, and are now mostly confined to Europe and dwindling fast.

Another interesting point that made this tedious dialogue almost worth reading:

From this we may infer that those who are already wise no longer love wisdom, whether they are gods or men. Nor do those love it who are so ignorant that they are bad, for no bad and stupid man loves wisdom. There remain only those who have this bad thing, ignorance, but have not yet been made ignorant and stupid by it. They are conscious of not knowing what they don’t know.

A point Wittgenstein might have appreciated, that those who are wise don’t love wisdom, that is, they don’t do philosophy.