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1/13
Quickly sketched thread on looking at how we look at things...
Quickly sketched thread on looking at how we look at things...
2/ Doing more reading on Socrates, I happened to look at two articles back-to-back today about his trial for "impiety." And one, by Pavlos Michaelides, centers on the ultimately (what we would call) religious core of Socrates' life practice.
3/ (Plato repeatedly has Socrates say in the Apology that he asked his questions about values & excellences & life's purpose *at the prompting of the god* — which he understood to be the practical import of the message from Delphi, namely, to explore what it means to be "wise.")
4/ Michaelides' piece is called "The Socratic *Daimonion*: Reconciling Religion, Philosophy, and Politics." (A draft copy is online.) https://lekythos.library.ucy.ac.cy/bitstream/handle/10797/6223/ISSEIproceedings-MichaelidesNew.pdf?sequence=3
5/ And in it he points out that knowing we don't know things can ultimately be for us a life-enhancing — and, in the end spiritual — sort of humility, supporting an ever more intimate engagement with life's worth and wonder. Michaeldies says things like:
6/ The other piece I read today covers the same material, namely, Socrates statements about his life's practice in Plato's *Apology.* It's by Josiah Ober and is called "The Trial of Socrates as a Political Trial" ... https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/political-trials-in-theory-and-history/trial-of-socrates-as-a-political-trial/10D8FB31D4728EF0243A0A025F671925
7/ … and while Ober speaks of attending to the “relevant contexts”…
8/ … Ober makes *no mention* of Socrates’ statements that, even though he was being charged with *impiety,* he understood his life's practice to be a matter of following “the god.”
9/ If we know anything about Socrates it's that he was interested in looking at how we look at things. Michaelides looks at Socrates and sees a man divinely inspired. Ober looks at Socrates and sees instead a man focused on politics.
10/ But in Socrates' day, those weren't such separable things. The Athenian assembly — judge and jury gathered there to adjudicate Socrates' (what we would call) religious piety — said a prayer before their deliberations.
11/ The word, "politics," comes from the Greek "polis"; and the polis of Athens was literally named after a god, Athena.
12/ We are forever divvying up our experience of being alive into categories and concepts — separating out (what we call) religion and philosophy and politics and psychology. ("Psychology," though a modern word, is "Greek", too — literally, "an account of the soul.")
13/13 Ima make a leap here — to the ground. I'm going to suggest that the practice of folks like Socrates, inviting us to look at how we look at things and to explore how we understand and enact worth & wonder, is like Buddha's suggestion that we reach down and touch the ground.
