Carrol Cox writes in denunciation of Sokrates and Platon:
>Well, he [Sokrates] hobnobbed with one of the sleaziest bunch of
>rich young terrorists that a democracy ever produced --
>the 30 tyrants....
You "forget" to mention Sokrates' defiance of the Thirty when he was
ordered to arrest Leon of Salamis. Of course some young men who later
were leaders of that group (Kritias, Charmides) had once hung out with
Sokrates. But so did future leaders of the democratic faction,
like Kleitophon. Not to mention
Alkibiades, the leading democratic politician of the
post-Periclean period who, by the way, was the hero of the only
proletarian group in Athens, the sailors.
>.... Cf. him to Pierre Laval in France or
>Quisling in Norway....
Did Sokrates ever try to rule as a collaborator of a foreign invader?
Did Sokrates ever try to play a political role like that of the prewar
Laval (sabotaging all French attempts to resist German, Italian, and
Spanish fascism) or Quisling (point man for the Stalino-Hitlerian
campaign to have Trotsky arrested and deported from Norway)?
> ...And even his accepting the death
>penalty rather than fleeing was a bit sleazy -- the assembly
>that sentenced him probably took it for granted that he
>would go into exile....
Yes, they certainly did. But why did the accusers specify the penalty
as death rather than exile? More than probably because they
hoped that Sokrates would discredit himself by fleeing into exile.
>....Actually you should take the metaphor one of his sneaky arguments
>against Thrasymachos literally. He establishes that the ruler rules in
>the interest of the ruled by comparing that ruler to a shepherd, who
>protects the sheep. Yeah, for a shearing....
Read your favorite (sic) book again. Sokrates distinguishes the work
of the shepherd qua shepherd, which is in the interest of the sheep,
from his labor qua "moneymaker" in the interest of the sheepowner.
If Plato's vocabulary had allowed him to provide his Sokrates with
the terms "concrete" and "abstract" labor, his argument would have
fitted seamlessly into Chapter I of Das Kapital.
>...Plato argued in effect that the only real pleasure was pure thought...
Read Philebos sometime, where Plato has Sokrates argue the exact
opposite of that silly notion (ie., that "knowledge" and "pleasure"
are quite different, that both have a necessary place in the
good life, but that "knowledge" ranks higher than "pleasure"
among goods).
>....Really, just think of the horror implicit in that injunction that
>"The unexamined life was not worth living" -- pronounced
>by someone who believed that only an aristocratic elite
>had the right and duty to rule.
Again, the reality is quite the opposite. Plato has Sokrates
contend that only a philosophic, not an aristocratic, elite would
rule in the "best" city. An aristocratic elite is defined by descent
and hereditary privilege. The Sokratic/Platonic philosophic elite
is defined by profound education and practical ability, its members
have no knowledge of even their immediate parentage, and in
regard to wealth and income they are below the lowest members
of the commonality, since they are absolutely destitute of both.
Shane Mage
"When we read on a printed page the doctrine of Pythagoras that all things
are made of numbers, it seems mystical, mystifying, even downright silly.
When we read on a computer screen the doctrine of Pythagoras that all
things are made of numbers, it seems self-evidently true." (N. Weiner)
