The Hemlock Cup: Socrates, Athens and the Search for the Good Life by Bettany Hughes. For the past couple of weeks, I had this eerie feeling of walking invisible though the streets of Athens; watching and learning from the greatest philosopher of all time. We miss a contemporary version of Socrates but I bet no one misses the ancient Athens. Barbaric is an understatement and Steven Pinker was right.
Walter Isaacson's NYT review precisely explains the sheer complexity of writing a biography of Socrates:
Socrates spent his whole life with this motto:
"The only virtue is knowledge, the only evil ignorance. An unexamined life is not worth living."
But after his death sentence, Socrates finally stood up to face his charges in front of his fellow citizens in a religious court in the Athenian agora, he articulated one of the great pities of human society that famous speech in his final days where:
"It is not my crimes that will convict me," he said. "But instead, rumor, gossip; the fact that by whispering together you will persuade yourselves that I am guilty."
This is where we can learn from that pragmatic wisdom of Confucius:
"When the Way prevails under the Heaven, then show yourself; when it does not prevail, then hide."
Having said that, the world as we know would have been a completely different place, if Socrates had not become a martyr. When I say world as we know, it includes - Liberty to IPhone, Morality to Hollywood, Science to Meditation, Reason to Globalization, Freedom to this blog and everything else. This alone is a very good reason to read this book.
"If Socrates had not become a martyr, a cause-celebre, then the history of philosophy, the value-system of West, and of the East, might have been immeasurably different."
Socrates not writing anything, only helped that cause.
Walter Isaacson's NYT review precisely explains the sheer complexity of writing a biography of Socrates:
"The problem with writing a biography of Socrates, as Bettany Hughes merrily admits, is that he’s a “doughnut subject”: a rich and tasty topic with a big hole right in the middle where the main character should be. Despite his fame and his insistence on an examined life, Socrates never wrote anything, and our knowledge of him comes mainly from three contemporaries — his devoted pupils Plato and Xenophon, and the parodist Aristophanes — each of whom had his own agenda. He produced no great answers, only great questions, and the most enduring image we have of his life is his leaving of it, as the title of this book suggests."
Hughes does a fascinating job of recreating Athens; it wasn't like reading a book but watching a documentary of Athens with Socrates as the protagonist. But it did feed my pessimism on understanding that eternal conundrum - "human nature". In the past 2500 years, almost nothing changed on that front. We still are the same hedonic suckers, longing for cognitive fluency in a complicated world. Our civilization crawls along, only with the help of occasional flashes of genius and greatness (human nature is a different animal and should be confused with our scientific achievement, technology, decreased violence, increased morality et al).
Hughes does a fascinating job of recreating Athens; it wasn't like reading a book but watching a documentary of Athens with Socrates as the protagonist. But it did feed my pessimism on understanding that eternal conundrum - "human nature". In the past 2500 years, almost nothing changed on that front. We still are the same hedonic suckers, longing for cognitive fluency in a complicated world. Our civilization crawls along, only with the help of occasional flashes of genius and greatness (human nature is a different animal and should be confused with our scientific achievement, technology, decreased violence, increased morality et al).
Socrates spent his whole life with this motto:
"The only virtue is knowledge, the only evil ignorance. An unexamined life is not worth living."
But after his death sentence, Socrates finally stood up to face his charges in front of his fellow citizens in a religious court in the Athenian agora, he articulated one of the great pities of human society that famous speech in his final days where:
"It is not my crimes that will convict me," he said. "But instead, rumor, gossip; the fact that by whispering together you will persuade yourselves that I am guilty."
This is where we can learn from that pragmatic wisdom of Confucius:
"When the Way prevails under the Heaven, then show yourself; when it does not prevail, then hide."
Having said that, the world as we know would have been a completely different place, if Socrates had not become a martyr. When I say world as we know, it includes - Liberty to IPhone, Morality to Hollywood, Science to Meditation, Reason to Globalization, Freedom to this blog and everything else. This alone is a very good reason to read this book.
"If Socrates had not become a martyr, a cause-celebre, then the history of philosophy, the value-system of West, and of the East, might have been immeasurably different."
Socrates not writing anything, only helped that cause.
No comments:
Post a Comment