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Jan. 20, 2009 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
24:26
1260 The Trial and Death of Socrates - Part One
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Hi everybody, it's Stefan Molyneux.
Sorry to be shocking you by not being in the Red Room, but my darling and beautiful daughter has fallen asleep there, so I will do this cast in another room.
And this is going to be a brief series on Socrates.
Socrates, the amazing, wonderful mind gnat who tortures and has tortured and elevated and inspired all subsequent philosophers.
Now, my history with Socrates goes back quite a ways.
When I was in theatre school studying acting and playwriting at the National Theatre School in Montreal, In Canada, I actually adapted the trial and death of Socrates to stage.
This would have been over 20 years ago, so quite a while back I have been wrestling and struggling.
As Nietzsche says, we all struggle and wrestle continually with Socrates.
And my struggle with Socrates has not obviously been about the amazing and mind-blowing invention of reason and empirical evidence, though he was more around syllogistical reasoning than empirical evidence.
As was evidenced by his religiosity and worship of the state and willingness to kill as a soldier.
But, you know, all ancient faults aside, which can be certainly forgiven in the same way that we can forgive Aristotle's physics and Democritus' amazing and fantastic discovery of the, or at least theoretical discovery of the atom.
Based on the fact that it was so long ago and what did they know, so there are certain things which obviously can be forgiven as we hope that the errors that we make in the present will be forgiven by wiser people in the future.
But what I have struggled in particular with, with Socrates for decades, has been what I consider to be his emotional stance.
Now, I'm not going to do an introduction to Socrates, you can look it up on the net, it's very easy.
He didn't write anything down.
He taught Plato, who in turn taught Aristotle.
Plato and Aristotle were metaphysical and epistemological opposites, though a little closer in terms of ethics.
Aristotle taught Alexander the Great, who was a mafia warlord who went on to conquer the world, at least a known world at the time.
Not a great example of ethical teaching or the reception of instruction, in my opinion.
And Socrates did not write anything down.
We only know what Socrates is supposed to have said, according to Plato, his student who worshipped him.
And, I mean, obviously, as a magical and beautiful and soulful of treasure, it was well worth Worshiping Socrates and a very, very brief introduction to the start of Socrates' life.
He went to the oracle at Delphi, which was his religious pilgrimage.
If you had questions, you would go and ask the oracle at Delphi, which would give you an answer.
And Socrates, as a young man, went to the oracle at Delphi.
And he said, who is the wisest man in the world?
And the oracle replied, you, Socrates, are the wisest man in the world.
And Socrates says, well, I mean, come on, you're talking crazy, because I don't know anything, and so how can I be the wisest man in the world?
And the oracle said, oh no, no, dude, you're the one.
And so Socrates said, well, I'm going to go prove the oracle wrong, because surely there are wiser men than I in the world.
So he went and began the Socratic examination.
So he would go to the wise men of the cities and towns in the ancient world, and he would examine them.
So these wise men would say, I know about truth and virtue and honor and dignity and courage and respect and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
And Socrates would examine them, and he continually found, as he examined them, that they didn't know what they claimed to know.
And so, I mean, in the Gorgias he is examining Alcibiades.
And Alcibiades, as a hedonist, makes an amazing and beautiful and well worth reading case for the life of pleasure.
And Socrates gives him the argument, this is just one of many, many examples, but Socrates gives him the argument and says, well...
According to your life, pleasure is the greatest pursuit and the highest purpose of life.
Or rather, because there is no higher purpose, we should go for pleasure.
And Alcibiades, lounging back on his divan, probably being fed peeled grapes by a well-oiled young slave boy, says, absolutely.
And Socrates says, well, you know, one of the greatest pleasures in life is when you can't quite get to an inch, and you finally get to it, and you scratch it.
It's like, ah, so good.
And he says, so basically for you, the highest and best form of life, the most noble form of life, would be to have a perpetual itch that you could perpetually scratch.
And of course, this is a bit of an argument from absurdity, but it has an interesting point when it comes to the pursuit of pleasure.
So, these sorts of arguments that he would make, and they're well, kind of, Aristophanes, who was a comic poet, wrote, I think it was called The Frogs or The Clouds, which has, Socrates is a character, and Socrates mentions it in the trial that he undergoes, for which he receives the death sentence.
And a man comes up to a farmer and the farmer says, Zeus brings the rain.
The rain comes from Zeus. And all the usual Socratic questions are asked and answered.
And Christoph Hitchens talks about this in God is Not Great.
And so the farmer says to the philosopher, Zeus brings the rain, and the philosopher says, well, have you ever noticed that there's no such thing as rain that comes from a clear sky, that there are always clouds when rain comes?
So therefore, wouldn't it be simpler to say not that Zeus brings the rain, but rather that the clouds bring the rain, because there's no such thing as rain in a cloudless sky?
And the farmer then says, yes, well, maybe, but it is Zeus who moves the clouds.
And then the philosopher explains about winds and so on, and condensation, evaporation, and so on.
And the farmer eventually reluctantly agrees and then goes completely nuts later on, as is typically the case when people come into contact with rational philosophy and burns down the Socratic school, which is kind of a pattern with philosophy.
So... This Socratic reasoning, Socratic questioning, was something that Socrates pursued around the world, and he would examine the great and self-proclaimed wise teachers and orators of the day and find that they really didn't know what they were talking about.
And this, of course, caused a great deal of resentment.
Unfortunately, he didn't do the same thing with priests, which is a real shame.
And so this is where we get the term sophists, which is those who through their eloquence make the worst argument appear, the better.
We also may call them lawyers.
But Socrates went through this process and aroused a lot of resentment.
And then what happened was some of his, quote, pupils, although he didn't actually have an official school, would just sort of sit around chatting with people and they'd bring him some food, as he was basically hiding from his wife, who apparently was quite a wretch.
And some of his students were involved in dictatorships and so on.
So there was this resentment, there was the resentment from the parents, right, because philosophers bring questions particularly to the young.
And the young then begin to ask those moral questions of their elders, and the elders, of course, in the time-honored tradition of usually unjust and illegitimate authority, feel resentment not towards their own hypocrisy in proclaiming virtues that they do not know and will not live,
but rather feel hostility towards the philosopher who is provoking such questions, and the young, and naturally, of course, the charge then comes back, and I've had my own brush with this, The charge comes back that the philosopher, you see, is corrupting the young by provoking the young or stimulating the young into asking questions that make their elders uncomfortable.
And of course it takes a lot of maturity to say that the problem is not with the questions or the questioner.
But with the falsehood of the answers that I have been living, and very few people make that transition, what they do is react usually with violent and aggressive anger and hostility towards the philosopher who is provoking these questions, and thus disarming their control and power of the moral narrative which defines the world.
The world runs on ethics, and that is why it is so explosive to talk about these things.
So, this is, you know, in very brief, that is the story of Socrates.
Now, what I wrestle with, and have continually wrestled with for many, many years, is I am a rabid empiricist, in other words, in any conflict between facts and theories, facts, the facts of sensual, empirical, objective, external reality, external to the mind.
It wins. You simply can't trump theory over practice.
That's called superstition or religiosity or statism or mysticism as a whole or collectivism.
So for me, the real challenge has been the simple fact that philosophy, if we count the pre-Socratics, is 2,500 to probably closer to 3,000 years old as a discipline, philosophy is.
Thousands of years old as a discipline.
And if you look at something like physics or even computer science, physics in hundreds of years, or empirical physical sciences, the chemistry, physics, biology in particular, have revolutionized the world over the past few hundred years to the point where what we live now and what is occurring now, this communication, for instance, would be completely inconceivable to anyone a few hundred years ago.
And that has been the incredible revolution that the discipline of science, physical sciences, has wrought upon the world.
Economics is slightly less old as a formal discipline, maybe you could say 250 years, 270.
And, of course, economics, through the application of the room for private property and the free market, at least for a timely minimal role of the state, completely revolutionized the world as well.
To the point where the goods and services and trade and currency that we have now would be incomprehensible to somebody in the late Middle Ages, even to the mid-Enlightenment to the late Renaissance to mid-Enlightenment.
Completely inconceivable that we would have these kinds of trades, property rights and contracts.
And that has transformed the world.
Physical sciences, economics completely transformed the world as disciplines of thought.
And even if we just look at something as sort of technical and practical as computer science, which is why we're able to have this conversation that has transformed the world in mere decades, has completely transformed the world and brought the human village cheek by jowl and allowed for this amazing communication medium that we are using here.
In a matter of a few decades to a few centuries, we have incredible revolutions in human capacity, thought, experience, and possibility and practicality.
Philosophy has had Tens to hundreds of times longer and has almost completely failed in transmitting the basic truths about the world.
We still have religiosity, we still have superstition, we still have mysticism, there are still...
The goddamn astrological things in newspapers.
There is massive amounts of philosophical illiteracy and hostility to philosophy.
Even look at psychology has done an enormous amount to change the world and to give people some sense that they should take ownership for their own thoughts and feelings and not wildly project them onto the skies, the stars, the state, the stars and stripes, the military and other people.
But in fact, people are responsible for the contents of their own minds and it is not Provoked or enmeshed with outside circumstances at all times.
It's been an amazing revolution in the way that we approach self-knowledge since then.
And that discipline, really, if we count Freud, 140, 150, 130 years old.
So, philosophy has had thousands of years where other disciplines have had only decades or centuries, and philosophy has sucked like a big wet vacuum.
And the question is, why?
Why, when you go to talk to someone reasonably intelligent and knowledgeable about physics, there is some general knowledge of the scientific method, of reproducibility, of experimentation, of the...
Triumph of experiment, of empiricism over theory and so on.
Talk to somebody about mathematics, talk to somebody about chemistry, talk to somebody about computers.
They have some basic knowledge and some basic facts that any reasonably educated layperson would know.
Ah, but when it comes to the realm of philosophy, everything completely falls apart and everything is relative, everything is cultural, nobody knows what truth is but they claim they do, nobody knows what What ethics is, but they claim that they might, and everybody lives in complete opposition to the values, right?
Relativists make decisions about non-relativists that are absolute.
People haven't even grasped the basic principles of logic and how it applies to reason, debate and evidence and so on.
So, in every conceivable realm that philosophy works with, from metaphysics or the nature of reality to epistemology, the study of knowledge of truth and falsehood, To ethics, to self-knowledge, to politics.
Every frame or every realm that philosophy has worked on for thousands of years remains an entirely mind-bending, kaleidoscopic, mental clusterfrag that people simply can't come up with anything sensible to say about these topics which philosophy has developed.
I've been muttered and nutted about with for thousands of years.
That is a massive and catastrophic failure.
If philosophy were a project, and of course as a former entrepreneur and project manager of some pretty large and meaty projects, I take this approach.
If philosophy were a multi-millennial project, it would have completely failed as a discipline.
And the question is, why?
Why has it completely failed?
And I think that In order to process that, we need to look at what has worked, so to speak, in terms of its effectiveness and vividness and penetration into the minds, thoughts, emotions and habits of people.
And we compare philosophy to superstition, to religiosity, to the pomp and circumstance of patriotism and all this other nonsense.
And what we find is, at least what I believe that I have found, is that the failure of philosophy has not been, in terms of content, Although there have been many failures in terms of content in philosophy, in other words, the actual arguments that are put forward.
But I think that the reason that philosophy has failed relative to statism and religion is that philosophers are emotionally retarded and anemic.
And what they do is they withdraw, right?
They pull back, right?
They don't engage.
They don't get down into the gutter.
They don't engage with the actual ethical questions of the world.
They're not passionate. They're not intense.
They don't let themselves ever get angry.
They get this Buddhist wall up in front of them where they retreat to their ivory tower to squint with wry amusement at the foolishness of the herd.
And that, to me, is vile.
To me, that is cowardice.
That is an extraordinarily destructive and irresponsible thing to do if you are a healer of the mind, a communicator of the right principles and right ways of thinking, reason and evidence within the mind.
That is to me like being a doctor who can cure a plague and retreating to his ivory tower to watch people die with wry amusement.
That to me is kind of cold and very much against what I think reason and passion are designed to do, which is to light up the world with truth and passionately engage And attack, if necessary, the falsehoods that, like satanic shadows, keep people's souls pinned to error and misery and aggression.
And this comes from Socrates, from his rye distance, right?
This is why we have this sort of Buddhist or monk-like infection.
Of reason as something which is dissociated from the emotions, as something which manages, controls, and rejects the emotions of the emotions and the passions as aspects of the soul which are destructive to reason.
And, of course, Socrates, like all of us, would have seen the passionate preachers of his day Who fire up the population with fiery words and thunderous gestures and, you know, Reverend Wright flourishes and all this kind of stuff.
He would have seen all of that and he would have made, or it seems that he made the mistake in association that because passion is used in the transmission of manipulative errors, of religiosity, of statism, of collectivism and so on, Because passion is used as a tool to communicate error, passion is therefore a source of error, and that is after this, because of this.
And that's a logical fallacy, right?
That this happened after this and therefore because of this, right?
So, if my headache goes away after it stops raining, that happened afterwards, but not because it stopped raining.
So, the suspicion of passion that is the hallmark of Western philosophy and Eastern philosophy as well, but let's just focus on what has come out of Socrates and the pre-Socratics and, of course, the Stoics and the skeptics and all of these other kinds of philosophers.
They have taken the approach that reason is the enemy of passion.
Passion is like the unruly mob that overthrows the legitimate authority of the government called reason within the mind.
And passion is associated with pitchforks and flaming brands and hunting the Shrek monsters of our fevered imaginations.
It is not associated with a unity and intensity of communication which actually does plant the seeds of truth and reason in the minds of others.
So because passion is so much used by Preachers and sophists and generals and politicians, it is then considered to be the lubricant for the transmission of error, of destructive and exploitive error.
That to me is really tragic.
That to me is giving away the most fundamental weapon in the fight for truth to the enemies of truth, of reason, of evidence.
Because it's not empirical, right?
So the fact is that patriotism, collectivism, superstition, nationalism, statism, they all have kicked philosophy's ass for thousands of years, and those people are not afraid to use passion, whereas philosophers kind of feel that if you show passion, you are succumbing to irrational emotions, and therefore you are not reasonable, and therefore blah blah blah.
What they don't say is, well, why has philosophy got its ass kicked for thousands of years, whereas these other false creeds have triumphed repeatedly and to the endless detriment of the human race?
Well, it's because they use passion, and philosophers generally eschew passion.
And Socrates is very explicit about this, as is Plato, very explicit about this, that he views the passions as something to be escaped.
He longs for death as an escape for, as a cure for, The passions of the body, and this of course fits into the Platonic theory of forms, right?
But philosophy has always had an oppositional relationship to emotions in the same way that religiosity has had an oppositional relationship to the body, and nationalism and patriotism have had an oppositional relationship To individualism,
to self-actualization, to self-knowledge, and of course in the way that religion has had a very hostile relationship to psychology, because psychology reveals religion as an irrational and immature projection of the psyche, where we project human characteristics onto an empty and non-human universe, that it is an immature pathology, not a reception of the Godhead from outer space.
And we'll get to this in the next video.
I don't want to go too long here, but wrestling with Socrates has been very much a foundation of how it is that I have approached philosophy.
The ferocity and passion that I have tried to bring to philosophy, which I genuinely feel, but I have not repressed because I recognize that it works for destructive and culty creeds like religiosity.
And statism and nationalism, and therefore it's going to work even better when it is aligned in the service of reason and evidence.
So for me, passion is essential in the communication of truth.
It causes a lot of people to feel very uneasy, and I think that the power of reason and emotion together is Unstoppable.
And fundamentally, as an empiricist and, of course, as a former entrepreneur, I look at the project called philosophy and I look at its effects.
Has it worked? And the answer is, of course, no.
It has completely not worked.
The advances that have occurred have almost always occurred not because of philosophy but almost despite it in human life.
And so it may be that I'm completely wrong and uniting reason and passion in communication is entirely the wrong thing to do.
But to me, again, as an entrepreneur, you just have to do something different when something hasn't worked for thousands of years.
You just have to do something different, whether you like it or not.
Doing the same thing over and over again when you don't get the results you want, of course, is the definition of insanity in a way, certainly of OCD or compulsive behavior.
And so I have really decided and allowed myself to express the passions that I feel about philosophy and truth and the value and virtue of ethical behavior and the happiness that results.
Because I don't view passion as the enemy of truth, but rather As its propulsion and its effectiveness.
And so I very much tried to not do what philosophers have done, almost all philosophers have done before, and tried to take a page from the enemies of sophists and priests and politicians and generals and so on.
That passion is something which is essential in the service of truth.
That, of course, puts me very much at odds with the traditions of philosophy and makes it very unsettling for people when I am passionate about truth.
But my basic philosophy, so to speak, in this area is that if something hasn't worked for thousands and thousands of years, if it has really done the opposite of working, Then you need to do something very different.
And maybe what I'm doing is not the right thing to do.
Maybe there's something else, right?
Maybe it's philosophy plus a tinfoil hat and a UFO will be what finally works.
But I can tell you that doing the opposite of what hasn't worked is usually a very good place to start.
So we will get into, in the next two videos, I'd like to get into the actual trial of Socrates and to show where I think, again, with all humility and recognizing the nonsensical nature of attempting to Attack this edifice, but nonetheless, where I think that he went horribly awry and did a terrible disservice to philosophy, which of course all pales in the service that he did for philosophy.
So again, these are just minor blemishes in a near-perfect way.
But I hope that you will join me, because I think if you are interested in truth to the point where you are listening to this, that we do not want to dedicate ourselves to the service of truth, reason, and evidence, and not be as effective as humanly possible.
That, to me, would be a terrible tragedy, because then you gain neither the pleasures of conformity nor the joys of wisdom, integrity, and effectiveness.
So I hope that you will join me for the next two on Socrates, on the trial and death, Thank you so much for watching, as always.
I appreciate it so much, and I am so thrilled to see how many people are so fascinated by philosophy.
It is a discipline that will, I think, give you the greatest possible joy in life.
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