Twenty Two Thousand Ways of Killing Socrates

Yes Humean this is a philosophic post.
Here is the thesis.
Socrates, in questioning the Athenian citizenry, relied for his punchlines and points on the substance of their characters, education and general virtue. By degrading or breaking these down with sophistic reason combined with analytical genius, by humiliating virtues, he was all to exult a certain type of reasoning, and feel somewhat alright with himself, feel “his daemon”. He felt his will to power.

Since then all reason has become degrading of virtue, and there is no virtue left among he citizenry. Nothing like in Athens, for sure.
So my conclusion here is that Socrates would not survive in this climate. There is no virtue to parasite off of.

It is my conviction that he would perish of this environment.
And I challenge any of you to …kill Socrates… with documents, videos, quotations, analyses or descriptions of such things that could bring the old man down before he would even get out of bed… as happens with so many of us.

Alright I’ll kill Socrates… by going after his method.

So he is basicly walking arround Athens and questioning the moral beliefs athenians hold, right. He does so by asking them for reasons, a justification, why they hold those beliefs… and finds, surprise that they can’t really justify them. The Athenians then are left confused… and Socrates emerges victorious!

The first flaw here is his general assumption that moral beliefs should be rationally justified, that one arrives at moral truth by using pure reason.

That’s a misunderstanding of human nature and the societal context wherein mores devellop. It’s a complex proces that could be compared to say the devellopment of an economy or a language… an emergent order that spans generations, involving many many people, trial and error etc. And in the end nobody really understands anymore how it all came to be, let alone for what reasons… but at least it is functional to some extend.

His second flaw is in the specific dialectic method he uses in his inquiries. Usually he’ll start by picking up on a certain concept used by a random Athenian interlocutor, and then proceed by asking for a specific definition. Because how can one know what is meant if definitions aren’t made clear afterall? Random Athenian usually responds by giving his best shot at a definition, which Socrates then shows to be contradictory with how the word often is used in another context. And because X=X, that cannot right… so eventually Socrates then usually ends up making up the definition out of the common denominator abstracted from specific contexts.

This is a misunderstanding of how language works. Words don’t usually have one and only one specific meaning. And a rigid definition is usually also not necessary to understand what one is talking about, because use and context determine meaning. By trying to extract only this one essence out of concepts, his is actually destroying meanings in the proces.

If you look at social propaganda or even the basic tenets of deception language and words are used in confused contrary ways. Nobody means what they say and nobody says what they actually mean. Everything becomes a head fake of pretension masquerading as fact. Human deception becomes the common underlying denominator.

My thoughts exactly… I had not seen this reply. Yes, absolutely.
Rather, reason is only possible on a basis of some basic ethics, such as “don’t lie to yourself”, a criterion that would instantly render Sok irrelevant.

Bam! Socrates down for the count.

I don’t see him moving. I saw him twitching just a few moments ago. Is he dead?
Is Socrates finally dead?

And the people in question themselves to not know all of what they are hiding. In fact, my sense is, they don’t know the important stuff. They hide more mundane lies and cheating and small theft and real reactions to other people, and they know they do this and much of it can be called intentional. But there real reactions to the ‘way things are’, the culture, life itself, themselves in general, who and what they are on a fundamental level, what their deep emotions really are in reaction to people and things

This they don’t even know about. It pops out in nightmares, a little bit when they are drunk or missed a night’s sleep or can’t get online or lost their cellphones. But that’s just the tip of the iceberg.