Socrates’ (the “erotic” man’s) preferred method of investigation, ad hominem (responding to the core of the human being, logismos aitias, or “recollection”), is no longer understood at all. Partly this is because of the power and wealth of the American universities, and the sheer number of professors they produce to authoritatively lay down their views, and to circle over them like eagles in velvet mittens concealing the totalitarian control of their authoritarian “norms” in the rich northern bloc of civilization.
Stalker: I don’t know if one can still listen to the human being. It seems to me, instead, one must listen to being. Pursuing it with speech, speech which names all things, which is the same as being alive, for speech and thought are the same, and without which nothing can ever come to our notice.
Socrates: Isn’t it an embarrassment to speak about all things, even the least serious, rather than the most important things only? Reason, beauty, justice, and the rest.
American: This conversion sounds romantic and irrational.
Stalker: I have often studied you Socrates, and your erotic ways. Your teaching is that one must move from opinion to knowing, and that to know is to respond to what is before birth, buried in the soul. Is it not?
Socrates: Only I, Socrates, and not Platon, he who lived in cloudkukuland, can answer this question. For I use the notion of recollection in a way that is far from the ordinary path. Just as would one who used a book to improve their posture, through balancing it on the head, would break from the common meaning of a book.
American: These people are boring.
Stalker: Socrates, does the word book have a meaning?
Socrates: It has no meaning beside from how it is used.
American: These people need to buy a copy of Webster’s dictionary.
Stalker: And so too, the word recollection?
Socrates: I use this word in a strange way, and not like most people. Therefore, yes, this too is not meaningful except as a tool for signaling a peculiar manner of understanding which lives in my soul.
American: This sounds religious. What romanticism! They should read Russel and learn to be free of the “soul” and such nonsense.
Stalker: And yet, Socrates, how can we know that your soul is in possession of the right understanding, the right way to use words?
Socrates: By the dog, it is because my Daemon is on guard against the error of imagining myself to know when I don’t know. Instead, following my erotic nature, I magnetically am drawn to the good. Most of all to virtue, which is knowledge.
American: What blather. They should invest their energies in STEM, of course, there is no money in science, except for computer programming, but that should suit their pure notions of the pursuit of knowledge, scientific knowledge.
Stalker: And knowledge is what we recollect? Not merely a collection of observations about things that don’t concern us.
Socrates: I say truly what I believe: It is.
American: Who cares if he believes it? What matters is the argument. Again, he must study Russell, and learn logic. He must study Frege. Quine! Tarski! He must learn to set his emotions aside! To not be involved, to cease and desist from the use of their nonsense word, “erotic”! He must learn to argue ‘to the object’!
Stalker: And yet, Socrates, your inner motives may be only your own. Why do you suppose that they come to a true knowledge for all of us? Your way of using the word recollection may, indeed, be available to others, but why is it the truth?
Socrates: Human beings have a beautiful divine spark in ourselves. We are part god. The inner realm, discovered first by the Egyptians, who first learned mathematics, in contradistinction to counting and using numbers in ordinary matters, showed us the way to the heavenly things which always are. The unmoving region of truth. The place of the psuke, where the mind moves, links to the outer realm, in the sense that the stars and the ether links to the changing mortal world by crowing it.
American: Nonsense talk!
Stalker: Socrates, it has been discovered that the visible stars are not any different from the things down here. They are changing things too. Their orbits are not perfect.
Socrates: By Hera! This is wonderous if true. I must have time to consider this. (exit)
American: Ah, at last, he realizes that he needs to learn facts and science.
Stalker: Soon Socrates will become like ourselves, and learn thinking.
American: Thinking? You need more experience. Get out of you Cartesian armchair! Live a little.
Stalker: Thinking is an understanding of experience, another way of naming it. We must pay heed to the way words are used by the one using them.
American: Buy a dictionary dude!
End