“Busybody” Socrates

Questioning everything made Socrates widely unpopular, and philosophers still evoke this reaction. Real philosophers accept that.

"My problem is that I roundly dislike Socrates, and have from the moment I met him. He is a humble-braggart and a busybody, minding everyone's business but his own: on his own showing he neglected his family and let them fall into poverty while he spent his time gadflying about town and picking quarrels with anyone reputed to be wise. What kind of conduct is that?" https://mindly.social/@koshtra/109705942348674471


To those who say there are some questions we're just not supposed to ask…

"The first charge brought against #Socrates by his accusers, that he is "a criminal and a busybody, investigating the things beneath the earth and in the heavens" is a very important one indeed for all who study natural history to contemplate, for in doing so we may better under how dangerous the pursuit may be perceived by those who do not." https://mastodon.green/@WRNBookReview/109677062906311246


"Rescuing Socrates"
"In my sophomore year of high school, I came upon a remarkable book in a garbage pile next to the house where we rented an apartment in Queens. It was the second volume of the pretentiously bound Harvard Classics series, and it contained a set of dialogues by Plato that record the last days of Socrates’s life. This first encounter with Socrates was as fortuitous as it was decisive. There is probably no better introduction to the life of the mind than Socrates’s defense of his philosophic activity in these dialogues. For over a decade, I have used these same dialogues every summer to introduce low-income high school students to a world that, almost without exception, had been until then inaccessible and inconceivable to them. The series of short dialogues are set in the days leading up to Socrates’s execution. He emerges in them vividly and heroically. Throughout his ordeal, he insists that “the good life, the beautiful life, and the just life are the same,” and that no matter what the city of Athens might threaten to do to him, he cannot give up the practice of philosophy. The youth of Athens love him, but the authorities find him an unbearable nuisance and, as Jesus would come to seem to the Romans, a dangerous political liability. Indeed, the citizens of Athens, finding seventy-year-old Socrates guilty of corrupting the youth and introducing new gods into the city, condemn him to death. Socrates accepts the verdict, rejects the plan his friends hatch to whisk him away from prison before the execution, and in obedience to the laws of the city he held dear, drinks the poison at the appointed hour, surrounded by the very friends he was accused of corrupting, and philosophizing to the very end. Every year, I witness Socrates bringing students—my high school students as well as my Columbia students—to serious contemplation of the ultimately existential issues his philosophy demands we grapple with. My students from low-income households do not take this sort of thinking to be the exclusive privilege of a social elite. In fact, they find in it a vision of dignity and excellence that is not constrained by material limitations. Some of these students, as was the case with me, will go on to elite colleges and find themselves surrounded by peers far wealthier and far better educated than they. Socrates whispers to them not to mistake these marks of privilege for true expressions of merit and to find in their own intellectual integrity a source of self-worth and self-respect that surpasses any material advantage their peers might have over them. When making the case for liberal education to low-income students and families, I often point out that there is a long tradition of steering working-class students toward an education in servitude, an education in obedience and docility, an education in not asking questions. The idea that liberal education is only for the already privileged, for the pampered elite, is a way of carrying on this odious tradition. It is a way of putting liberal education out of the reach of the people who would most benefit from it—precisely the people who have historically been denied the tools of political agency. I ask them to take a look at who sends their children to liberal arts colleges and at what liberal arts college graduates go on to do with their “useless” education. Far from a pointless indulgence for the elite, liberal education is, in fact, the most powerful tool we have to subvert the hierarchies of social privilege that keep those who are down, down."

"Rescuing Socrates: How the Great Books Changed My Life and Why They Matter for a New Generation" by Roosevelt Montas: https://a.co/4O2orUP