Hello everyone, here is a small broadcast reading, today let us continue to read this classic book of Western philosophy: A Brief History of Western Philosophy.
The mention of Socrates must have been heard of by many people, and may be familiar with them. Born in 469 BC and died in 399 BC, Socrates was one of the "Three Sages of Ancient Greece", a famous thinker, philosopher and educator in ancient Greece, and is widely regarded as the founder of Western philosophy. But Socrates did not leave any writings during his lifetime, so our understanding of Socrates is not very accurate, mostly from the works of his two students Xenophon and Plato, but the eyes of these two disciples are very different from those of Socrates.
One of Socrates' disciples was Xenophon, who was born in 440 BC and was a famous philosopher and historian of ancient Greece, who wrote such works as "Memories of Socrates" and "The Long March". In His Remembrance of Socrates, Xenophon describes how he was miserable when Socrates was accused of moral corruption and misleading youth; he firmly believed that Socrates was morally high and would not mislead. His defense of Socrates is too mundane, and there is no mention of why Socrates is hated. But precisely because Xenophon was conservative and ordinari, those who believed him thought he would not lie.
In the eyes of others, Socrates was a strangely behaved man, even a little epileptic, Socrates looked ugly, and always ragged, walked barefoot, did not care what others thought, walked the streets of Athens all day to find people to argue, often said that others were dumb. He rarely drank, but he drank so much that he never got drunk. He controls his body with his soul and resists desire, even love is "platonic". From these descriptions, Socrates has a shadow of the future Stoics and Cynicism. The Stoics believed that virtue was paramount, while the Cynics despised the lives of the rich. Socrates' ragged clothes all day fit this point.
In the eyes of Plato, another of Socrates' students, Socrates was a completely different person. In the Apology, Plato portrayed a confident, free,sublime socrates socrates. In 399 BC, Socrates was accused by an Athenian youth of corrupting the youth and not believing in the athenian gods, and after hundreds of Athenian referendums, Socrates was eventually sentenced to death. Plato is said to be on the scene and records the entire process of Socrates' sentencing and execution.
It is said in Plato's Clemento. Some of Socrates' disciples and friends had planned to take Socrates to the Tessaria. But Socrates did not escape, and he did not think that he could escape whether the verdict was fair or not. He made a statement that would later become a Christian teaching: "We cannot complain no matter how others treat us. Socrates decided to stay and accept the death penalty. Even before his death, Socrates was allowed to talk to relatives and friends, and he cut off his weeping wife so that the conversation would not be disrupted.
Socrates told his friends and students that philosophical people are not afraid of death, but they cannot commit suicide, because suicide is illegal. He also explained why, saying that people are like prisoners, time is like prison, and prisoners cannot escape from prison without permission. He also compares man to cattle and horses, god to shepherd, and no shepherd wants his cows and horses to die, which has obvious Christian ideas.
Socrates believed that death was nothing more than the separation of the soul from the body. This is in line with Plato's view that beauty and ugliness, good and evil, reason and feeling, soul and body are all one-to-one correspondence. Before Socrates was executed, he left a sentence: When the time comes, we will go our separate ways, whether it is better to live in this world, or to die and go to another world, only God knows the answer. Socrates believed that the soul was immortal and believed in a better life in another world.
Socrates believed that the body and the soul can be separated, and that the average person will take the pleasure of the body as the sole purpose of living, while the philosopher will separate the body and the soul, and he advocated that the philosopher should not become a slave to desire, should not indulge in the pleasure of the body, but should pay more attention to his soul. Furthermore, he believes that those who possess noble souls are those who are virtuous.
Socrates also believed that only when the mind abandons the joy of the flesh can it discover the best thoughts, the truth, the good, the beauty, the justice, and the essence of things. These are invisible to the eye, and only the mind can appreciate them. He believes that what we see with our eyes and what our ears hear is not real, that the body is an obstacle to the acquisition of knowledge, that what is really in knowledge is experienced through the mind, not the body. But apparently, this view negates the possibility that science can be obtained through observation and experimentation.
Regarding knowledge, Socrates insisted that knowledge comes from memory, and it is hidden deep in the depths of everyone's heart. Socrates' mother was a midwife, and he himself considered himself a spiritual midwife, so he often asked questions and answers to enlighten others' minds and help others discover the knowledge that was originally in their hearts. One day Socrates asked a slave a question about geometry, and the slave gave the answer, leading him to conclude that the slave had knowledge of geometry but did not know it himself. Thus he concludes that wisdom has always been lurking in man's heart, but we ourselves do not yet know it.
Socrates famously said, "The only thing I know is that I know nothing."
One day, Socrates asked a young man, "Is there an egg or a chicken in the world?" The young man replied without hesitation: "The chicken hatches from the egg, and naturally there is the egg first!" But Socrates asked, "The egg is laid by the chicken." Without chickens, where do the eggs come from? The young man thought about it again and said, "Then there are chickens first!" Socrates still asked, "You have just said that chickens hatch from eggs. Where do the chickens come from without eggs? The young man began to get a little impatient, and asked, "Then do you say that there are eggs or chickens first?" Socrates replied honestly, "I don't know." The young man smiled and said, "In this way, you are actually similar to me!" Socrates said, "No, you know by not knowing, I am unaware by not knowing." ”
This means that there is a big difference between the young man not knowing his ignorance and Socrates knowing that he is ignorant, and Socrates believed that knowing his ignorance is the greatest wisdom. That's it: The only thing I know is that I don't know anything. It's common to say that you know you're ignorant, but admitting your ignorance is no small thing, it takes courage and wisdom.
This way of deriving truth and knowledge through this question-and-answer dialogue is typical of Socrates' method of questioning and answering, and even when he taught his own disciples, he also adopted this method, so that his student Plato, when he established the school teaching, also retained this traditional "question-and-answer" teaching method, which has been used to this day and is often used in our classrooms today. Socrates' dialectical questioning and answering method was not invented by him, nor was he the first to use it, but is said to have been first used by Zeno, another great mathematician and philosopher of ancient Greece. Later Socrates also adopted this method and extended it to the general extent.
Okay, let's briefly summarize today's content. Today we talk about what kind of person Socrates was. In the eyes of different people, there is a very different Socrates. In the eyes of some, Socrates was a strange thinker, wandering the streets of Athens all day in rags and debating with people; in the eyes of his student Xenophon, Socrates was a noble but ordinary man who would suffer in the face of death; and in the eyes of his student Plato, Socrates was a confident, free, and noble and rational man who would face death calmly and without fear. But in any case, these different characters have created a fuller and more three-dimensional image of Socrates, and they have not affected Socrates as the founder of Western philosophy and have a great influence on Western thought.
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