"He does not call for a revolutionary overthrow of the aristocracy and for the subsequent installation of a worker’s city-state in Athens, but he does question the root values which allow the Athenian aristocracy to sustain its position of power. Socrates was killed because, as Cornel West says of Jesus, he was 'running out the money changers.'"
Projecting modern issues and attitudes in too mechanical a fashion is easy to do. If we look back and see anticipations of the bourgeois in the tradesmen and handicraftsmen of the ancient city, we should also look back and see anticipations of feudal lords too. Like physical distance, the distance in time makes clear vision quite difficult, I think. People are people but the variety in personalities so often overlooked in daily life today can be obliterated when trying to interpret the surviving records of the past.
For instance, as I recall there is a dialogue where Socrates questions a man who is charging his father (what we would call an aristocrat, a propertied citizen in a world with widespread slavery,) for abuse that led to the death of a poor man. As ever the point of Socratic questioning is to question. That is, to demonstrate that this man who would apply some foolishly abstract and ill-conceived standard of justice against his own father did not know he did not know. It appears likely Socrates refused to teach for pay because such vulgarity was as incompatible with true virtue as being a vulgar moneygrubber is.
Was Socrates really undermining the moral values that supported aristocracy? Was Plato's cousin Critias, a pupil of Socrates and perhaps the main leader of the Thirty ("Tyrants" they were called) undermined in his aristocracy, or was he liberated from custom by Socratic questioning? Was Socrates' student Alcibiades, another eminent aristocrat, no less than an Alcmaeonid and cousin of Pericles himself, yet also a renegade who at one point fled to Sparta, taught that his aristocracy incarnated values that were not true moral knowledge? Plato makes much of Socrates refusing to help the Thirty capture one Leon, but was this genuinely defiance, or passing on an opportunity for advancement? How can we know which, now?
I.F. Stone's The Trial of Socrates presents another case, widely rejected by those who see Socrates' as philosophy's martyr. But perhaps that issue is too remote to spend much time on.
"He does not call for a revolutionary overthrow of the aristocracy and for the subsequent installation of a worker’s city-state in Athens, but he does question the root values which allow the Athenian aristocracy to sustain its position of power. Socrates was killed because, as Cornel West says of Jesus, he was 'running out the money changers.'"
Projecting modern issues and attitudes in too mechanical a fashion is easy to do. If we look back and see anticipations of the bourgeois in the tradesmen and handicraftsmen of the ancient city, we should also look back and see anticipations of feudal lords too. Like physical distance, the distance in time makes clear vision quite difficult, I think. People are people but the variety in personalities so often overlooked in daily life today can be obliterated when trying to interpret the surviving records of the past.
For instance, as I recall there is a dialogue where Socrates questions a man who is charging his father (what we would call an aristocrat, a propertied citizen in a world with widespread slavery,) for abuse that led to the death of a poor man. As ever the point of Socratic questioning is to question. That is, to demonstrate that this man who would apply some foolishly abstract and ill-conceived standard of justice against his own father did not know he did not know. It appears likely Socrates refused to teach for pay because such vulgarity was as incompatible with true virtue as being a vulgar moneygrubber is.
Was Socrates really undermining the moral values that supported aristocracy? Was Plato's cousin Critias, a pupil of Socrates and perhaps the main leader of the Thirty ("Tyrants" they were called) undermined in his aristocracy, or was he liberated from custom by Socratic questioning? Was Socrates' student Alcibiades, another eminent aristocrat, no less than an Alcmaeonid and cousin of Pericles himself, yet also a renegade who at one point fled to Sparta, taught that his aristocracy incarnated values that were not true moral knowledge? Plato makes much of Socrates refusing to help the Thirty capture one Leon, but was this genuinely defiance, or passing on an opportunity for advancement? How can we know which, now?
I.F. Stone's The Trial of Socrates presents another case, widely rejected by those who see Socrates' as philosophy's martyr. But perhaps that issue is too remote to spend much time on.