From: Jasper
Date: March 23, 2006
Time: 06:01 PM
Jean, … Socrates was my first hero outside of my family. Somehow I missed the passage from the teaching that you quoted but if you know the man you know that it fits. ……… Socrates was not a writer. He was a soldier, a philosopher and teacher. He learned from his experiences and developed a method of going beyond “popular wisdom” and his own beliefs to get at the truth. The method was simple. State the proposition as clearly and concretely as possible, expose the underlying assumptions, then challenge them. You invariably get into a lot of messy details that usually lead to contradictions and confusion. That’s what I did with all of the theories I could find to explain the Bundy murders. Contradictions and confusion is what I got. ……….. This was not a bad thing to Socrates, who was just as happy to learn that he didn’t know what he thought he did. Any teacher who ever had had a student who “new everything” from day one knows why Soc was right. ………. Socrates’ student Plato was a writer. I often wondered how many “Socrates” quotes were really Plato’s interpretation of what his teacher actually said or what Plato thought he would have said under the circumstances he described. I don’t think it would have mattered to Socrates as long as Plato go the essence of his teaching right. ……… A huge difference between the Socratic method and mine is the way the Socratic method can be used to “win” debates. Lawyers do it to trick their opponents into going down a road that leads to only one logical conclusion (the lawyer’s) and to one or more contradictions (the opponent’s). Socrates loved to debate and he never questioned debating as a way for people with an agenda other than to find the truth to obscure it. ……….. This perversion of the “Old Soc” method works like magic on most people because most people don’t question anything that appears obvious to them. They invariably assume that anyone who doesn’t accept the obvious as true must be dishonest, delusional or stupid. Most of all, people who question conventional wisdom are dangerous. We were not the first independent thinkers and we won’t be the last to be offered a cup of hemlock. –Jasper