Mabus_Zero

It was only recently that I recoiled my brown nose from volumes and journals of Nietzsche to take a fresh look at the world. It was even more recently that I washed the brown from my nose. For you see, immediately after taking a fresh look at philosophy, I noticed something very unusual from the very beginning, about Plato's Socrates.

That was mostly just a splash of humor. I'm not going to pretend to be a subject matter expert, so please correct me if I make any glaring mistakes. Now here's the meat to your potatoes.

The general consensus is that Socrates was once a living person, roughly dating from the time of 470–399 BCE. From what could best be gathered from Plato's writings that don't sound like Plato, and from the crimes that he was accused of by his detractors was that his was a philosophy of Parsimony. Occam's Razor, if you will, and in the rawest sense. He would cut away at the arguments of rivals, and continue cutting away, until he'd forced them to contradict themselves, believing this contradiction, in a way, to be the starting point for working his way forward towards 'the truth'.

Deconstruction, in contrast to Plato's seeming philosophy of constructionism (don't use these two as philosophical terms, because I seem to remember them meaning different things entirely in that regard).

As such, he could not rightfully hold to such an approach of philosophy and still have said many of the things that Plato attributed to him, at least not as anything more then idle conjecture. But still, in works such as 'The Republic' we see Plato claiming that Socrates managed to persuade a slave boy to show his disciples the pythagorean principle (hypotenus-squared?), and the theory of forms. These sound more like Plato then Socrates.

But then how, you might ask, if a novice to this subject, or even for the sake of the protection of empiricism, do you differentiate Socrates from Plato? The character from the author?

To begin with, you can use other sources, such as Xenophon or Aristotle. For the sake of expediency, however, I will propose an analysis of the history of the writer.

For our object of analysis, I propose the story of the slave-boy. It is known that Plato studied under Pythagoras after the fateful incident of Socrates' trial and subsequent execution. Pythagoras was a philosopher who believed that numbers were the driving force behind the world, and that through an understanding on numbers, and their quality and meaning, that one could understand, or even control the world.

More constructionism, then Socrates' tendency to deconstruction.

But who cares about the main course, when desert is sweet and succulent?

The sweet morsel is the implications. The implications are that, regardless of Socrates' philosophy, to Plato, he eventually becomes little more then the literary device of a character with which to voice his opinions, not unlike Nietzsche's Zarathustra. Unlike Zarathustra, however, the genuine Socrates never wrote any of his own works. Or if he did, none of them have survived. So Socrates becomes little more to Plato then a character. His main character. A main character that, thanks to his verifiable martyrdom, is worth just that much more in providing justification to Plato's ideology, based on the ordinary custom of not questioning the dead out of respect, in short.

Worship of the dead provides the logical foundation for many pantheons and religions.

More then two thousand years ago, most in the western world believe that a man was born in Israel from an obscure branch of a noble line, and that he was imbued with divine authority by some manner of deity. According to stories, he is credited with speaking with and humiliating a number of self-ascribed 'wise-men' in private and public, and was later executed for pissing off at least one too many people.

Sound familiar?

'His followers' then went on to publish several works, which have since become the holy books of a religion that currently calls itself Christianity.

Jesus, when deconstructed, is little more then a Platonic Socrates figure, with additional divinity for fluff.

Merry Christmas.

lpetrich

While Socrates very likely existed, telling fact from fiction about him can be difficult, from the nature of our sources on him. Plato used him as a literary sock puppet, while Aristophanes was satirizing him and likely also philosophers in general.

So we don't have some sort of double standard where we are gaping-mindedly credulous about everything but the Bible; the questions that we ask about the authenticity of the sayings and actions attributed to Jesus Christ can be asked about Socrates and others.

Lógos Sokratikós

The sad story is that the historicity of a Jesus will be forever one big question mark, unless some detailed Sanhedrin official report on him is one day unearthed. Unlikely.

The good part is that we can live without him. A great amount of his opinions in the canonical gospels are essene anyway, so the "core" Jesus (as I call the possible historical Jesus behind the gospels) was probably an exceptional essene who decided to spread the spiritual developments of his ascetic sect to the outside world. So it's no great deal anyway. IMO.

Gamera

This conclusion fails to take into consideratons the differences between Socrates and Jesus. While Socrates generated a rich literature written by one man (there is a paucity of contemporary references to the man), Jesus generated a rich literature written by many people.

Further, the "accuracy" of Plato's depiction of Socrates is moot and was moot at the time -- it hardly matters to anybody whether Socrates invented Platonism or Plato did, since the point is Platonism, a philosphical assertion about the world, not whether the words were said by Socrates per se. In contast, the accuracy of the historical accounts of Jesus is significant and more importanly apparently was significant to many people who lived during and shortly after his death. Whether the Jesus narrative accurately depicted what Jesus claimed and what happened to him is the core of the gospel and hence Christianity. This would suggest that the earliest Christians had a stake in the accuracy of the depiction in a way that the first Platonists did not. Indeed, this must be the case because Luke goes out of his way in asserting that his account is accurate and based on witnesses. There is no similar claim in early Platonic literature because there was no problematic about historical accuracy. It simply didn't matter.

Lógos Sokratikós

Right you are. Because of the doctrine of Chirst's atonement, the historicity of Jesus Christ is paramount for Christianity. Big heap of a problem, since, well, you all know the problem with Christ's historicity.

Gamera

I think this fact rebuts your position, rather than supports it.

What's paramount is the narrative, which for the early church would have been an historical issue. I don't know if it has any significance to modern Christians. It doesn't for me.

I'm merely arguing the problematic of historicity existed in early Christianity, and that itself is evidence that the narrative is "accurate" to the extent that it was agreed upon, and not simply a fictionalization, as Plato's dialogs well may be. It didn't matter to Plato's followers one way or another. It did for Christians. This is evidence that there was a man name Jesus who made the claims the narratives say he made. Certainly that was something the early church was anxious about.

But like I say, all we have now, as modern Christians, is the narratives themselves. Nothing more. We are not similarly situated as the early Christians. So frankly the historicity of Jesus is virtually a meaningless concept to me, since history is simply narrative texts and nothing more.

Lógos Sokratikós

Actually, I see no way it can rebut my position, as you are not most Christians. The doctrine of Christ's atonement of sins depends on, well, if there actually was a Christ who died for people's sins and came back to life, rather than just died like anyone else, or never existed at all.

Your "it doesn't have any significance for me" is far from the orthodox (trinitarian) Christian position of any time, even today. Most Christians belong to churches for whom the historicity of Christ "has significance".

Gamera

My unorthodoxy really isn't the issue. The only thing modern Christians have is a text about Jesus. That's it. So appeals to historicity are misguided or naive whether from skeptics or Christians. What orthodox Christians mean, if they gave it any thought, would be what Paul said, and that is they accept the gospel (i.e., a narrative, a text), and that events about Jesus' life aren't the same as a text and never can be.

Now, I admit many Christians have naive views of history (just as you do) and conflate texts with events. But that doesn't change even orthodox Christianity's central concept, which is the gospel is the soul of Christianity, and the gospel is a linguistic artifact, not an event.

Lógos Sokratikós

Explain how my view of history is naïve, if you please.

Gamera

You have conflated events (which can be experienced) with texts about events (which can only be read, interpretated and analyzed).

The corpus of Christian scriptures are mss about events. Those events, whether they happened or not, can never be experienced one way or another. The mss can be read. That's it. That's what history is, a bunch of texts. That's what history always is, whether were talking about the Peloponesian wars or the life of Jesus. So history is a form of semiotics in which you evaluate texts. Its never a form of experience in which you evaluate events.

Now you can legitimately find the Christian texts meaningless to your life, just as most people find Tacitus meaningless to theirs. But it's not a difference in kind (one being "historical" and about real events, while the other being "religious.") It's a difference in your hermeneutics about these texts.