Re(5): awakening

Hello,

I had actually typed this response over a month ago (September 27, to be precise), but never posted it because it seemed to me wise at the time: I did not want to be contentious or appear to be engaging in some kind of intellectual one-upmanship. However, every time I think of Socrates being accused of not championing women, it makes me cringe. Finally, I absolutely had to break down and post my original reply for my own mental health:

Being a light unto myself implies that I must search within myself for the truth. That may not be entirely false for we all have to in the end decide for ourselves what is true or false (whether in truth we be right or wrong). However, being a light unto oneself carries with it the implication that we are the sources of own light: that there is no source of light higher. For the Buddha, that would have been the truth, for the problem of humanity has nothing to do with good and evil, it has to do with ignorance. To know oneself is to know that there really is nothing higher than myself, for all things are in a state of flux. Buddha would have made Heraclites proud, for the Buddha would have resoundingly agreed that one never steps in the same river twice, not only because it is not the same river but likewise because it is not the same foot. This belief system, however, is in direct opposition with monotheism, in that it posits transience as the absolute. Transience cannot be the ultimate reality of the universe and an absolute God likewise be the ultimate reality at the same time, for this would make transience higher than God, who is by definition “that which nothing is greater than.”

Socrates sought to know himself, but he was no Buddha. He fluctuated between seeming agnosticism and belief, though in the Apology, he clearly sees himself in pursuit of God—likely Zeus personified as nous (Pure Mind) if we could read the original Greek. This inner daemon you mention was not “reason” per se, but a voice of the gods that gave him counsel. [The descriptions of this daemon in the Apology lead me to believe it was a true voice or else Socrates believed it to be; in other words, either he was in contact with a spirit or else he was suffering from a form of schizophrenia or hallucination. Some contemporary scholars also argue that he had a kind of epilepsy: I don’t remember the exact type now.] Also, while none of the ancients took issue with slavery and Aristotle even legitimized it to some degree, you misread Socrates if you say that he did not give a much higher degree of equality to women than is common in the ancient world. Re-read sections 450c–457b of the Republic again: remember the equal co-ed bathhouses and equal co-ed training and the recognition that while women might be physically weaker they were otherwise equals? Or, if you prefer the cliff notes version, see The Equality of Women from Molloy College in Rockville Centre, New York.

And what of Theano of Crotona, wife of Pythagoras and fellow mathematician that kept his school running after his death? Socrates and Plato were cotemporaneous with this time period and believed women had equal powers of reasoning, or at least were quite capable when circumstances allowed them to have equal training.

In any case, this is neither an apology for Socrates nor an attempt to discredit him, but simply the recognition that he was what he was, the Buddha was what he was, and monotheism is what it is. While there are similarities to be found between them, they do not all present the same message and to read them in this way would be revisionist. We may call them equal if we wish, I suppose, but if we do (in addition to being discourteous to them), we lose our bargaining power in being able to compare and contrast their ideas.

To finish up my thought, Socrates was surely no sexist. In fact, his student Plato (for it was his quill and ink that have been passed down to us and not his mentor’s) has long been described as the great, great, great, great, great godfather of feminism, give or take a few “greats.” As for slavery, his student Aristotle [in Politics] believed it to be a state of nature with certain barbarous people: a result of the influence of their inferior culture upon them, among other things. In other words, part of society’s role for Aristotle was to produce virtuous citizens—able to rule and be ruled just as a general starts out a private before climbing the military ranks—and in barbarous states, the citizens lacked this kind of cultural refinement and their societies turned out inferior people. We may not agree with that justification of why some people deserve to be slaves—we probably would argue strongly about that “deserve” part—but at the least, Socrates and his followers were no ignoramuses peculiarly unenlightened. In fact, I would go so far as to argue that if it were not for these men, much of what many call good today would have never happened. We may fault them for their breach of faith in relegating the gods to their “reservation” on top of Mount Olympus, but it was precisely this kind of relegation and pursuit of reason that cleared the way for much of our society today, not the least of which the emancipation of women. Conversely, others have argued that Christ showed an amazing acceptance of women Himself, and that the Greco-Roman and Judeo-Christian streams combined together to create the new world in which we live today.

God bless,
Eric

God in the Re-Creative Silence