Socrates...What if?

That the foundations of the Western intellectual tradition may rest on a military moment is a notion that somemay find unsettling; its potential consequences are even more so. Philosophy as we know it was "nearly aborted" one late autumn afternoon in 424 B.C. in "an accidental battle in a failed campaign in a backwater theater of the Peloponnesian War," the twenty seven year old long struggle between Athens and Sparta. At the Battle of Delium, a ragtag Athenian contingent confronted a larger force from Thebes, an ally of the Spartan confederacy. One middle-aged infantryman from Athens was Socrates, a philosopher whose reputation was as yet uncertain. Service in war was an obligation of citizenship, and Greek men from the ages of eighteen to sixty could expect to experience in their lifetimes at least two or three episodes of concentrated terror; Socrates had already fought in two campaigns. What if he, like several hundred of the men he fought with at Delium, had been ridden down and skewered as he tried to flee Athens?
What if Socrates had not lived another quarter of a century, the period of is greatest influence? Or if he had not been alive to meet, and teach, the young Plato --who, without Socrates may have become a politician or a poet and not a philosopher? Beyond leaving an excessive number of corpses to rot, that encounter at Delium may have decided nothing. Stiill, if it had counted one more Athenian victim the entire course of Western philosophical beliefs and political thought would have been radically changed.

Opinions, What if socrates really died?

Very, very good questions.

I remember reading that Socrates was reported to have been the last man to give up ground to the Sparticans...and that he held them off with his glare.

I like to believe that eventually, there would have arisen a new Socrates had we lost the first. Maybe Plato WOULD have become something of what he ended up, without Socrates. Less, but still, a philosopher. I think that the loss of a single person, no matter their contribution, causes a delay of development, but not extinguishing.

Oh thank god, i got a reply!

I think a new Socrates would have arisen in the form of Plato too, he had a lot of potential and could have steered himself towards his own destiny, still its nice to imagine "what if?" and i have a few other scenarios in my head lined up too.

Well, share them by all means. I would be very interested in following this "thought experiment".

Um, you are kinda forgeting the eastern philosophies that dated back long before socrates was born, and the philosophers that came before socrates, such as Zeno(who in my opinion, is one of the greatest philosophers).
Plato would have become a great philosopher even without Socrates' influence. I dont like to get into "what if?" questions, as they are pointless. There are innumerable what ifs to consider, "what if the dinosaurs werent wiped out?", "what if the first mammal got stepped on by a brontosaur", "what if blah blah blah." There are so many potential realities that could have existed because of some minute detail it is purposeless to even talk about them unless you are an alternative history buff.

XAOS

Velocity,
actually, I think that this is an awesome question. Some, in fact many, would argue that western society has yet to fully 'examine itself'... so I seriously doubt if the full meaning of socrates has yet to be realized... But, certainly, without socrates Plato, and thus aristotle, would probably have never reached his unique position, in terms of metaphysics, and, as a result, it may not have been until the middle ages that people like Thomas Aquinas could have developed a concept of the detached, objective self that can analyze concepts as a mind above personal history...

However, at the same time, many 'democratic' and republican notions were very well developed before socrates, in both Greece and Italy (and in Germania and gaul, BTW), So I doubt that Socrates' non-existence would have had any effect, at all, on political philosophy. AS it stands, Socrates spured the man who, in turn, educated the man who laid the froundwork for the functional systems of logic we use today... So, his non-existence, at the very least, would have stalled the development of western logic by a few decades.

Jim

BTW: Those who say that 'eastern philosophy' would have covered for him have obviously never read plato or a work by an eastern philosopher (as the concept of the objective self is entirely... Greek in origin, though the thoughts leading to it are eastern).

Uh, I just came in from a night out with my people, so pardon the sloppiness, above, that I usually despise on this board. To correct myself, I meant to say that, without socrates:

1)the Concept of the 'self', as an entity detached from all other conscious beings, might not exists in the world, or... this concept may not have appeared until the middle ages (my thinking, here, is based on philogistic data).

2)Political ethics would have evolved, without socrates, as they normally did, as they were already well-along when he entered the scene.

and
3)Eastern philosophies, though they added to western thought, did NOT encompass the ideas Plato attributes to Socrates. That is, the idea of the personal 'daemon', self-awareness, and objective categorization is NOT present in eastern philosophy prior to socrates (or, at least, Plato, who wrote 'for' socrates).

[Edited on 16-8-2003 by onlyinmydreams]

[Edited on 16-8-2003 by onlyinmydreams]

(setting aside the fact that Delium was actually the second of Socrates' 3 campaigns and he still had another battle to fight), "what if's" are usually dubious little beasties; but this has its attractions.
It's hard to dodge the matter that we know nothing of Socrates beyond what Plato, on the one hand, gives us -and how far is he simply a "mouthpiece" for Plato - and Aristophanes on the other:who suggests that S was a comical and morally reprehensible charlatan.
We have no way of knowing much about the pre-Socratics: exactly what Zeno, Heracleitus or Parmenides taught; but the fact that their names endured along with fragments of their thinking suggests that there was already fertile soil for Plato -with or without Socrates - and it's hard to imagine the comprehensive genius of Aristotle being dependent upon any single person.
The "icon" of Socrates is enormously powerful: the physically unprepossessing dialectician, the hemlock, the injustice: a template for the "philosophical life" that we have yet to abandon. But I suggest that the Western tradition would have developed much as it has done, whatever the amount of genuine Socrates was, or wasn't, in the works of Plato.

Estragon

Yes.

And the contributions of such 'luminaries' as Henry Ford and Hugh Hefner have further steered the bark of 'western tradition' in the past 100 years.

There are more revolutions in thought and counter-thought (and disinformation) each year than there were in the first millennium.

Well, when you take into account that we basically have two sources for the accounts of Socrates' life:

Plato (writer of dramas)
and Xenophon (historical novels)

we're in dire straits to determine what portions of Socrates' life were historically recorded and just fictionalized.



[Edited on 16-8-2003 by Valhall]

In regards to sources,
I have no doubt that Plato added more to socrates' thinking than S himself said in his life... However, the extreme differences between pre-socratics and the post-socrates would imply that some type of intellectual breakthrough did occur in Socrates' lifetime... I mean, there are many concepts in the writings of Plato that were neither foreshadowed or inspired by the presocratics (with the exception of Pythagoras, of course... a thinker with ideas plato was familiar with).

As for Xenophon... I think that various historians have shown that X was probably just a well-connected, wealthy patron of Socrates', an aristocratic military officer who 'dabbled' in philosophy. In this case, even if Socrates was debating the finer points of metaphysics, it is doubtful that Xenophon would have picked up on anything besides S' easy to remember aphorisms.

One is, based on the surviving texts themselves, forced to conclude that either Socrates WAS revolutionary... Or that Plato was abnormally gifted and capable of formulating complex concepts we still use today without any preceding, lead-in, concepts. Really, if you read the works of the pre-socratics, there is a quantum leap between them and Plato.

What if Einstein never came over, and was on Hitler's team instead???

Originally posted by Gazrok
What if Einstein never came over, and was on Hitler's team instead???

Einstein was Jewish.

XAOS

It is a moot point what contribution Socrates and his pupils Plato and Aristotle made to the western intellectual canon, but they certainly didn't invent philosophy.

Philosophy as an ordered inquiry into the nature of truth was already well established in the early empirical science of Heraclitus as well as in the structured ethical jurisprudence of Solon.

It is worth remembering that Socrates was eventually executed as an enemy of the Athenian state. Lysias, a generation or so later, drops heavy hints that Socrates' crime may have been his support of anti-democratic military juntas in the city. if you consider just how fascist an administration Plato advocates in 'The Republic' this is well credible.

We could certainly have managed without Socrates. we might even have done better.

That is just me though.

[Edited on 10-11-2003 by maynardsthirdeye]

No one else has any thoughts? I found this topic rather interesting.