How can I walk in the shoes of Socrates?

[coberst]

How can I walk in the shoes of Socrates?

The following is an attempt to develop a means for us to empathesize with Socrates.

Many decades ago a professor of philosophy told me that “philosophy is about radically critical self-consciousness”. It was thirty years later that this statement began to make sense to me.

To become critically self-conscious is to tread on the path to a philosophical frame of mind. If you treat this imaginary problem that I lay out here as more than thoughtless past time you might begin to comprehend what that philosophy professor thinks philosophy is about.

Imagine that you and a thousand other people live deep in the isolated and frozen interior of Alaska. Imagine further that every one of you had been born colorblind and none had any idea what color was. Imagine further that you are an exercise nut and discovered, quite by accident, that if you performed a certain sequence of exercises you developed color perception.

What would you do?

If you tried to tell the others what would they do? Would you be able to convince any one of them to follow your example? How would you explain to them what you had accomplished?

Would they eventually kill you like the Athenians did Socrates?

[Griffith]

Socrates was a seducer, not a praiseworthy philosopher. He was responsible for the decadence of the greatest culture created by the humanity. Follow his steps is foolishness and degrading.

[billl]

I would ask them to pour a few drops of seal's blood on a patch of snow when I wasn't looking, and then point it out to them. If that didn't impress them, I'd try to create some balance of hues that, in a "shades-of-gray" environment, would appear to be identical, but would in actuality represent two very different colors (e.g. orange hunting camoflauge).

If, however, the idea of this thought-experiment is that it would be impossible to actually demonstrate the reality of colors to those who had not developed color-perception, then I would probably mention it to someone, and perhaps they would become interested in it. However, if there was no demonstrable utility to acquiring color-perception, I wouldn't worry too much about whether or not others developed it.

[AuntShecky]

I have been re-reading "The Trial of Socrates" by I.F. Stone in hopes of eventually writing something for the "Write a Book Review" forum here on the best web site in all the land.

I was surprised to learn --or maybe I had known but had forgotten -- that in the Cradle of Democracy, Socrates was very anti-democratic, for his ideology called for a "philosopher-king," that governments should be ruled by "one who knows." This presented a dilemma for I.F. Stone,
perhaps the most brilliant apologist for liberalism of the last century, but how would he look upon the execution of history's greatest opponent of democracy? Thrown into the mix is Stone's dedication to freedom of speech. The
resolution comes in Stone's highly-readable book.

But to your hypothetical scenario set in the frozen north: I think you're alluding to Socrates' (via Plato) allegory :"In the kingdom of the blind, the one-eyed man is king."
So should the person who acquires the skill to distinguish colors share it with the other members of the community, or should he use his color-distinguishing ability in order to keep his edge and remain king? Our twenty-first century
mind-set toward egalitarianism, would tend to make me think that the color-savvy person would teach the skills to others. On the other hand, many people seem very self-centured, discourteous, and acquisitive these days, so I really don't know what would actually happen in this scenario.

[Scheherazade]

How can I walk in the shoes of Socrates?Thought Socrates wore sandals...

:goof: