scumbag Socrates
I remember starting to study philosophy in search of answers.
When you get into philosophy, and even before entering it, you already have a philosophical position, it is your own personal way of living things.
As you study, for example, the writings of ancient Greece, you usually part from a man recognized as the forerunner, the first of its kind: Socrates.
Socrates history is a little like that of Jesus Christ, in the sense that we do not have anything directly from him, we do not have evidence of his existence, only of his disciples, in my case, Plato and then Aristotle through Plato.
So you've probably heard many stories of Socrates, I got to hear a Venezuelan politician cite him in a shameless attempt to look smart, for those who have a minimum of general culture, he got the opposite result, he looked like a fool.
But really Socrates never wrote anything, as far as we know, he could have been nothing more than a delirious bum who inspired several intellectuals and talented speakers / writers who later developed his teachings and spread them around the world.
But we do have some more or less concrete things about Socrates, for example, the "I only know that I know nothing". Think of the magnificence of this thought, which even after 2 thousand years still bounces between human minds, I find it fascinating.
There are some descriptions and sculptures of his appearance, we can say that he was a short, ugly guy with bulging eyes (much more than we can say about Jesus, although he is continually portrayed as a handsome man with blue eyes)
That beard tho, fancy!
Still, his existence is hard to believe, because his life was the life of an extraordinary human being. But what is so special about him? I believe that the most important aspect of Socrates story is that everything he did he did within the capabilities of any human being.
Socrates is not surrounded by supernatural events, it is not believed that he returned sight to a blind man or that he multiplied fish.
He does not demand faith in people, he demands reason.
The only thing people seem to recognize unanimously about Socrates is that he influenced the thinking of others, nothing more. And in the end, he would be condemned to death precisely for this reason, his influence.
So, to not go deeper and make this article readable, I'm going straight to the point.
Philosophy raised questions at its beginning that would not find a concrete, satisfactory or sufficient response after long years of reflection. That's right, the issues philosophers trated at the beginning are the same as the issues now, but different things were believed along the way.
For example, the relationship between soul and body, human identity, the meaning of life, morality, ethics, matter, time.
They are all concepts that are constantly reeling, everyone has their version, there are some that are wrong, but there is not a correct one version. What is achieved with philosophy can never be a traight answer, but the meaning of the answer, the importance or the rules to think the answer.
Immanuel Kant
It looks more like mathematics. Why do I say this? Let's look at maths problems for example. When we solve equations we see that the result is already given, we have the variables previous to the "=" and the result or the subsequent to the "=".
We get to give an answer to the equation, for example:
2x - 2 = 4this we know,
2x = 4 + 2 therefore,
2x = 6 finally,
x = 3
But what is really learned in mathematics, what really has value for us, is not that x = 3, but the process by which we decode the functions, trying to clarify the unknowns and simplifying complex operations, making them smaller to understand them better and analyze how the different variables are related.
This is philosophy too, it is not about really knowing what we live for or how we should live, but the process that is taken to get to the result, to get to think the result.