PHILOSOPHICAL WRITINGS

WAITING FOR SOCRATES

TIMES ARE BAD

As one noted thinker has said: "What is happening to our young people? They disrespect their elders, they disobey their parents. They ignore the law. They riot in the streets inflamed with wild notions. Their morals are decaying. What is to become of them?" Was he speaking about the youth in England rioting in the streets of London?

Can you blame that thinker for lamenting the state of young people? They have consistently been taught that they are nothing more than mere matter, no better than the animals. In fact, monkeys are only one chromosone away from being human. (It is easy to believe when you see the way some humans act.) Everything is relative. There is no absolute right and wrong; rather everything is a matter of mere personal opinion in which one person's opinion is as good as another person's. Why not riot if rioting is not wrong? Why restrict sex to the marriage bed? Rather, why not bed any and every willing person regardless of gender?

Such is the times we live in. Yet the great thinker who penned that lament is not alive today. In fact, he has been dead over 2,000 years. His name, Plato, the most famous and most influential philosopher of our Western Heritage. This thinker, and his mentor Socrates, faced nearly the exact same situation we face today, and yet through their sheer insight and wisdom, they were able to change the face of Western Civilization for over 2,000 years.

But everything eventually comes full circle. We are now faced almost with the same situation they faced. Just like Socrates and Plato appeared at the right time, so we hope the time is right for another Socrates to emerge on the scene. We are truly waiting for another Socrates.

SOCRATES' CONTRIBUTION--There are Absolutes in Life

One o fthe most important contributions Socrates made to our civilization was the idea that absolutes truly exist. This was really revolutionary for his time because most of the philosophers before him (the pre-Socratics) promoted the idea that everything was in flux, that is, everything is relative. Their claim came from the fact that they believed that all of life was material. For example, Thales believed that everything was ultimately made of water. Well, what does water do? It can change from water to ice to steam and back to water again. Flux. OTHER PRESOCRATICS AND THEIR VIEWS OF A STRICTLY MATERIAL UNIVERSE AND ITS STATE OF FLUX.. Flux is such an element of matter that Buddha saw nearly all of life as one of flux, change. His desire was to be able to escape this world of flux and merge into Nirvana, complete stillness, no flux, no change.

The idea of flux and change is not restricted to the ancients. The theory of relativity, proposed by Albert Einstein and demonstrated by Sir Arthur Eddington1, showed that gravity "bends" matter. If everything is matter, then everything, including ethics, is "bendable" or relative too.

If everything is material, then everything is relative, everything is bendable; HOWEVER, Socrates rejected that ultimate reality is relative. Rather, it is absolute. He promotes this in one of the most famous illustrations in all of philosophy, The Cave.

The cave. Footnotes 1Sir Arthur Eddington demonstrated during a solar eclipse, during which you can actully get a view of the stars normally overpowered by the sun, that "stars with light rays that passed near the Sun would appear to have been slightly shifted because their light had been curved by its gravitational field" (Wikpedia, "Arthur Eddington").