“And now I wish to prophesy to you, Athenians, who have condemned me. For I am going to die, and that is the time when men have most prophetic power. And I prophesy to you who have sentenced me to death that a far more severe punishment than you have inflicted on me will surely overtake you as soon as I am dead. You have done this thing, thinking that you will be relieved from having to give an account of your lives. But I say that the result will be very different. There will be more men who will call you to account…. And they will be harsher toward you than I have been, for they will be younger…. For if you think that you will restrain men from reproaching you for not living as you should, by putting them to death, you are very much mistaken. That way of escape is neither possible nor honorable. It is much more honorable and much easier not to suppress others, but to make yourselves as good as you can. This is my parting prophecy to you who have condemned me…”
I’ve talked about this parallel here before actually… still. It’s really striking in this passage. I could believe that Jesus is completely based on Socrates.
It’s kinda like when you sit at home for months and do nothing but watch movies. After a long enough period of time, you realize that there are only so many possible interactions between people and only so many ways of describing it, and you realize that all movies are pretty much the same. I mean…jesus could be based on socrates who was probably based on some other dude. When scientists say that there’s nothing new under the sun, or that matter can’t be created or destroyed or whatever, they fucking mean it. I just gave up on reading stories a long time ago for exactly this reason. The day I think someone can say something that I can’t totally predict I’ll change my mind.
Well, basically Socrates was the member of the aristocratic party which has made wars against the mob by leading them into wars. Aristocracy knew if there are no wars the mob will take over and eliminate them all. Only through wars was aristocracy needed by the mob, for financial and other reasons. The statement of Socrates was maybe based on an optimism that his party could win. But they have lost and gradually all have perished until the time of Demosthenes.
So, Socrates hope was not based on a heavenly force but on a real force on the ground and thus his hate was not futile by default. In the end all Greeks have perished because they have not “lived as they should”, i.e. non-decadent and ethically, i.e. non-nihilistic.
I don’t quite understand what you are saying here in toto, but I did not claim that his hate was futile. Neither was Jesus’ hate or resentment futile. He did actually inspire a lot of followers, as he claimed he would do, even if he did not exist.
Yes, but there are two types of revenge.
What Nietzsche calls the noble type commits it out of personal honor, family and clan, blood and loyalty. The slave type calls to an objective justice. Socrates could not have explicated his slavish nature more eloquently.
Jesus did not support the New testament.
I see the hate of the apostles as futile, because there is no true force that battles for them. The only Earthly that supports tales from the NT force was socialism, but that is still not their party because socialists persecute Christians too (because each of the socialists believes they are the Christian god and who doesn’t see that he must perish).
Christians hate army, church, police, court, … everything that is an Earthly institution. They have nothing from the Earth. And those who call themselves “Christian” and don’t think so must be deluded. There are more Christians on Woodstock from the 60’s protesting against the war, or on universities and in Discos than in the church. Even communists dream about anarcho-primitivist theories… One sees that their hopes are futile.
How would that help? The taking of distance in order to justify oneself is a sign that one knows that, close up, one is not really justified.
Surely, Socrates’ ideas of free speech are now hallowed by us. But he was a fanatical hypocrite with an agenda that he never expressed: rebellion.
The Greek state was in decay, and Socrates saw his chance fit - now his type would rule.
I can not argue with his hope nor his taste as they were his, and they came to be enforced. I am more concerned with that which was defeated in the process.
As there was loyalty.
But Socrates did not call to his clan for justice. He referred to his legacy as the objective truth.
Clever tactics surely. But infinities removed from the naturally privileged “we Greeks”.
To the clan, but not as the clan.
He feels it is time for an intellectual change.
The Greeks no longer justified their pride.
Aristocracy had to be seduced into a new type of self-valuing.
It is all justified along with writing its own moral code. However from a biological viewpoint, it is a decadent movement, and decadent tactics, and decadent views. A sublimation of weakening into a refuge - ‘justice’ - ‘Heaven matters more than Earth’. Before the Olympos was defiant.
Now, heaven was inescapably within the mind of the citizen.
How narrow suddenly, the quarters of the Gods!
"Good triumphs over “good” because it has found a new weapon: “good” is now “evil”. A new word.
To be fair there is a continuum between hubris and evil, and the Greeks of Socrates time must have been truly declining to even feel danger in such views. To even be able to conceive that oneself could be imagined objectively immoral requires a neurological alteration not to be underestimated. It could very well be that the Greeks became decadent in the procedure of de facto legalizing (“gedogen” as in Dutch) of the “Eleusian mysteries”.