July 2nd 2009

    Why Socrates chose hemlock, when the alternative was exile, is in my view, a tribute to stubbornness.  

    Naturally it is romantic to follow Plato's version of events.  A man dedicated to an understanding of life in which the role of individual becomes sublimated to an idea of a created real.  In this romantic view, I argue, Jesus and Socrates are one and the same.  What actually happens is something very different.

    It is the "F-you" moment, and I suspect it is one insufficiently understood.  For Socrates and Jesus, Hemlock and the cross were vengeance.  In one context they were the suicide bombers of their respective coteries.  In another context they were deluded. 

   I can hear mutters from the back row.  The noise of self righteous nonsense emerging from our great cathedrals of understanding.  Those worrying refuges of both received and constructed truth.

    Too bad reasonableness as wisdom has so little to do with reasonableness as the real.  The "F-you" moment contains assumptions which are apolitical in nature.  This moment does not actually belong to a set of shared ideas.  More accurate to place the "F-you" moment in the "I that is me".  An "I" that has a point to make with the adamancy of vengeance.  Gray areas are gone, it becomes either "yes" or "no".

    And here, for those who choose death, better to think of it as stubbornness, rather than attach to it words like noble, or savior, or martyr, or the good. 

     A cathedral of understanding rigorously disciplines thinking.  Few are persuaded to chose careers as a dead man in their pursuit of the "I".  Otherwise the sky would occasionally rain dead people.  A Circumstance, the cynical might suggest, occurs with the regularity of a process.

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