The Misunderstood Awards seek to accolade those champions of the human soul who have, either through hard work or mere brightness, advanced human thought and philosophy beyond the limits in which they lived, just to be held by common sense as having said and argued something completely different from what they believed and proposed. Paraphrasing Kipling, they have the truth they spoke being twisted by knacks to make a trap for fools.
This year the award goes to:
Socrates
Of course, we mostly know Socrates through the writings of Plato. And the way Plato understood everything is completely at odds with what Socrates thought. Not that we actually have any proof — and the issue has been rehashed ad nauseam — but you have to be a little stupid not to notice how stupid Plato was in his appropriation of his so-called teacher.
Platonists believe in Perfect-Universal-Ideas. The usual example is taken from geometry: A triangle made of wood will never be perfectly triangular, but the idea of a triangle is both perfect and universal.
Because they believe in P-U-Ideas they feel the thinker grasps more reality than the doer. The doer knows but a single triangle, while the thinker knows every single motherfscking triangle in the history of the universe. That is a lot of triangles! But it is very important to understand that this judgement comes from their belief, not the other way around. Because they want to believe in P-U-Is they conclude that thinking is better than doing. Not the other way around!
The judgement isn’t wrong, nor is it right either. It is just a badly formulated question. We can provide lots of definitions of “reality” that make it one way or the other. And all those definitions look good, none of them provable or disprovable, in an endless reproduction of words that is very similar to not knowing anything. If you want to believe in Perfect-Universal-Ideas, you can pick the definition of reality that stands for “that which the thinker grasps more of”. But, in a way, we just don’t really know what reality is.
Of course, the thinker in the origin of this fable was Socrates. Plato believed Socrates could grasp more of reality than his peers. Maybe he did, we can not know. It would still be impossible to know it even with a time machine.
For Plato, Socrates was living proof that P-U-Is existed. Plato even believed that Socrates grasped more of reality than himself (which conveniently would make him discount any arguments about his own way of thinking).
We do not have any reason to believe that Socrates would agree with any of that, though. First of all, he pretty much says so himself, when he affirms to “only know that I know nothing”. You can interpret it in many ways, but to say that this means he believes that thinking it better than doing, or that ideas are perfect and universal, or that truth is independent from experience, is just stupid. I mean, the obvious straightforward way to interpret it is that he does things even though he does not know things in advance. There might be abstruse complex other ways to interpret it, but since they do go against the obvious, there should be a very good reason to go there. Otherwise you are being silly.
The very method of asking questions depends on valuing the other person’s experience, the other’s own circumstantial point of view, instead of ideas. Maybe he valued thought, but certainly not in preference to doing, and certainly not P-U-Is in preference to understanding what is in front of you.
You see, Socrates was not a thinker, he was a doer that liked to think. That is what it means to value Ethics, in the Ancient Greek sense: to know the good way to do stuff. He was an artisan, he fought in wars. He went out there, he never constrained himself to his own little world, as Plato did.
So, Socrates tends to deal in localised and contingent ideas, not perfect universal ones. The opposite of Plato. Whom, of course, liked to put words in the mouth of Socrates.
Now suppose you understood how problematic the distinction between thinker and doer is, and a fanboy of yours came up with some crazy highfalutin idea that you yourself is the one thinker that grasps perfect universal ideas.
What would you do?
If you argue for the importance of experience, you can count on the smartypants fanboy latching on the doer as a source of some kind of Perfect Universal reliability-stuff. You know, because you can see his belief in P-U-Is is a moral choice that precedes any thinking that they made.
Instead, you might try to go into how (exactly) the who-grasps-more-reality contest rests on a badly formulated question. Into how so many things we take for reality turn out to be circumstantial. Say how a Brazilian would take it for unreal that water would be a solid while a Norseman would think unreal to expect water to dry.
If you had a bent for sci-fi, you might even try to construe an artificial world where your fanboy’s favourite ideas are obviously wrong. Or, better yet, obviously over-valued.
This sci-fi world is, of course, the Allegory of the Cave: Plato loves his geometric shapes. Where would you find a world in which people valued geometric shapes more than actual real things? Well, shadows look like geometric shapes — a head looks like a circle when it is projected into a wall. You can’t see hairs or details or color in the shadow, you can only see a shape. In fact, the word for “drawing something with geometric shapes” is “projecting”.
Even if someone argues that shadows are infinitely detailed, the shadow of the head not being a circle but an infinite amount of curves, it is still less detailed than the real head, which has not only an infinite amount of curves, but an infinite amount of volumes, of colours, of smells and so on, none of which exists in the shadow. The shadow is, very clearly, a simplification of the world.
So if someone could only see shadows, he would think geometry is much more important than the real world. He would think a triangle is perfect, and would consider imperfect the wood of which such a triangle is made of. He would think the woodcrafter betrays the true shape of the table.
If you wanted to make Plato understand how much of a fool he was, you could come up with a fancy story of someone who lived all his life seeing only shadows. That would be a joke, you are making fun of Plato the lover-of-perfect-triangles.
Of course Plato, being a fool, would refuse to take the hint. Never underestimate incompetence.
And of course, feudal Europe having nothing better to read than Plato for 400 years, the view that the shadows do not represent geometry, but the real world, and that the real world in the cave allegory actually represents not the real world but geometry, well, it became canon. To suggest otherwise is to say something very strange. To say that Socrates was actually making a fool out of Plato sounds preposterous. Socrates is believed to agree with his stupid fanboy.
And therefore, this year the Misunderstood Award goes to Socrates.
Truth of the Lesser Men 