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Manila Bulletin devider Drive devider Reading Socrates in this TikTok world

Reading Socrates in this TikTok world

Published Apr 14, 2022 07:00 pm
School of Athens from the Stanza della Segnatura, Fresco by Raffaello Sanzio of Urbino

Socrates, are you (for) real?

By Socratic method, may I challenge your truth

Like the truth of a star burning billions of light years away

For I have no more proof than the dialogues of Plato

Or the words of Xenophon

Or the writings of Aristotle in defence of you

Just as I have no evidence that the faraway star exists

Other than that I see it ablaze in the dark sky

As far as I can trust my eyes, the Athenians fed you hemlock 

They watched you walk to your death

They laughed when your knees began to buckle

As the poison claimed your body and released your soul

The law of retaliation, eye for an eye

They poisoned you for poisoning the minds of the youth

For speculating about the heaven above

For searching into the earth beneath

Yet in your wisdom you denied all knowledge

Scio me nihil scire

I know I know nothing

But the knowledge of nothing is knowledge itself or the illusion thereof

That drives the philosopher and the mathematician to a search

That drives the poets and the painters to the path of discovery

That drives people to follow the (social media) stars

In the hope of uncovering the secrets of the universe

Illustration of Socrates

The greatest way to live with honor in this world is to be what we pretend to be. —Socrates 

Socrates, are you (for) real?

As epistemology is your lasting contribution, how do I know that I know you?

You who said what you didn’t know you didn’t think you knew

What of God and our ignorance of Him

What of death and our ignorance of it

What of empirical and sensorial truth and all that contradicts it

What of the truth of ourselves as opposed to our beliefs and justifications of it

And what of you and what we do not know of you

Beyond the words of your protégés Plato or Xenophon

Of whom you might be a mere invention

Aristophanes cooked up The Clouds to see beyond their idealized versions

Such sceptics say they might have only put words in your mouth

Borrowing your wisdom to give weight to their own

The Socratic problem lies in the many contradictions to the truth

Why did you not write it all down for posterity

Did you not know you will live on to this day

Novels echo words you might not have uttered

Theater satirizes philosophies you might not have espoused

Thoughts rid of contradictions in a process you might not have introduced

Ho de anexetastos bios ou biôtos anthrôpô

The unexamined life is no life for any human

But what of the life we live now, whose only evidence is an Instagram post

But what of truths that seek followers by way of Vsco cam filters

A life like yours but shrouded in the mysteries of X-pro II, its legacies secondhand

Maybe a life liked once and then completely forgotten

Are you (for) real, Socrates?

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