Member-only story
Socrates Heard a Voice
And it wasn’t his conscience
We know this for sure — commentators impose the prevailing orthodoxies of their time on the ideas of other ages or cultures. This is commonly known as the fallacy of presentism.
Related to this fallacy is when the earnest beliefs of one culture are dismissed as false consciousness by another and given a functional or reductive reason for its existence. A devout Muslim will not eat pork because, in Islam, pork is deemed to be impure meat. The secular anthropologist may say the real reason for Muslims not eating pork is that pigs were impractical as livestock for the nomadic societies in which Islam initially flourished. What is lost on the anthropologist is that both ideas can be true.
I see this a lot in modern Stoicism, where Stoic proclamations about the nature of the universe and God are ignored or glossed over to make reductive readings about the “dichotomy of control”, a modern coinage that flattens down Epictetus’s ideas about human agency into a rather vapid self-help lesson.
Besides Jesus of Nazareth, the ancient figure who is most often abused with interpretative sock-puppetry and presentism is Socrates. In every age and culture there is a Socrates that suits a commentator’s narrative. There’s a conservative Socrates, a leftist Socrates, a proto-Christian Socrates, a…
