The Cache

Socratic Sessions

The death of Socrates in 399 BCE was said to have been a voluntary act, a kind of self-applied euthanasia. Socrates had several offers to leave Athens, but chose to stay and drink the hemlock. The legend says that he was accused, loosely, of "corrupting the youth," and, a bit more specifically, of asebia, impiety—meaning refusal to honor the accepted dieties of high Athenian culture.
You could say, he died for what he did not believe.
A shamanic figure left over from a lost oral tradition, Socrates was a satyr-like sage who rejected the authority of Apollonian intellect. This was his greatest heresy, and it is also his finest legacy.

CONTENTS

Socrates in the Last Days presents an idiosyncratic portrait of the patron saint of metahistory and takes a wild shot at explaining his unique position in the Western intellectual tradition.

In Session One the old sage poses the troubling suggestion that we do not adopt beliefs because we find truth in them, although once they are adopted, we come to regard them& as true. Hence, the truth value of a belief can be contrasted to its expedient value, the reason why it was adopted. This dialogue introduces the technique of dereasoning beliefs, the third basic tool of metacritique.The other two are: assessing belief by the behavior it produces, and defusing belief by analysis of the rationale constructed around it.