Akshay: Thank you for your insight. I find the comparison of life experiences of Plato and Popper interesting, although I perceive not just their conclusions but also their experiences to have been inverted. Whereas in Popper’s case the loss he experienced was the loss of democracy at the hands of the rising culprit of fascism, Plato’s loss was that of his mentor, Socrates, who was lost to the culprit of democracy. Further, if we consider Socrates to be not just a literary stand in for Plato but represented as a genuine approximation of the man, the act of the Athenians in imposing capital punishment becomes poignant to our current historical status and considerably less bizarre. Recall that Socrates was convicted of corrupting the youth. If the Republic is representative of the sort of material with which Socrates was educating the youth around him, most of whom were of the Athenian (and Spartan) privileged class we might easily conclude that Socrates was inciting a proto-fascist overturning of the democratic order. As I see antidemocratic fervor gaining traction all around, I’m not sure that I fault the Athenian democrats for engaging in an act of self-preservation.
Akshay: Thank you for your insight. I find the comparison of life experiences of Plato and Popper interesting, although I perceive not just their conclusions but also their experiences to have been inverted. Whereas in Popper’s case the loss he experienced was the loss of democracy at the hands of the rising culprit of fascism, Plato’s loss was that of his mentor, Socrates, who was lost to the culprit of democracy. Further, if we consider Socrates to be not just a literary stand in for Plato but represented as a genuine approximation of the man, the act of the Athenians in imposing capital punishment becomes poignant to our current historical status and considerably less bizarre. Recall that Socrates was convicted of corrupting the youth. If the Republic is representative of the sort of material with which Socrates was educating the youth around him, most of whom were of the Athenian (and Spartan) privileged class we might easily conclude that Socrates was inciting a proto-fascist overturning of the democratic order. As I see antidemocratic fervor gaining traction all around, I’m not sure that I fault the Athenian democrats for engaging in an act of self-preservation.