Socrates brought about a “Copernican turn” about 2000 years before Copernicus. OK. That is not possible. But if it could, then he would have deserved this proud attribute.
Socrates is the father of Cynicism. Without Socrates no Diogenes, no Jesus, no Nietzsche, no Klaus.
The God of Socrates and the Cynics
Socrates, as we know, was sentenced to death for seducing the youth to his alleged godlessness. What Socrates actually did was stunning and we must understand it if we want to understand Cynicism.
Before Socrates, the gods were numerous and represented by images, statues, etc.. Each city had its own gods to worship. Now Socrates brought the god into his and our soul. God was suddenly no longer outside, but inside. Inside each one of us. Now it was no longer a matter of worshipping some statue, but of becoming God himself. And this seemed blasphemous and godless to the Greeks.
Become God? Isn’t that blasphemy even today?
Until today, many Christians or Muslims, for example, consider it blasphemous to presume to want to become God themselves.
But this is exactly what the Cynic Jesus preached. He did not want to be worshipped or adored, he wanted us to follow him, to become like him, to go his way.
Socrates wanted to help people to self-knowledge with his conversational method of so-called maeeutics, which means midwifery. He assumed, and we assume, that infinite divine wisdom is invested in all of us, which only has to come into the world.
Self-realization for us Cynics is to bring forth, to give birth to the God in our soul. So we have the claim that self-knowledge is possible and necessary to achieve eudaimonia. And are thus at odds with existentialists who claim, with Sartre, that we can and must invent ourselves. “Existence before essence” is what Sartre called this claim, in which, like Munchausen, we can supposedly pull ourselves out of the swamp by our own hair.
But the “swamp”, that is just our essence. We know: whoever tries this will never get out of the swamp and remains dictated by determinism. Only through a supersensibly understood natural power in ourselves, which we call God, freedom is possible at all. Most people do not understand this. Hegel, for example, made fun of the Romantics for this, saying that they were only celebrating a dependence instead of their freedom. Well. Some understand it, others do not.
In any case, meeutics is quite comparable to methods such as client-centered conversation developed by Rogers. Through accepting listening, also into our own soul, we gain our freedom.
