“Apologias and Oranges”
The original “apology” was written for Socrates. After he was found guilty of corrupting the youth of Athens with this crazy little thing called curiosity, his student Plato decided to speak up. Socrates wanted people to push the boundaries of human knowledge, to question, and by extension, I believe, to feel. If his was a a sin punishable by death, then everybody that works for a tabloid should be shot out of a canon into a sea of molten lava, to be rained on by anvils. But what’s lost in Plato’s apology for Socrates, called “The Apologia Socratis,” is that it wasn’t an apology at all. The Greek word, in fact, is closer in meaning to “defense” than what we think of today as the modern mea culpa, where we prostrate at the feet of those we’ve offended and beg forgiveness. Either way, I’m not sure either approach is ideal, but we work with what we’ve got. Read more…