A barometric low hung over the Aegean. It moved eastward to a high-pressure area over Athens, and below in the shade of the clouds stood the man without Socrates.
For all appearances, this man is not special. He wears clothes, speaks words, thinks and eats and drinks, but there is a secret thread which pulls this man away from the Western world and towards a freedom unknown for over two-thousand years.
This man is free to think, without the poisoning of history which has enframed the entire structure of Western philosophy. Every idea, vision, insight he holds exists on a plane free from burden, and therefore exists as a more authentic thought.
He is not concerned with the imperative of Kant, of the dialectic of Hegel, of the Leviathan of Hobbes, because living without Socrates, without Plato, without Aristotle, all these thoughts fade away.
There is no Ibn Sina, no Marcus Aurelius, and no Nietzsche, and as such, this man, let us call him Ulrich, is the greatest thinker of his time, the greatest thinker of any time.
If Kant’s dogmatic slumber was broken by a needed fusion of the Empiricists and Rationalists, Ulrich’s slumber is broken by the freedom of a single thought. Any thought could be the foundation for a new path or an entire tradition of history. A single axion could paint humanity’s next move. And this too could be us, any of us.
Even though we can never be the man without Socrates, we need not let this thought dictate the path forward. It is, of course, inevitable to walk with this in our rearview, but what is behind can only suggest a future, contain a possibility within it, it needn’t actualise the future within itself.
Philosophy is the act of creation. Why should we constrict any probable path?