Western thought and philosophy was fundamentally founded by two real human beings: Socrates (469-399 BCE) and Plato (430?-347 BCE).

Socrates never wrote anything down.

Plato opened the most famous higher education institution in the history of the world (The Academy – 380’s BCE – 525 CE when closed by the Byzantine Emperor Justinian).

Plato left behind 47 dialogs of theoretical abstractions that constitute the basis for all philosophy and the derivative forms of higher education that followed.
I have harbored a fantasy for years in which the real Socrates, from some heavenly outpost, would comment on what Plato (his most famous self-proclaimed protege) chose to create and leave behind as the historical legacy of both.

It goes like this:

Whereas Plato worshiped the Spartan Ideal, Socrates would describe the world’s knowledge about Sparta as:

“The ‘certain truth’ about the Spartan ‘system’ and the history of the Spartan Brotherhood is a conundrum buried in a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, hidden in an enigma.” (Page 317 – The Memoirs of Socrates)

Whereas Plato makes no moral or political judgment about the moral character of the many famous people he employs as characters in his eternally abstract dialogs, the rational Socrates comments about all of them.

Athenian political assholes are accurately identified without fear or favor. Critias, Plato’s close relative, is a “devil.” Alcibiades is the greatest “Politician” in the world because he is “…the greatest liar in the history of the world.” (Page 334 – The Memoirs of Socrates)

Although also involved in politics, Pericles the Great is a “Statesman” because he always was governed by moral integrity when exercising his “free will.”

The human-nature associated idea of individualized universal human free will never fully makes it into Plato’s theoretical philosophy, idealistic or otherwise. And yet, even in one of his dialogs, Plato reports Socrates as saying, in response to inquiries, as to how he will present his defense at his impending “impiety” trial:

“As I have said to many of my friends, it is as if I am a physician, arraigned by a confectioner before a jury of children, and my only refuge, my only defense is the innocence with which I have lived my entire life.”

Without universal individualized human nature free will, that kind of talk is crazy. I don’t think Socrates was crazy. Do you?