Abstract
An account of Socrates’ life based on Plato’s Apology, dealing with the topics of the Socratic quest, the Socratic method and dialogue, and the confrontation between Socrates and Athens.
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Notes
- 1.
To truly understand what Socrates says in the Apology, it is essential, I think, to understand the fields of relation between Socrates and the divine on the one hand, and between Socrates and his fellow citizens on the other. However, these fields of relation are now hard for us to grasp, as we no longer have the Greek understanding of the divine, or of relations in the interior of a city; and modern exegesis, instead of illuminating things, has tended rather to obscure them. [A.D.]
- 2.
It is perhaps worth noting that it is the politicians above all who think they are really wise (cf. 21c). [A.D.]
- 3.
There is an ambivalence here: specialization implies both a σοφία and an ἀμαθία, a ‘knowledge’ and a ‘lack of knowledge’, and the two are bound together (see the occurrence of ἀμφότερα, at 22e). In Protagoras 321d, a distinction is made between those specializations, τέχναι, that spring from a necessity of life, and those problems that do not spring from such a necessity, such as the problem of good and evil, the problem of virtue, etc. This distinction in fact points to the discrepancy that exists between the extraordinary potential of technology and the lack of understanding of how to use it (a discrepancy that is also to some extent pointed to by the attack on writing in Phaedrus 274e). Here we cannot but think of the problem of technology in our time. Technology nowadays puts good and evil in the shade. In knowing something, technology thinks it knows everything. The technical way of looking at things makes it impossible to see the whole in which good and evil appear. No matter how high it rises, technology has nothing to say to us about good and evil. Good and evil concern how you use something, and technology cannot teach us that (cf. Phaedrus 274e). The certainty of technology is set against the moral uncertainty of its use; and nowadays there is no longer anyone capable of judging what is harmful and what is not harmful in that use. [A.D.]
- 4.
This turning to consider one’s life is not, however, entirely positive; for the prospect of death may overturn die Rangliste, the list of values that one has when one is not thinking of death. But more of that later. [A.D.]
- 5.
Confessions , XI, 14, 17: ‘quid est ergo tempus? Si nemo ex me quaerat scio; si quaerenti explicare velim, nescio.’ Plotinus expresses himself in a similar way (cf. III, 7, 1, 1–10). [A.D.]
- 6.
See Being and Time, § 1 (Heidegger 1962, 23); compare also: ‘We understand the word “is” (“being”), we know the meaning; but we are unable to say what we “really” mean by it. […] We understand “is” and “being”, but in a non-conceptual way. […] (most people never obtain a concept of being and yet they live at every moment in the understanding of being)’ (Heidegger 2002, 149–150). [A.D.]
- 7.
Petru Cercel, Ruler of Wallachia 1583–1585. (In fact he died in 1590, assassinated in Constantinople, where he had been trying to get support for a return to his throne.) [Trans.]
- 8.
The word μέθοδος does not appear in the index of the Diels-Krantz edition of the Presocratic fragments, although there are plenty of words relating to roads. It appears, however, in Plato: a need was felt for it, and it appeared. [A.D.]
- 9.
It is the same in the case of Descartes. Why do I want to reach the hypothesis that I do not know anything? Because this is the basis on which I can build. (And yet how surprising it is that the firmest foundation is precisely this ‘I know that I do not know’.) [A.D.]
- 10.
In the Timaeus, Plato claims that only the divine can know, not human beings (cf. 68d), and that human knowledge is anchored in divine knowledge as in a model (since human reason is no more than a copy of the reason of the universe—cf. 41d–e, 90d). Thus we might say that man’s ‘I know’ must be based on a fundamental ‘I do not know’, in order to be delimited from a total—and thus divine—‘I know’. [A.D.]
- 11.
And—if we are to believe what Socrates says in the Alcibiades (a dialogue that is most likely apocryphal, and probably the work of one of Plato’s pupils)—even the examination of the individual soul is undertaken interpersonally. Here, in Alcibiades 132 sq., Socrates wonders what exactly is meant by the inscription on the façade of the Delphic oracle: ‘Know thyself.’ Let us imagine, says Socrates, that the oracle was speaking to our eyes, not to ourselves (all Plato’s philosophy is in fact a philosophy of sight). What would it mean for the eyes to know themselves. It would mean, he says, that the eye would look at something in which it could see itself. What can an eye look at in order to see itself? ‘You mean mirrors and that sort of thing,’ replies Alcibiades (132e). But this is precisely what Socrates does not want. According to him, the eye sees itself only in another eye, or to be more exact, in the best part of another eye, i.e. the pupil (133a). However the eye is merely an analogy for the soul, which means that the soul can only know itself if it ‘looks’ into another soul. But it is not enough for the soul to look into another soul; it must look into the best part of another soul, i.e. into ‘the region of knowing and understanding’, i.e. the rational part (νοῦς) of another soul, which is like the pupil of the eye. That is where you should look, into the ‘virtue’ of the soul, just as in the case of the eye you look into its ‘virtue’, i.e. its pupil. If the soul knows itself in this mutual looking, then the place where you can know yourself is the intersubjective space. [A.D.]
- 12.
The gaze of a soul into another soul, to speak in the terms of the Alcibiades, is not an affective embrace, but a dialogue. [A.D.]
- 13.
The Socratic dialogue can begin with anyone, for judgement about good and evil concerns us all. [A.D.]
- 14.
In Aristotle, the logical principle of contradiction is based on an ontological principle; for Socrates, on the other hand, the situation is exactly the opposite: the non-contradictory character of life extends to knowledge, and not the other way around. [A.D.]
- 15.
The Romanian translation used by Dragomir renders λόγος by ‘raţiune’ (reason) at this point. [Trans.]
- 16.
In the first case, I distinguish things that resemble each other, and that are, so to speak, on the same plane (for example, rye from wheat). In the second case, I separate what is good from what is bad, i.e. things that belong to different planes (for example, rye from weeds). This distinction is important, for Socrates’ approach (to which this passage points, as I shall show), is all about cleansing, i.e. the isolation and elimination of what is bad. [A.D.]
- 17.
At 23a, τῲ ὄντι is not emphatic, but underlines that that is how things are ‘in reality’. [A.D.]
- 18.
There is another key word besides ἀγών, namely ἄσκησις, which appears at the end of the Socratic discourse at Gorgias 527e: ‘Let’s use the account that has now been disclosed to us as our guide, one that indicates to us that this way of life is the best, to practice [ἀσκοῦντας] justice and the rest of excellence, both in life and in death.’ So in order to obtain excellence, you must, according to Socrates, engage in the ‘exercise of excellence’, ἄσκησις. By ‘exercise’, we mean a procedure that simply ‘gets you in shape’. But ἄσκησις is in fact something that causes you to be no longer the same, that changes you and makes you feel ‘more capable’. [A.D.]
- 19.
I would like to make an observation at this point. Socrates never left the city, and in the city he talked to everybody. He never wrote a book, because a book does not involve such an examination of each person; thus his examination is basically an examination of the city. This examination of the city is, for him, the true politics. ‘I believe that I’m one of a few Athenians,’ he says, ‘to take up the true political craft and practice the true politics’ (Gorgias, 521d). This ‘political craft’ of Socrates ultimately sought the embodiment of another type of city. The confrontation between Socrates and the city is thus the confrontation between the city in Socrates’ mind and the city in reality—the confrontation, ultimately, between a utopia and history. [A.D.]
- 20.
Following Dragmoir’s similar modification of the Romanian translation, I have changed ‘half-science’ in David Magarshack’s English translation to ‘half-knowledge’. [Trans.]
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Dragomir, A. (2017). Socrates: Philosophy Confronts the City. In: Liiceanu, G., Partenie, C. (eds) The World We Live In. Phaenomenologica, vol 220. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-42854-3_8
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