The Ontology of Socratic Questioning in Plato's Early Dialogues

Sean D. Kirkland

• Publisher: SUNY Press
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781438444055
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Ancient & Classical Philosophy

Winner of the 2013 Symposium Book Award, presented by the Symposium: Canadian Journal of Continental Philosophy Modern interpreters of Plato's Socrates have generally taken the dialogues to be aimed at working out objective truth. Attending closely to the texts of the early dialogues and the question of virtue in particular, Sean D. Kirkland suggests that this approach is flawed—that such concern with discovering external facts rests on modern assumptions that would have been far from the minds of Socrates and his contemporaries. This isn't, however, to accuse Socrates of any kind of relativism. Through careful analysis of the original Greek and of a range of competing strands of Plato scholarship, Kirkland instead brings to light a radical, proto-phenomenological Socrates, for whom "what virtue is" is what has always already appeared as virtuous in everyday experience of the world, even if initial appearances are unsatisfactory or obscure and in need of greater scrutiny and clarification.

PART I

SOCRATIC PHENOMENOLOGY

1

Setting Aside the Subject-Object Framework in Reading Plato

Die »wahre Welt«, wie immer auch man sie bisher concipirt hat,—sie war immer die scheinbare Welt noch einmal.*

—Friedrich Nietzsche, Nachlass,

November 1887–March 1888, 11 [50]

ARISTOTELIAN ASSESSMENTS OF PLATO'S SOCRATES

A fundamental tension presents itself to us if we read carefully Aristotle's remarks on Socratic philosophy. This tension should indicate to us that the Socratic philosophical project is worlds away from the modern one with which we are familiar. Indeed, if we linger for a moment within this tension, Socrates must appear to us by Aristotle's lights as a quite perplexing figure.

Before beginning, it is important to note that, for Aristotle, who never experienced Socratic conversation firsthand, Plato's early dialogues seem to present a fair portrait of the historical Socrates.¹ At the very least, nothing Aristotle says concerning the historical Socrates is inconsistent with the character drawn by Plato in his early works. Thus, because Aristotle's image of the historical Socrates seems so thoroughly informed by the persona of Socrates in these works, his assessments of the former can be used in good conscience to illuminate our subject here, which is strictly speaking the latter.

The first of the two relevant remarks comes down to us only secondhand. It is found in Plutarch's responses to the Epicurean Colotes, specifically to the latter's attacks on Socrates and various other philosophers for the purported impossibility of living according to their teachings. We read there,

Of the inscriptions at Delphi, “Know Thyself” seemed most divine, for it even provided Socrates with the source (ἀρχὴν) of his aporia and his searching (τῆς ἀπορίας καὶ ζητήσεως), as Aristotle states in his Platonic writings. (Adv. Col. 1118c)²

According to the young Aristotle, the simple Delphic imperative to know oneself is the ultimate impetus for the constant searching and questioning of Socrates, which is all that the early dialogues depict. And this imperative, therefore, is the ultimate origin of the aporia beyond which Socrates' philosophical activity in the early dialogues never reaches. Apparently, in Aristotle's judgment, that activity should be considered an attempt by Socrates, originally and primarily, to come to know himself and to aid his interlocutors in coming to know themselves.

Surely Plato scholars and casual readers of the early dialogues alike would endorse such a claim on some level. However, the possible significance of this description has been largely missed even in the massive wealth of secondary literature that addresses itself to the subject. Either interpreters rest content with understanding Socrates' activity as directed toward self-knowledge in some vague and commonsensical manner, or if they offer any explanation of this, they manipulate the concept ‘self-knowledge’ to the point of unrecognizability. As one commentator remarks,

Among the nominees we find, e.g., innately correct beliefs, a self-consistent set of beliefs, the so-called Socratic precepts, virtue itself, and even knowledge of knowledge. Yet with a few exceptions, one candidate is conspicuously absent from the ballots: self-knowledge in the context of the Socratic elenchus is rarely taken to be knowledge of the self.³

That is to say, scholars have been largely uninterested in pursuing the most direct path—whatever the “knowledge” aimed at or effected by Socratic conversation, it is in some sense reflexive, i.e., it is above all of one's self, one's own character, tendencies, or perhaps one's very own thoughts and beliefs, and their unclear or unremarked contents and implications.

Indeed, many interpreters have been able to ignore this implication partly insofar as they equate the Socratic goal of ‘self-knowledge,’ simply and without remainder, with what is reported in the second of our Aristotelian assessments.⁴ In the Metaphysics, Aristotle summarizes the Socratic contribution to the search for wisdom as follows:

Socrates made his central occupation (πραγματομένου) the ethical virtues (τὰς ἠθικὰς ἀρετὰς) and first sought to define (ὁρίζεσθαι) these according to the whole (καθόλου)…. It is well-spoken to say that he sought the ‘what it is’ (ἐζήτει τὸ τί ἐστιν). (Met. XIII. 1078b17–23)⁵

It is the first part of this passage that has been glossed as addressing the issue of Socratic self-knowledge. Rather than seeking all-embracing explanations of natural phenomena, in the words of Cicero, Socrates “first called philosophy down from the sky, placed it in the cities and brought it into the homes, and compelled it to consider life and morals (de vita et moribus), and what is good and bad” (Tusc. 5.4.10). That is, he turned his philosophical attention away from the natural world and toward human beings. Broadly speaking, this has been taken as an adequate and perfectly manifest description of the Socratic aim of self-knowledge—we search for knowledge of ourselves with Socrates insofar as we seek definitions of the ethical universals that concern how we should live our lives.

However, the other defining feature of Socratic questioning mentioned here must be considered as well—Socrates asks the ‘What is “x”?’ question. Indeed, Richard Robinson in his seminal work on Plato's early dialectic follows Aristotle here, identifying this as the Socratic question. Examples include ‘What is piety?’ in the Euthyphro, ‘What is temperance?’ in the Charmides, ‘What is courage?’ in the Laches, ‘What is friendship?’ in the Lysis, ‘What is fineness or beauty?’ in the Hippias Major, ‘What is virtue?’ in the Meno, and ‘What is justice?’ in the first book of the Republic, which may well be an independent aporetic dialogue predating the composition of the rest of the Republic.⁶ Of course, Robinson rightly points out that Socrates' questions in some dialogues also take the alternate form of ‘Is “x” “y”?’, as is the case in the Crito, Ion, Lysis, and Protagoras, for instance. At other times, the ‘What is “x”?’ form explicitly gives way to this one (Chrm. 165b–e, 169c–d, Grg. 466a–527e, Men. 86c–100b). Nonetheless, as Robinson also notes, Socrates explicitly and repeatedly prioritizes the question ‘What is “x”?’ over all other questions, especially those seeking any particular predication (Hp. Ma. 287b–e, La. 189e–190a, Men. 71, 86d–e, R. I. 354c, and Prt. 360e). Thus, although it “owes its prominence in the earlier dialogues not to spatial predominance but to the emphasis Socrates puts upon it,”⁷ ‘What is “x”?’ is nevertheless the central and characteristic form of Socratic inquiry, which is precisely what Aristotle highlights in the passage above as a Socratic contribution to the search for the sophia or ‘wisdom’ that is protē philosophia or ‘first philosophy.’

Any reading of the early dialogues certainly bears this out, for Socrates insistently and with a certain precision demands of his interlocutors that they give an account not just of human virtue (and the various virtues that we shall see as its context-specific appearances), but of ‘what human virtue is.’ What precisely does he have in mind here? To be sure, Socrates never in the early works thematizes Being itself. He does not, for instance, dig beneath the (as yet undifferentiated) special sciences to ask the Aristotelian metaphysical question concerning “being qua being (τὸ ὄν ᾗ ὄν)” (Met. 1003a21). Neither does he chase after the sufficient reason for the existence of contingent beings as such, asking with Leibniz why there are beings at all, and not rather nothing. And, although he sometimes uses terms that are familiar from Plato's middle dialogues in order to refer to the object of his inquiry, such as ousia, eidos, idea, and paradeigma, his object here seems not yet the more fully articulated Platonic Idea of the middle period, as that is usually understood.⁸ Thus, we must surely proceed with caution and not simply read back into the early works any or all of the characteristics traditionally associated with the ideas, as immaterial, intelligible, changeless, eternal, self-same, perfect, paradigmatic, essential causes that are in some way separated from the material, sensible, changing, temporal, self-othering, imperfect appearances thereof, which populate the world of our everyday experience. At the very least, we can say that, when Socrates directs his interlocutors' gaze toward his target, ‘what virtue is,’ and away from how virtue initially and immediately appears to them, he does distinguish the being of virtue and gives some indication of how he understands it.⁹

We might say provisionally that the Socratic question ‘What is virtue?’ seems to gesture toward what belongs in some sense to all virtuous individuals, is the cause in some sense of their being virtuous, and is that according to which these individuals are called or recognized as ‘virtuous.’¹⁰ It is unnecessary for us to determine at this point whether Socrates takes the subject matter of his questioning to be separated from and transcendent with respect to material, sensible, particular virtuous things, or whether he takes it to be immanent to them. Rather, we need only say that, given his insistent posing of and emphasis on this question, a prima facie central aim of Socratic philosophizing, whether we see this as successful or unsuccessful in Plato's portraits, seems to be bringing the participants in the discussion into a proper and truthful relation to what we can refer to as ‘what virtue is’ or the being of human virtue.

With this, however, a distinct tension presents itself between the two Aristotelian assessments cited earlier. According to the first, Socrates' discussions aim at some kind of reflexive knowledge of oneself, while according to the second, they seek knowledge of the being of human virtue.¹¹ In order to bring the unarticulated but no less pervasive modern bias to light, this tension could be put in the following terms. The Socratic project as described in the first assessment seems directed toward and confined within the horizon of the inquiring subject him- or herself,¹² while in the second, it is directed toward ‘what is,’ or toward what exists as objectively real over against the subject. This would then map onto the Socratic paradox discussed earlier in the introduction. The negative or destructive moment would be in effect a kind of self-knowledge, the subject's recognition that his or her opinions are groundless and disconnected from the objective reality of human virtue, while the positive moment, the sought-after salvific knowledge, would be a certain grasp of this reality.

Given any such bias, the question must arise, at what precisely is the inquiring Socratic gaze directed? In Socratic conversation, does one come to a knowledge of oneself or a knowledge of ‘what is,’ as something other than oneself? What is especially illuminating here is the fact that the Socratic project seems to us to suffer because of this tension, and yet both Plato and Aristotle are (troublingly) untroubled by it.

The tension made manifest through our consideration of these Aristotelian remarks, when rendered in subject-object terms, should make us suspicious of any interpretation that explicitly or implicitly imposes these categories and consequently settles on two mutually exclusive Socratic projects—a skeptical project whereby the subject would come to know only itself and its own oblivious ignorance or an epistemologically positive project whereby the subject would ultimately establish a secure connection to the objective reality of virtue. In contrast, we might ask how both the Aristotelian assessments might be true and essential, even if each in a radically modified sense, and this is precisely what the following chapters attempt to show. The Socratic elenchus does indeed accomplish a radical form of self-knowledge, but this is nothing other than a proper and truthful relation to the being of virtue.

It is generally agreed that this ‘proper and truthful relation’ for Socrates would be a ‘knowledge,’ an epistēmē or a technē, of virtue,¹³ the necessary and perhaps sufficient condition of which would be the ability to give Socrates the propositional definition he clearly demands in his characteristic philosophical activity and then to defend that definition from elenctic refutation. I argue later that this is not the case. Rather, Socrates' elenchus, focused as it is on the being of virtue, has the following two aims, one more immediate and the other more remote.¹⁴ First, he sets out directly to interrogate his interlocutors' opinions about virtue, exposing their self-contradictions and their false presumption of just such an epistēmē o...

Table of contents

• Title page
• Acknowledgments
• List of Abbreviations for Ancient Works Cited
• Introduction: Socrates and the Hermeneutic of Estrangement
• PART I. SOCRATIC PHENOMENOLOGY
• PART II. VIRTUE'S ONTOLOGICAL EXCESS AND DISTANCE
• PART III. SOCRATIC VIRTUE IN THE FACE OF EXCESSIVE TRUTH
• CONCLUSION: APORIA IN THE MIDDLE DIALOGUES
• Notes
• Bibliography