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1 Reading Plato with a Difference Socrates, Beautiful and New There is no disputing that Socrates marks a decisive turning point in Greek philosophy, and thus in Western philosophy as a whole. But is it not then all the more remarkable that this Socratic event continues to provoke our questioning, that it is still able to challenge and even subvert the most established interpretations of it? That the question of Socrates continues to assert itself, that it has not allowed itself to be put to rest, means simply that our Western philosophical tradition remains at a loss before the question of its own origins. To be sure, philosophy has always taken place only within such an impasse, has never been in a position to proceed otherwise. This predicament is, of course, due in no small measure to Plato’s authorship . The Platonic text gives us our Socrates, makes him an unavoidable figure, but only by presenting him at the same time as a kind of Silenic enigma, to paraphrase the assessment of Alcibiades (Sym. 221d–222a). We now speak of “pre-Socratics” and, by lumping together these early thinkers in this way, already give a clear indication of what is at stake in the historical transformation marked by Socrates. It is no exaggeration to say that after Socrates, virtually all philosophy claims to be the continuation of his legacy, although this takes place in various ways and through quite divergent appropriations.1 Yet the proliferation of so many divergent and opposing schools, which all nevertheless claim the title “philosophy,”2 is sustained precisely in the dense inexplicability of the figure of Socrates himself, as if philosophy had to pass through this intensely contracted moment , to be gathered together for an instant in a single enigmatic figure, only to find itself afterward projected, dispersed, and diversified. 3 Socrates thus appears as nothing less than the titanic upheaval that forms the landscape of philosophy as such. But why, after nearly two and one-half millennia, have we not achieved an adequate understanding of this transformation? The ongoing voluminous research bent on resolving this enigma confirms that our understanding of what comes to pass with Socrates has not become any less controversial.3 In order to grasp the distinctly Socratic contribution to history, one can easily take refuge in a consideration of the “intellectual” and “cultural” setting that frames his appearance. Yet the mere employment of this language, the simple fact that we inevitably have recourse to it, is revealing enough. While it can hardly be said that we lack the resources for an interpretation of Socrates, at the same time the language and the conceptuality that allows us to carry out the interpretation is usually taken for granted. The difficulty confronted here, however, is not simply that we continue to be entangled in language and history as if in a net. The more insidious point turns on the trenchant expectation that in our interpretation of history we should in fact be able to liberate ourselves from the metaphysical legacy we are interrogating. And it is not to be overlooked that, as a stratagem for overcoming the tyranny of history, this contemporary project of freeing ourselves from metaphysics only repeats what is perhaps the most definitive philosophical gesture of radical modernity.4 The pervasive tendency to believe in a wholesale departure from history, to believe that it is possible to start over through the invention of the “new,” simply confirms in an utterly daunting way that our age continues to be insidiously dominated by its own historical paradigm. The task of the liberation from history, in other words, is itself already a condition of history. Nevertheless, this prevailing view of philosophical inquiry—the view that as a discourse it can be conjured up from scratch at any given moment —can also be seen dominating the modern approach to Socrates, precisely because it takes him to be an object to be studied and rendered transparent in such objectivity. With the achievement of such clarity it is supposed that we will be in a position to decide about what parts of Socratic thought are applicable to our own lives and what parts (perhaps unsavory ) are to be rejected. Let me propose that by approaching the event of Socrates in this way—in terms of the adequacy of our comprehension, as if this event were indeed something before us we might examine, measure, and finally grasp—we already bypass what is...

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