Descent of Socrates: Self-Knowledge and Cryptic Nature in the Platonic Dialogues

2. Socrates and the Retreat of Nature: Suffering a Simple Teacher of Ethics

2 Socrates and the Retreat of Nature Suffering a Simple Teacher of Ethics I began this discussion taking up the way in which historical understanding finds itself at a loss before the event of Socrates. There is a way in which the entire philosophical tradition remains caught up in the descensional appearance of Socrates, even as that history produces its image of Socrates. Yet Socrates is not just subjected to this operation, not merely an effect of it. He appears also as its originator, as one who withdraws in his own appearance . As this strange appearance, Socrates holds a placeless place, indicating an uncanny and tragic doubling of nature in human life. Attending to this doubling of nature in the figure of Socrates leads to a different way of reading Plato, just as this way of reading Plato proves to open up the doubling itself. Before pursuing this reading further, I want now to show briefly how the most traditional account of Socrates, far from denying this descent, can also be seen to consist in its continual confirmation, whether knowingly or not. Regardless of how one engages the historicity of philosophical inquiry, it would be absurd to claim that there is a lack of resources for an interpretation of Socrates. It is evident that an entire tradition has already succeeded in defining and constituting itself in a powerful and thorough appropriation of this event, an appropriation that at a certain level remains unquestionable and even in many ways unrecognized. It is then not at all a matter here of first establishing an interpretation, since this is already long since accomplished , but of finding a way to interrogate the dominant and prevailing account in its complacency and self-assuredness. This is precluded, however, as long as the interpretation to be interrogated and interrupted remains 28 oblivious to the way in which the text it submits to interpretation has already infiltrated and anticipated the assumptions it would bring to the text. With certain attendant risks, therefore, a preliminary formulation of the traditional interpretation of Socrates can and must be offered, so that it might serve as a guide for this inquiry and open up its topic. Yet it would be unfair to say that I am seeking to test the validity of such an interpretation , as if it were something like a tentative hypothesis, in need of evidence, critique, or supporting arguments. Such a goal would have to assume in advance a certain transparency (or self-knowledge) with regard to the matter that is at issue in the interpretation, a transparency that has never been achieved. If Socrates marks an originary event in which philosophy is thought to have first established itself in a kind of self-relation (as a saying of the same), first discovering or inventing itself in that relation, then the interpretation of Socrates can no longer be considered, as it usually is, as if it were merely the elaboration of an incidental historical detail, as if it were an independent or isolated claim. The traditional interpretation of the historical significance of Socrates as a philosopher, an interpretation that is brought to bear upon him again and again, is more decisively the activity of a self-interpretation, a retrieval that enacts or reenacts this moment that it takes to be constitutive of philosophy, confirming that moment, as it is thought to have occurred first with or in Socrates, by repeating it and reinscribing it upon itself. Because I want to interrogate the descent of Socrates in this way, as a double movement that both establishes the tradition and is established by it, the task cannot be merely to compensate for the neglect of the tradition as it has interpreted Socrates, so that now we might acquire a better picture of who he was and what he actually believed. Strictly speaking, it cannot be decided whether the tradition has an “accurate” or “correct” view of the Socrates who descends, since questioning such “correctness” can occur only through an encounter with the entire tradition as such. We have to enter into a different order of questioning at this point, and begin by admitting that the measure is lacking for assessing the descent. To introduce and to repeat the Socrates who both establishes and is established by the philosophical tradition is also already to concede that he asserts himself with a certain necessity. And it is this necessity itself that must be questioned. According to what...