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  • Socrates’ Irrational Rationality1
  • Patrick Lee Miller (bio)

Socrates seems to most to be a paragon of rationality. In nearly every encounter, he draws distinctions, deploys arguments, and relentlessly pursues definitions of the virtues. He is not satisfied knowing that something or other is just, or courageous, or pious; he wants to know why it is so. To acquire this knowledge, he insists on consistency, expecting it of others no less than himself. But despite the importance to him of these rational techniques, James Hans considers them only part of his wisdom, a broader sensibility whose most important resources are irrational. “Only by investigating Socrates’ deep, lifelong commitments to the irrationalities at the center of our being,” Hans declares, “can we properly appreciate the mixture of qualities that contribute to Socrates’ well-being and to our own” (19). Socrates and the Irrational is thus at once an interpretation of Socrates and an impassioned recommendation that we adopt in our times and our own lives the wisdom that emerges from this interpretation.

Signs of Socrates’ irrationality are his persistent attention to poetry, myths, oracles, dreams, and his personal daimonion (55). Hans does well to highlight these signs, which have been too often overlooked by those eager to distill sound arguments from his conversations. According to Hans, these irrational voices help acquaint Socrates with patterns, rhythms, and contexts that escape rational scrutiny (82), permitting him to live intuitively (91, 97, 141). Rather than regimenting his environment to harmonize with a score prescribed by reason, Socrates tunes himself instead to his environment’s independent music (98). This is the greater part of his wisdom, but it need not be a divine revelation, even if that is how Socrates himself understands it. In Hans’ [End Page 299] interpretation, Socrates begins with an “intuitive assessment of the affects through which the world is assimilated,” then adds a “reasonable interpretation of what those affects might mean” (97). This synthesis of rational and irrational, whatever its ultimate source, yields “an aesthetic awareness of the dynamics of the universe” (95).

By foregrounding affects and the aesthetic, thereby reducing the distance between us and the Greeks’ demonology, Hans is able to import Socratic wisdom into our own times. We each have a daimonion, he believes, but this is just “the universe speaking to us and our place within it” (92). The notes of this speech are our affects, and the instrument is our body. Hans thus celebrates intuition (198), or the “wisdom of the body” (104, 190), often regretting its neglect nowadays whenever it fails to square with our rational accounts of the world. Equipped with this wisdom, presumably, he frowns upon human cloning (163), global capitalism (164, 184), and recent Republican presidents (151). In fact, Hans rarely misses an opportunity to use his interpretation of Socrates to make observations about contemporary America, especially its universities and the field of English in which he works.

There is not space enough in so short a review to evaluate these many observations, let alone the complex notion of wisdom that motivates them—except to say that the distinction between reason and irrationality has not been handled carefully enough. If Hans thinks our affects are paradigms of irrationality, then he should address some of the philosophers, from the Stoics to Robert Solomon, who have argued that they are judgments of a sort. Are they therefore rational? If so, does the book’s distinction between reason and affect collapse? Is that Hans’ goal? It is difficult to answer any of these questions without a more sustained examination from him of the central notions at work: reason and emotion. Without that examination, we cannot probe further the notion of wisdom he celebrates, but we can nonetheless cast doubt upon the interpretation of Socrates which grounds it.

In short, Hans does not make sufficiently clear which Socrates he treats: the Socrates of Plato, the Socrates of history, or some other Socrates. The Socrates of Plato is so vivid as to be confused sometimes with the Socrates of history, but we receive rather different characterizations of the historical man from two other writers who knew him (Xenophon and Aristophanes), not to mention others from the subsequent...

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