The Ontology of Socratic Questioning in Plato's Early Dialogues , livre ebook

SUNY SERIES IN C ONTEMPORARY C ONTINENTAL P HILOSOPHY
Dennis J. Schmidt, editor
SUNY SERIES IN A NCIENT G REEK P HILOSOPHY
Anthony Preus, editor

The Ontology of Socratic Questioning in Plato's Early Dialogues
SEAN D. KIRKLAND

Cover photo: Battle of Lapiths and Centaurs, west pediment, Temple of Zeus, Olympia (Photo: Hirmer Fotoarchiv, München)
Published by State University of New York Press, Albany
© 2012 State University of New York
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America
No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission. No part of this book may be stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means including electronic, electrostatic, magnetic tape, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise without the prior permission in writing of the publisher.
For information, contact State University of New York Press, Albany, NY www.sunypress.edu
Production by Laurie D. Searl Marketing by Anne M. Valentine
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Kirkland, Sean D.
The ontology of Socratic questioning in Plato’s early dialogues / Sean D. Kirkland
pages cm. — (SUNYseries in contemporary Continental philosophy) (SUNY series in ancient Greek philosophy)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-4384-4403-1 (hardcover : alk. paper) 1. Plato. 2. Socrates. 3. Ontology. 4. Questioning. I. Title.
B398.O5K57 2012
184—dc23
2011047982
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Acknowledgments
While researching and writing this book, I was fortunate to receive funding from the following sources: the State University of New York at Stony Brook; the Collegium Philosophiae Transatlanticum (CPT), which was funded by both the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) and the Kade Foundation; the Latin/Greek Institute of Brooklyn College and the City University of New York Graduate School; the Deutsche Akademische Austauschdienst (DAAD); and the University Research Council (URC) of DePaul University.
As this text is related, however distantly, to my dissertation, I would like to take this opportunity to acknowledge the great debt I owe to all the inspiring teachers I have had during my years at Gustavus Adolphus College, Stony Brook, and the University of Wuppertal, Germany, as well as at the Latin/Greek Institute. I am especially grateful to the two professors who acted as coadvisors for the dissertation, Peter Manchester and Klaus Held, and in addition, I thank the rest of the committee, Professors Clyde Lee Miller, Edward S. Casey, and Francisco Gonzalez, for their helpful questions and comments. Since taking a position in the Department of Philosophy at DePaul University, I have grown as a thinker thanks to the challenge and inspiration provided by my colleagues here; various parts of the following have benefited in particular from the criticisms and suggestions of David Farrell Krell, Richard A. Lee, William McNeil, Michael Naas, Franklin Perkins, and Peter Steeves. Finally, colleagues elsewhere who have substantively improved this work along the way with their comments on and responses to chapters they have read include Sara Brill, Jill Gordon, Heinrich Hüni, Malek Moazzam-Doulat, Andrea Rehberg, and Peter Trawny.
Intellectual stimulation and moral support have come in equal measure from family and friends and I take the opportunity here to express my sincere appreciation to them all en masse . Most of all, I must thank my wife, Lisa Mahoney. Because I adore her she lends a flattering light to everything that appears on my horizon, but this work has benefited from her in substantive ways too, not only from her discerning editorial judgment, but also from her clarifying intelligence and essential questioning.
List of Abbreviations for Ancient Works Cited
All texts in Latin and Greek are taken from the Oxford Classical Texts series (Oxford: Clarendon Press) and translated by the author, unless otherwise noted. A ESCHYLUS Ag. Agamemnon Prom. Prometheus Bound Suppl. Suppliants A RISTOTLE APo. Posterior Analytics De An. De Anima De Part. De Partibus Animalis EE Eudemian Ethics EN Nicomachean Ethics MM Magna Moralia Met. Metaphysics Phys. Physics Pol. Politics Rhet. Rhetoric SE Sophistici Elenchi Top. Topics A RISTOPHANES Brd. Birds Cl. Clouds Fr. Frogs C ICERO Acad. Academica Tusc. Tusculan Disputations De Off. De Officiis D IOGENES LAERTIUS Lives Lives of Eminent Philosophers E PICTETUS Disc. Discourses Ench. Encheiridion E URIPIDES Bacch. Bacchae Med. Medea Mel. Melanippe H ERODOTUS Hist. Histories H ESIOD Op. Works and Days Theog. Theogony H OMER Il. Iliad Od. Odyssey H IPPOCRATES OAM On Ancient Medicine , fr. Hippocrates , Vol. I (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1923) PT Peri Technēs , fr. Hippocrates , Vol. II (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1923) H IPPOLYTUS Ref. Refutatio P INDAR Ol. Olympian Ode P LATO Alc. I Alcibiades I Ap. Apology of Socrates Chrm. Charmides Cra. Cratylus Cri. Crito Ep. VII Epistle VII Euthd. Euthydemus Euthphr. Euthyphro Grg. Gorgias Hp. Ma. Hippias Major Hp. Mi. Hippias Minor La. Laches Lg. Leges ( Laws ) Ly. Lysis Mx. Menexenus Men. Meno Prm. Parmenides Phd. Phaedo Phdr. Phaedrus Phil. Philebus Plt. Politicus ( Statesman ) Prt. Protagoras R. Politeia ( Republic ) Sph. Sophist Smp. Symposium Thg. Theages Tht. Theaetetus Ti. Timaeus P LATO (S PURIOUS W ORKS ) Ax. Axiochus Hipparch. Hipparchus P LUTARCH Adv. Col. Adversus Colotem S ENECA (L UCIUS A NNAEUS ) Epist. Mor. Epistulae Morales , fr. Seneca, Epistles (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press / Loeb Library, 1925) S EXTUS E MPIRICUS Adv. Math. Adversus Mathematicos S OLON Solon Fragments, fr. Greek Elegiac Poetry (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press / Loeb Library, 1999) S OPHOCLES OT Oedipus Rex Ant. Antigone X ENOPHON XAp. Apology of Socrates XSmp. Symposium
Introduction: Socrates and the Hermeneutic of Estrangement
Evidently Socrates had called something into being long ago which was very explosive. Intellectual dynamite! A moral bomb!
—Winston S. Churchill, My Early Life: A Roving Commission
A s is true with every work of interpretation, our subject matter in the following chapters presents itself as hidden. After all, interpretative effort is required of us only when we encounter resistance, and we are then guided in that effort by trace indications of something not yet grasped, not yet fully available. Given that our topic here is Socratic philosophizing in Plato's early dialogues, we might understand ourselves to be addressing texts that are foundational to a tradition we receive as our own. If so, let us acknowledge at the outset that, in reading such tradition-laden texts, 1 we should not look begrudgingly on this hiddenness or view it as a regrettable if inevitable obstacle. Rather, we should welcome just this play of resistance and indication, for it alone provides us with some hope that we are responding to that which most concerns us today.
Indeed, the liminal position in which we find ourselves, our transitional moment at the still undetermined and open end of metaphysics, complicates the historical hermeneutic task facing us. Plato's early Socrates should be fascinating just now not because he represents an established or heroic philosophical ideal, not because we are able to recognize and affirm his approach to thinking and questioning as sound or beneficial, but rather only to the extent that he emerges before us with a radically unfamiliar, even a bizarre philosophical project. That is to say, with a project perhaps not wholly delimited by those fundamental metaphysical principles operating throughout the tradition of thought inaugurated by the Greeks and still joining us to them. This is the Socrates who attracts our attention, for it is only as such a shadowy and confounding figure of our still living philosophical past that he might gesture ahead to our as yet uncharted philosophical future.
To be sure, the Socrates who thus provokes the following reading of Plato's early works, and who emerges into view through that reading, is a figure existing neither in the past nor in the present, neither as a product of Plato's imagination nor as a mere figment of our own. Rather, in his calling forth our interpretive effort, he exists between our past and our present, between Plato's text and us, allowing each to disrupt the other's sedimentation and, perhaps, set one another free. In approaching this figure, we ask not simply what Plato's Socrates says, but what he has to say to us … and we are delighted to hear something disturbing.
In Socrates, Ironist and Moral Philosopher , Gregory Vlastos might seem initially to be hearing something quite similar. He describes there his decision not to publish his first book-length manuscript on Socrates because it had failed to do justice to what was truly perplexing about this character, his essential “strangeness.” This early failure left the twentieth century's most important Socratic scholar with the conviction that, when approaching the central figure of Plato's early works, “his paradoxes, pushed to the margins in that book, had to be brought into dead center.” 2
Indeed, Vlastos insists that everything be viewed in the obscuring light of what he elsewhere refers to as “ the paradox of Socrates.” 3 That central paradox is as follows. Socrates is, on the one hand, committed to the search for ethical knowledge, and he insists that only in the possession of such knowledge are we able to live well as human beings: “He has an evangel to proclaim, a great truth to teach: Our soul is the only thing in us worth saving, and there is only one way to save it: to acquire knowledge.” 4 And yet, on the other hand, in both word and deed, Socrates consistently seems to undermine the very possibility of this knowledge. Throughout the early dialogues, he declares in both general and specific terms that even after a lifetime of exemplary searching he knows