The Way of the Platonic Socrates

S. Montgomery Ewegen

Description

Who is Socrates? While most readers know him as the central figure in Plato's work, he is hard to characterize. In this book, S. Montgomery Ewegen opens this long-standing and difficult question once again. Reading Socrates against a number of Platonic texts, Ewegen sets out to understand the way of Socrates. Taking on the nuances and contours of the Socrates that emerges from the dramatic and philosophical contexts of Plato's works, Ewegen considers questions of withdrawal, retreat, powerlessness, poverty, concealment, and release and how they construct a new view of Socrates. For Ewegen, Socrates is a powerful but strange and uncanny figure. Ewegen's withdrawn Socrates forever evades rigid interpretation and must instead remain a deep and insoluble question.

Preface
Acknowledgements
Introduction: Wandering: Apology
1. Retreat: Phaedo / Timaeus
2. Power(lessness): Gorgias
3. Poverty: Symposium
4. Indebtedness: Statesman
5. Ignorance: Protagoras
6. Releasement: Republic
Epilogue: Plato
Bibliography
Index

Sujets

• PHILOSOPHY
• Phenomenology
• Ancient philosophy
• Plato
• Classics
• Socrates

Informations

• Publié par: Indiana University Press
• Date de parution: 01 septembre 2020
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9780253047595
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

STUDIES IN CONTINENTAL THOUGHT
John Sallis, editor
Consulting Editors

Robert Bernasconi
James Risser
John D. Caputo
Dennis J. Schmidt
David Carr
Calvin O. Schrag
Edward S. Casey
Charles E. Scott
David Farrell Krell
Daniela Vallega-Neu
Lenore Langsdorf
David Wood

This book is a publication of
Indiana University Press
Office of Scholarly Publishing
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1320 East 10th Street
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iupress.indiana.edu
2020 by Shane Montgomery Ewegen
All rights reserved
No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences-Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1992.
Manufactured in the United States of America
First printing 2020
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Ewegen, S. Montgomery, author.
Title: The way of the Platonic Socrates / S. Montgomery Ewegen.
Other titles: Studies in Continental thought.
Description: Bloomington, Indiana : Indiana University Press, 2020. | Series: Studies in Continental thought | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2020013587 (print) | LCCN 2020013588 (ebook) | ISBN 9780253047557 (hardback) | ISBN 9780253047564 (paperback) | ISBN 9780253047588 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Socrates. | Plato.
Classification: LCC B317 .E94 2020 (print) | LCC B317 (ebook) | DDC 183/.2-dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020013587
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020013588
To Maggie-may gravity never interrupt your grace.
Listening not to me, but to the . . .
-Heraclitus
Contents
Preface
Acknowledgments
Introduction: Wandering ( ): Apology
1 Retreat ( ): Phaedo/Timaeus
2 Power(lessness) ( ): Gorgias
3 Poverty ( ): Symposium
4 Indebtedness ( ): Statesman
5 Ignorance ( ): Protagoras
6 Releasement ( ): Republic
Epilogue: Plato
Bibliography
Index
Index of Greek Terms
Preface
T HE SIXTH-CENTURY AUTHOR Olympiodorus wrote the following about Plato: When [Plato] was about to die, he saw in a dream that he became a swan moving from tree to tree and in this way caused much trouble to the bird-catchers. Simmias the Socratic judged from this that he would not be captured by those desiring to interpret him (Olympiodorus, 2.156-59). The mistake, of course, is trying to capture him at all. Rather, one should let him be : one should let him dance about freely and should be content to watch his magnificent and puckish play. This book is an attempt at precisely such a letting .
Middletown, CT
Spring 2019
Acknowledgments
T HE CREATION OF this book required a great deal of support from people who, for whatever reasons, deemed me worthy enough to receive it. I repay them here with paltry words, knowing that my debt to them can never be fully repaid. I thank Maggie Labinski for her patience, her conversation, and her criticism, as well as for her willingness to humor my insights. I offer boundless and enduring gratitude to John and Jerry Sallis, both of whom have enriched my life immeasurably; hats off, too, to Dee Mortensen, for her excellent work and remarkable kindness. I also thank Carol McGillivray for overseeing the beautiful copyediting of this book, and Ayesha Malik for help with the index. Ich sende meine herzliche Dankbarkeit an meine wundervolle Kollegin Julia Goesser Assaiante-vielen Dank f r unsere bersetzungen, und f r die Kicheranf lle. Ich freue mich auf die bevorstehende Arbeit. For reading and commenting on drafts of chapters, I am extremely grateful to Drew Hyland, Joe Forte, Ryan Drake, Jeremy Bell, Mike Shaw, Robert Metcalf, and Julia Goesser Assaiante. Many thanks, too, to Robert Newman for allowing me to use his stunning photograph for the cover of this book. Love and thanks, finally, to Bailey, Atticus, Baruch, and Artemis for reminding me that no matter how important a project seems, it pales in comparison to the rustling of the wind through the trees, the gleam of the sun across the water, and the smell of summer baking off of freshly cut grass: I hope you know that, in a heartbeat, I would trade my writing for your being , would that I could.
Chapter 2 is a revised version of a previously published article, A Man of No Substance: The Philosopher in Plato s Gorgias , published in 2018 in volume 33 of The Proceedings of the Boston Area Colloquium in Ancient Philosophy (Leiden, Netherlands: Brill).
Chapter 4 is a revised version of a previously published article, Where Have All the Shepherds Gone: Socratic Withdrawal in Plato s Statesman , published in Plato s Statesman , edited by John Sallis (SUNY Press, 2016). Both are used here with permission.

Introduction
Wandering ( ): Apology
I am still not able [ ] to know myself, as the Delphic inscription enjoins, and so it seems laughable for me to think about other things when I am still ignorant [ ] about myself. So leaving those other matters aside, I believe whatever people say these days about those [mythological] creatures, and I don t inquire [ ] about them but rather about myself. For me, the question is whether I happen to be some sort of beast even more complex in form and more tumultuous than the hundred-headed Typhon, or whether I am something simpler and gentler, having a share by nature of the divine.
Phaedrus , 229e-30a
S OCRATES DOES NOT know himself-he is ignorant ( ) of himself. Despite being himself, the precise character of that self remains withdrawn from him. Phrased otherwise: Socrates s self retreats from Socrates; it retreats from itself; it conceals itself from itself. Moreover, Socrates is not able ( ) to know himself-he lacks the ability, the power, the , to have knowledge of himself. Owing to this ignorance of himself-an ignorance that belongs to that very self, on account of a certain powerlessness-Socrates looks ( ) into himself, making himself into a question or, rather, letting himself be the question that he, owing to the essentially withdrawn character of his self, always already was. By allowing his essential question-worthiness to come to light, Socrates makes manifest the manner in which his self essentially retreats from him-that is, it essentially retreats way from itself -and remains withdrawn from his (that is, its ) grasp. By knowing that he does not know himself, Socrates admits-or, rather, insists with a fortitude and incessancy for which there is no earthly parallel-that the of his self, its way, its manner, its mode of being, remains concealed from him.
Moreover, insofar as it is the Delphic inscription that motivates him into this state of awareness regarding his essential question-worthiness, Socrates demonstrates an openness to a outside of himself-in this case, a belonging to Apollo, to the god whose (i.e., place) is the sun that lights the open expanse of the earth, to the god who gave Socrates to Athens in such a way that he might serve as a measure to the Athenians by leading them to call themselves and their lives into question. 1 By receiving this and living in accordance with it, Socrates indicates that his way-a way that remains elusive to him-is a way of deference, a way of yielding and submitting to a measure beyond himself, which, as such, effaces his self in the face of something other. It is because of such deference and such essential ignorance that Socrates s way remains withdrawn from him-and, of course, from those who seek to understand his way.
This book serves as an attempt to adumbrate, but certainly not settle, the way of the Platonic Socrates. This will be accomplished by following Socrates down a number of his ways-that is, by reading a number of so-called Platonic texts in which the way of Socrates articulates itself. (What precisely a Platonic text is-or if there even is such a thing-is a question to which we will return in the epilogue.) In the dialogues with which this book deals-principally the Apology , the Phaedo , the Timaeus , the Gorgias , the Symposium , the Statesman , the Protagoras , and the Republic -one finds a Socrates characterized by a set of related gestures and qualities, namely, those of withdrawal , retreat , powerlessness , poverty , indebtedness , ignorance , and releasement . While each of these movements has its own contours and nuances that arise from out of the dramatic and philosophical context in which it occurs-nuances that will come to light through the analyses offered within each chapter-all of them share an essential affinity toward what is here being called, employing the following neologism, the anachoratic way of the Platonic Socrates: that is, the way in which Socrates retreats ( ) and thereby makes a space ( ) in which something other may come to pass. 2 Of what precisely such retreat consists, how exactly Socrates makes such a space, and what precisely the other is for whom or for which he makes way are all issues that will come to light through the course of the book as a whole.
It is owing to their shared expressions of this anachoratic movement that the particular dialogues with which this book deals are grouped together here, a grouping that neither takes for granted nor makes any additional claims regarding the proper ordering or arrangement of Plato s texts or about Platonic philosophy as a whole (if there even is such a thing). Although this book seeks to delin