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Introduction
Socrates and Oedipus
Perhaps the most impressive prediction of all time was made by Plato in his
Apology of Socrates when his Socrates suggests that no one will ever really understand
him. At 20c4, Socrates says, “Perhaps one of you would then retort, ‘But, Socrates, what
is your practice?’” That this question should be asked at 20c4-5 of the Apology after
Socrates has lived 70 years, been the subject of a famous comedy, been indicted by
Athens, and after Socrates has had 3 Stephinus pages to set us straight is a reflection of
Socrates’ incredible elusiveness, and in addition is an absurdity equal to or surpassing
anything in Aristophanes’ Clouds. Absurd or not, the history of philosophy has proven
Plato correct, for the Socrates of the history of philosophy is no easier to pin down than
the Socrates of 399 B.C. Athens, or at least the Socrates of the Apology. It is as if Plato
wanted us to deploy quotation marks anytime we speak or write Socrates’ name.
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Socrates over time has been a poster boy at one time or another for skepticism, stoicism,
early Christian metaphysics and ethics, and more recently for egalitarianism and the
philosophy of civil disobedience. In the 19
th
century alone, within a few decades of one
another, Mill used Socrates to spearhead his school of liberalism and Kierkegaard his
version of existentialism. In our time, understandings of Socrates are as divergent as
ever, for at one extreme Socrates is read as a simple moralist and at the other extreme, as
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“And [the god] appears…to use my name.” (Apology, 23a7-8) Is Plato suggesting that Socrates eludes
even the gods? In other words, the essence or being of Socrates is beyond even the gods. They know only
his name. Or is it that the essence of Socrates is that he has no essence except the conventional use to which
the gods have put him Socrates name might be taken to mean, “the rule, or power, of the whole”.
swj
(safe, sound, whole) +
kratoj
(power, might, rule).
Convention