Reconceptualizing Plato’s Socrates at the Limit of Education by Magrini James M

Author:Magrini, James M.
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Taylor & Francis (CAM)

In the Symposium, it is possible to observe that Plato establishes the “insurmountable distance” between philosophy and wisdom and at once demonstrates the impossibility of absolute transcendence, and thus a “lack” or “privation” (existential-nothingness) manifests at the heart of the philosophical project and defines this way of life. For Hadot, this demonstrates the “tragic” aspects of the philosophical pursuit, in that the “bizarre being called the ‘philosopher’ is tortured and torn by the desire to attain this wisdom which escapes him, yet which he loves” (47). However, he is driven on, as an zetetic skeptic toward the pursuit of bettering his life, which requires idealizations, mythologies, and fleeting glimpses of truth in perfected states, which Diotima calls “pure” states, in that they are not obscured or “clogged up with human flesh and coloring, and a whole lot of other worthless corruptible matter” (Sym. 211e). According to Hadot, although this “transcendent norm” escapes Socratic philosophy, it nevertheless possesses this norm within it in some veiled and partially concealed manner. The understanding of Socrates as a “seeker of truth” (zetetic skeptic) will now be set within an analysis focused on the interpretation of both the ontological distance that separates the philosopher from full-disclosure of the virtues and the mode of finite human transcendence as related to learning and Being-educated, and these issues, as related to philosophical hermeneutics, will serve as themes in this final section of the chapter.

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