The Rhetorical Sense of Philosophy by Donald Phillip Verene

Author:Donald Phillip Verene [Verene, Donald Phillip]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Language Arts & Disciplines, Rhetoric, Philosophy, Language, History & Surveys, Ancient & Classical
ISBN: 9781501756351
Google: dS39DwAAQBAJ
Publisher: Cornell
Published: 2021-07-15T13:23:24+00:00

Socrates’ Apologia

There is an old principle in the practice of courtroom law that an attorney should not ask a question of a witness to which the attorney does not know the answer. It is the principle that Socrates employs in questioning those he meets in the agora and elsewhere. Socrates knows one thing in advance: that the person he is questioning does not know the answer because he, Socrates, does not know the answer. When Socrates questions Euthyphro regarding hosion, he knows in advance that Euthyphro does not know what it is, because Socrates also does not know. Socrates does not know the answer because he does not know what it means to be a human being, an anthropos, for to know this would be to possess a knowledge of things both human and divine.

In the Apology Socrates says he may really possess human wisdom, but he does not possess divine wisdom (20d–e). To possess human wisdom implies a knowledge of the difference between human and divine wisdom, but not a knowledge of the divine as such. Without a knowledge of the divine we cannot know fully what it is to be human. Knowledge of what it is to be divine would require an apotheosis such as that of Empedocles, as related by Diogenes Laertius (8.67–68). Diogenes also says: “Aristotle in his Sophist calls Empedocles the inventor of rhetoric as Zeno of dialectic” (8.57).

Socrates knows that he does not possess wisdom because, as Cicero later reports, and as was mentioned in chapter 3, wisdom is understood by the Greeks as “the knowledge of things divine and human and acquaintance with the cause of each of them” (Tusc. 4.26.57); he says wisdom has been defined this way “by the philosophers of old” (De off. 2.2.5). In the Apology Socrates says that his friend from youth, Chaerephon, went to Delphi and asked the Pythian if anyone was wiser than Socrates. The oracle replied that no one was wiser. The Pythian was correct that no one was wiser than Socrates, but that does not entail that Socrates was in possession of wisdom. No one is in fact in possession of wisdom. The Pythian always speaks in amphiboly (amphibolos). The popular view, that Socrates says that he knows that he knows nothing, is incorrect. Socrates does not claim to possess wisdom. Socrates’ philosophy is not written down because it cannot be put into language. It is never possible adequately to define the meaning of an eidos because the eidē are not dialectical in nature. The mind is dialectical, but mind is not an eidos. Dialectic is a means to approach the eidē, but the eidē in themselves simply are, the Good being the supremely real.

Socrates’ purpose, in his use of the elenchos, his questioning of the orators, poets, and politicians, is to bring them to the realization that they do not possess the Good. In this way he is the gadfly that stings the body politic. Socrates is dangerous because he would turn anyone with whom he speaks into a philosophos, a lover of wisdom.

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