The Socratic enterprise is existential in that it appeals to the individual.
This is why Nietzsche and Kierkegaard, each in his own way, tried to repeat it .. In the following text by Nietzsche, where he describes the "Schopenhauerian man," isolated in the midst of his contemporaries, it is hard not to think of Socrates' constant appeal to "take care of yourself," 59 and his continual calling into question of the individuaclass="underline"
hiN fellow men , . 11trut about in a hundred masquerades, as youths, old
,
men, liu herN, cit iienN, 1nic11t11, oflki11IN, merchants, mindful solely of
1 56
Figures
their comedy and not at all of themselves. To the question: "To what end do you live?" they would all quickly reply with pride: "To become a good citizen, or scholar, or statesmanl" 60
the objective of all human arrangements is through distracting one's thoughts to cease to be aware of life.61
Haste is universal because everyone is in flight from himself.62
Already in Plato's Symposium, Alcibiades had said: "Socrates makes me admit to myself that, even though I myself am deficient in so many regards, I continue to take no care for myself, but occupy myself with the business of the Athenians." 113 This passage allows us to glimpse the political consequences of such a reversal of values and upending of the guiding norms of life.
Concern for one's individual destiny cannot help but lead to conflict with the state. 64 This is the deepest meaning of the trial and death of Socrates.
Socratic irony becomes especially dramatic when, thanks to the evidence of Plato's Apology of Socrates, we sec it being used at the expense of the philosopher's accusers, and, in a sense, bringing about his condemnation to death.M
Here we have an instance of the "seriousness of existence" of which Kierkegaard speaks."" For Kierkegaard, Socrates' merit was that he was an exis1i11g thinker, not a speculative philosopher who has forgotten what it means to exist. Kierkegaard's fundamental category of existence is the individual, or the unique, isolated in the solitude of his existential responsibility. For Kierkegaard, Socrates was its discoverer.1'7
Here we come upon one of the most profound reasons for Socratic irony: direct language is not adequate for communicating the experience of existing, the authentic consciousness of being, the seriousness of life as we live it, or the solitude of decision making. To speak is to be doubly condemned to banality. In the first place, there can be no direct communication of existential experience, and in this sense, every speech-act is "banal." Secondly, however, it is this same banality which, in the form of irony, can make indirect communication possible.611 In the words of Nietzsche: "I believe I sense that Socrates was profound; his irony was above all the necessity to pass himself off as superficial, in order to be able to associate with people at all." 69 For the existential thinker, banality and superficiality are a vital necessity. The existentialist must remain in contact with mankind, even if the latter is at a level of less-than-adequate consciousness. At the same time, however, we have here to do with a pedagogical artifice. The circuitous detours of irony, and the shock of aporit1, can cause the reader to attnin 10 the seriousness of existential consciousness, especially if, 1ts we sh11ll 11cc l111c1", 1·hc power of l•:ros is thrown in for icood measure.
The Figure o/Socrates
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Socrates had no system to teach. Throughout, his philosophy was a spiritual exercise, an invitation to a new way of life, active reflection, and living consciousness.
Perhaps the Socratic formula: "I know that I know nothing" ought to be given a deeper meaning. We are thus brought back to our starting point: Socrates knows that he is not a sage.70 As an individual, his conscience was aroused and spurred on by this feeling of imperfection and incompleteness.
In this regard, Kierkegaard can help us to understand the significance of the figure of Socrates. Kierkegaard asserts that he knows only one thing: that he is not a Christian. He was intimately convinced of this fact, because to be a Christian is to have a genuine personal and existential relationship with Christ; it is to intcriorize Christ in a decision emanating from the depths of the self. Since such interiorization is so very difficult, it is virtually impossible for anyone truly to be a Christian. The only true Christian was Christ. At any rate, the least we can say is that the best Christian is he who is aware of not being a Christian, insofar as he recognizes that he is not a Christian.71
Like every existential consciousness, Kierkegaard's was divided. It existed only in its consciousness of not truly existing. Kierkegaardian consciousness is identical to Socratic consciousness:
0 Socrates, you had the accursed advantage of making it painfully obvious, by means of your ignorance, that others were even less wise than you. They didn't even know that they were ignorant. Your adventure was the same as mine. People become exasperated with me when they sec that I can show that others are even less Christian than I; I who respect Christianity so much that I see and admit that I am not a Christian!72
Socratic consciousness is also torn and divided: not by the figure of Christ, but by the transcendent norm of the figure of the sage.
justice, as we have seen, cannot be defined. It must be lived. All the human discourse in the world could never suffice to express the depth of one person's resolution to be just. All human decisions arc, howc�er, fragile and precarious.
When a person chooses to be just in the context of a particular act, he has the inkling of an existence which could be just in the full sense of the term. Such a fully just existence is that of the sage, who is not sop/10s, but philo-sophos: not a wise man, but one who desires wisdom, precisely because he lacks it. Paul Friedlander puts it welclass="underline" "Socratic irony, at its center, expresses the tension between ignorance - that is, the impossibility ultimately to put into words
'what justice is' - and the direct experience of the unknown, the existence of the just man, whom justice raises to the level of the divine." 73
just llS K icrkc1c1111rd wns only Christian insofar as he was conscious of not being n ( :lui11tii111, Sm·1·111c11 wn11 n 1mgc only insofar as he was conscious of not
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Figures
being wise. An immense desire arises from such an awareness of privation, and this is why, for Western consciousness, Socrates the philosopher takes on the features of Eros, the eternal vagabond in search of true beauty.
2 Eros
It could be said that Socrates was the first individual in the history of Western thought. Werner Jaeger,. was right to point out that Plato and Xenophon, in their Socratic writings, strive to make the reader sense Socrates' originality and uniqueness as they sketch his literary portrait. This need of theirs was certainly the result of the extraordinary experience of having known an incomparable personality, and, as Kierkegaard pointed out, 75 it is the true explanation of the terms atopos, atopia, and atopotatos, which recur so often in the Platonic corpus76 to describe Socrates' character. In the Theaetetus, for instance, Socrates declares: "They say I am atopotatos, and all I create is aporia." 77 Etymologically, atopos means "out of place," hence strange, extravagant, absurd, unclassifiable, and disconcerting. In the Symposium, Alcibiades insists on this point in his speech in praise of Socrates. Normally, he says, there are classes of men, ideal types to which individuals correspond.