baracchi visions of another world

COMPARATIVE LITERATURE STUDIES, Vol. 43, No. 3, 2006.Copyright 2006 The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA.

269

THE INCONCEIVABLE HAPPINESS OF

MEN AND WOMEN: VISIONS OF AN OTHER

WORLD IN PLATOS APOLOGY OF SOCRATES

Claudia Baracchi

ros dut mho lusimls dnei, glukpikron amkhanon rpeton.

(Sappho fr. 130)

[Eros the melter of limbs (now again) stirs mesweetbitter unmanageable creature who steals in.]1

The primal scene out of which the lineage of Western philosophy unfolds takes place in a tribunal. Philosophy, summoned before the law, indeed, constituted through such a summons, fundamentally accused, must present itself in order to apologize, to defend itself, if not fi nally to establish its own legitimacy. Philosophy comes forth in, through, and as the gesture of an apologia. Its institution (its being instituted and becoming institution) rests on the originary trauma of an accusation and death sentence. The analysis of a few pivotal moments in Platos Apology of Socrates [Apologia Skratous] provides the occasion for a refl ection on the task and danger of the philo-sophical endeavorindeed, of the philosophical life. The consideration of the praxis of philosophy in its uncertain position (or even non-position) vis--vis the law illuminates the intertwined issues of vulnerability, foreignness, estrangement, and gender, casting them in the context of a comprehensive concern with justice.2

The present hermeneutical exercise aims at releasing the ancient text in its strangeness and bringing it into dialogue with contemporary, altogether haunting preoccupations.3 At stake is, however inceptively, revealing the

270 C O M P A R A T I V E L I T E R A T U R E S T U D I E S

philosophical longing both in its atopia (in its having no place) and in its visionary potentialin its potentiality for vision and envisioning, for imagining otherwise, for seeing places others do not see, places that are not, or not yet. Atopia and utopia: philosophical placelessness indicates the ongoing task of probing the invisible, groping in the not-yet, intimating the otherwise unseen.

There appears to be a crucial connection between the indictment against Socrates and the confl ation or con-fusion of philosophy and soph-istry. Socrates himself, at least according to Plato, suggests this much in his deposition before the jury. It is clear since the very inception of the Apology of Socrates that the men of Athens have confused the fi gure of the philoso-pher with that of the sophist, collapsing all distinctions between them. It is a matter of a certain obscuration of difference, of a lack of discernment. Such an indifference vis--vis the irreducible comportments of philosophy and sophistry provides the ground for the charges of impiety (heresy) and corruption of the youth brought against Socrates.

Socrates refers to an ancient, deeply rooted, and essentially imponderable hostility against the philosopher. Even before the present, formal accusations, others (his fi rst accusers) slandered and compromised him:

First, then, men of Athens, it is just for me to speak in defense [apologsasthai] against the fi rst false charges [katgormena] against me and the fi rst accusers [katgorous], and next against the later charges and the later accusers. For many accusers have risen against me before you, even long ago, talking now for many years and saying noth-ing true; and I fear them more than Anytus and those around him, although they too are dangerous [deinous]. But the others are more dangerous [deinoteroi], men. They got hold of the many of you from childhood, and they accused me and persuaded you [epeithon]al-though it is no more true [than the present charge]that there is a certain Socrates, a wise man, a thinker of the things aloft, who has investigated all things under the earth, and who makes the weaker speech the stronger. (18ab) 4

The characterization of Socrates by his fi rst accusers is paradigmatically to be found in Aristophanes Clouds. It is evident how such a depiction of the philosopher would constitute the ground and background for the later accusations. It should be noticed, however, that Aristophanes posture is not that of positive, determinate accusation. Nor can his grotesque portrait of the philosopher simply be seen as originating the suspicion surrounding

271THE INCONCEIVABLE HAPPINESS OF MEN AND WOMEN

the philosophical practice and ultimately causing open hostility against it. To be sure, Aristophanes play refl ects a situation in which the philosopher is perceived as a charlatan, a sophist skilled in winning causes through argumentative manipulation, and a non- or mis-believer. However, the Aristophanean comedy also caustically denounces the factors that lead or contribute to this perception, most notably the ignorance and ineptness of the protagonist. The fi gure of Strepsiades points to the literal as well as fi gurative bankruptcy of paternal authority and, in general, to the corruption of customs, to the loss of reliable points of reference in matters of wisdom and thos. Socrates continues:

Those, men of Athens, who have scattered this report about, are my dangerous [deinoi] accusers. For their listeners hold that investigators of these things also do not believe in gods. Besides, there are many of these accusers, and they have been accusing for a long time now. Moreover, they spoke to you at the age when you were most trusting [malista episteusate], when some of you were children and youths, and they accused me in a case that simply [atekhns, without the resource of artfulness, cleverness, or other skill] went by default, for no one spoke in my defense. And the most unreasonable thing of all is that it is not even possible to know and say their names, unless a certain one happens to be a comic poet. (18b-c)

Socrates insists on the nearly ineffable quality of these slanderous claims. They are so powerful, so insidiously dangerous, because they have become self-evident and obvious. They are pervasive, hence unapparent, inconspicu-ous. They operate in the dark and unseen, that is, unconsciously. They derive their authority precisely from their unquestionable characterfor, remaining below the threshold of appearance, they altogether withdraw from the order of questioning. Such is the in-forming, con-forming, ultimately normative power of habituation, and most notably of upbringing, of instruction received from childhood, shaping the psukh precisely when most plastic, adaptable, and defenseless, at the age when one is most trusting (believing, recep-tive), prone to grow accustomed literally to anything, even slanderous lies. It is in this way that the talk began to circulate and crystallize concerning the thinker on the things aloft, who has investigated all things under the earth.5

The ineffability of these rumors is the ineffability of doxa, of dogmatic commitments and unrefl ective automatismsso much so that it is hardly possible to ascribe them to specifi c sources, to attribute them to determinate


individuals, to circumscribe their operation and resonance. That is why Socrates is forced to speak in his own defense somehow artlessly, without the adequate skill or devices [atekhns], as though fi ghting with shadows [skiamakhein] and refuting with no one to answer (18d). That is also why Socrates opens his address by gesturing toward the ungraspable, elusive force of past occurrences: How you, men of Athens, have been affected by my accusers, I do not know [ouk oida]. For my part, even I nearly forgot myself [emautou epelathomn] because of them, so persuasively [pithans] did they speak (17a).6 The beginning (of the events leading to the accusation and, simultaneously, of Platos text, of the apology that philosophy itself must become) is thus marked by an operation that cannot be traced back to a source, determined in its origin, calculated according to its principle. In the beginning there are but ghosts, hardly thereand the engagement, both necessary and impossible, with their nameless lingering. So overpowering is such an inception that the labor of recollection, let alone self-recollection, is from the start almost impossible.

Thus, on the ground of the old prejudice dramatized and exposed in Aristophanes, the difference seems to be lost between sophistry and philoso-phy, between the one who lays claims to wisdom and the one who is moved by a love of wisdom. In its reaction to and disdain for the sophists, the city will have accused and condemned the philosopher. This is why so much of Socrates defense speech will attempt to present itself as altogether other than sophistry. And yet, in its passionate appeals to a certain call (indeed to a provocation) of the god, in its dissociation of philosophy from other professions and practices, from the logic of professional dexterity, skill, and cunning, from art and artfulness [tekhn] tout court, Socrates speech fails to be an effective self-defense. Indeed, it cannot but further exacerbate the hostility against the uncanny fi gure of the philosopher.

The paradox should be underscored: not only do the sophists thrive in the city, but, when the city reacts against the outrageous practices of sophistry, the target of this outcry is the philosopher. Not only is the philosopher not seen as such, not perceived in his essential irreducibility to the sophist, but he becomes (comes to appear as) the paradigmatic, exemplary sophist. Socrates is brought before the law, in court, out of a certain ignorance or denial, out of the failure to recognize and draw the appropriate distinctions. A certain invisibility marks the condition, the being of the philosopher.

As we see in another Platonic dialogue, the Sophist, it takes a stranger, and not the men of Athens, to decide (judge) appropriately regarding the being of the philosopheror, minimally, to acknowledge and broach the question of the being of the philosopher as a question.7 It takes a stranger to


see what the men of Athens cannot see.8 The philosopher, himself hardly visible, is in his community as though among shades.9 And little does it matter that, in the Sophist, a defi nition of the philosopher is never achieved; that the stranger, indeed, begins by undertaking to defi ne the sophist, i.e., what the philosopher is not; and that this dialogue, in its clearing and empty-ing function, ultimately delineates a via negativa. Little does it matter, also, that in the course of the discussion concerning the sophist, for the rest of the dialogue, the stranger often hints at a proximity, even an inextricable intertwinement of the two fi gures.

What matters in this context is that the stranger endures the diffi culties and aporetic moments of the task undertaken, the paradoxes of the endeavor of defi nition, and never capitulates, never simply asserts that, for lack of an adequate grasp of being (of the being of the philosopher and of the soph-ist), the two fi gures should be confl ated, any differentiation between them dissolved.

In light of our present concerns, a passage in the initial stage of the Sophist seems especially relevant, namely the moment in which Socrates introduces the question he is compelled to ask the stranger. Socrates begins with a remark on the genus of the philosopher:

This genus, however, is in all probability scarcely much easier to discover than that of the god. For on account of the ignorance of everyone else, these menthose who not in a fabricated way [plasts] but in their being [onts] are philosopherscertainly show up in all sorts of apparitions [phantazomenoi] and haunt cities, looking down from on high on the life of those below. And to some they seem to be [dokousin einai] worth nothing and to some everything, and at times they take on the apparitions [phantazontai] of statesmen, and at times of sophists, and there are times when they might give some the impression [doxan] that they are altogether crazy. From our stranger, however, I would with pleasure inquire, if it is to his liking, what those in that place [topon] were accustomed to believe and name these things. (216cd)10

Socrates then specifi es what he would like to know concerning the views held by those in that other place about the sophist, statesman, and philosopher: Its this. Were they accustomed to hold all these one, or two, or, just as their names are three, to divide their genera into three as well and attach a name to each individually? (217a). The stranger replies that this is not diffi cult to say. There where he comes from they believed them three. However,


he adds, its no small and easy work to distinguish with clarity whatever they severally are (217b). On the one hand, thus, the philosophical inquiry under way calls for seeing through appearances, for seeing phantoms as such, as phantomsfor a seeing that, as such, cannot not challenge ignorance in its arrogant or complacent self-assertion.11 Yet, on the other hand, the strangers cautionary remark about the diffi culty of the task intimates that philosophy may remain crucially implicated in appearances and ignorance, in the play of opinion, never simply shedding them like an old skin.

What must be noticed again in this preliminary exchange, most notably in Socrates opening, is the situation of the philosopher with respect to his citythe paradoxical position or placement of the philosopher vis--vis his community. In a way, he is an exquisite, unmistakable fruit of the city. Socrates emphasizes his relation to the city, his multifarious appearing to and within it. The dwelling of the philosopher is the city, this city, nowhere else.12 Also, besides being a resident in the broad sense of the term, he is a citizenhe shares in political responsibilities, serves in the army, takes on public offi ces.13 Yet, in another way, on account of the ignorance of the many, he is disclosed as a specter, a faint apparition, a shadow, indeed, as appearing in a variety of shadowy semblances. No less spectral than those among whom he lives, he hovers over the city in many guises, haunts it as an alien. As if too close to the philosopher, as if blinded or alarmed by his nearness, his fellow citizens display an inability properly to perceive his be-ing; they distance him, projecting the philosophical spectacle outward and up against the sky, in a phenomenal proliferation. It takes the distance of the stranger who comes from that other place to honor and catch a glimpse of the philosopher in his estrangement and non-belonging, in brief, in his foreignness with respect to his own city.

The stranger and the philosopher, then, share in common a certain extraordinary (uncommon, not shared by many) character. But in what way is the philosopher foreign in and to his own city? What manner, what mode of extraneousness is at stake here? For, in their own way, the sophists, too, are paradigmatically and by defi nition foreign. Let us return to the Apology in order to delve deeper into this issue.

Near the beginning of his speech before the men of Athens, refer-ring to Aristophanes staging of a certain Socrates treading on air and spouting much other drivel, Socrates observes:

But in fact none of these things is so; and if you have heard from anyone that I attempt to educate human beings and make money from it, that is not true either. Though this too seems to be noble, if one


should be able to educate human beings, like Gorgias of Leontini, and Prodicus of Ceos, and Hippias of Elis. For each of them, men, is able, going into each of the cities, to persuade the youngwho can associate with whomever of their own citizens they wish to, for freethey persuade these young men to leave off their associations with the latter, and to associate with themselves instead, and to give them money and acknowledge gratitude besides. (19d20a)

The sophists wander from city to city offering teachings that yield political success and splendor of reputation. In the Timaeus they are referred to as those who do not dwell, who move from place to placeas a wandering kind [planton] not belonging to any one polis and, strictly speaking, having no home (19e20a). A certain superfi ciality or abstractness is associated with their restless, extensive mobility. Precisely because lacking an intimate understanding of place, of a place in its uniqueness, the sophists are said to be a genos astokhon, a class inadequate vis--vis those who are at once [hama] philosophers and statesmen.

Far from being apolis in the manner of the sophist, the philosopher does dwell and belong in a polis, indeed, is even a polits. Yet, he dwells and belongs as strange, or even as estranged and a stranger. Through the fi gure of the philosopher, dwelling becomes an outstanding phenomenon, all but unremarkable. Dwelling becomes strange and unsettling. Thus, the philoso-pher does not, or not necessarily, come from another country, city, or state. Rather, the philosopher seems to come from an other worldand it is in this light that we should hear Socrates remarks concerning the philosopher as god-like, analogous to the god in his fl eeting character (as we read in the Sophist) and god-sent (Apology). Socrates importantly elaborates on this in his speech before the law:

And, men of Athens, I do very much beg and beseech this of you: if you hear me speaking in my defense with the same speeches I am accustomed to speak both in the marketplace at the money tables [en agorai epi tn trapezn], where many of you have heard me, and elsewhere [allothi], do not wonder or make a disturbance for the sake of this. For this is how it is: now is the fi rst time I have come before a law court, at the age of seventy; hence I am simply [atekhns, artlessly] foreign [xens] to the manner of speech [lexes] here. (17cd)

At the inception of his address to those sitting in judgment, Socrates un-derscores the basic asymmetry jeopardizing the very possibility of his self-


defense: as someone inexperienced in that mode of interaction, unpracticed in the language spoken there, Socrates experiences a technical inadequacy, or even powerlessness. Such is the predicament of any foreigner (whether politically or otherwise understood) vis--vis the task of self-presentation and representation. The somehow unrepresentable character of the phi-losopher/foreigner necessitates the appeal to the custom of benevolence toward aliens:

So just as, if I really did happen to be a foreigner [xenos], you would surely forgive [xunegignskete] me if I spoke in the dialect and man-ner in which I was raised [ti phoni te kai ti tropi], so also I do beg this of you now (and it is just, at least as it seems to me): leave aside the manner of my speechfor perhaps it may be worse, but perhaps betterand instead consider this very thing and apply your intelligence [noun] to this: whether the things I say are just or not. For this is the virtue of a judge, while that of an orator [rhtoros] is to speak the truth [talth legein]. (17d18a)

It is, then, precisely with respect to his manner of logos, to his turn of voice, that Socrates is foreign in his own cityor, at least, in that hypostasis of the city that the tribunal is. The logoi of the philosopher have come to be at odds with the logoi dominating in the city. Socrates lack of skill, his being helpless, atekhnos, is directly linked to his foreignness. While, in the spirit of a certain cosmopolitanism (of a tenuous relation to, or even abstraction from place), the sophist operates at the very heart of the community (of the political organism), shaping the opinions, values, and comportment of the citizens, the philosopher dwells in the city without quite belonging to it, without being aligned with its identity and self-representation. His voice, the way in which he embodies discourse in the marketplace, among trades-men and various craftsmen, goes nearly unrecognized in the city that has come to identify itself with its forensic voice. There the philosopher dwells as a destabilizing anomaly. In this peculiar sense, he does not have a place, a proper place, a place that would be his own. If not apolis, he is atopos. He is out of place, indeed, placelessutopian and absurd, out of the ordinary, apart from most, incomprehensible, and hence nowhere to be found. A visionary apparition, the philosopher contemplates and speaks of what is notnot there, not yet.

It should also be noticed that it is exemplarily in the courtroom that the philosopher appears as an alienmisplaced and without a place. But the courtroom is the domain of the sophist, the arena wherein he practices


his skills and exerts his infl uence.14 The scene/stage of the accusation is not neutral but belongs to the practice of sophistry, is informed by its ethos, by a mode of logos that the philosopher cannot embrace simpliciter. It is, thus, possible to discern a trait of absurdity (at once of surreality and of displace-ment) in the taking place of the discourse of the philosopher before the law. Furthermore, an element of disorder is announced in the words and comportment of the philosopher. He will not speak beautifully, he says. His words will not be orderly [oude kekosmmenous]. Rather, what you hear will be spoken at random, in the words that I happen upon (17bc).

In this light, the philosopher emerges as a factor of unrest, agitation, motilityas a dynamic, if not one-sidedly subversive, element within the community. He dwellsbut in the mode of motion. He emerges, in other words, as a critical voice, as a source of institutional and political criticism. The philosopher, too, wandersbut within the city walls, inquiring and interrogating: Indeed, I must display my wanderings [plann] to you as a performing of certain labors, says Socrates, echoing the predicament of Heracles (22a).15 Such is the assignment (task) from the god. Socrates at work examines his fellow citizens, most notably those who assume they are wise, who are not perturbed by a sense of the uncanny inhering in them. To them, Socrates gives back a disquieting image of themselves as strange, strangers, unknown to themselves. The one who is committed to the life of self-examination and to the prescription of self-knowledge cannot but attempt to share this least common of drives. This is the strange gift of the philosopher, of the stranger the philosopher is.

Even more pointedly, the philosopher poses a threat to the cityto its institutions, conventions, laws, and practices. His way of life (his calls, pas-sions, compulsions) in so many ways undermines the structures on which the polis rests. He is as strangely dangerous, deinos, to his community as his accusers, past and present, are deinoi to him (the pervasiveness of this adjective has already been signaled above). This issue deserves a few further observations.

First of all, as is also apparent from the accusation, the comportment Socrates has adopted represents a challenge to the established beliefs about the gods. He affi rms that living the life of (self-)examination is a divine injunction: I have been ordered to practice this by the god, as I affi rm, from divinations, and from dreams, and in every way that any divine allotment [theia moira] ever ordered a human being to practice anything at all (33c).16 Just as, when stationed by the rulers to do battle, he has obeyed, so (indeed all the more), must he obey the god who apparently stationed him in the city as a philosopher (28d29a). Believing [oiomai, hupolamban] (28e) to


have been sent and positioned in such a fashion, he further declares: I, men of Athens, salute and love you, but I will obey the god rather than you; and as long as I breathe and am able to, I will certainly not stop philosophizing, and I will exhort you and explain this to whomever of you I happen to meet, and I will speak just the sorts of things I am accustomed to (29d). Socrates replies to the charge of impiety by appealing to a relation with the divine that grants the possibility of insubordinationvis--vis human orders and in general.

Indeed, Socrates relation to the god exhibits traits as polemical and unresolved as those characterizing his relation to the polis.17 Nothing is settled or self-evident, for him, in matters of piety. Piety comes to be a call for engagement, a matter of wondrous undergoing and dynamic contestation. Even the god is defi edfor the god has posed a riddle to Socrates when saying that Socrates is wisest among human beings. And Socrates set out to philosophize precisely in order to refute the divination (21c), to show that the god was mistaken, that his oracular response could not possibly be true or that, at least, it requires a hermeneutically refi ned assessment. In Socrates experience, the connection with the divine bespeaks an openness (on)to that which presents itself as ungraspable and perplexing. It bespeaks the sway of the call to search. The divine comes to be intimately connected with the vocation or attraction to inquire. But the ethical and political consequences of this are quite evident. The contestation of the god and the commitment to inquiry imply a suspension, or even an overturning, of human rules and regulationsnot on the ground of a truth revealed and owned, but out of a desire for it, out of a certain being owned and revealed (to oneself as well as others) by such a desire.

Secondly (and this, too, is apparent from the formal accusation), Socrates challenges paternal authority and patrilinear logic. Socrates refers to himself as a father or an older brother, going to each of you privately (31b). But the turning of the soul and the inquisitiveness encouraged by this philo-sophical paternity are such that a disruption of legal/biological paternity and its authority must occur.18 A couple of passages are enlightening in this respect. In both of them Socrates articulates both his relation to the youth and the love his way of proceeding elicits in them:

The young who follow me of their own accordthose who have the most leisure, the sons of the wealthiestenjoy hearing human beings examined. And they themselves often imitate me, and in turn they attempt to examine others. And then, I suppose, they discover a great abundance of human beings who suppose they know something, but


know little or nothing. Thereupon, those examined by them are angry at me, not at themselves, and they say that Socrates is someone most disgusting and that he corrupts the young. And whenever someone asks them, by doing what and teaching what? they have nothing to say, but are ignorant. (23cd)

And again: I know well that wherever I go, the young will listen to me when I speak, just as they do here. And if I drive them away, they themselves will drive me out by persuading their elders. But if I do not drive them away, their fathers and families will drive me out because of these same ones (37de).

Thirdly, the subversion and transfi guration of the epic-heroic thos should be considered in its civic-institutional signifi cance. Far from ac-cidental or relevant only in the Apology, a certain assimilation of the thos of the warrior to the concerns of philosophy informs the Platonic corpus in its entirety. While an adequate analysis of this pervasive theme clearly does not belong in the present context, a few considerations must be outlined, at least in passing, concerning Socrates defense speech. Socrates compares himself to the son of Thetis, Achilles, in his despising danger and not being afraid of dying (28bd). The Homeric hero is acknowledged in his some-what surprising similarity to the philosopher. After all, he, too, presents the essential features of the outcast. Of incomparable beauty and unique valor, he is extraordinary among humans, troubled by the gods, and communes with neither.

However, in the Socratic version, heroic courage is no longer a matter of excellence to be displayed on the battlefi eld, but wherever and in whatever function one may happen to be stationed in this life. It has to do with the ability to endure in the face of danger, to abide, to stay and run the risk [] and not take into account death or anything else (28d). However implicitly, such a reconfi guration of heroic intrepidity entails a thorough critique of the tradition and of the values it endorses. Excellence in fi ghting comes to des-ignate the ability to sustain philosophical praxis, i.e., to live philosophically: if someone who really fi ghts for the just [makhoumenon huper tou dikaiou] is going to preserve himself even for a short time, it is necessary for him to lead a private life [iditeuein] rather than a public one (32a). We can hardly avoid relating this statement to the myth concluding the Republic, where Socrates, in a similar fashion, at once draws upon and transforms the Homeric repertory. Toward the end of the myth, the soul that was once embodied as Odysseus is said to have chosen the life of a private manaway from the clamor of war and the love of honor (620cd). In this choice, such a soul


fi nally manifests itself in its movement of emancipation from the love of glory and displays a resourcefulness joined with wisdom. Away from both the emergency of war and the seduction of splendor and reputation, a furthering of (or fi ghting for) the just seems to become possible.

Thus, this transfi gured hero, the philosopher, endures whatever must be endured in order to follow his way (his compulsion, necessity, or voice). Resonating with the fi gure of Antigone, his posture with respect to the community shows that the authority and determinations of the polis, on the one hand, and justice, on the other hand, are neither coextensive nor interchangeable, nor yet the same. Socrates recalls having opposed both the democratic regime and the Thirty, in order not to take part in actions he deemed outside the law [paranoms] (32b), unjust [adikon] or unholy [anosion] (32d): although the orators were ready to indict me and arrest me, and you were ordering and shouting, I supposed that I should run the risk with the law and the just rather than side with you because of fear of prison or death when you were counseling unjust things (32bc). It should be noted that Socrates sides with the laws, nomoi, qua expression of justice or of the desire for justice, and not qua expression of the arbitrariness of power.

Among other things, what becomes evident through these refl ections is that a certain foreignness to the city bespeaks a foreignness to the ideal of manlinessforeignness to the idea of man, masculinity, and the male/virile values informing the polis. It is in this way, too, that Socrates points to his strange predicament, to his belonging and yet not belonging to the communityto his belonging to a certain life of the community, while not belonging to its legal-institutional self-enforcement.19 To the men of Athens Socrates seems to be saying: I am not one of you.

It is in this vein that, to conclude, a remarkable passage toward the end of the Apology should perhaps be heard or read. Socrates at this point turns to those who have supported himvoting for his acquittal before the law, but also, most signifi cantly, having shared the life of (self-)inquiry or examination:

But with those who voted for me I would be pleased to converse on behalf of this affair which has happened, while the offi cials are oc-cupied and I do not yet go to that place where, when I do go, I must die. Please, stay with me, men, for this much time; nothing prevents our telling tales to one another [diamuthologsai pros alllous] as long as it is possible. [] For to me, judgesfor by calling you judges I would address you correctlysomething wondrous has happened [thaumasion ti gegonen]. (39e40a)


With such judges, Socrates speaks of what, for all he knows, death might be like. In these words drawing the discourse to a close, what Hegel called the principle of Socrates is envisioned, bridging the abysmal discontinuity between life and death, between the place of the mortals and the placeless-ness (or altogether other topology) of the immortals.20 In the manner of Er, the warrior-angelos of the Republic, or of Eros, the daimn evoked in the Symposium, such a principle remains operative through the unspeakable passage to an other place [eis allon topon] (40e):

On the other hand, if death is like a journey [apodmsai] from here to an other place, and if the things that are said are true, that in fact all the dead are there, then what greater good could there be than this, judges? For if one who arrived in Hades, released from those here who claim to be judges, will fi nd those who are judges in truththe very ones who are said to give judgment there, Minos and Rhadamanthys, and Aeacus, and Triptolemus, and those other demigods who turned out to be just in their own liveswould this move [apodmia] be a paltry one? Or, again, to associate [xungenesthai] with Orpheus and Musaeus and Hesiod and Homer, how much would any of you give? For I am willing to die many times if these things are true, since espe-cially for myself spending time there would be wondrous [thaumast]: whenever I happened to meet Palamedes and Telamonian Ajax, or anyone else of the ancients who died because of an unjust judgment [dia krisin adikon], I would compare my own undergoing [path] with theirs. As I suppose, it would not be unpleasant. (40e41b)

Socrates suspends the automatism associating death to fear. Precisely be-cause withdrawing from illumination and understanding, precisely because unknowable in the most radical sense, death cannot, rigorously speaking, be feared. Its impenetrability can only provide the occasion for an imaginative exercise, in all tentativeness expanding and thrusting the experience in this life beyond itself:

And certainly the greatest thing is that I would pass my time exam-ining and searching out among those therejust as I do to those herewho among them is wise, and who supposes he is, but is not. How much would one give, judges, to examine him who led the great army against Troy, or Odysseus, or Sisyphus, or the thousand others whom one might mention, both men and women [kai andras kai gunaikas]? (41bc)


The visionary as well as transgressive dimension of the Socratic pursuit is here most perspicuous. There is no reason to fear the unknown and, thus, death. Precisely in its unintelligibility, death should not, indeed, cannot occasion disquietude, but rather invites the contemplation of unheard-of possibili-ties. Thus, in death Socrates comes to envision an other life, an other place in which he may share his passion for inquiry and self-examination with archaic generations of judges, with just ones, poets, and heroesa place in which he may hear from them their ventures and compare them to his own. There as well as in Athens, he would take delight in those around him, in their lives and stories. He would engage themmen and women alike, he meticulously specifi es in the end, no longer confi ned to addressing the men of Athens only.

At this stage his accusers, who can barely discern and judge, are left behind. Indeed, the physical scene of the trial, which could be attended only by a male audience, seems to be transcended. Socrates now speaks as if alone with the few friends and true judges present there, and shares with them the imagination, the visionary evocation of a world in which men and women alike would live thoughtfully, share their vicissitudes, carry on the task of understanding themselves through each othereven trouble, restrain, and thus inspire each other the way friends do (41e). 21

It is with the hypothesis of this delight, with the projection of such a world, that Socrates defense speech comes to an end. After conjuring up the company of those who passed on, Socrates adds: To converse and to associ-ate with them and to examine them there would be inconceivable happiness [hois ekei dialegesthai kai xuneinai kai exetazein amkhanon an ei eudaimonias]. Certainly those there surely do not kill on this account (41c).

Let us conclude by calling attention to this adjective, amkhanon, which amplifi es the recurrence of the adverb atekhns variously emphasized earlier. Socrates seems to point to a certain non-technical, non-artful, ultimately non-volitional, excessive dimension of his inquiry and passion. The happi-ness here at stake is inconceivable in the sense that it cannot be devised or contrived. No skill, technical mastery, machination, or otherwise calculative resources pertain to it or may grant it. A certain lack of resource, or even powerlessness, seems to mark the philosopher and to distinguish him from the epic hero, who at least in Homer is characterized as wily and shrewd (paradigmatically, Odysseus is fi rst said to be of many guiles, polumkhanos, in Iliad II.173). The philosopher would, quite distinctively, do what he can, not what he wants.22

Taken over by an unmasterable vision of happiness, the philosopher glimpses at a possibility, divines a reverberation of human potential. Such


an experience of rapturean experience potentially rupturing, disruptive vis--vis human constructionsoperates as an unrelenting reminder of the irreducibility of the human to human conventions and institutions. It reminds the human of that which, in and as the human, exceeds the humanof that which the human can be and become. It reveals the human precisely in and as this thrust of the human beyond itselfin and as this openness into the possible. The philosophical experience may at once recall and announce the human to come.

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Notes

1. Anne Carson, trans., If Not, Winter: Fragments of Sappho (New York: Knopf, 2002) 265. 2. This cluster of issues is central to presently ongoing debates at the intersection of phi-losophy, political theory, sociology, and psychoanalysis. Consider the paradigmatic case of Julia Kristeva, whose intellectual trajectory from Histoires damour (Paris: Denol, 1983) to trangers nous-mmes (Paris: Fayard, 1988), to Le gnie fminin, Hannah Arendt (Paris: Fayard, 1999) is compelled by such themes precisely in their interconnectedness. 3. In Beitrge zur Philosophie (Vom Ereignis), Martin Heidegger announces a thinking that would assist the Greek beginning toward its inalienable and ownmost otherness [Andersar-tigkeit], which becomes fruitful solely in the historical dialogue of thinkers. (Gesamtausgabe 65 (Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 1989) 187. 4. Although often emending it, in the present essay I use the translation of the Apology by Thomas G. West and Grace Starry West, Four Texts on Socrates (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1984). I work with the Greek text of the Apology of Socrates, ed. Michael C. Stokes (Warminster, UK: Aris and Phillips, 1997). Further citations in text are according to the Stephanus pagination. 5. A Talmudic saying recalled by Leo Strauss in Persecution and the Art of Writing (Chicago: University of Chicago, 1988) again echoes the danger inherent in this kind of inquiry: For him who refl ects about four thingsabout what is above, what is below, what is before, what is behindit would be better not to have come into the world (20). For a discussion of Strausss reading of Plato in light of the political hostility to philosophy (a reading whose implications and consequences are signifi cantly remote from the present hermeneutical exercise, in particular as regards the unquestioned assumption of ultimate authorial masteryand hence of reticence, esoteric withdrawal, disappearance, and dissimulation as purely intentional determinations), see Catherine H. Zuckert, Postmodern Platos (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1996) chap. 46. 6. Phaedrus 228a and 236c. 7. The mysterious stranger from Elea is introduced by Theodorus at the beginning of the dialogue. He remains unnamed but is said to be a lover of wisdom, a disciple of Parmenides and Zeno, and somewhat divine, if not a god (216af.). 8. It should be noticed that, in the Apology, Socrates does not acknowledge the men of Athens as judges. Cf. 40a. 9. Republic 386c and 516d, in which the fi gure of Achilles lamenting his condition in Ha-des is evoked by reference to the Odyssey. However dimly, the shadow of the epic hero among shadows images the philosophers estrangement among those who are not quite living. 10. Though not without variations, I refer to the translation of the Sophist by Seth Benardete, Being of the Beautiful (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1984). I work with the Greek text in Plato,


Theaetetus, Sophist, trans. H. N. Fowler (London: Heinemann, 1921). Further citations in text are according to the Stephanus pagination. 11. See Republic 476 c ff. 12. See Phaedrus 230 d. 13. See Apology 32 ac. This theme is also broadly elaborated in Symposium and Crito. 14. In the Nicomachean Ethics Aristotle addresses what could be called a certain cosmopoli-tan feature of legal-juridical (and, we may add, sophistical) discoursesnamely, the generality and uniformity of laws, their allergy to the particular, to place and embodiment. Referring to the unqualifi ed way [apls] in which the legal texts speak, Aristotle turns to the language of hamartia (which designates fault, error, and also the essential fl aw disclosed in and through tragedy). The law [nomos] errs [elleipei, falls short, leaves something undone or unsaid] because it is stated universally [dia to katholou] (1137 b 2627). It is in its divergence from the singular that the law falls short of justice. 15. Cf. 31 c, connecting such destabilizing labors with placelessness [atopia]. In the Phaedrus, Socrates, on his walk through the countryside, is said to appear wondrous and most place-less [atoptatos], moving as artlessly or helplessly [atekhns] as a stranger being guided about [xenagoumeni tini] (230 cd). 16. Philosophy seems, thus, to stem from the same source of poetic inspiration (Ion 534 c) and the madness of divination (Phaedrus 244 c). 17. See John Sallis, Being and Logos (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities, 1986) 46 ff. 18. I have extensively discussed this issue in my Of Myth, Life, and War in Platos Republic (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 2002), especially in chapter one. 19. According to his own words, the philosopher seems to be most signifi cantly related to the marketplaceto that place of exchange of goods and money which, analogously to the fi rst city envisioned in the Republic (369 b372 d), discloses the life of the polis as essentially based on work and trade. Neither assimilable to the private locus of the household nor to the public space of political-forensic debate, the marketplace points to the fundamental dimension of need and interdependence, both intra- and inter-political. 20. The principle of Socrates manifests itself as revolutionary against the Athenian state. [] At this stage, in Athens, that higher principle which was the destruction of the substantial endurance of the Athenian state, advanced in its development more and more. Most remark-ably, Hegel connects this revolutionary character of the Socratic refl ection with Socrates daimonion, thus disclosing the rupture with actuality (Wirklichkeit) as daimonic Vorlesungen ber die Philosophie der Geschichte (Leipzig: Reclam, 1924) 350 f; my translation. 21. Cf. Meno 81 a, Phaedrus 235 b. See also Peter Kingsley, Ancient Philosophy, Mystery, and Magic: Empedocles and Pythagorean Tradition (Oxford: Clarendon, 1995) 149171. 22. It should be said that the language of mkhan occurs at crucial junctures in the Platonic texts, whether to indicate the contrivances of the sophist (Gorgias 459 d), the means out of a predicament (Phaedo 72 d), a theatrical mechanism (Cratylus 425 d; cf. Aristotles Poetics, 1454 b 2), a stratagem such as the noble lie (Republic 414 b), the various machinations meant to control the poietic-reproductive processes in the just city (Republic 415 c, 460 d, Timaeus 18 d). This terminology in and of itself decisively orients the interpretation of the political construction taking place in the Republic, showing this program in its eminently suspect willfulness. Because of this, the incidence of such language would warrant a detailed study. The passage in the Cratylus should also be considered, where the language of mkhan is implicated in the hermetic-hermeneutic cunning of Hermes and related etymologies (407 e408 b). On the other hand, the recurrence of amkhanon should be mentioned, whether in connection with the strangeness [atopia] of imaginary beings (Phaedrus 229 de), or designating the inconceivable greatness of the rewards for virtue (Republic 608 c), the [i]nconceivable beauty [amkhanon kallos] of the good itself (Republic 509 a), or the joyous experiences [] and visions of inconceivable beauty [eupatheias [...] kai theas amkhanous to kallos] of the souls journeying through the heaven (Republic 615 a).

baracchi visions of another world

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