Abstract
This chapter builds on the foregoing analyses to address new themes and is divided into three sections: Section “Plato’s Socrates Attuned Mode of Questioning” considers the “original” nature of Socratic questions and demonstrates how these types of questions that give birth to the inquiry and guide it function to “attune” participants who are opened to a form of understanding that holds the potential to transform their ethical character or disposition. The second section moves to consider the ontological structure of the human condition, attempting to elucidate the context from out of which Socratic inquiry grows and unfolds. It is shown that the human condition is bounded by the horizons of finitude and this indicates that all forms of human knowledge and potential for learning-through-transcendence is radically limited.
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Notes
- 1.
As might directly relate to our critical reading of the doctrinal Plato in Chapter one and the manner in which educational practitioners of Socratic Seminar adopt a strict “Socratic method” for instruction, Gonzalez (2009) observes that neither Heidegger nor Socrates reduce the practice of questioning to a strict indelible method or technique for procuring truth of a definitive nature, “neither do they make it an absolute end-in-itself divorced from truth” (427), thus both philosophers embrace the original necessity of questioning in philosophy and the idea that “artful” questioners understand that is crucial to hold themselves in the process of questioning—the sway of its unfolding—despite the turns, detours, and aporetic breakdowns encountered in the process of inquiry.
- 2.
Teloh (1986) provides a unique view of the type of “psychic” transformation that occurs through the process of question-response-aporia in his reading of “Socratic teaching/education.” Claiming that there are many forms of the Socratic elenchus in the dialogues, Teloh approaches Socrates’ philosophical method in terms of explaining the characteristics of both the processes of the elenchus and the incorporation of psychagogia into a philosophical practice that is soul-altering or character-changing. In this view, each interlocutor has a “distinct type of psyche, and Socrates fits his words (logoi) to the type of psyche which he addresses. Socrates uses either refutation (elenchus) or positive psyche-leading (psychagogia) depending on the type of psyche” he encounters, and in each instance Socrates is attempting to guide the soul of the interlocutor “to wisdom” (69). What is crucial about Teloh’s reading is that he interprets the elenchus as a practice that is ad hominem in nature, because it is focused exclusively on the interlocutor’s deeply held beliefs, and thus when properly carried out it has the potential of changing not only the interlocutor’s beliefs, but also, more importantly, his/her attitudes toward those beliefs.
- 3.
Kirkland (2010) is also concerned with the ontology of Socratic questioning, a questioning that brings the participants to experience, as opposed to the sheltering effect of techne, the “exposure to excess,” or the excessive nature of truth of the virtues, that always frustrates efforts to arrive at an “explainable and thereby teachable understanding of virtue,” and because we fail to arrive at a “directly proximal grasping or epistemic possession of the being of virtue” (109). In this way, through this phenomenon, we are brought by Socrates to experience the “distressing distance” bound up with Socratic questioning. If virtue is experienced in “the mode of human wisdom and the painful concern it entails” (110), which is the experience of it “exceeding our grasp and withdrawing itself” (110), then the distance of the Being of virtue and human wisdom is exposed and laid bare. This is because the elenchus brings us into an experience that is both excessive and distant, and as such it is possible to read this in terms of ontological finitude, as we do in the final chapter. However, unlike our reading, Kirkland is emphatic that this “distressing distance” is neither due to “personal failure” nor “human finitude,” but instead the “failure arises from the being of virtue itself, and the proper, wise, and truthful experience thereof is nothing other than the pain of being concerned for it and the posing and holding open of the question ‘What is virtue’” (110)? This indicates that for Kirkland, as mentioned above, the Being of virtue can never be brought to full revelation, but his direct focus is not on the ontological context itself, but rather the way the Being of virtue is in relation to the human’s care and concern for understanding it, which must, as he argues, always be limited. Kirkland’s reading does not focus on human finitude as the defining ontological horizon delimiting all human endeavors to know the world in its compete fullness.
- 4.
The philosopher, it is possible to state, in relation to Hadot (2002), staying consistent with the phenomenological aspects of our reading, is thrown-into-the-world of his concern or care in a way where he is most primordially, and thus existentially, not-at-home, knowing that he will “always be the person who knows he does not know, who knows that he is not a sage, and who is therefore neither sage nor nonsage. He is not at home in either the world of senseless people or the world of sages; neither wholly in the world of men and women, nor wholly in the world of the gods. He is unclassifiable, and, like Eros and Socrates, has neither hearth nor home” (47, my emphasis).
- 5.
Mittelstrass (1988), who stresses the notion of “phronetic” understanding of the virtues, argues that in Socratic questioning understanding emerges through the unfolding of the asketic practice of dialectic, through and by means of a process of development, which is consistent with the pursuit of the “normative” understanding of the virtues. Mittlestrass, in line with our reading, claims that understanding of the virtues is irreducible to either propositional or “textbook” knowledge (as we relate to contemporary education), for the very aporetic structures underlying Socratic dialectic are, in terms that have been introduced from a phenomenological perspective, grounded in the ontological distantiation that is foundational to human existence, i.e., the radical human finitude delimiting the horizon of all forms of “human wisdom” indicates that the character of Socratic philosophy does not seek to transport “objective knowledge”—because such knowledge is impossible—but rather to inspire and facilitate philosophically and ethically informed “attitudes” (139), or what might be interpreted in terms of the “attunement” of the disposition (hexis) in moments of finite human transcendence.
- 6.
As stated, Weber (196) does seek to draw out the positive elements he finds in Plato’s systematic philosophy. Weber, in presenting his theory of learning, states that the Forms “attract us by the love we have for them,” which inspires us to “strive to realize them,” and it is the wise educator, attempting to apply “Platonism” in the classroom, who “presides,” as did both Socrates and Plato, “over the birth of ideas” (96). This calls for, as is consistent with ouor understanding of Socratic philosophy, resistance against the imposition of “rigid requirements of rote learning from without” (96). However, and this is where we part ways with Weber, he argues that the things we learn are not “unknown,” rather they have been “forgotten” (97), and thus the pursuit of knowledge can be accomplished when the correct “Idealist” educational method, traceable to Plato and Socrates, is applied, and the knowledge acquired will be sure and certain, and this includes an understanding of values, ethics, and morality.
- 7.
In Tarrant (2009), this notion of echonic inspiration is uniquely couched in quasi-religious terms, related to Socrates’ “personal religious experience” (e.g., Ap. 33c), for Socrates believed that “divine knowledge did exist,” and that this knowledge “was able to direct human conduct,” and such “guidance offered the hope of acting rightly under the influence of knowledge, even where we cannot know ourselves” (96). This view also retains the notion of the radical limitations bound up with human knowledge, for although there was a “higher wisdom among the gods,” Socrates resisted “the notion that humans,” much unlike the position of Protagoras, “could be the final measure” (96).
- 8.
Hyland’s (1995) unique notion of “noetic vision” emerging from his phenomenological reading of the dialogues also might be said to address the paradox of learning. Hyland divides “insight” into two forms: “archaic noesis” and “telic noesis”: “[E]very philosophical speech is bounded at its beginning and its end by a noetic vision” (182). Achaic noesis forms the “ground of the speaking,” i.e., “we speak in the light of that insight” (182), which indicates that something is already, in a legitimate manner, an issue for our Being, such as the insight into the Being of the virtues or the Idea of the Good. “Similarly, the ‘telic’ noesis is the final culminating insight toward which the speech hopefully leads us, but which again is not reducible to the speech itself” (182). If we map Hyland’s interpretation onto our reading in order extend it, we see that it is possible to envision elenchus-dialectic unfolding through the phases Hyland identifies, that of the initial vision or “inspirational” insight into the Being of virtue (archaic noesis), which attunes the discourse, and gets us into the “circle” of interpretation and which moves us toward the latter type of “vision, i.e., the fleeting and partial revelation of “truth,” or the intimation of truth (telic noesis), that the dialectic makes possible. Crucially, telic noesis is not a complete revelation of truth; it is also, importantly, not a terminal destination, where, once reached, the dialectic has achieved its goal (telos). Telec noesis, much like achaic noesis, represents an incomplete “vision” or vista into the Being of virtue. Neither of these “visions” can be brought to stand with certainty or utter clarity in either the intelligence or through language.
- 9.
Gadamer (1980) also endorses the notion that an “idealized” form of understanding of the virtues is always at play in the Platonic dialogues: “[H]e who is himself supposed to get a vision of the thing itself or he who would engender that vision in another must have ‘affinity’ for the thing besides having the intellectual gifts of comprehension and memory. The purpose of the Socratic art of conversing was to avoid being talked out of the fact that there is such a thing as the Just, the Beautiful, and the Good” (117).
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Magrini, J.M. (2018). The Ontological Context of the Human Condition: Original Socratic Questions and the Paradox of Learning. In: Plato’s Socrates, Philosophy and Education. SpringerBriefs in Education(). Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-71356-4_3
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