The Ontology of Socratic Questioning in Plato's Early Dialogues

by Sean D. Kirkland

Modern interpreters of Plato s Socrates have generally taken the dialogues to be aimed at working out objective truth. Attending closely to the texts of the early dialogues and the question of virtue in particular, Sean D. Kirkland suggests that this approach is flawed that such concern with discovering external facts rests on modern assumptions that would have been far from the minds of Socrates and his contemporaries. This isn t, however, to accuse Socrates of any kind of relativism. Through careful analysis of the original Greek and of a range of competing strands of Plato scholarship, Kirkland instead brings to light a radical, proto-phenomenological Socrates, for whom what virtue is is what has always already appeared as virtuous in everyday experience of the world, even if initial appearances are unsatisfactory or obscure and in need of greater scrutiny and clarification."

Genres: Philosophy

289 pages, Paperback

First published October 12, 2012

Reviews

[James Magrini · Rating 5 out of 5]

Kirkland’s text is a dense study of Plato’s Socrates focused on the ontology of Socratic questioning in the early aporetic dialogues of Plato. It is written eloquently in a clear style that is uncommon within so-called “Continental” scholarship. Kirkland’s lucid stylistic approach facilitates the precise communication of ideas and enhances the line(s) of argumentation such that his position is both highly readable and understandable despite its complexity. The notes offer further explanation for certain concepts, contribute to deepening etymological analyses, and set the scholarship within the historical context of Platonic interpretation. The monograph could be classified in terms of “Third Way” Platonic scholarship, which was first articulated by Francisco Gonzalez (The Third way: New Directions in Platonic Studies), which rather than a tightly organized school of Platonic interpretation, simply refers to interpreters reading Plato as a non-doctrinal philosopher. Thus, Kirkland does not adopt a doctrinal approach embracing either a completed or developing “system” in Plato, whether this system is found in the extant dialogues (exoteric) or esoteric in nature. In addition, the text also avoids the traps of “skeptical” or “eristic” readings, and instead finds the positive or “constructive” philosophical content in the dialogues, while refusing to trace such moments of insight to a “system” of Plato’s design.

Kirkland’s reading of the early Platonic dialogues is both phenomenological and ontological; Socrates is read as a proto-phenomenologist practicing, as Kirkland states, a “particularly Greek form of radicalized ontological phenomenology” (111). There are three main components to Kirkland’s reading: The Socratic project is phenomenological in that it is concerned with the initial appearing of virtue in the space of discourse in terms of everyday doxai. The Socratic project is also ontological in that what emerges in the context of elenchtic inquiry in the “questioning of doxa with Socrates is ‘what virtue is’ or the being of virtue,” which Kirkland claims is “the phenomenal being of virtue” (115), i.e., the truth of the virtue as it intimately related to embodied Being-in-the-world, and not as it relates to a transcendental or transcendent realm (“reality”) that is radically disengaged from but gives legitimacy to the appearing of virtue (the “Separate Forms Theory”). The project is also a “radicalized phenomenology in the precise sense that the study of appearances is pushed to its very limit” (115), and the limit can be understood in terms of the aporia of Socratic questioning. For Kirkland, this moment of breakdown, the disturbance of our doxai, marks the “success” of the Socratic phenomenological approach to questioning virtue, for this indicates that the virtue’s appearance in the context of the dialectic points beyond opinions and the propositions employed attempting to express those opinions.

Thus, in essence, what is thereby present in the doxa always exceeds it even within moments when truth manifests, and this means that what is clarified through dialectic examination never shows itself in complete revelation, yet what remains concealed is still there obliquely present in the clarified appearance. It is this concealed aspect of the virtue that drives Socrates and the participants on to pursue its continued interrogation. One of Kirkland’s crucial contributions to the field of Platonic studies, I think, is that he explicates a phenomenological approach grounded in the view that even in everyday modes of “knowing” virtue, there is already an appearance of the virtue’s Being that must be in place if there is to be dialogue, in terms of representing the doxastic requirement of the elenchus. Thus, opinions and appearances are never reducible to “mere” opinions or “mere” appearances; they are taken seriously and interrogated, interpreted, and clarified. In this way Kirkland rescues Plato from the idealist critique found in doctrinal readings. This move also severs Plato’s ties to Cartesian metaphysics, for “phenomenology proposes to circumvent the epistemological problems brought on by the Cartesian separation of the subject from objective reality by studying instead the relation of consciousness to this intentional object,” i.e., the Being of virtue in its appearance, presents us with “an inviolable connection even when the object in question appears in obscurity, obliquely, contradictorily, or as withdrawn, concealed” (29).

As stated, Kirkland is 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,” because we fail to arrive at a destination that would mark the acquisition or possession of the Being of virtue, i.e., we never “have” or "possess" virtue, so to speak. 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. However, unlike the tradition in phenomenological-ontology, e.g., the fundamental ontology of Heidegger in Being and Time, 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.

The book could serve as either a core text or supplemental text within graduate studies in philosophy and ancient philosophy focused on presenting alternative readings to the doctrinal readings of Plato’s dialogues that dominate the philosophy curriculum in institutions of higher learning, as observed by both David Krell (“Reading Plato After Nietzsche & Co.”) and Jacob Howland (“Re-Reading Plato: The Problem of Platonic Chronology”). I have incorporated quite successfully sections of the book into a philosophical foundations of education course. It would also be useful to classicists for its presentation of in depth etymologies, which contribute much to enhancing the interpretation, and they do so while avoiding both the fallacy of argument from etymology and the anachronistic fallacy. For readers familiar with the SUNY Series in Ancient Greek Philosophy, Kirkland’s book, because it embraces a phenomenological approach that is ontological and interpretive (hermeneutic), is more relatable in content and style to Drew Hyland’s Finitude and Transcendence (reviewed) in the Platonic Dialogues than Gary A. Scott’s Plato’s Socrates as Educator.

Dr. James M. Magrini
College of Dupage
Philosophy and Religious Studies

[Ramzzi · Rating 3 out of 5]

Sean D. Kirkland’s book became a good resource for my papers. I endured well enough that I explored better ancient Greek philosophy, particularly the relation of Plato and Socrates with it. It came like a reinforcement, though not much of its writing holds brilliance, the explication it rendered at least, guided me.