Philosophy as a way of life

Socrates pulled off his enterprise of dissimulation so well that he succeeded in definitively masking himself from history. He wrote nothing, engaging only in dialogue. All the testimonies we possess about him hide him from us more than they reveal him, precisely because Socrates hns nlwnyN been UNed 11s n mask by those who have spoken nhoul him.

The Figure of Socrates

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Because he was himself masked, Socrates became the prosopon, or mask, of personalities who felt the need to take shelter behind hinl. It was from him that they got the idea both to mask themselves, and to u�e Socratic irony as a mask. We have here a phenomenon extremely rich in its literary, pedagogical, and psychological implications.

The original nucleus of this phenomenon was the irony of Socrates himself.

Socrates, the eternal interrogator, used skillful questions to bring his interlocutors to admit their ignorance. By so doing, he disturbed them so much that they were eventually led to question their entire lives. After Socrates'

death, the memory of his Socratic conversations inspired a new literary genre, the logoi sokratikoi, which imitated the conversations Socrates had had with a wide variety of interlocutors. In these logoi sokratikoi, Socrates became a prosopon - an interlocutor or character - and hence, if we recall the meaning of prosopon in the ancient theater, a mask. Especially in the subtle, refined form given it by Plato, the Socratic dialogue was intended to provoke in its readers an effect analogous to that produced by the living discourse of Socrates himself. Thus, the reader of these dialogues finds himself in the same situation as Socrates' interlocutors: he does not know w�ere Socrates'

questions are going to lead him. Socrates' elusive, unsettling prosopon/mask sows disquiet in the soul of the reader, leading it to a heightening of consciousness which may go as far as far as a philosophical conversion. As Konrad Gaiser has convincingly shown,'8 the reader himself is invited to take refuge behind the mask of Socrates. In almost all Plato's Socratic dialogues, there comes a moment of crisis, when the interlocutors are overcome by discouragement. They no longer have confidence in the possibility of continuing the discussion, and it seems as though the dialogue is about to be broken off. This is where Socrates intervenes: he takes the others' doubt, uneasiness, and discouragement upon himself. He assumes all the risks of the dialectical adventure, and carries out a complete switching of roles. If the enterprise fails, it will henceforth be his responsibility. In this way, he shows his interlocutors a projection of their own selves. They can now transfer their personal uneasiness onto Socrates, and regain confidence in dialectical research and in the logos itself.

In his dialogues, Plato too uses Socrates as a mask, or, in Nietzsche's terminology, as a "semiotics. " 19 As Paul Friedlander2° has pointed out, whereas the "ego" had long since made its appearance in Greek literature -

,Hesiod, Xenophanes, Parmenides, Empedocles, the Sophists, and even Xenophon do not hesitate to speak in the first person - Plato completely effaces himself behind Socrates in his dialogues, and systematically avoids the use of the first person singular We arc dealing here with an cxl rcmcly subtle

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Figures

for members of the Academy, and his written dialogues, in which he utilized the mask of Socrates to exhort his readers to philosophy? Alternatively, should we conclude that Plato uses the figure of Socrates to set forth his doctrines with a certain degree of distance and irony? In any case, this initial situation has indelibly influenced Western consciousness. Whenever thinkers have been aware of - and frightened by - the radical renewal of which they were the bearers, they too have used a mask to confront their contemporaries.

They have usually chosen to use the ironic mask of Socrates.

When, in the nineteenth century, j.G. Hamann praised Socrates in his Socratic Memorabilia, he did so, to use his own term, to mimike. 22 In other words, Hamann himself took up the mask of Socrates - the rationalist par excellence in the eyes of the eighteenth ccntury21 - in order to make people see, behind the mask, a figure prophetic of Christ.