Summary Twenty years after the first issue of Philosophie antique, devoted to the "Figures de Socrate", the panorama of Socratic studies seems to have been profoundly modified by innovations in terms of content and method, resulting from a better understanding of the phenomenon of the logoi sokratikoi and of its importance in Athenian cultural and political history of the 5th and 4th centuries. The use of the intertextual method has not only contributed to break the Platonic monopoly on the transmission of the Socratic heritage, but also to go beyond a doctrinal reading of the Platonic texts, in favor of a more attentive reading of the dialogical form and the internal logic of Platonic representation, which draws its scenes from the ethical and political debate of the recent Athen ’s past. In these texts, Socrates plays the role of the critical consciousness of the city while Plato is simply absent. Considering the importance of this reconstruction of the common memory, within the framework of the political conflicts that certainly involve the Socratics, this essay proposes to shed new light on some particular aspects of the Platonic representation of Socrates: 1) the solitude of the philosopher, obtained also by minimizing and discrediting the presence of the Socratics around him; 2) the Socratic “atopia”, as a practice of paradox including the overthrow of the traditional canons of knowledge and political power; 3) virtue as a criterion to be defined to distinguish and choose the best men of Athens for political government; and therefore also as a stake in a challenge in which the Platonic Socrates takes a very different position from Antisthenes’ and Xenophon’s Socrateses, who emphasize the moral importance of the hardest virtues (enkrateia, karteria), evoking a world of values similar to the Spartan model. The aim of this research is to show that Plato exposes a divergent political perspective (in relation to the democratic city and in relation to the other Socratics) through the choices practiced by his Socrates in matters of virtue. These are choices that coherently develop the paradox of Socratic “atopia”, allowing us to trace the lines of a unitary drawing across different contexts, even between dialogues that tradition considers as distant from each other: between the Protagoras and the Republic, or between the Crito, the Gorgias and the Statesman. The overthrow of traditional canons also finds its aesthetic expression in the mask of Socrates as Silenus.

L’atopie comme paradoxe politique. Voyage intertextuel à la recherche du Socrate platonicien / de Luise, F.. - In: PHILOSOPHIE ANTIQUE. - ISSN 2648-2789. - STAMPA. - 2020.20:20(2020), pp. 17-48.

L’atopie comme paradoxe politique. Voyage intertextuel à la recherche du Socrate platonicien

F. de Luise
2020-01-01

Abstract

Summary Twenty years after the first issue of Philosophie antique, devoted to the "Figures de Socrate", the panorama of Socratic studies seems to have been profoundly modified by innovations in terms of content and method, resulting from a better understanding of the phenomenon of the logoi sokratikoi and of its importance in Athenian cultural and political history of the 5th and 4th centuries. The use of the intertextual method has not only contributed to break the Platonic monopoly on the transmission of the Socratic heritage, but also to go beyond a doctrinal reading of the Platonic texts, in favor of a more attentive reading of the dialogical form and the internal logic of Platonic representation, which draws its scenes from the ethical and political debate of the recent Athen ’s past. In these texts, Socrates plays the role of the critical consciousness of the city while Plato is simply absent. Considering the importance of this reconstruction of the common memory, within the framework of the political conflicts that certainly involve the Socratics, this essay proposes to shed new light on some particular aspects of the Platonic representation of Socrates: 1) the solitude of the philosopher, obtained also by minimizing and discrediting the presence of the Socratics around him; 2) the Socratic “atopia”, as a practice of paradox including the overthrow of the traditional canons of knowledge and political power; 3) virtue as a criterion to be defined to distinguish and choose the best men of Athens for political government; and therefore also as a stake in a challenge in which the Platonic Socrates takes a very different position from Antisthenes’ and Xenophon’s Socrateses, who emphasize the moral importance of the hardest virtues (enkrateia, karteria), evoking a world of values similar to the Spartan model. The aim of this research is to show that Plato exposes a divergent political perspective (in relation to the democratic city and in relation to the other Socratics) through the choices practiced by his Socrates in matters of virtue. These are choices that coherently develop the paradox of Socratic “atopia”, allowing us to trace the lines of a unitary drawing across different contexts, even between dialogues that tradition considers as distant from each other: between the Protagoras and the Republic, or between the Crito, the Gorgias and the Statesman. The overthrow of traditional canons also finds its aesthetic expression in the mask of Socrates as Silenus.
2020
20
de Luise, F.
L’atopie comme paradoxe politique. Voyage intertextuel à la recherche du Socrate platonicien / de Luise, F.. - In: PHILOSOPHIE ANTIQUE. - ISSN 2648-2789. - STAMPA. - 2020.20:20(2020), pp. 17-48.
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Utilizza questo identificativo per citare o creare un link a questo documento: https://hdl.handle.net/11572/286571
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