The Thinker 113
(though such issues can never disappear) and issues of humanity
writ large will matter more.
If so far the metaphysical tradition has often been homosexual
and sometimes misogynistic, which it has, those qualities often rise
out of anxiety. Marriage, home, the family: they can bring the states
that terrify the thinker— placid contentment on the one hand, or
grinding anxiety on the other. Either way the thinker can drop into
the State of Self hood and never leave. This world— the world of im-
mediately apparent phenomenal being—is never the world in which
the true thinker can rest.
Even the thinker’s own body can be an antagonist. The thinker
wants to transform himself into something more pure and universal
than he is. The body is a prison to him. He is enchained by his phys-
ical being, for the simple reason that a body is a congestion of needs
and demands. It is not unlike the thinker’s archetypal foe, the home.
It is the home within the home, like a second encased Rus sian doll.
Another encasement is convention, conformity— the way we go
about doing things around here. The thinker has to burst through
the heaped-up circle of convention that would “solidify and hem in
the life” (404). He must strain with all his spirit to “expand another
orbit on the great deep” (404).
Once, out on military maneuvers, Socrates became absorbed
with a question. He left his comrades and stood alone out on a
promontory. He was barefoot and thinly clad, and the weather was
frigid. Yet he stood all night brooding on his prob lem, what ever it
might have been. In the morning when the army woke, Socrates was
still there. He released himself from his refl ections, saluted the gods,
and rejoined his comrades, none the worse for wear. His fellows
seemed to admire his in de pen dence and resolve; at least Alcibiades,
who tells the story in The Symposium, suggests they did. But the
echo of the tale is not so certain, for it is the strange and singular
nature of Socrates that will eventually put him on trial.