KNOW THYSELFabout the “awful thought” leads to another emotional response where
he exclaims, “Lysis and Menexenus, our wealth has all been a dream!”
(Lysis 218c). Each reassessment reveals that Socrates uses his emotional
reactions as an opportunity to explore himself more fully. He uses his
emotions to aid his philosophical inquiry into himself.
These passages make it diffi cult to continue regarding Socrates
as Nietzsche’s “tyrant of reason.” But they also raise a larger issue about
Plato’s philosophical motivation for presenting Socrates as both a char-
acter and a narrator. Many of the moments where Socrates refl ects on his
mood, his emotional state, and his state of mind are ironic. Sometimes
this irony carries over into what Socrates the character says out loud in
the dramatic context of the dialogue, but more often than not, Socrates
the narrator gives the information to his narrative audience. Of course,
the audience of the dialogue receives this information as well. Indeed,
they can distinguish between the comments Socrates makes as a charac-
ter and the comments he makes as a narrator. Plato’s audience also sees
how the characters within the narrative frame respond to Socrates’ re-
marks. As a result, his audience has, at least potentially, a pedagogic and
hermeneutic advantage over both the characters within the dramatic
action of the dialogue and the characters in the narrative frame. Theo-
retically this external, or dialogic, audience may be better prepared to
apply the philosophical insights of the dialogues to the dilemmas and
diffi culties of their own lives. However, if as Alexander Nehamas sug-
gests, Plato constructed his dialogues with precisely this possibility in
mind, the audience of the dialogues might well be led astray by their
privileged hermeneutical stance.^53 Platonic irony “uses Socratic irony as
a means for lulling the dialogues’ readers into the very self-complacency
it makes them denounce. It is deep, dark, and disdainful. It is at least as
arrogant a challenge to Plato’s readers as Socrates’ irony was to his inter-
locutors and perhaps even more so.”^54 At the same time, the refl ective,
self-corrective model of Socrates the narrator remains present for us. By
imitating this model, we create the possibility of overcoming our own
ignorance and self-deceptive tendencies. In this way, the narrated dia-
logues continually exhort us to know ourselves more fully, more deeply,
and more completely.
Notes
I would like to thank the Baylor University College of Arts and Sciences for sab-
batical leave, which supported my work on this chapter. I also thank Gary Scott
and Phil Hopkins for their careful reading of early versions of this essay, the
Baylor University Philosophy Colloquium members for helpful comments on