Spring 2010 - Interpretation

Political Science and the Irrational
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who are ignorant of them would justly be called slavish. (Xenophon
1994, Book I, chapter 1, paragraphs 11 and 16; see Addendum 7.)
As can perhaps be gleaned from the comments above, Socrates’ “other way”
of conversing about the nature of all things or first principles is carried out
and sustained by looking to our everyday ideas about political things. In
some way, then, the latter shed light on the former. Of course, in Socrates’
time the nature of all things or first principles of the cosmos were expressed
in political life through the belief in and worship of the gods. It is therefore
not overly surprising to read the Xenophontic suggestion that Socrates’
political philosophy consisted in an examination of the divine as the root of
all things through an examination of political opinions. It would thus seem
that Socrates’ proposition to Alcibiades, that self-knowledge requires knowledge
of the divine and therewith knowledge of one’s place in the cosmos, is
no mere anomaly, but rather goes straight to the heart of Socratic political
philosophy itself. Now, as for what Socrates himself claims to already know
about the nature of the divine in the Alcibiades in particular, it is, as we have
already seen, said by him to act “justly and moderately” (Plato, Alcibiades
1987, 134d).
As for the second of these two terms, moderation or the
attribute of moderation as such, throughout the Alcibiades Socrates has
argued that it is a virtue or quality that is bound up with the question of the
still sought-after self (133c-134b, 134e, 135a-c). As for the just, it is inextricably
tied to the question of our need for knowledge of the good, a good that has
so far come to light as being either for one’s self or the city. Accordingly, what
is primarily required is an examination of these two sometimes disparate
goods (see Addendum 8). By carrying out this examination of the just and
the good in particular, one is subsequently able to attain an understanding of
moderation as well, if only because moderation as self-knowledge necessarily
issues from the knowledge of what is both “inside” and “outside” one’s self
(130e-131a). That is, self-knowledge necessarily follows from the examination
of justice because that examination pertains to one’s own private good and
the city’s. Knowledge of the just (and therewith the good) thereby provides
the passkey or rather is the passkey that, in issuing in self-knowledge and
moderation, also makes clear attributes belonging to and so an essential
portion of the nature of god. Such an examination, moreover, is precisely
what we have been conducting all along and which occurs throughout the
entire Alcibiades. For that reason, the problems in the Alcibiades, or rather
the problems with Alcibiades in particular, reflect the principal problem