Double Ignorance and the Perversion of Self-Knowledge

In this chapter, the author highlights the tension that obtains between the soul in its theoretical activity, qua abstract subject of a purely “object-oriented” cognition of form, and the soul in our embodied life, characterized by an interpersonal awareness of our own finitude. The work of satisfying the demands of both poles of human existence constitutes the fundamental ambiguity of the philosophical life and the fundamental task of self-knowledge. The author locates the tension as it manifests itself in the speeches of Socrates and Alcibiades and argues that, far from eradicating this tension, the Symposium urges us to live it, endure it, and express it. Alcibiades himself serves as a paradigm for one characteristic way in which such a life may be refused and illustrates the disastrous consequences for those who would follow his approach. The author also traces this sort of decentering evasion as it emerges in Hesiod’s Theogony. The Symposium, Sanday argues, is both a kind of warning for human beings about how not to live a self-ignorant or self-evasive life and a philosophical recapitulation of the Delphic command, which reveals just how demanding a command it is.