Socrates is an elusive figure, Sarah Kofman asserts, and he is
necessarily so since he did not write or directly state his
beliefs. "With Socrates", she writes in her introduction, "we will
never leave fiction behind". Kofman suggests that Socrates's avowal
of ignorance was meant to be ironic. Later philosophers who
interpreted his text invariably resisted the profoundly ironic
character of his way of life and diverged widely in their
interpretations of him. Kofman focuses especially on the views of
Plato, Hegel, Kierkegaard, and Nietzsche.
The information that is available about Socrates's life is
paradoxical. He was famously ugly, but he was also a notorious
seducer of youth. His sexuality is ambiguous, according to Kofman,
for his allure is stereotypically feminine. His death is also
subject to varied interpretation. Some commentators regard him as a
redemptive, proto-Christ figure, more Jewish than Greek, and others
see him as an archetypal Stoic hero.
Despite radically different interpretations, Plato, Hegel,
Kierkegaard, and Nietzsche all found Socrates to be a dominant
figure of immense importance in the history of philosophy.
Kierkegaard and Nietzsche try to retain the idea of irony as
essential to the Socratic way of life. Hegel, in contrast, insists
that Socrates be assigned one particular place in the historical
development of Absolute Spirit. While Kierkegaard considered
Socratic irony as an intellectual position, Nietzsche recognized
and resisted Socrates's irony as a predisposition. In examining
each philospher's response to Socratic irony, Kofman draws
specifically on the history of philosophy and psychoanalytic
theory.
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