Socrates

Fictions of a Philosopher

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by Sarah Kofman,

Translated by Catherine Porter

Cornell University Press

Due/Published May 1998, 352 pages, cloth

ISBN 080143551X

Kofman writes in her introduction, "With Socrates we will never leave fiction behind." Because Socrates himself never committed his words to paper, and because there are no objective or incontestable images of him available, everything about him is open to interpretation except the acknowledgment by all major Western thinkers that he is a figure of immense importance in the history of philosophy. Kofman focuses on the views of Plato, Hegel, Kierkegaard, and Nietzsche in viewing Socrates from all angles, studying all the different takes on what she sees as his ironic avowal of ignorance.

Review

He never actually wrote anything, yet his words have been examined, appropriated and dissected by some of the greatest minds of the last two millenniums. He is often seen as the paradigm of Western wisdom, yet he himself often proclaimed his own ignorance. In case you haven't figured it out, we are talking about Socrates, a man whose life, philosophy, and contradictions have been read and fictionalized to suit the needs of later thinkers. In this original new study Sarah Kofman discusses how Plato, Hegel, Kierkegaard, and Nietzsche read Socrates. According to Kofman, Socrates' life and words has a kind of openness that allowed these philosophers to portray him in vastly different ways: Plato idealized him as a totemic figure of philosophy; Hegel gave him a prime position in the evolution of the Absolute spirit; Kierkegaard saw him as the ultimate ironist, a man who believed in nothing; and Nietzsche, who had a near-obsessive interest in Socrates, saw him as riddled with contradictions but someone whose death had a Christ-like quality.