WORKSHOP: APOREIA
By Don Finkel
Divide into 3 groups of 8. Limit discussion on each question to about 10 minutes.
Consider five "moments" in a dialogue with Socrates, each drawn from a different dialogue:
a. From Laches (194a-b), Laches says, "I am ready to go on, Socrates, and yet I am unused to investigations of this sort. But the spirit of controversy has been aroused in me by what has been said, and I am really grieved at being thus unable to express my meaning. For I fancy that I do know the nature of courage, but, somehow or other, she has slipped away from me, and I cannot get hold of her and tell her nature."
b. From Euthyphro, (11b), Euthyphro says, "Now, Socrates, I simply don't know how to tell you what I think. Somehow everything that we put forward keeps moving about us in a circle, and nothing will stay where we put it."
c. From Republic I, (334c), Polemarchus says, "No, by Zeus, I no longer know what I did mean. Yet this I still believe, that justice benefits the friends and harms the enemies."
d. From Crito (50a), Crito says, "I can't answer your question, Socrates. I am not clear in my mind."
e. From Xenophon, Recollections, (IV.2.19), p. 111, Euthydemus says, "Socrates, I really don't trust my own answers any longer. Everything that I said before now seems to be different from what I once thought."
1. What is similar about these five moments? Formulate a paragraph describing what has happened at this point in the dialogue to the person conversing with Socrates.
2. There is a Greek word to describe this state. The word is aporia. Scholars of Plato use this word to describe moments such as these. Rather than defining it formally, it is best to define it inductively as you have just done, looking at the moments of aporia and trying to capture what they share in common.
In an article entitled, "Aristophanes and Socrates on learning practical wisdom" (Yale Classical Studies, Vol. XXVI, 1980, p. 75), Martha Nussbaum writes, "The paralyzing effect of the elenchos ... finds its comic expression in the Clouds in the scene in which Strepsiades, enjoined to look into himself and find a solution to his aporia, feels himself being bitten by bedbugs that drink his life's blood and torture his genitals." Taking into account Aristophanes pe nchant for extreme exaggeration and coarse caricature, do you think the scene where Strepsiades is tortured by bedbugs in his mattress reflects the state of aporia as you have conceived it above?
3. Go back to the texts and locate each of the five moments of aporia. For each one locate and describe what Socrates does in response to each of these five moments. Just find out literally what happens next in the dialogue and describe it. (In 2 of the 5 cases, the answer will be: Socrates just goes on with the argument; the other 3 cases are more interesting.)
4. In most of these five cases, Socrates does something different, but is there any general characterization you can make that might account for Socrates' way of responding to aporia when it occurs in a dialogue? Try to come up with one.
5. Xenophon wrote of Socrates, "He did not approach everybody in the same way." (p. 104). This statement may be interpreted to suggest that Socrates was psychologically astute, or could gauge people's character with great sensitivity. Taking this inte rpretation as a hypothesis, see if you can understand the 3 cases where Socrates seems to offer a distinctive response to aporia{1} as being responsive to the particular character of the person he is talking to, and the particular context of the dialogue at that moment.
6. Alcibiades wakes up in the morning after having slept the night naked under Socrates' tunic to discover that "nothing happened." Could we define this moment as a moment of aporia? In what way is it such a moment? In what way is it not such a moment ?
7. Let us assume the story that Alcibiades tells at the end of the Symposium illustrates Xenophon's sentence, "He did not approach everybody in the same way." Exactly how did Socrates approach Alcibiades--and why? (i) Brings in and personifies the laws of Athens so he can have a conversation with them. Notes:
(i) Brings Nicias into the conversation to "spell" Laches; (ii) introduces the metaphor of Daedelus, (iii) personifies the laws of Athens so he can have a conversation with them.