Abstrakt
The article revisits the issue of self-knowledge as recommended and analyzed by Socrates in the First Alcibades. While taking into account the double context of Greek literary texts (especially Sophocles' Oedipus Rex) and Plato's other dialogues (especially the Phaedrus), it reconstructs the series of tensions between an effort at formulating a general definition of is a human being and the task, prescribed always to individuals, of knowing one's own self.
Without disregarding the actual progress of division that enables Socrates to delimit the common source of both our epistemic capacity and the temperance in our actions, its focus is on the repeated reinforcement of the theoretical mereology of man and soul by use of the language of power including the latter's political sense. In this way, the article sheds some new light on the relation between Socrates' recourse to the scheme of the productive activity and his use of the catoptric model of self-reflection.
An equally close attention is paid to the role of analogy and synecdoche as two formal schemes shared by the logic of Socratic questioning and those descriptions of soul that aim at a sort of its descriptive anatomy, which should supplement the definition of human being by capturing the reflection of the divine in the human soul. Comparing the result of such a broad reading of the First Alcibiades with a passage from Aristotle's Protrepticus, the article concludes that the obvious equivocation of all description of a divine reflection in man does not diminish the impact of Socrates' analysis of the soul.