Continuing the Conversation

As we saw in Chapter 6, after the great speech in which Critias presented self-knowledge as his account of σωϕροσύνη, Socrates conducted a ­scrutiny of that account, which led to two new formulations of it: the Critian and the Socratic. Socrates then launched the discussion on a new beginning, saying that they must treat first the possibility and then the advantageousness of σωϕροσύνη understood as self-knowledge. Socrates first discusses the possibility question with respect to the Critian formulation. As we saw in Chapter 7, Socrates focused on the reflexive aspect of this formulation, that is, the respect in which the knowledge of itself and other knowledges takes itself as its object. The investigation into the possibility of such a thing revealed the need to locate knowledge within a dialectical division of relatives. To do that, as I have argued, would require determining the substantive, nonrelative nature to which knowledge is related.