Abstract

The title theme is explored in seven chapters, five of which are revisions of previously published papers. As sketched in the introduction, the central claim is that the dialogues not only always present their explicit themes in a context of "finitude, limitation or negation", but also depict three different responses to such finitude, "domination, submission, or an acknowledgment of the finitude which transforms it into possibility", of which the latter is to be preferred. Moreover, subsequent chapters argue that this mode of presentation is a form of irony which is not merely a literary device or a tactic of political prudence or of pedagogical method, but a reflection of a core tenet of Platonic philosophy, that is, that while the whole has an arche which is in principle intelligible, the finitude and erotic character of human nature render any complete or adequate grasp of that arche humanly impossible. Consequently, the philosophic enterprise, insofar as it is engaged in a necessarily unsuccessful striving for an unattainable goal, partakes of certain elements of tragedy, including the tragic sense that such striving is somehow ennobling. Yet insofar as it yields to the temptation to believe that its goal is attainable, it runs the risk of turning comic in its ignorance of its own limitations. Hence it seems to be self-knowledge about its own finitude which makes the philosophic life finally neither tragic nor comic.