Abstract

This work is concerned with the traditions of comic discourse surrounding Socrates, with Plato's creative use of this tradition, and with the effect that the tension between the original comic Socrates and his post-mortem transformation has had on the way we understand both Socrates and Socratic literature. It is the argument of the following pages that Socrates' notoriously ugly exterior is not merely a charming quirk of his personal make-up, but is deeply implicated in the way he was perceived among his contemporaries , in the development of the appropriate decorum of the philosopher, and in the hierarchy of concerns that make up the ideal of the "good life" for later philosophers. ;Subsequent hagiographical accounts of Socrates have served to minimize both Socrates' individual body and the role of the body in philosophy. This sublimation of the comic and physical elements of Socrates' make-up was fostered by Plato's response to his master's heritage. While he could not avoid confronting the tradition of the bawdy, bodily Socrates, clearly this for him was not the most interesting or important aspect of Socrates. Plato makes it clear that it is not by virtue of one's body that one becomes a philosopher. He responds to Socrates' infamous ugliness by fully developing the implications of the Orphic-Pythagorean inner/outer contrast, just as he sublimates Socrates' ribald carnality by turning Socratic eroticism to a means of achieving union with the Forms, the prototypically transcendent philosophical entities. Plato thus codifies, even if he does not initiate, what the feminist scholar Elizabeth Grosz calls "the profound somatophobia" which has characterized the Western philosophical tradition