Socrates' questions

Socrates’ pathos for questioning is the timeless signature of philosophy. It matters very little how devotedly philosopher might distance oneself from Socratic experience of world, sooner or later the cloud of Socratism in any way will hover over his philosophical practice. Celebrated daemon of Socrates, he often refers to with discreet uneasiness, in the process of very peculiar art of midwifery and sculpturing radiates the invisible glimmerings of philosophically vital actuality, which is tasked to assemble inward impossibilities disseminated all along Athenian polis. There is something tacitly Beckettian in whole Socratic affair, everyone is well aware that only impossible should be asked of him, and in accordance with mechanics of destiny, question after question, while approaching the old age, in the gulf of shuddered time, he himself becomes the voice of impossibility, in a certain sense, the daemon of philosophy eternalized.

Socrates’ impossibilities are literally gazing from the angle of his questions. But why does he ask them so compulsively? As an answer to this, his passion for truth value found in communal dialectics seems to be overly formalistic, to accentuate on irony and the pleasure gained from its effluences would be somewhat derogatory, even the factor of his character type will miss the point here. Truth, momentarily unconcealed is silently fading away and philosophy is not domesticated yet. In this realm Socrates adheres to impossible, through indefatigable questioning to invent the affection for philosophy. For this very specific reason he avoids writing, because to write automatically means to memorize, while the one who invents affections for the knowledge, preferably stays under the rug of imperceptibility. Why so? Simply because inventing affections and not living them incessantly are never compatible with each other, writing on the other hand, downgrades the living intensities of questions, it inevitably saturates the process with pauses of stagnation, and after all, necessitates time, which is always deficient.

Socrates inaugurates philosophy with the taste for questioning. Questions are his figures of impossibilities against the vulgar impatience of every contemporaneity to finalize the world. While being the first one who fully experienced the metaphysical condition of becoming the philosopher, Socrates senses that affection for philosophy mysteriously born through him is garmented with singular contingency, demanding the work of invention and impetus of registration after him. Luckily Plato was nearby.

Words by Joe Bousquet so highly admired by Deleuze in the best way depicts dramaturgy of Socratism - “My wound existed before me; I was born to embody it.”

His questions are embodiments of impossibilities of his own time, and subsequently they become the impossibilities of any time. He discovers the productive power of question.

With such arrangement of things, asking the questions becomes the strategic device for ensuring the process of continuation of thought, there is always something awaiting from the future, things left unsaid, landscapes not yet experienced, encounters expecting real equivalents, possibilities to be realized. As a result, Socrates’ questions become conceptualized sensibilities for philosophy which is always on the way of its coming.