Self-Confrontations: ‚Socrates‘, Wittgenstein and the Reference to What Cannot be Known

Abstract

Education and Bildung are not exhausted in the expansion of knowledge, but rather they are closely connected with the dignity and the legitimation of knowledge as well as with the question of how this knowledge is meaningful for one’s own existence. One can say at least that this statement represents one of the oldest leitmotifs of the Western pedagogical tradition. In this context it is held that human beings are not determinate regarding what or who they are. Rather, it is the challenge and responsibility of human beings to determine and to critically reflect all the relevant issues for one’s own life as well as for the life of the community. Even the Aristotelian description of human being as zoon logon echon, i.e., as talking and thinking living being, thematizes this idea and directs attention toward these questions of human existence: In what framework is this existence philosophically graspable, and how does it become the topic of pedagogical reflection? These questions have been framed all too hastily into a humanistic setting, thereby suggesting the feasibility and determinability of a humane human being. In contrast to the highly influential self-elevation of human self-realization in the (pedagogical) modern era (cf. Ballauff 2004, Meyer-Drawe 1998), one can refer to the beginning of pedagogy and philosophy in ancient Greece. In ancient Greece the question of how to lead one’s own life was conceived as a personal as well as political problem that required considerable attention, specifically with respect to the relevant knowledge and how, if at all, this knowledge can be acquired. Socrates and his elenchus, as portrayed in the Platonic dialogues, provides the most salient example for our attention. With his method Socrates was able to lead his interlocutors to the point where the limits of knowledge central to both one’s own life and that of the polis, i.e., knowledge of the aretai, became apparent.