{The Divine Point}[16th December 1989]

 [Redbook6:360-361][19891216:1645]{The Divine Point}[16th December 1989]

19891216.1645

‘... That crucially important word by which Socrates refers to his monitions from ‘The god’: “The ‘daimonon’”.*

‘As grammarians have noticed, that word (literally “the divine”) is “elliptically substantial” – an adjective flanked by a semantic hole where a substantive must be understood. What is that substantive? The “divine” what? Plato’s** text leaves no doubt as to the answer: “the divine sign” (semeion). Socrates refers to it as “his customary sign” (Apology of Socrates 40C) or even as just “the sign” (Apology of Socrates 41D). So his daimonion is his susceptibility to certain peculiar subjective states he takes to be signs from the god. These signs are not self-interpreting. They call for interpretation which is left entirely for Socrates to supply, allowing him to use his reason*** to his heart’s content in the process. So what ‘the voice’ tells him can never constitute a ‘divine revelation’ in the proper sense of the term (“disclosure of knowledge**** to man by divine or supernatural agency”, OED)’#

But according to my Greek textbook,#* σημειον means sign or point.#** ‘The divine point’ as the inner source of spiritual energy,#*** which one then has to differentiate into Human knowledge, makes a great deal of ‘experiential’ sense.

*per G Vlastos, T[imes] L[iterary] S[upplement] 19891215-21: 1393.

**(ie as against Xenophon’s)

***& cf ‘Not now for the first time but always I have been the sort of man who is persuaded by nothing except the proposition which seems best to me when I reason about it.’

(Plato, ‘Crito’, 46B, per T[imes] L[iterary] S[upplement] ibid)

{& cf ‘T[imes] L[iterary] S[upplement] 19900105-11 p11 (The author’s reply)}

****{(?!=)}

#[Oxford English Dictionary]

#*–(T[each] Y[ourself] Greek, Smith & Melluish

#**(& cf Euclid)

#***cf ‘The “command” of his god “to philosophise, examining himself and others[”].’

(Apology of Socrates, 28E)

(per T[imes] L[iterary] S[upplement[,] ibid]

[continues]

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