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Socrates, according to his disciples, was a model citizen and at the same time a sort of foreign body the State wanted to oust. Plato in large measure exploited this foreignness, partly attributing to it the paradoxical tendency-which is on the margin of the doxa or popular thoughtof his concept of philosophy. Plato's Socrates is a polymorphous figure, well acquainted with the new currents of thought that were rife in fifthcentury Athens, but also with the ancient doctrines that became marginalized because they no longer fit with official morals. Although this Platonic Socrates claims that he does not know anything, he nevertheless practices name-dropping and readily quotes sophists, rhetoricians, and ancient philosophers. He also knows the doxa he opposes extremely well. Throughout his work, Plato has given his character an ambivalent personality, one that adheres perfectly to the State while playing the role of the outsider to his compatriots' belief system. On the subject of knowledge, especially moral knowledge, Plato's Socrates enjoys playing "homeless," the man without a center, the atopos who keeps asking his friends unanswerable questions.
Several character traits contribute to Socrates' atopia. One of them is a certain "feminine posture" with which Plato sometimes endows him and that is at odds with the sexual hierarchy of Athenian society. For example, in the Theaetetus (148-52), Socrates explains that he inherited from his mother, Phaenarete, the profession of midwife; being barren of knowledge himself, he practices-like Artemis, patroness of midwives- maieutique (midwifery) on the minds of young people pregnant with knowledge! By this astonishing comparison, Socrates not only places himself outside the traditional value system, which esteems masculine activities and reveres the father, but also gives philosophy the character of an unusual activity: midwifery, among all feminine professions, certainly has an exceptional and somewhat mysterious dimension.2
From among the many interpretations of Socrates' identification with his mother's profession, we can cite Hegel's view of it as symbolically expressing the mind's self-birthing at the first moment of self-consciousness. For Kierkegaard, on the other hand, Socrates' "femininity" is of the same ilk as his irony: as part of the character's negativity (to which Kierkegaard opposes Plato's idealism), femininity contributes to making Socrates an "enigmatic and unclassifiable monster."' In her essay on modern interpretations of Socrates,...