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Tyranny and Self-Knowledge: Critias and Socrates in Plato's Charmides

Thinkers such as Derrida and Levinas locate the source of the totalitarian tyrannies of our century in totalizing thought, the view that claims the whole is perfectly explicable. Their response maintains that there is no determinate knower and thus no access to enduring intelligibles. This response, however, subverts any claims to political truth, leaving no principles as a basis for political judgment. Plato's Charmides provides a corrective of this difficulty. In this dialogue, Socrates discusses self-knowledge with Critias, who advocates a tyranny founded precisely on a claim of comprehensive knowledge and control. Socrates responds to this theory-based tyranny with a view of the elusiveness of self-knowledge that denies Critias' claim to know the human good with the precision necessary to establish his error-free society. But furthermore, this elusiveness is itself intelligible; possessing a discernible structure, it can substantiate specific political principles. Thus, Plato shows how we might resist such tyranny without subverting the very principles that allow us to judge it unjust.