Socrate: mito ed etica della conoscenza. Studio sugli scritti socratici di Walter Friedrich Otto

This book deals with the yet unpublished writings on Socrates of the German philologist Walter F. Otto (1874-1958) stored at the German Literaturarchiv in Marbach am Neckar. It provides a comprehensive interpretation of all the manuscripts, notes, drafts for conferences, and university lectures Otto wrote on Socrates from the 1940s to 1958. These writings touch upon the following topics: Otto’s ancient and modern sources on Socrates, his account of the “novelty” Socrates, Socrates’ character, physiognomy, life and death; the religion of Socrates; Socrates’ knowledge ethics; the interiority of Socrates’ knowledge; the ancient and modern ethics of will. The book enquires into Otto’s interpretation of Socrates’ most renowned doctrines (on the good, the ti esti, the happiness, the forms, the soul, the virtue and its equivalence with utility). All of these doctrines turn out to be linked to each other, as the cornerstones of a knowledge-based ethics. This ethics is dominated by Socrates’ faith in the goodness of being, which Otto interprets as a religious approach to knowledge that has its origin in the Homeric eidenai of divinities (here Otto’s account links up with his major work, “The Homeric Gods” of 1929). Another important feature of Socrates’ knowledge ethics, to which the last chapter of the book is devoted, lies in its contraposition to the ethics of the will. Otto sketches the development of the ethics of will from Antiquity (Aristotle and Roman age) to the middle ages (Christianity) until modernity (Kant, Schopenhauer, and Kierkegaard). An appendix tackles Otto’s claims of a failure of the ethics of will after World War II and the necessity to return to a “Socratic” knowledge ethics.