Abstract

In Alcibiades I, for many interpreters still a spurious dialogue, Plato claims that our true self (the part of the soul) resembles the divine. Someone who looked at it and grasped everything divine, God and intelligence, would have the best grasp of himself as well. The question of the self comes as the natural consequence of previous claims showing we are neither our possessions nor our bodies, but our souls. By making the self similar to God, we can tackle the problem of reflexivity differently, putting the question of self-knowledge into new perspective. The article discusses some unclear questions concerning the definition of the self, defined as "the whole man" in Charmides (156e7-8), i.e., including body as integral part, or as excluding it in Alcibiades I, where the self is the soul (130ct), since the soul uses the body (130al) and rules it (130ae), and its relations to the divine