Heidegger’s Socrates: Being on the Way

Once we are so related and drawn into what withdraws, we are drawing into what withdraws, into the enigmatic and therefore mutable nearness of its appeal. All through his life and right into his death, Socrates did nothing else than place himself  into this draft, this current, and maintain himself in it. This is why he is the purest thinker of the West. This is why he wrote nothing. For anyone who begins to write out of thoughtfulness must inevitably be like those people who run to seek refuge from any draft too strong for them. An as yet hidden history still keeps the secret why all great Western thinkers after Socrates, with all their greatness, had to be such fugitives. Thinking has entered into literatour… (Heidegger, “What is called thinking?”) 1968:17-18) 

The Socrates described here is a Socrates who persists in questioning, who remains always underway, who endures in the draft of that which withdraws without every taking refuge in that pretence of having arrived called writing.  If the Socrates is the purest thinker of the West despite not being the greatest philosopher, this is because, “Thinking itself is a way. We respond to the way only by remaining underway” (Heidegger 168-9). 

The aim of this topic is to explore the meaning of the therapeutic view of Daseinsanalysis in the light of being “underway”. Could the Socratic method contribute to this exploration?

So then,

What does it mean to remain “underway” in psychotherapy?