Chapter 2: To Be Born
(Gynecology)
The last child…
In ancient Greece, pregnancy was considered one of the most dangerous times in a woman's life. Maternal and infant mortality was high, giving childbirth an almost liminal dimension, between life and death. The women of the city gave birth standing or squatting, using gravity to facilitate labor. The child came into the world in a vertical position, where the head falls first into the hands of the maïeutikes (midwives) and the divine invocations of their voices accompanying the ritual of birth. Childbirth was a dreaded source of defilement, for blood manifested "the uncontrolled irruption of the biological into the social" and the resulting bacteriological risk. Cathartic laws stipulated that the woman in labor rendered her house and all who entered it impure, a pollution limited in time but real. Associated with miasma, the maïeutikes are forced to practice their art in the confinement imposed by the city, which sometimes costs them rejection for occultism in return. Hippocrates judged their work necessary but close to charlatanism.
The maieutics of Socrates, himself the son of a maïeutike, finds its deep origin not in the ideal, astonishment, or love of wisdom, but in a tradition of social repression, in screams, pain, between bloodied thighs where gods are sung in the fall of childbirth, in the placenta that must be torn out and expelled, in the advent of a babe, in the terror of miscarriages and death that sometimes reaps mothers.
It is through this vital and social knot being untied — the joy of a birth and the fear of a death, warded off by the call to eternal powers — that Socrates forges his view of the world. He observes labor, these women traversed by opposing forces. He sees the maïeutikes chanting songs to Artemis, shouting "Thanks to the gods!" at each delivery. He impregnates himself with the power in their hands and conceives of nothing stronger beyond this circle of women who, together, alone and banished from the gaze of men, regenerate the city. During these life-death scenes where a passage opens, young Socrates understands that transcendence is immanence that blisters, the water bag that bursts, life doing violence to itself to tear itself away. Like any child, Socrates lives in a time that knows only the instant. He does not yet distinguish what precedes it: the "making come what is beyond" from the simple "giving birth to what did not exist." The transcendence that Athenians intoxicate themselves with is for him not in temples, not in a place elsewhere, but in the instant, in the generative moment itself. Like any child, he deifies his parents. In the birthing room, he does not see Artemis, he sees the power of his mother Phaenarete's skills. Thus, every time she chants the glory of deities intertwined with the cries of newborns, he sees in it the sign that a god has passed and has just been born thanks to his mother. A simple association imprints itself on him: if one invokes well and a being arises, then gods arise too. He understands that his mother invokes deities less than the strength of the woman in labor to bring her to deliverance. It is not a logical error: it is a pre-metaphysical logic, childish in its essence. The divine is not elsewhere; it is in the most wonderful and perilous incantation there is: that of women struggling for regeneration.
Socrates then thinks back to the day of his birth. He has heard the tale of a violent labor in which he nearly perished, and his mother perhaps along with him. When he was born, his parents cried out “Sôs!”, which means “saved.” They then named him So-crates, signifying “strength that escaped,” and more literally, “he whose vitality survived the danger.” Socrates thus bears the programmatic name of a living peril. He thinks then of that ephemeral god who accompanied the moment his mother brought him into the world—a god who, for his part, did not survive. He imagines this god stillborn, or who did not have time to pass through entirely. He thinks that his mother made a choice, that she killed the god meant to be born in order to save her son. The more he witnesses births, the more his god calls him by its absence. This daimonion that accompanies him all his life is not a quirk of a personal god, nor that "demon" which will later be taken up and demonized by the Church; It is the psychic scar of the generative instant, a sensation of the eternal not-yet-born. Socrates does not hear a voice: he hears the silence of the one who did not cry out. The daimonion is the persistence of the unfinished which condemns Socrates to start over, again and again, to ward off of what did not survive.
How many children of midwives in Athens? Dozens, perhaps hundreds. How many made this association? Probably many. Children are naturally animist: they see life and magic everywhere around them. But how many maintained this association into adulthood to make it a technique, against the cultural indoctrination that teaches them gods inhabit Olympus, pre-exist rituals, descend when called? Only one: Socrates. He is not a genius. He is faithful. Faithful to the gaze of the child he was. He never unlearned what he saw. He placed maternity where it must always be: before the gods. He resists the reversal of the order of things imposed by the city in the education of youth. Perhaps he sometimes heard certain men of the city or reputed doctors express their contempt for maïeutikes, shared their disgust for the impurity of these women's role. Perhaps he saw his mother as a true expert saving perilous situations where other maïeutikes had abdicated by praying for the gods to intervene. Perhaps even — as much as one is allowed to speculate on this mythical man — Socrates forges a vengeful spirit against all those aristocrats he is not part of, who despise women, gargle with the logos they understand better than anyone, with their talents gifted by the gods.
The "I know nothing" becomes literal: this Socratic ignorance is not a sophisticated rhetorical posture. It is the refusal to learn what culture teaches (gods pre-exist) to remain faithful to what he saw (gods are born). The "I know nothing" is also a way of saying "I refuse to know what you claim to know, because I saw something else." He does not deny knowledge, he denies the right of this knowledge to erase what he saw; by saying "I know nothing," he keeps hidden what the city seeks to kill. Faced with adults who learnedly explain how the world really works, it is the stubbornness of a child who says deep down "but I saw it! I do not recognize your gods as the source of virtues; they come into the world thanks to my mother, Phaenarete, and her name means 'she who makes virtue appear'." For delivering others while "not knowing" is the obstetrical paradox: the midwife does not "know the child," she knows how to bring forth, she knows the posture, the rhythm, the void. It is a method that reveals truth is not contained, it is expelled: Socrates "knows nothing" because he does not carry the truth just as the midwife does not carry the child. As Socrates grows and gains wisdom, his childhood "I know nothing" reaches a maturity that gives it wingspan. It is a phrase that calls through the intellectual void it provokes in the other, an invocation that behind what it says, seeks to say: "you know nothing."
The daimonion expresses this force of resistance of a god who failed to be born, and who prevents Socrates, now an adult, from believing in the already-there gods. Xenophon remarked on this, stating that Socrates obeyed this sign more than any oracle. As long as the truth has not been birthed in pain and personal effort, the daimonion signals that it is a counterfeit. It takes the form of a preventive mourning, the haunting fear that intellectual childbirth might end badly, forcing Socrates to absolute exigency. Behind every game of the mind Socrates indulges in, his demonic power (in the Greek sense of "daimon," meaning "intermediary") illustrates itself not between gods and men but between life and death.
Socrates is not impious, he is perhaps even a hyper-believer. He does not reject the gods. He wants to see them born constantly. He is not content with statues, ritual sacrifices, conventional tributes. He wants to be present at every divine birth, as he was present as a child alongside his mother.
Maieutics is not a metaphor, not even a method, but a transmuted nostalgia. What does Socrates seek? To regain what he saw as a child: the moment his mother, through her hands and voice, made appear what the city holds most sacred. Each dialogue is an attempt to recreate this moment. Each aporia is a contraction. Each definition that emerges is a newborn screaming — and with it, a god is born. The Socratic quest is an obsessive quest to relive the wonder of childhood, to ward off the peril of the stillborn.
Socrates is not the first philosopher. He is the last child — the one who refused to grow up, if growing up means accepting the metaphysical categories of adults before begetting.
The story of Socrates is therefore perhaps that of a childish observation (gods/birth association), an adult fidelity (refusal to unlearn), a method (reproducing what the mother did), a teaching (transmitting the technique), and a condemnation (the city rejects its child).
…becomes the first philosopher…
Socrates thus knows that the eternal does not precede time, that it is nowhere else but in maternal hands: it spurts from the bloody tear, fragile, precious. The ritual does not implore the sacred; it slides it between the thighs of the instant. Deities do not assist birth: they are born on the same occasion.
It is in primal obstetrics — a technique transmitted solely orally — that Socrates forges a practitioner's method: maieutics is not metaphor, not reminiscence, but the assisted fall of ideas. Socrates squats the mind as a woman squats: thighs open to gravity. Between two contractions, he slides his hand, grabs a head, and pulls endlessly. He knows, he does, that this head is that of a divinity. He does not know which divine will be born, he only knows it will be divine — because he has understood the generating mechanism itself. His interlocutor believes he is seeking human opinions, practical definitions, civic answers. Socrates knows that what comes out of this mouth, this effort, this dialectical contraction, is becoming divine by the very fact of being extracted. But it is a secret he cannot reveal, for if the one being delivered realizes he is manufacturing the sacred, either he retracts in terror (hubris), or pushes too hard (fanaticism), or stops pushing (cynicism). The work only functions in ignorance of its own theurgic power.
Socrates lures the one being delivered, expels the infinite, forces it to scream in the city; God did not ask to be born — neither did we. And that is how he will attract accusations of being a manipulator or a sorcerer.
But to welcome what ceases not to come out, question after question, Socrates understands he must become a bottomless cradle. And maieutics then gives birth to itself. Maieutics was never the reminiscence of eternal knowledge, but the art of setting the oracular in motion and thereby precipitating God into the city. It transforms human questioning into a cosmic uterus where the divine is born of its own absence.
Socrates does not bring the soul back to forgotten Ideas: he is the first precipitator of concepts. He is called stubborn. For good reason, aporia is not the end, it is the goal. He saturates discourse with assumed ignorance, he creates a void on the side of eternal beliefs to raise the pressure of rationality until piercing the pocket of the cosmos and making the truths of the instant fall into the funnel of the human mind. Passing through this narrow cervix, the abstract structures itself and breathes, just as the newborn's body passing through the pelvis undergoes strong pressure necessary to clear amniotic fluid from its lungs and dynamize its vascular system.The midwives of knowledge pass on their wisdom only through speech, and Socrates all the more refuses to set his teaching in writing: writing is an act of autopsy, the very opposite of the obstetric breath. It is a science of otherness that teaches the risk of miscarriage to anyone who attempts to engender alone.
Socrates is this father who does not beget, but hollows out so the infinite falls in headfirst. The divine manifests not by revelation, but by the precipitation of the void into speech. The birth of the divine is a side effect of human speech. Socrates knows this only too well: he reverses the invocation of the maïeutikes. He invokes Man to bring forth the gods. He invokes his mother to make Olympus fall.
When the Pythia declares "Socrates is the wisest," she does not state a fact; she sends the echo of a divine invocation back to Socrates' human invocations. The oracle-maieutic feedback loop then widens the matrix of the divine, itself in return eliciting more complex questions that invoke new human actions until setting the whole city in motion.
God is evoked, the oracle invokes, Socrates convenes, the sophists revoke: this is how the work begins in the city.
…facing the sophists, guardians of time…
Plato painted them as merchants of smoke. But dissoi logoi is not cynicism: it is democratic inoculation. Exposing the city to two equal versions of reality produces antibodies against killing certainty. Philosophers, fanatics, or illusionists are not refuted: they are all stunned by the double mirage; the assembly, however, is immunized.
Protagoras holds the birthing pool where every idea must learn to swim before screaming. Without this bath, newborn concepts drown at the first public dive. Deliberation is a swimming lesson for novice thoughts, in a turbulent bath where all beliefs, prejudices, truths are thrown in to see which dive, which float, which sink, which drown — which, in short, can be selected for a new competition. And the sophists themselves jump into the bath, not hesitating to splash each other with their disagreements.
In primitive democracy, exact truth, requiring expert debates, is lethal for any decision that must be made before sundown. Faced with five thousand pressed citizens, the sophist operates in urgency: he sutures the social bond with stitches of plausibility. Tomorrow, the thread will break; another will sew it back. Democracy is marked by the scars of compromise, rarely by the beauty of smooth truths.
The verisimilitude of the sophists belongs to those creeping plants, barely edible, often labeled weeds, but they do not kill the soil. "Pure truth," however, paves over when it doesn't require glyphosate. Between the two, one must make do with wild grass, not as a lesser evil but as the condition of the possible.
Without sophists, consensus becomes solitary madness or manipulation by one; without Socrates, cohesion becomes dogmatic slumber or popular tyranny. Members of the same family, the acute awareness they have of the other's limits installs a porous border between them. Socrates does not reproach his sophist friends for being wrong, but for cheating with life: their rhetorical method is fraudulent as long as it has not provided the effort nor paid the price of blood to allow a "true birth." In return, the annoyance he arouses among sophists is that of emergency doctors facing the purist who would forbid treating and closing the wound under the pretext that the divine has not yet passed, potentially condemning the patient to die of his own truth. The annoying "gadfly" of Athens is also a tragic sentinel, a border guard of the living, terrified at the idea of letting corpses (dead dogmas) circulate in a City already sick from the lost Peloponnesian wars and political corruption eating away at Pericles' legacy.
Maieutics, a vertical force, precipitates truths through the void; rhetoric, a horizontal force, selects them through overflow. If these forces operate on the same plane without annihilating each other, it is simply thanks to the agora. It is the illustration par excellence of spiritual selection: the place where ideas are thrown pell-mell — only those that resist the sun's course survive.
True sophistic power is not in decorative eloquence, but in the fight itself. The city does not judge men on their ideas: it hurls them into the arena to test them.
…the trial of the matrix
The trial of Socrates is not really that of a man, but of an intellectual matrix. He reversed the rules in that he invokes men before gods with a woman's practice. Because he suggests the emergence of intermediate deities. He is not accused of "feminism," no one has an idea of such a concept, not even Socrates, not even women, in a society where the evidence of gods dictates they be assigned to the home. But one perceives well among Socrates' detractors the effect of questioning that maieutics provokes in them: "the midwife, Socrates" as he is called, the "intellectual newborns" as his students are designated, this "sorcerer" teaches in a way that is poorly conceived but results in what the established order loathes: a youth that defies fathers and laws. Without really understanding his method, Socrates was very well understood by his detractors on the results it provokes, and Aristophanes makes himself the mouthpiece in The Clouds, describing a Socrates as a bad master teaching that one should not believe in traditional gods and that a son can beat his father if reason commands it. By awakening the youth, Socrates reawakens in the fathers a deep instinct of the human psyche: the Kronian drive for conservation. And as political as his trial may be, it is indeed on his "kind of teaching" that Socrates' fate will be sealed.
Facing Socrates, the city adopts a similar posture and turns his method against him: it too begins to judge the substance of his ideas rather than their performance. Or at least it tries. It accuses him of not believing in the city's gods, of creating new deities. But Socrates believes in neither the former nor the latter: he just believes in childbirth. The Athenians accuse of impiety he who is perhaps the most pious of all — so pious that he refuses the idolatry of gods frozen in temples and myths. Socrates wants living divinity, divine that screams upon being born, truths, virtues that traverse man, which he must birth himself by doing violence to himself, often in suffering, with the help of another, but there, in the moment, and not instilled by a superior and timeless authority.
Athenian men who, alone, direct political life, fail to pin him down; it is as if they had thrown Socrates into the bath of the agora and he did not dive, did not float, did not swim, did not even get wet. He defends himself so well against an entire assembly of seasoned men that the bathwater becomes viscous, thus confirming the charges against him: he subverts traditions.
By substituting the sentence of hemlock for spiritual selection, Athens ties its tubes to think the infinite only through the minds of men, through ideal spurts towards the cosmos. For Socrates gave them no choice. And Athens kills him precisely for that. Not because he is intellectually dangerous, but because he shows them the true origin of the world: the "matrix," which before being understood in the figurative sense as the framework qualifies in the literal sense the vagina. Because when Socrates repeats "I, I am barren," he speaks not so much of himself as of a phallocentric political system — and the phallus is not the problem as long as all accept that the intellectual matrix, this uterus-mind in question, is neither feminine nor masculine, but universal to the human gender insofar as it assumes it. Because in a society where civic virility is doxa, where the young man must become hoplite (warrior) and logos (reason), Socrates tells him: "Useless to pray, listen to the midwife, it's going to be painful, squat down, dilate your logos, spread your certainties, push. Hard! There is your virtue, your truth, full of blood, struggling to breathe. Wonder is philosophical postpartum. Start again!".
Hemlock is not just the execution of Socrates. It is a forced weaning for the entire city.
But this punishment is perhaps not as senseless as it seems. The elimination of Socrates could be likened to an autoimmune reaction. By making divine speech as banal as breathing, Socrates inoculates the political body with a virus it does not recognize: the capacity to birth gods without permission. He democratizes the divine. The city, a fragile organism, responds like any living thing: it chases away the pathogen. Socrates is not condemned; he is expelled through the same cervix he opened, in a sort of inverted birth, as if to annul his thought.
Plato takes it upon himself to purify the death certificate for a rebirth acceptable to the canons: the fall by gravity becomes ascension towards ideas; hands in blood, pure intellect; maieutics transmitted orally in the cycle, becomes written protocol for eternity; the birth of renewal, a reminiscence of the déjà-vu. Wonder (thaumazein) becomes a contemplative starting point on the world, where it was the exhausted arrival point of dialectical birth. But perhaps Plato perfectly understood the toxic intolerance Socrates caused in the city. Perhaps he took up his reed pen to save what dried placenta Maieutics left behind. Perhaps even — as much as one is allowed to speculate on the intentions of a giant — he realized that the "bottomless cradle" bequeathed by Socrates could only be filled by eternity. Aristotle, after him, no longer births truths, he classifies them in logical herbariums, dried and pinned like dead butterflies. The post-Platonics, for their part, resign themselves to Ataraxia, a life without pain, without surprise, without upheaval, this peace of the soul that resembles to a tee an amenorrhea of the mind: philosophy gains in wisdom what it loses in generative power, it becomes "wise" in the sense one says of a woman that she has passed the age.
Thus Socrates is not the first philosopher: he is the whole of philosophy, from his birth to his death. A wise man who never denied his midwife origin, he transmits the art of birthing gods to all men — and the next moment, the city closed its thighs, repressing this uterus it was not ready to assume.
And Socrates, after his death, ironically becomes a textual artifact, the father of the fathers of philosophy, of all these men so quick to awaken, nourish, and fertilize thought, but terrified of being pregnant.