This dissertation investigates divergent treatments of self-consciousness in antiquity and modernity. Specifically, it asks why, despite the affinities of Hegel's conception of Geist with certain Platonic themes, Plato does not regard self-consciousness as a philosophical first principle. The first chapter begins with Hegel's charge that Plato fails to grasp the full implications of self-consciousness' reflexive and self-determining character. For Hegel, self-consciousness, if understood dialectically, points toward a self-knowledge which is identical with “Absolute” knowledge of the whole. By contrast, Platonic noêsis (intellectual intuition of determinate form) renders self-knowledge impossible. The soul cannot grasp itself since it has no “form,” and noêsis lacks any reflexivity. We thus lose ourselves in the exercise of our highest capacity. Platonic thought accordingly culminates — from a Hegelian perspective — in the impossibility of wisdom and in alienation.

Each subsequent chapter addresses some part of this critique. In the Charmides, Critias attempts to justify his thymotic self-assertion by identifying virtue with a self-knowledge which is identical with comprehensive knowledge. This attempt founders, however, on its inability to explain the connection between self-knowledge and knowledge of the good. The Symposium chapter argues that the relationship between eros and logos in the speeches of Diotima and Alcibiades sheds light on why, for Plato, both desire and discursive thought are necessarily derivative of a prior intelligible order which they cannot constitute. An analysis of the Sun, Line, and Cave images in the Republic completes the account by showing that noêsis must be passive and receptive rather than active and constructive if a distinctly human way of being is to be at all comprehensible.

Finally, I argue that, in its broad outlines, the modern conception of self-determining and self-reflexive subjectivity is already visible in Plato's dialogues but rejected by him. The soul ultimately depends for its very coherence upon the prior intelligibility of nature as the standard for “remaking” ourselves under the rule of reason. Surprisingly, then, the subject cannot be an origin or first principle for Plato because, in modern, or perhaps even post-modern fashion, it is itself a result, the product of the rational work of self-perfection.