1 Reading the Dialogues

Almost everything is an obstacle to understanding Plato.^[1] The passage of time, rather than providing objectivity, has simply petrified errors and given them a time-honored authority. The very method of classifi­cation so frequently portrayed in the dialogues has added to the difficulty. After all, if you want to read Plato or about Plato, you go to the section of the library where books on philosophy are kept, for you reasonably think that Plato is a philosopher. The language Plato wrote in, already ancient, varied in its metaphor, offered infinite opportuni­ties for playfulness or ambiguity. And not least, Plato’s own genius created problems: Plato’s words, eloquent beyond belief, were soon enmarbled in lapidary sanctity; they radiated such sublimity that they seemed more the pronouncements of a deity than the words of a mere mortal man.^[2]

Plato wrote principally if not entirely in the fourth century, a generation before Aristotle and only a few years after the conclusion of the Peloponnesian War, a conflict that formed the background of Plato’s first twenty-five years.^[3] We must not forget the state of literature at that time, if we are to avoid the error into which virtually all readers of Plato have fallen, even when trying to escape it, of projecting onto him suppositions that would be true if he had written at a different and later time. When Plato wrote, Greek prose had been invented or come into use as a public medium only a few years before. Tragedy had existed in its fully developed form for less than one hundred years. The only literary forms with a venerable tradition were epic and lyric. Epics were not being composed anymore, and lyric was in decadence. His predecessors, the so-called “Pre-Socratic Philosophers,” wrote for the most part in verse. Rhetoric was just coming into its own, but, if the rhetoric of such figures as Gorgias be indicative, its pyrotechnical excesses and orotund verbal dexterity (perhaps a compensation for the lack of meter) did not hide its intellectual vacuity, at least from the critically acute of Plato’s generation. Indeed, such rhetoric provides Plato a continual target. History too had just sprung full-blown into life from the magnificent heads of Herodotus and Thucydides. Anaxagoras and Democritus had written treatises on their philosophic views.

In this environment, Plato invented the dialogue. During the two and a half thousand years that have followed, he has been flattered by very few imitators. Many, to be sure, have written dialogues, but these dialogues do not duplicate his sprightly dialectic. It would be mislead­ing to compare the dialogues of Cicero or Xenophon with those of Plato. Simply put, Plato’s dialogues are sui generis. Because they are sui generis they are hard to study.^[4] would say, whatever cannot be placed into a genus does not admit of a definition. If, therefore, we approach the dialogues with the preconceptions of an As Aristotle established genus, we shall undoubtedly err.

It is natural, however, to compare Plato’s dialogues to that which they are most like, and in this way perhaps we can gain some insight into what Plato is attempting. Shall we then compare them to works of philosophy? If we do, we shall, I think, be committing a profound error, for virtually all prose works of philosophy come after Plato. If we compare the dialogues to the poems of Xenophanes, Heraclitus, and Parmenides, then perhaps we would accurately compare Plato’s works to the tradition of philosophy that Plato received. But who would seriously wish to do so? First, the Pre-Socratics deal with questions of physics, the principles of which they poeticize and anthropomorphize. Indeed, if Cicero is right in claiming that Socrates brought philosophy down from the sky and placed it in the cities of men, we might equally declare that the Pre-Socratics took the affairs and lives of men from the cities and placed them in the skies. Thus Love and Strife become forces of nature, and the whole vocabulary of everyday life becomes appropriated for philosophical disquisitions. Consider the following exchange in the Sophist (242C-D):

STRANGER: It strikes me that Parmenides and everyone else who has set out to determine how many real things there are and what they are like, have discoursed to us in rather an offhand fashion.

THEAETETUS: How so?

STRANGER: They each and all seem to treat us as children to whom they are telling a story. According to one there are three things some of which now carry on a sort of warfare with one another and then make friends and set about marrying and begetting children. Another tells us that there are two–moist and dry, or hot and cold­ whom he marries off, and makes them set up house together. (Tr. Cornford)

What a sensible objection to the carefree abandon with which the Pre­ Socratics went about explaining the world! Plato is not to be justly compared with their views.

Can we compare the dialogues to the essays of Aristotle or of Sextus Empiricus or of Epicurus or of Seneca or even to the so-called dialogues of Cicero? There is no life, no playfulness (with the possible exception of some verbal jokes) in these works. All is seriousness and ponderous discourse.

I would venture to say that as Herodotus’s boldness and genius lay partly in his adaptation of epic to prose, so Plato’s lay partly in his adaptation of drama to prose. Tragedy and comedy are the genres that most resemble the Platonic dialogue: like tragedies and comedies, the dialogues have settings and characters, unity of time and place, and conversation in the character’s own persona without benefit of a narrator. And of the two dramatic forms, Plato’s dialogues are most like comedy, the Old Comedy of Aristophanes. As in Old Comedy, the personae of the dialogues are people of historical reality, the topics are contemporary, and the discussions contain commentaries, parodies, and critiques. That Plato’s dialogues are dramatic has of course been noticed for a great while, and in this century many pursuing Plato’s drama have made substantial progress in understanding him. Werner Jaeger, Paul Friedlander, Leo Strauss, W.K.C. Guthrie, and their students are especially to be noted.^[5]

But even those who have noted the drama have proceeded with a mistaken methodology. For while they see the dialogues as dramatic, they fail to see them as dramas. Believing the purported topic of the dialogue's particular argument to be the main subject matter of the dialogue, they have labored to work out how the various non-philo­sophical elements contribute to or corroborate the point of the dia­logue. Thus, Stanley Rosen believes the Symposium to be about love, which he claims is the teaching of the work and a fundamental doctrine in Plato. Yet I would argue that the Symposium is no more about love than is the Phaedrus. Again, the Timaeus has for two and a half thousand years appeared to be the great statement of Platonic cosmol­ogy, a notion that has inspired countless commentaries and perpetrated much confusion in an already confused world. The moving Phaedo has inspired scores of differing philosophers to expend much energy in attacking or defending this point or that point as if the whole Platonic edifice and all of Western Civilization would tumble to dust if the argument were proven fallacious.^[6]

In these cases, as in others, a little distance from the dialogue, a glimpse at the dialogue as a work of art, of literature, of drama, would have solved a great many of the problems. Thus, as I shall argue, in the Symposium, love, though indeed the subject matter of the various speeches, is not the subject matter of the dialogue. In Sophocles' Oedipus Rex, there is much discussion about the death of Laius, but this is not the subject of the play; rather, it is a play about self­ discovery and the underlying order of the cosmos. To be sure, the Symposium contains much discussion about love, but the dialogue is actually about theology and about the practice of men making gods in their own images. Each character, including Socrates, describes love as a reflection of himself. Why should we assume that Socrates' myth or projection of his own nature onto love is more valid than that of the other speakers? Why should Plato speak through Socrates any more than Shakespeare through Hamlet? Indeed, Plato seems very often critical of his master.^[7] Again, when we have fought our way through the fog of the Timaeus, and have seen one contorted argument after another, and have gaped in wonder at commentators who writhe to explain how red and black (68C-D) make green; when we have realized just who are these most peculiar characters who participate in the conversation; when we see women and animals claimed to be men's corrupt descendants—even when there were no original women to have shared in their procreation-we come to the conclusion that far from being a serious account of cosmology, the Timaeus is actually a parody of the science of the Pythagoreans. When, having admired the courage of Socrates, we put down the Phaedo and reflect on how we have been lost in the wandering maze of arguments about the immortality of the soul or remain lamentably unconvinced by them, as must Socrates' interlocutors, we see that the dialogue is not about the immortality of the soul at all, but about the courage with which the noble Socrates met his death. We see then that the arguments had to fail, not only because we cannot in this life know about our souls' longevity after death, but because the drama of the dialogue requires them to fail. Only if the arguments fail can Socrates meet death with courage. What courage would be needed if he had actually proved the immortality and happy futurity of his soul?

Phaedo, we understand the arguments, we, like many commentators, will see that they are defective. Instead of expending our energies in seeking to show by some tangled ingenuity that the argument actually makes sense or could have made sense if Plato had but stopped elsewhere, we need to ask a different question: why did Plato have Socrates or another character make this statement? What can Plato's purpose have been in putting so faulty an argument in the mouth of an interlocutor? Inasmuch as Plato wrote dialogues, don't we owe him the attempt to understand his meaning in the context of his chosen medium? Surely he could have written treatises, if he had wanted to, and perhaps in his esoteric works, like the famous Lecture on the Good, he did. And if we had that lecture, we should apply our minds to it in the way we apply them to Aristotle. But since Plato chose not to do so but chose instead to try his luck in a medium much less certain and much more ambiguous, we need to approach him in a way different from that appropriate to Aristotle.^[8]

Some professors of philosophy might shudder at the views expressed here. They might feel perhaps I am suggesting that Plato should not be taught in their department, that he ought to be taught, if taught at all, in departments of literature.^[9] To respond in such a way, however, would be to divorce philosophy from life. They should instead see literature as applied philosophy and consider whether the division of learning into separate departments—so convenient for academic bureaucrats—does not in fact obscure the truth that knowledge, like the radiant light of the sun, embraces the whole world. There is, I would venture to say, much to be learned about philosophical issues in literature, not of course in the syllogistic and systematic way we find in treatises, but in the complex and deceptive way we find them in life. And Plato, like all great authors, has points to make. He simply makes them dramatically, not discursively, and the point may have little or nothing to do with the particular storyline of the drama.^[10] At the same time, I think it important to avoid supersubtlety in interpreting the dramatic meaning of the dialogues. The students of Leo Strauss seem to contend with one another to find the deepest meaning in the slightest dramatic gesture or incident, so much so that they tend to allegorize Plato. It is easy to fall into the trap of finding symbolism everywhere and hard to resist the impulse to do so. Perhaps such critics are more to be praised despite their excesses than condemned for lapses in moderation; it is, after all, easier to prune than to cultivate.

Plato himself offers us a little help in understanding him. In his Seventh Epistle (342C-D) he explicitly says that he never published in the form of a treatise his advanced thought:

There neither is nor will there be any treatise of mine concerning these things: you see, it is not capable of being put into words, as are other things that are learned; instead, as a result of being much together concerning the matter itself and from much living together, suddenly, just as light kindled from a spark that has leaped out, having come to be in the soul, it itself nourished itself instantaneously.

Plato adds that if there were to be such a treatise, either in writing or in speech, it would have to be one of his own composition. If the statement is true, it would be evidence from Plato himself that the dialogues do not reveal exactly what he taught in the Academy or, in fact, his most serious philosophy.^[11] In the Phaedrus (276B) an analogy is drawn between a farmer who expects a crop in eight days and the one who writes, expecting immediately to affect the soul of his reader. Both farmer and writer are silly to expect a crop so soon. The point is that real education does not come from reading silent texts, but by rigorous living debate.^[12]

The question of Plato's audience is critical. For whom were the dialogues written? Every author obviously writes with some kind of audience in mind. Thus, children's books differ from those for adults in vocabulary, plot, difficulty, and many other ways. Whomever Plato may have expected as his audience, it is certain that it was not those who would sit down with the dialogues and analyze, with the aid of sets of commentaries and dictionaries and scores of articles, every word that he wrote, word by word. Indeed, such scholarship had not yet come into being and was not to until the Hellenistic period. Nor, given what we know about the ancient practice of reading, is it likely that he expected his audience to wring with labyrinthine ingenuity every possible interpretation out of every word. Since books were usually read aloud by a slave to a group of people, Plato must have expected his hearers to catch the essence of his meaning the first time around.^[13] Nor is it likely that Plato had in mind an audience 2,500 years later. Whatever the rivalry Plato may have felt with poetry, there is simply no evidence that he intended it to continue through the ages. He was writing for a contemporary audience on issues of contemporary significance.

One of Plato's contemporaries, Isocrates, founded a school of rhet­oric in 392, about five years before Plato founded his Academy. Isocrates published various works, the Busiris (390) and the Helen, cast in the form of eulogies and designed to advertise his literary views in order to attract students to his school. His work Against the Sophists, written about the same time, defends his principles and is directed against philosophers. Later, his Antidosis (353) discusses his educational theories and explains how his speeches are more elevated than those of his rivals. It would seem to me, therefore, entirely possible that Plato did the same sort of thing: he wrote his dialogues in order to advertise his school. As he and Isocrates were rivals (along with such others as Alcidamas),^[14] fathers might look at their respective advertisements and choose the school appropriate for their sons.^[15] Such a purpose would explain as well the persistent attention given to education and schooling in the dialogues.

A rival of both Plato and Isocrates, Alcidamas (On the Writers of Written Speeches) argued that there is value only in extemporaneous speeches, for they alone meet the exigencies of fortune, show the suppleness of their speaker's mind, and persuade the audience of the speaker's sincerity. Alcidamas's principal target is Isocrates, the pro­ ponent and merchant of prepared speeches written out in advance. The question of the value and validity of extemporaneous speeches is presented dramatically in a number of Platonic dialogues, and these references to the debate shed light both on the controversy and on how Plato saw his own school differing from those of his rivals. It is difficult to believe that Plato was not sometimes directly responding to and commenting upon the controversy (though, of course, if we believe Plato's own remarks about writing, we can never be really sure about what Plato or any other writer means). For example, in the Symposium, there is an oratorical contest of extemporaneous speeches on eros; in the Menexenus, Socrates amusingly shows how easy it is to compose extemporaneously a funeral speech when standard topoi are used (such topoi are the sort of education Alcidamas must have given his students); and in the first part of the Phaedrus, Socrates delivers two extemporaneous speeches on love, speeches meant to compete with Lysias's written speech (which was memorized by Phaedrus­ and the practice of memorizing speeches is one of Alcidamas's targets). The reference to lsocrates at the end of the Phaedrus makes it even likelier that the dialogue was intended, at least in part, as a commentary on the debate.^[16] It seems to me that the evidence of the dialogues suggests that Plato found fault with both rivals: neither school aimed at the good of the soul-either the speaker's soul or the audience's soul-and neither school aimed at truth.^[17]

Finally, in a great many places (Phaedrus 276A, Republic 536C, Timaeus 59C-D, Laws 685A, Parmenides 137B, and passim), the characters in the dialogues refer to their conversations as play and the noun paidia or the verb paizo are used to describe them. In the Epinomis it is written that a wise man is both playful and serious at the same time (992B). Despite these clear statements that what occurs is play, the conversations are almost universally taken quite seriously. In these pages, in contrast, I shall begin with the assumption that Plato means what he says when he claims that his dialogues are play, and I shall look for the serious point that emerges in the play.^[18]

Here let us not read the arguments of the dialogues as Plato's views on this subject or that.^[19] Instead, let us stand outside the dialogues and see whether we can determine the point of the work as a whole.^[20] This is not, of course, an easy task. The acres of books and articles on Hamlet are a testimony to the difficulty of knowing precisely the message of a given text. Yet we would certainly laugh at a critic who looked at Hamlet's words or Polonius's words and claimed them to be Shakespeare's doctrine. Polonius's admirable wisdom has meaning in the context of the drama; though it has a life outside of the drama, though when plucked out of a dictionary of quotations it may be nicely inserted into many a fine commencement speech or paternal letter, Polonius's words nevertheless do not constitute the meaning of Ham­ let. Nor in the Platonic dialogues should we assume that the position of Socrates is Plato's teaching or the right position, the one that we should adopt. Would it not have been a greater tribute to Socrates for his disciple to have criticized rather than lionized him? Moreover, Plato the artist might very well emphasize certain features of Socrates' in order to point out clearly his defects.^[21] Again, just because in a particular context Socrates may say that it is better to suffer an injustice than to commit one, and though we may agree with the statement, and though we may think it is well argued, yea, though we may think the statement absolutely true, we still are not justified in saying that the proposition is the point of the dialogue. We must see that statement and every other statement as part of the whole. When we stand outside of the drama and attempt, like Pythagoras's spectators, to see the whole and not one particular part of the whole, we may attempt a general interpretation. I ask the indulgence of my readers to realize that my attempt to read the dialogues in this way is new and that the interpretations here are in no way meant to be the last word. Rather they are meant to show what may result from a literary approach. The ground, though much trodden, is not yet explored.^[22]

Often the drama of a dialogue will reveal a positive teaching when the arguments themselves have been inconclusive. For example, inter­ locutors will present extreme positions, the extremes, say, of the wholly contemplative and wholly practical lives in the Gorgias, or of the sexless and over-sexed in the Symposium, or of the wholly natural or conventional origin of names in the Cratylus. In these cases, where each extreme results in some absurdity, the drama suggests an answer: the via media—the golden mean—a doctrine writ large in Greek culture long before Aristotle. Here again we see Plato as philosophy's great synthesizer: as he could take the Heraclitean world of flux and the Parmenidean world of being and combine them into his system of duality, so he could also take starkly opposite views and, by showing the defects in each, suggest a happy medium as the answer.

One might perhaps ask why Aristotle did not interpret Plato as I suggest and why he objected to many of the seeming conclusions of the Socratic conversations. After all, Aristotle was a student at the Academy for nearly twenty years. If anyone should have understood Plato, it ought to have been Aristotle. This indeed does seem at first glance a powerful objection to the interpretation herein presented. Yet, if we recall certain facts about Aristotle and Plato, we may begin to get a sense of why this objection is not in the end so very powerful. Plato was born in 428 and died in 348 at the age of eighty. Aristotle was born in 384, when Plato was already forty-four. He is reported to have entered the Academy when he was seventeen and Plato was sixty­ one.^[23] According to Jaeger (p. 25), this was the time when Plato was writing the Theaetetus and transferring his interests to "methodological, analytical, and abstract studies." If indeed Jaeger's chronology is correct, it may well be that Plato no longer had much of an interest in discussing his early work. The youngster Aristotle would hardly have controlled the subjects of discussion, and in any case, he seems to have had a natural propensity for scientific inquiries. It is entirely possible therefore that his misunderstanding of Plato arose from the reverence he would have for all his master's words. Unfamiliar with the ironic youthful Plato, he would have taken literally Plato's playful­ ness. In addition, he might never have asked Plato his true meaning. The difference in age of a generation and a half (forty-four years) would in all likelihood have made their relationship a very formal one. As Aristotle himself says (Nicomachean Ethics 1158b) friendships among equals are best, and there was certainly no equality in Plato's relationship with his young pupil. The famous anecdote about Aristo­tle's attending Plato's Lecture on the Good, if true, might perhaps also show some distance between the two philosophers. The lecture may have been one of the occasions in which Aristotle would actually have the opportunity to be in Plato's company; his avidity in staying to the end shows how eager he was to avail himself of the opportunity.^[24] There has been a great deal of discussion in the last two centuries about how well Aristotle understood Plato and about the various motives that may have led him to present Plato's views in ways that seem to contradict what we know about Plato.^[25]

In any case, if my interpretation of Plato be correct, it turns out that many of Aristotle's criticisms of Plato actually show how well trained he was in the Academy. If Plato's purpose be ironic, and if the views he gives his interlocutors are not his own but are presented in order to be refuted or questioned, then Plato would be presenting dramatically the very same views Aristotle spells out straightforwardly. The attempt at reconciliation would therefore not be the hopeless task that some have thought. Indeed, this interpretation should revitalize such efforts. There has been much discussion in recent years about the drama in Plato, and here and there some points of mine have been anticipated.^[26] Plato's text is often so perplexing that the kind of reading given to a "normal" philosophical work yields nonsense, and scholars in desper­ation have resorted to dramatic interpretation. Some have indeed been bolder than others and have approached the brink of dramatic interpre­tation. Where this work differs from the others is in taking a dramatic purpose as a premise, not as an interpretive device to be resorted to when all else has failed.

I make no presumptions here about chronology, nor do I think a knowledge of chronology essential for understanding the dialogues as drama. It may be useful for Shakespeare scholars to know that Shake­speare wrote Titus Adronicus before he wrote Hamlet, but were that knowledge essential, no one could ever have understood Titus Andron­icus until Hamlet had been written, and no one could understand Hamlet without first seeing Titus Andronicus. When we look at individ­ual works of art for their own value, it is not necessary to think of them as part of a unified and ordered corpus. Nor do I think internal complexity or sophistication useful clues to chronological order. For example, if Albert Einstein had been asked late in his career to speak to a group of girl and boy scouts, he would no doubt have spoken in a simple, even simplified, language. If many years later we found the speech among his papers, it would be erroneous to assume an early date on account of its simplicity. So too with Plato. Short, simple dialogues like the Laches or Crito may have been written for a particular audience and hence written after longer, difficult dialogues like the Theaetetus or Parmenides.^[27] In accordance with these views, then, and to reinforce the idea that they are separate plays, the dialogues are discussed in no particular order. There are no hidden theories concerning chronology, importance, stylistic complexity, or anything else in the placement of the chapters on the various dialogues. (The introduction and conclusions, however, have been placed with attention to location.)

I should perhaps add, as a final note here, that I was educated by those who took the drama in the Platonic dialogues seriously. In college I read Jaeger, Friedlander, Guthrie, Klein, and Strauss, and for the twenty years since have learned much from them and others. Their work seemed to me infinitely better than that alluded to above, which ignored or scornfully rejected the drama. To weave the drama into the discussions and see it as corroborating them was appealing and fruitful. My view now is that these fine scholars simply did not go far enough. They continued to believe that drama was subordinated to philosophy and that the drama exists as a corroborative adornment to reinforce the arguments. The extra step that I recommend is to see the arguments as subordinate to the drama, to see that they need to be understood in order to understand the dramatic purpose. Perhaps this last step is simply too much. Let us see where it takes us.