Complete Works (3 page)

But Plato was not the only or even the first of Socrates’ companions to write Socratic dialogues. Though, with the exception of Xenophon’s, no other such dialogues have survived complete, we know enough about the contents of some of them to be sure that no convention of the genre forbade the author to write freely and from his own head about philosophical and other matters that interested him. Indeed, quite to the contrary, as we can see from Xenophon’s dialogue
Oeconomicus,
in which Socrates discourses knowledgeably and at great length about estate management, a subject we have good reason to think he never knew or cared anything about—though Xenophon himself certainly did. So we have good reason to expect that at least some of what Plato makes Socrates say in his Socratic dialogues expresses new ideas developed in his own philosophical reflections, not mere elaborations of historically Socratic thoughts. This is perhaps particularly clearly the case, though in different ways, in
Charmides, Lysis, Euthydemus,
and
Gorgias,
but it is an open possibility in them all, to be decided in the light of a full interpretation of their contents, in relation to that of other dialogues. It is worth saying again that classifying these along with the rest as Socratic dialogues carries no implication whatsoever of an early date of composition or an early stage of the author’s philosophical development. As I am using the term, it is a thematic classification only. We know no reason to conclude that Plato wrote dialogues of this genre during only one phase of his career as an author, whether early or late. Though it is reasonable to suppose that Plato’s earliest writings were in fact Socratic dialogues, there is no reason to suppose that, just because a dialogue is a Socratic one, it must have been written before all the dialogues of other types—except, of course, that if we were right to accept a special group of late dialogues, the Socratic dialogues must predate all of these. The decision about the relative chronology of any of these dialogues, if one wishes to reach a decision on that secondary question at all, must be reached only after a careful and complete study of their philosophical content, in comparison with the contents of Plato’s other works.

There are eight dialogues other than the Socratic and the late dialogues:
Phaedo, Cratylus, Theaetetus, Parmenides, Symposium, Phaedrus, Meno,
and
Republic.
It is not easy to identify a common theme unifying this whole group. As it happens, however, they correspond closely to the putative classification of ‘middle-period’ dialogues. In these Socrates remains a principal speaker, although in
Parmenides
not Socrates but Parmenides sets and directs the philosophical agenda. As noted above, these stand apart from the Socratic dialogues in that here Socrates takes and argues directly for ambitious, positive philosophical positions of his own. However, those considerations do not set them cleanly apart from the late dialogues as a whole, since Socrates is the main speaker again in
Philebus,
and he appears in the introductory conversations of
Timaeus
and
Critias,
more briefly in those of
Sophist
and
Statesman,
and those dialogues are just as philosophically ambitious, even if in somewhat different ways. In all but two of the dialogues of this group (
Theaetetus
and
Meno
), the Platonic theory of Forms plays a prominent and crucial role: Indeed, it is these dialogues that establish and define the ‘classical’ theory of Forms, as that has been understood by later generations of philosophers. Were it not for
Theaetetus
and
Meno,
one might be tempted to classify this group simply as the ‘Classical Theory of Forms’ dialogues. On the other hand,
Phaedrus,
despite Socrates’ use of the classical theory in his second speech on
er
ō
s,
foreshadows the revised conception of a Form as some sort of divided whole—no longer a simple unity—known about by the method of ‘collection and division’ that the late dialogues
Sophist, Statesman,
and
Philebus
set out and employ at length. And it seems that one important lesson Parmenides wishes to teach Socrates in the
Parmenides
also goes in the same direction. Moreover,
Theaetetus
is marked by Plato as some sort of successor to
Parmenides
and predecessor of
Sophist
and
Statesman.
(See the introductory notes to these dialogues.) Thus
Phaedrus, Parmenides,
and
Theaetetus
all have clear forward connections to the late dialogues.

For all these reasons, it would be a mistake to claim any unifying single common theme for this group. At the most, one could say that this group develops the positive philosophical theories in ethics and politics and in metaphysics and theory of knowledge that we normally associate with Plato, centering on the classical theory of Forms, while including several dialogues which point forward to the innovations worked out in the late group. Accordingly, no thematic name for the group seems available, and we must make do simply by referring to a ‘second’ group of Plato’s dialogues, alongside the Socratic works, both groups to be placed chronologically before the late dialogues. As before, this classification must be understood as having no chronological implications whatsoever of its own, as regards their relationship to the Socratic dialogues. Any decision as to relative dates of composition, either within the second group itself or with respect to the various members of the Socratic group, must be reached only after comparative study of the philosophical contents of the individual dialogues themselves. While one might reasonably suppose that, in general, the dialogues of the second group were written later than the Socratic group, it is not safe to rule out some chronological overlapping in composition.

III. Plato and the Dialogue Form

Why did Plato write dialogues? What does it mean for the reader of his works that they take this form? Philosophers of earlier generations expounded their views and developed their arguments either in the meters of epic poetry (Xenophanes, Parmenides, Empedocles, for example), or in short prose writings or collections of remarks (Anaximander, Heraclitus, Anaxagoras, Philolaus, Democritus), or in rhetorical display pieces (the Sophists Gorgias, Protagoras, and Prodicus). Socrates himself, of course, was not a writer at all but engaged in philosophy only orally, in face-to-face question-and-answer discussions. It is clear that the dialogue form for philosophical writing began within the circle of those for whom philosophy meant in the first instance the sort of inquiry Socrates was engaged in. I mentioned above that Plato was not the first or only Socratic to write philosophical dialogues, but he certainly elaborated and expanded the genre far beyond what anyone else ever attempted. He not only wrote Socratic dialogues, as we have seen, but he developed the genre also to the point where, eventually, Socrates dropped out of the cast of characters altogether—in the magnum opus of his old age, the
Laws.
Plato’s younger associate Aristotle also wrote dialogues (all of which have perished), as well as the lectures and treatises that we know him for, but, significantly, they seem not to have had Socrates among their characters:
¹⁷
Socrates had been dead for fifteen years at Aristotle’s birth, and he could not have had the personal attachment to him as a philosophical model that Plato and the others in the first generation of dialogue writers obviously did.
¹⁸
But, as already with Aristotle, the medium of choice for later philosophers—Theophrastus and other Peripatetics, Epicurus and his followers, the Stoic philosophers, Sextus Empiricus, late Platonists—was the prose discourse or treatise (sometimes a commentary on a work of Plato’s or Aristotle’s or some other ‘ancient’ philosopher).
¹⁹
There, the author spoke directly to his readers in his own voice. The close association of the dialogue form with the Socratic conception of philosophy as face-to-face discussion is borne out in the principal exception to this rule, the Latin philosophical works of Cicero (first century
B.C.
): the plurality of voices and the author’s capacity to stand back from and question what these voices say made the dialogue format suit perfectly a nondogmatic or ‘skeptical’ Platonist like Cicero. (On ‘skeptical’ Platonism, see further below.)

It was characteristic of philosophy before Socrates and Plato that philosophers usually put themselves forward as possessors of special insight and wisdom:
they
had the truth, and everyone else should just listen to them and learn. Thus Parmenides’ poem tells how he was brought in a chariot to a goddess at the borders of night and day—the very center of the truth—and then sets out that truth and the arguments on which it rests, while also revealing the errors of everyone else’s ways. Similarly Heraclitus, in his prose book, claims to have discovered in one big thought—essentially, the unity of opposites—the key to all reality, and he excoriates other thinkers—several by name—as having missed it by wasting their time learning up all sorts of arcane details. These philosophers hoped and expected to win fame for themselves personally, as the authors (among humans) of their own ‘truth’. The genres in which they wrote suited this intellectual stance and these authorial ambitions perfectly: they could speak directly to their readers, as the authors of the poetry or prose in which they were handing down the truth.

Socrates was a totally new kind of Greek philosopher. He denied that he had discovered some new wisdom, indeed that he possessed any wisdom at all, and he refused to hand anything down to anyone as his personal ‘truth’, his claim to fame. All that he knew, humbly, was how to reason and reflect, how to improve himself and (if they would follow him in behaving the same way) help others to improve themselves, by doing his best to make his own moral, practical opinions, and his life itself, rest on appropriately tested and examined reasons—not on social authority or the say-so of esteemed poets (or philosophers) or custom or any other kind of intellectual laziness. At the same time, he made this self-improvement and the search for truth in which it consisted a common, joint effort, undertaken in discussion together with similarly committed other persons—even if it sometimes took on a rather combative aspect. The truth, if achieved, would be a truth attained by and for all who would take the trouble to think through on their own the steps leading to it: it could never be a personal ‘revelation’ for which any individual could claim special credit.

In writing Socratic dialogues and, eventually, dialogues of other types, Plato was following Socrates in rejecting the earlier idea of the philosopher as wise man who hands down the truth to other mortals for their grateful acceptance and resulting fame for himself. It is important to realize that whatever is stated in his works is stated by one or another of his characters,
not
directly by Plato the author; in his writings he is not presenting his ‘truth’ and himself as its possessor, and he is not seeking glory for having it. If there is new wisdom and ultimate truth in his works, this is not served up on a plate. Plato does not formulate his own special ‘truth’ for his readers, for them to learn and accept. You must work hard even to find out what the author of a Platonic dialogue is saying to the reader—it is in the writing as a whole that the author speaks, not in the words of any single speaker—and the dialogue form demands that you think for yourself in deciding what, if anything, in it or suggested by it is really the truth. So you have to read and think about what each speaker says to the others (and also, sometimes, what he does not say), notice what may need further defense than is actually given it, and attend to the author’s manner in presenting each character, and the separate speeches, for indications of points on which the author thinks some further thought is required. And, beyond that, you must think for yourself, reasoning on the basis of the text, to see whether or not there really are adequate grounds in support of what it may appear to you the text as a whole
is
saying. In all this, Plato is being faithful to Socrates’ example: the truth must be arrived at by each of us for ourselves, in a cooperative search, and Plato is only inviting others to do their own intellectual work, in cooperation with him, in thinking through the issues that he is addressing.

One might attend here to what Plato has Socrates say at the end of
Phaedrus
about written discourses. Socrates is speaking in the first instance of speeches written for oral delivery, but he applies his remarks to all writing on political or other serious philosophical subjects. Actual knowledge of the truth on any of these matters requires a constant capacity to express and re-express it in relation to varying circumstances and needs and in response to new questions or challenges that may arise. Knowledge is a limitless ability to interpret and reinterpret itself—it cannot be set down exhaustively in any single set of formulas, for universal, once-for-all use. Accordingly, no book can actually embody the knowledge of anything of philosophical importance; only a mind can do that, since only a mind can have this capacity to interpret and reinterpret its own understandings. A book must keep on saying the same words to whoever picks it up. Most books—perhaps those of Parmenides and some other early philosophers among them—attempt the impossible task of telling the reader the truth, with the vain idea that, through putting their words into their heads, they will come to possess knowledge of it.
²⁰
Plato’s dialogues are writings—books—too; like all books, once written, their words are fixed for all time and all readers. But because they demand that the reader interpret and reinterpret the meaning of what is said, going ever deeper in their own questioning and their own understanding both of the writings themselves and of the truth about the subjects addressed in them, these writings speak in a unique new way to the reader. It may remain true that only a mind, and no book, can contain the knowledge of anything important. But a Platonic dialogue makes a unique claim to do what a book
can
do to engage a person effectively in the right sort of search for truth.