Complete Works (4 page)

IV. Reading Plato

Despite this inherent open-endedness and the fact that Plato speaks only through the writing as a whole, all Plato’s dialogues do have a principal speaker, one who establishes the topic of discussion and presides over it. In the Socratic works and the second group of dialogues, with the exception of
Parmenides,
this is Socrates. In the late dialogues, except
Philebus,
where Socrates reappears to discuss the nature of the human good, it is the anonymous visitor from Elea, in
Sophist
and
Statesman,
or the equally anonymous Athenian of
Laws
and
Epinomis,
or else Timaeus or Critias, in the dialogues named after them. In each dialogue Plato focuses the reader’s attention on what the principal speaker says. Indeed, in the late dialogues, though again
Philebus
is something of an exception, the other speakers put up so little opposition and their comments introduce into the proceedings so little of the sort of fertile nuance that one finds in the other dialogues, that for long stretches there is little else that could claim the reader’s attention at all. In fact, the substance of
Timaeus
and
Critias
is contained in uninterrupted discourses that the main speaker delivers to the others present, with no indication even at the end of how they received it: there is no return to the conversational context in which it was originally introduced. Can one not take these principal speakers as Plato’s mouthpieces, handing straight out as their own opinions what Plato himself believed at the time he wrote and what he wished his readers to understand as such—both as the truth and as what Plato
thought
was the truth?

If what I have said about the dialogue form and Plato’s commitment to it—right to the end of his writer’s career—is correct, the
strict
answer to this question must be in the negative, in all cases. However much his principal speakers really do, in some way, speak on his behalf, he must also, in some way, be holding back from arguing and asserting personally the things that he has any of them say. What, then, are we to make of Plato’s relation to what they do say? Each dialogue has to be read individually, but the three different groups—the Socratic dialogues, the second group, and the late dialogues—plainly do place the author in different sorts of relationship to his main speaker. Without going into the individual differences, here is some general orientation on the author’s relationships to the leading speakers in each of the three groups.

First, there is a matter of literary form that applies to all the dialogues. As I have emphasized, Plato never speaks in his own author’s voice but puts all his words into a particular speaker’s mouth. This means that, although everything any speaker says is Plato’s creation, he also stands before it all as the reader does: he puts before us, the readers, and before himself as well, ideas, arguments, theories, claims, etc. for all of us to examine carefully, reflect on, follow out the implications of—in sum, to use as a springboard for our own further philosophical thought. Authors writing in their own voices can, of course, do the same: they do not always have to be straightforwardly advocating the positions they develop and argue for, though that is what Greek authors usually did, and with passionate self-promotion. But they must take special steps to make the reader aware that that is what they are doing, for example by saying it in so many words. In his dialogues, Plato adopts that stance automatically.
²¹
However much he may himself believe everything that, say, the Athenian visitor puts forward in
Laws
X about the existence of the gods and the importance for human life of accepting their providential relationship to us and the physical world, he stands to it, even though he is its author, as his readers also stand. To finally understand all this
as
the truth requires further work—one must sift and develop and elevate the thoughts expressed there into the kind of self-sufficient, self-interpreting total grasp that I referred to above in drawing on what
Phaedrus
says about writing. Certainly, we should not think that Plato had already attained that Elysian condition and was writing from its perspective through the Athenian’s mouth. Much less should we think that he was pretending to himself or to his readers that he had attained it. That would be a malicious and unprincipled abuse of the very dialogue form that Plato was so obviously determined to uphold. So even in the late dialogues, where, as noted, there is often little else before us but the arguments of the principal speaker, Plato stands back—everything needs further thought; what we have before us is partial and provisional at best, however decisive it might be about particular points under discussion.

In the dialogues of the second group, the role of the interlocutors is much more substantial, and the main speaker himself, usually Socrates, expresses more reservations, more caution and tentativeness, about what he is putting forward. Accordingly, even though readers always and understandably speak of the theories adumbrated by Socrates here as ‘Plato’s theories’, one ought not to speak of them so without some compunction—the writing itself, and also Plato the author, present these always in a spirit of open-ended exploration, and sometimes there are contextual clues indicating that Socrates exaggerates or goes beyond what the argument truly justifies, and so on. Finally, in the Socratic dialogues, all these cautionary points hold good, and others too. To the extent that Plato is providing a portrait of his friend Socrates, it is only common sense not to assume that Plato accepts as valid everything philosophical that he makes Socrates say. Even beyond that, and however much one knows Plato admired Socrates and, indeed, regarded him as the very model of how a philosopher should live, one should remain open to the possibility that a Socratic dialogue, when read fully and properly, may actually indicate some criticisms and point to some shortcomings of positions or methods of argument that it attributes to Socrates. Here one might especially mention
Gorgias
and
Protagoras
as dialogues that may demand interpretation along those lines, but the same applies in principle to all the Socratic dialogues.

Reading a Platonic dialogue in the spirit in which it was written is therefore a dauntingly complex task. It is in the entire writing that the author speaks to us, not in the remarks made by the individual speakers. To find out what the writing itself is saying—equivalently, what Plato is saying
as its author
—one must work constantly to question everything that any speaker says, to ask what reasons he may have or what reasons might be provided to support it and what might tend to speak against it; one must never simply take, as if on Plato’s authority, a claim made by any speaker as one that, from the perspective of the dialogue as a whole, constitutes an established philosophical truth—certainly not in the form in which it is stated and not without qualification, expansion, taking into account wider perspectives, and so on. Especially in the Socratic dialogues and those of the second group, one must be alert to contextual indicators of all sorts—the particular way in which an interlocutor agrees to or dissents from something, the more or less explicit characterization provided and other indicators about the personal qualities and commitments of the speakers, as well as hesitations and reservations and qualifications expressed by one or another of them.

Those, then, are my own suggestions about the significance of the dialogue form in Plato’s writings. The dialogues have not always been read in the way I have suggested, and not all scholars today share this approach to them: many would not hesitate simply to identify the positions and arguments stated or suggested by Socrates, or whoever the principal speaker is in any given dialogue, as those of the author at the time of composition. Already in antiquity Aristotle usually treats them in that ‘dogmatic’ way, except for the Socratic dialogues, which he seems to have taken as depicting (equally ‘dogmatically’) the historical Socrates’ philosophy. However, in Plato’s own Academy, beginning only a couple of generations after Aristotle’s death, the dialogues were read differently. They were taken to express a skeptical philosophy, one that raises questions about everything, examining the reasons pro and con on each issue, but always holds back from asserting anything as definitely established, as known to be the case. This reading works best, of course, for the Socratic dialogues, in which Socrates makes much of the fact that he does not actually know anything himself and can only examine and criticize the well-groundedness of other people’s opinions who think that they do. But Arcesilaus (third century
B.C.
), one of Plato’s successors as head of the Academy, who first adopted such a skeptical mode of philosophizing and defended it as genuinely Platonic, is reported to have owned a complete set of Plato’s writings—apparently that was an unusual thing in those days—so apparently he studied them all. And indeed, even the last of Plato’s works can sustain the skeptical reading if one takes account of the fact that, formally at least, as I have emphasized myself, Plato never speaks in his own person when any of his characters does: even a main character like the Athenian in
Laws
or the visitor from Elea, who does not hesitate to speak dogmatically himself, as if he had full possession of the truth on the matters he discourses upon, can still be read as putting something forward that Plato the author is presenting merely for examination and criticism. This ‘skeptical’ Platonism held the field in the Academy for the best part of two centuries, until Antiochus of Ascalon early in the first century
B.C.
refused any longer to accept the skeptical interpretation of Plato’s own dialogues.

After Antiochus, Plato was interpreted again, in the way Aristotle and his contemporaries had understood him, as a systematic philosopher with a whole system of doctrine, both about human life and about metaphysical and scientific principles for interpreting and relating to one another all the facts of experience. This system could be found expounded and argued for especially in the dialogues of the second and the late groups—one just had to take each dialogue’s main character as Plato’s mouthpiece. In Roman imperial times, this dogmatic interpretation was expanded and consolidated, as Platonist philosophers came to regard Plato’s writings as the repository of the ultimate and permanent highest truths about the universe—the equivalent for rationalist pagans of the Jews’ Books of Moses or the Christians’ Gospels. For them, Plato himself had gained a complete and totally adequate insight into the nature and structure of the world and of the divine principles upon which it is organized. All that anyone need do is to read the dialogues correctly in order to discover the truth about every important question of philosophy. It is as if, for Plotinus and the other Platonists of late antiquity (the ones we usually refer to as ‘Neoplatonists’), Plato was speaking to us in his writings in the same way that Parmenides or Heraclitus had done, as possessor of his own ‘truth’—the
real
truth—handing that down to other mortals in his own somewhat cryptic way, in dialogues. It is quite an irony that, in treating Plato thus as a superwise authority on all philosophical subjects, himself in direct intellectual touch with the highest and most divine principles on which the universe depends, these late Platonists set Plato upon the pedestal of wisdom, traditional among earlier philosophers, the very pedestal that, if I am right, his own commitment to the dialogue form for his writings was intended to renounce.

My suggested approach to the reading of Plato pays full respect to this renunciation. But—with the reservations already noted about Plato’s openness and experimental spirit—it also accepts the overwhelming impression, not just of Antiochus, but of every modern reader of at least many of his dialogues, that Platonism nonetheless constitutes a systematic body of ‘philosophical doctrine’—about the soul and its immortality; the nature of human happiness and its dependence on the perfection of mind and character that comes through the virtues of wisdom, justice, temperance, and courage; the eternal and unaltering Forms whose natures structure our physical world and the world of decent human relations within it; the nature of love and the subservience of love in its genuine form to a vision of that eternal realm. These and many other substantive philosophical ideas to be explored in Plato’s dialogues are his permanent contribution to our Western philosophical culture. But we would fail to heed his own warnings if we did not explore these in a spirit of open-ended inquiry, seeking to expand and deepen our own understandings as we interrogate his texts, and ourselves through them.

V. The Translations

Hackett Publishing Company began bringing out the works of Plato in modern, readable English translations in 1974, with G.M.A. Grube’s
Republic.
By 1980 I was advising first William Hackett and then James Hullett, his successor, in the commissioning of, and providing editorial oversight over, the new translations that the company published during the next decade and a half, looking toward an eventual
Complete Works.
In 1991 D. S. Hutchinson joined the project. In completing the process we now add to the twenty dialogues already published twenty new works commissioned specially for this volume, taking over five additional translations from other sources (two of them extensively revised by the translators for publication here).

In overseeing the preparation of the translations, I have had constantly in mind two principal objectives, not often combined, that I was convinced could be achieved simultaneously. First, I wanted them to be as correct as was humanly possible. Taking Plato’s to be first and foremost works of philosophy, for me that meant not just that the meaning of the Greek sentences should be correctly grasped and rendered, with any significant, genuine alternative renderings indicated, but, equally important, that everything establishing the flow and connection of philosophical ideas in the Greek be somehow preserved in the English. Variances and continuities in philosophically significant terminology within a single work should so far as possible be preserved or otherwise indicated in the translation. Where logical relationships are precisely defined in the Greek, they have to be rendered equally precisely in the English. And so on. Many older translations, smooth-reading though they sometimes are, fail signally in these crucial respects. On the other hand, I saw no need, in the name of ‘philosophical accuracy’, to introduce indiscriminately neologisms and technical language and to resort to other odd and unnatural terminology or turns of phrase or to torture normal English syntax and patterns of prose composition. Plato’s Greek is straightforward and elegant, most of the time, though in order to express novel and complex theoretical ideas, it must sometimes strain the powers of ordinary language.