Notes Toward an Introduction to Plato

By Trish Roberts-Miller

There are many translations out there, each with advantages. Hackett publishers has come out with wonderful and quite modern translations of some of the dialogues; I like them best. The Loew translations are en face, which is great if you want to follow the translation issues (which are very interesting). Some of the older translations are very close to the Greek, but they tend to obscure the sexual innuendos (important in the dialogues on rhetoric). The collected dialogues is the best choice if you intend to read them all, at least as far as price.

The standard tale to tell about Plato is that he was a playwright who, after a fairly festive dinner, ran into Socrates in the agora. Socrates questioned him about drama, thereby persuading Plato to give up writing plays and study philosophy. One of the crucial questions about interpreting Plato’s dialogues (which are always interactions between a character Socrates and various other real and imagined characters who argue about some philosophical issue) is the extent to which he did actually give up drama.

His dialogues are generally divided up into three stages, largely on the basis of the character of Socrates—how contentious he is, whether he advocates a philosophy (or simply points out the flaws in others), and what that philosophy is. In the “early” dialogues, the Socrates character is very similar to that presented in Xenophon’s Conversations—contentious, ironic, skeptical, and almost entirely negative (that is, he frequently says he doesn’t know what the truth is, but he does know when others are not speaking the truth). Thus, he simply poses questions, and doesn’t really answer them. In the “middle” dialogues, the character of Socrates does sometimes put forward answers to the questions, but generally in terms of myths, metaphors, and allegories. The “later” dialogues are the most mystical, with the least contentious argument, and they are the least read now (although there was a time when they were the most read).

Athens was a very oral culture, and people in oral cultures have an extraordinary ability to remember and relate speeches, sayings, and conversations, so it isn’t impossible that the early dialogues represent something similar to conversations that really happened. While Plato himself could not have heard them, he might have heard about them in considerable detail, and he may be relating what he heard. (Personally, I think it extremely unlikely, but it is possible.) By the middle dialogues, Plato was putting together people who could not have met, or who did not exist (but may accurately represent a type). In his famous “Seventh Letter,” Plato says that he does not advocate a philosophy in his dialogues, but simply presents what he thinks would have happened had Socrates met various people. (An important issue, discussed further below, is the extent to which a reader takes this claim seriously).

There are, loosely three ways of reading the dialogues:

• The character Socrates is Plato’s mouthpiece (.e.,g Gregory Vlastos, Brian Vickers). This is one of the more common ways of reading Plato, and certainly many other famous dialogues in the philosophical tradition are written that way (e.g., Cicero, Hume, Berkeley). There are some problems with this reading, though. The most obvious is that it lands Plato in a blazing contradiction—his dialogues regularly condemn monologic forms of discourse, and a written dialogue is monologic. In his seventh letter, Plato says explicitly he did not use Socrates as a mouthpiece, so this reading is contradicted by what Plato himself says. In addition, while Athenian philosophical dialogues may or may not have used a character as a mouthpiece for the author (we don’t know), Athenian dramas definitely did not (although the chorus often fulfilled that role).Having said all the things wrong with this reading, I have to say that it is difficult not to read the Socrates of the later dialogues as a mouthpiece for Plato (for various reasons). My sense is that most scholars accept that the later dialogues probably do represent something fairly close to Plato’s doctrine (which, some have argued, is a self-consuming concept), and that the early dialogues represent Socrates’ method, but the major disagreement is about the middle dialogues.
• Plato’s stance in regard to the issues disputed by the interlocutors is indicated in the drama itself, and not in any specific character’s words. (e.g., Martha Nussbaum, Stanley Fish) This is not to say that Plato rejects what Socrates says, but that his intention is closer to a novelist’s or playwright’s who might have more sympathy for some characters than others, but doesn’t have a mouthpiece. By this reading, to look at what Plato thinks about rhetoric, one looks at how rhetoric functions in the dialogue, rather than just what Socrates says about it explicitly.
• Who cares whether it’s Plato’s conscious intention or not? (e.g., Derrida) Some of the most fascinating readings of the dialogues leave aside the question of just what Plato may have been doing intentionally, and talk about the dialogues in ways that literary critics would recognize as formalist. The dialogue is read separate from historical-biographical context.

Even though most scholars accept the tripartitie division in priniciple, there is some disagreement as to individual dialogues (is The Republican early late or a late early?) Within the categories, there is even more disagreement, and most scholars fall into a circular argument. For instance, the Phaedrus has a much more positive attitude toward sexual passion than Symposium. Scholars who want to argue that Plato moved toward an increasingly hostile attitude toward sex put Symposium after Phaedrus, and those who see the more favorable attitude the later one do the reverse. (Then, surprisingly often, the order of the dialogues is taken as evidence for the conclusion—a pretty striking example of begging the question.)

In regard to rhetoric, there are three dialogues that are generally considered the most important: Protagoras, Gorgias, Phaedrus. (I’d add Symposium and Republic, but that’s just me.)

One last point about background: it isn’t clear just when Plato began writing the dialogues, but they were almost certainly written during or after the Peloponnesian War—a very complicated and long war that did great damage to Athens. What we know about the war is from Thucydides, and we don’t know how widespread his view of it was. He thought that the quality of Athenian leaders (both political and military) gradually declined, and that Athens was led into some very bad policies through the greed and ambition of the leaders. If this was shared by Plato’s audience, then some of the analogies, comments, and examples are instances of dramatic irony (the dialogues, whenever they were written, are set before or at the beginning of the war).

Some crucial concepts

Skill vs. Trade

For Socrates (and Athenians in general?), some pursuits are more honorable than others. What is supposed to make these things skills (techne) as opposed to crafts (how the term is usually translated, but I’m pretty unhappy with that translation) is that the practitioners of skills really know what they’re doing—a doctor prescribes things based on knowledge of what is best, while a confectioner panders to the customers, and possibly even hurts them. It’s an open question whether Plato and/or Socrates engages in some irony on this topic—while there is no reason to think that Socrates thought doctors were, in fact, no more knowledgeable than confectioners, it’s quite likely he (and his audience) would have seen generals that way.

Lover/Beloved

The two best books on Greek homosexuality are Dover’s Greek Homosexuality and Halperin’s One Hundred Years of Homosexuality. Basically, their argument is that there were fairly complicated codes of conduct about homosexuality, and what was (and is) considered honorable and shameful. An older man was supposed to be the active participant, and the younger man the passive (which most translations indicate as lover and beloved). It was not expected that they “beloved” would get any pleasure out of the experience. Anal sex was considered shameful (especially for the passive participant), of particular shame was what was called a katamite (catamite, in most translations) who was a male prostitute who was the passive in anal sex. It was acceptable for men to engage in fondling and what Dover politely calls “intercrural” sex. (All of this becomes very important in the Gorgias when the argument turns on whether someone should just be interested in pleasure—in addition, Socrates calls Callicles the “lover” of democracy, and I think the implication is intended. This is all extremely important throughout Phaedrus.)

Opinion vs. Truth, Opinion vs. Knowledge

In the dialogues, there is always an important distinction between what people think and what is really true. (So, for instance, people might think that there is no difference between a donkey and a horse, but it would be disastrous to fit an army with the former.) Most translation go with the “opinion” vs. “knowledge” translation, which is fine, but it’s important to remember that the dialogue assumes that the latter cannot be wrong.