Does Socrates Speak For Plato - Cohn

Does Socrates Speak for Plato?
Reflections on an Open Question

Author(s): Dorrit Cohn
Reviewed work(s):
Source: New Literary History, Vol. 32, No. 3, Voice and Human Experience (Summer, 2001),
pp. 485-500
Published by: The Johns Hopkins University Press
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/20057673 .
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Does Socrates Speak for Plato?
Reflections on an Question
Open
Dorrit Cohn
"
^m lato says," "Plato believed that," to Plato": expr?s
"according
I?^sions of this kind have, for more than two millennia, preceded
JL. or of words Plato explicitly attributes to
quotations paraphrases
Socrates. The idea that Plato may not have been speaking through the
voice of his Socrates has surfaced only quite recently. It is in the last
twenty years or so that we have come to read, with increasing frequency,
statements that deny the so-called "mouthpiece theory": "Plato himself
never speaks directly to his readers. Only his characters speak.. .";*"It is
crucial to note that there is no character called 'Plato' who speaks in any
. . . Still more
of the dialogues; importantly, we are not justified in
Plato with any of his characters. Indeed, there are positive
identifying
reasons why he cannot be identified even with Socrates . . .";2
"Why
should Plato speak through Socrates any more than Shakespeare
through Hamlet? Indeed, Plato seems very often critical of his master."3
The wide spread of this "dialogic" interpretation of Plato's works may be
gauged from the fact that at least five volumes have appeared since 1988
that announce themselves as collections of essays illustrating this new
approach.4
Despite such prefatory announcements, however, the possibility of

understanding the dialogues in this dramatic fashion has remained
largely abstract and theoretical. The potential separation of the author
from his main protagonist, in particular, has made only faint inroads
into the close reading of Plato's works.5 In the first part of this essay I
intend to explore the grounds and implications of such a reading for
three middle-period dialogues?the Platonic texts that perhaps bring it
to mind most loudly and most clearly?and then propose a reason why
the separation of Socrates from Plato may also resolve an overriding
problem in Plato's oeuvre. Having displayed these interpretive vistas, I
will not, however, insist on their conclusiveness. To understand Socrates
as a dramatic character in lieu of a stand-in clone for Plato seems to me
much rather an alternative reading option opened up by the dialogic

structure of Plato's works. With a view to clarifying this problem, the
second part of my essay will look to literary theory for guidelines to
New Literary History, 2001, 32: 485-500

486 NEW LITERARY HISTORY
sorting out the complex relationship between philosophy and literature

and to placing Plato's genre?the philosophical dialogue?in respect to
this relationship.
No doubt the most striking incongruity between what Socrates says

and what Plato does occurs when Socrates condemns writing in a work
that Plato has written. Even though the place where this happens?the
final part of the Phaedrus?is one of the most intensively discussed
moments of the Platonic oeuvre, few critics clearly face the problem it
raises the of the author to his protagonist.6
concerning relationship
Those who do look at it squarely are forced to conclude, at least in
that it is difficult (if not to understand Socrates as
passing, impossible)
Plato's spokesman here.7 Charles S. Griswold, the only critic who has
given this problem more than cursory attention, describes it as follows:
"a simple act of reflection reveals a puzzling dimension in the last
section of the Phaedrus. Socrates' criticisms of writing are themselves
. . .Must not Plato either
written. reject the criticisms or weigh them
than Socrates does? ... [Socrates'] criticism of is itself
differently writing
written and so itself recanted?by Plato."8
Socrates' argument against writing is decisive and peremptory. Begin
ning with his "Egyptian legend," he quotes Thamus's reply to Theuth,
the inventor of writing: "this invention will produce forgetfulness
[lethen] in the minds of those who learn to use it, because they will not
their own memory [mn?m?s].... You have invented an elixir
practise
[pharmakon] not of memory [mn?m?s], but of reminding [hypo
mn?se?s]; and offer the of wisdom, not true
you your pupils appearance
wisdom."9 After the conclusion, Socrates' discourse confirms
legend's
that Thamus represents the voice of wisdom that he endorses: "He who
thinks, then, that he has left behind him art in . .would be
any writing,.
an utterly ..." (275 C); "he who has of the just
simple person knowledge
and the good and the beautiful. . .will not, when in earnest, write them
[the letters of the alphabet] in ink . . ." (276 C). In short, however
qualified in what follows, Socrates leaves no doubt in this part of the
Phaedrus that he regards writing as a simplistic and nefarious mode for
transmitting knowledge.
It may be possible to understand Socrates' polemic against writing
here, and his corollary advocacy of oral discourse, as the representation
of a historically an aging man launching a defensive
significant moment:
move new form of communication increasingly
against literacy?the
fashionable with the younger men of Socrates' time. The relationship of

DOES SOCRATES SPEAK FOR PLATO? 487
Plato to his protagonist would then correspond, in this respect, to the

a in which Plato
historically realistic image of generational conflict,
takes his place as a pivotal figure in the transition from an oral to a
literate culture.10 It is indeed hard, if not impossible, to imagine Plato?
a man who spent the better part of his long life recording the works that
allowed his words to survive?espousing the negative views toward
that he here attributes to Socrates. Is it not far more likely that
writing
he attributed some value to the performance of the mind in solitary
play of language, the product of private,

speech, the inward meditative
silent thought, and that writing down his meditations seemed to him, at
least in some respects, preferable to conversational exchange with
others?11
Another powerful argument for driving a wedge between the author

and his protagonist is that Plato wrote the Republic in precisely the form
Socrates condemns most within the same work.12
severely
The problems of narrative "diction" [lexis] are the subject of a well
known section of Book 3. Here Socrates explains: "there is a form of
diction and narrative [eidos lexe?s te kai di?g?se?s] in which the really
and true man would narrate anything he had to say, and another
good
form [heteron . . . eidos] unlike this to which the man of the opposite
birth and breeding would cleave and in which he would tell his story."13
The first of these forms is achieved "by pure narration" [hapl?i di?g?sei]
even
(R 392 D): only the poet himself is heard speaking, without
suggesting the voices of his characters; the second is effected "through
imitation" [dia mim?se?s] (R 392 D): the poet's characters are quoted
directly and thus heard speaking in their own voice.
Now in the Republic, Socrates of course tells the story of his long
conversation with Glaucon, Adeimantus, and his other interlocutors
"through imitation" almost from its beginning to its end, with "he said"
and "I said" perennially or interrupting the direct quotation
introducing
of their words and his own. The scene of Book 3 from which I have
no it is in a direct of his words that
quoted above is exception: quotation
Socrates rejects the poet who tells by direct quotation; and when he
ultimately insists that this poet be sent off "to another city" [eis allen
(#398 A), he narrates in this same manner as well. In effect, ifwe
polin]
attribute Socrates' words to Plato here, we must conclude that Plato
banishes himself ?rom his ideal state: the author of the Republic would be
forbidden to write the Republic within the Republic.
The clash between Socrates' words and Plato's manner of presenting
the words of Socrates and his interlocutors sounds even more loudly and
clearly in Book 10 of the Republic. This iswhere?as many commentators
have noted?the word "mimesis" expands its meaning beyond the

strictly formal sense

of "imitation," to the point where "mimetic art"
signifies every kind of poetry?all forms of discourse that include the
actions and words of invented figures or "phantoms." This is also where
an extended
analysis of the corrupting effects of poetry confirms that all
poets ("beginning with Homer" and including the tragedians) should
be banished from the ideal polis: "we must know the truth, that we can
admit no poetry into our city save only hymns to the gods and praises of
good men" (#607 A).
But what other works, most
about Plato's of which?unlike the
Republic?take the form of directly quoted dialogues without interven
ing narrative phrases of the "he said" variety? Remembering that
Socrates understands tragedy and comedy as the literary forms in which
imitation reaches its apogee, the contradiction between Plato's form and
Socrates' rejection of that form clearly holds true for the entire corpus
of Plato's works. It holds true even if we grant that Socrates (in Book 3)
allows for the rendering of the words of wise and good men. For Plato
indulges time and again in the direct quotation of voices that variously
miss thetruth: wrongheaded sophists (Gorgias, Protagoras), blinded
specialists (Ion), fallible human beings (Alcibiades in the Symposium),
no less than that of the philosopher bent on finding the truth. What is
certain, at any rate, is that Plato's language in no sense conforms to the
"hymns to the gods and praises of good men" which Socrates is alone
willing to admit to his city.
On the face of it, the Symposium is Plato's most "dramatic" work. This
is true despite the fact that it has a narrative frame. Told by Apollodorus
on the basis of the report given to him by Aristodemus?and in part
confirmed by Socrates?of a that had taken place years earlier,
banquet
of the text embed the verbatim and uninter
major portions supposedly
rupted quotation of seven speeches made at this banquet: six speeches

in of Love?those of Phaedrus, Pausanias, Aris
praise Eryximachus,
tophanes, Agathon, and Socrates?and Alcibiades' speech in praise of

Socrates. Thus Socrates, though his discourse is somewhat longer than
those of his interlocutors, is not given the dominant near-monologic
role in the Symposium that he holds in Plato's other Socratic dialogues:
that of the principal ideas most often give rise merely to
speaker whose
questions and echoing agreements from the persons he addresses. As
the work's title suggests for an English reader, he is one of several guests
at an event that calls for numerous competing contributions on a
predetermined topic.
Socrates' celebrated on the nature of Eros?includ
pronouncements
ing those he attributes to Diotima?have nonetheless, almost universally

through the ages, been identified as the gospel truth according to Plato.
Paul Friedl?nder, to cite one example among many, describes Socrates'
discourse as "the highest insight," "the fulfillment of the mystery," "the
path of the Forms," and Socrates himself as "the mouthpiece through
whom some higher being is announcing its wisdom."14 Only occasional
critics note in passing that the Symposium may call for a different dramatic
reading: one that does not automatically identify the author with the
character of Socrates.15
But what strikes me as far more significant than momentary insights of

this type is the possibility of reading the Symposium as a whole against the
stream of Socrates' speech?a reading proposed by such prominant
scholars as Martha Nussbaum and Jonathan Lear. According to both
Nussbaum and Lear (though the latter does not refer to the former)
Plato's sympathies in the Symposium lie not with the sober Socrates but
with the drunken Alcibiades, the chaotic and tumultuous quality of his
discourse notwithstanding. Both take this latecomer's entrance as the
most dramatic event of the work. Both believe that Alcibiades under
mines Socrates-Diotima's ideas on love, that he expresses what the latter
suppresses: the knowledge of a deeply human, unique, and uniquely
valuable experience in love. Nussbaum concludes that Plato here not
only makes a positive case for Alcibiades, but that his speech signifies
"Plato's indictment of Socrates."16 Lear concludes Socrates' of
ignorance
"a possibility that Plato
saw," and that he deliberately displayed in the
Symposium: the tragicomic nature of human life and love. It is this
recognition that, according to Lear, was ultimately to lead Freud to
thanking "divine Plato" for his inspiration.17
Whatever one might think of Nussbaum's and Lear's interpretations,
the very fact that the voice of truth in the Symposium can be?has been?
attributed to different seems to me to
speakers by different readers
dramatize quite strikingly the dramatic structure of Plato's works. For, as
we will see in a moment, it is only in literary works?narrative and
dramatic fiction?that disagreements can exist as to where an author
stands, what ideological values he intends his work to convey.
We may conclude that there are important reasons in at least three of

the dialogues why a reader may want to resist identifying Socrates' views
with Plato's. But there is, in addition, an reason that may
overriding
induce a reader to oppose the identification, one that applies not to a
single work but to the interrelationship between the works. It concerns, in
a word, Socrates' As has often been there are
inconsistency. noted,
certain discrepancies, even contradictions, between what Socrates says in
different dialogues?even in works that Plato is thought to have written

in close chronological proximity. As one critic shows, in the Meno

Socrates demonstrates that virtue is not teachable, in the Protagoras that
it is teachable.18 Another shows that in the Symposium personal passion is
rejected in favor of erotic purity, whereas this view is "recanted" in the
Phaedrus, where the passionate lover is exalted (FG 201, 211). But the
most frequently noted irreconcilability on Socrates part, and the one
that has aroused the most extensive critical controversy, concerns his
evaluation of poetry. Its condemnation in Book 10 of the Republic?
which even when taken on its own is often considered a shocker, if not
an absurdity (PP6)?is manifestly contradicted by the supreme value he
places on it in other more or less contemporary dialogues, notably in the
Meno and the Phaedrus.
These are not easy to account
inconsistencies for if one attributes
them to Plato
himself. For would one not, at the very least, expect a
serious philosopher to explain that, and to provide reasons why, he has
changed his mind? Some scholars simply pass over these discordant
or as
views, accept them Plato's inexplicable peculiarity.19 Others call on
farfetched hypotheses. for example,
Nussbaum, breaking with the
laudably nonbiographical approach to philosophical texts she takes
throughout her work, maintains that the exalted vision of physical love
in the Phaedrus is due to Plato's erotic attachment to Dion (the ruler of
Syracuse) at the time of writing; this dialogue, accordingly, "has the
character of a love letter, an of wonder and
expression passion,
gratitude" (FG 229).

What seems to me a more inspiring explanation is offered by Paul
Friedl?nder when he deals with the condemnation of poetry in the final
book of the Republic, though he does not elsewhere favor a decisive
separation of Socrates from his author (see his reading of the Symposium
mentioned above), he here refers to Plato as a "mimetic artist" who
projects onto Socrates a part of his inner self; his polemic against art
thus represents "a struggle of Plato with himself, struggle of the
philosopher against the poet" (P124). The assumption seems to be that
Plato suffered from a psychic split: that the Socrates of the Republic
stands for only one part of the self, whereas the poets he condemns
stand for another part, a part that the writer of the Republic wishes to
suppress (that is, banish from the ideal city-state). What Friedl?nder
here suggests is a depth-psychological approach that could potentially
be extended to the Platonic corpus as a whole: Socrates is a fictional
character, who is made in turn to adopt different positions that
correspond to different aspects of Plato (or different ideas he holds),
thus alternately dramatizing aspects of a discordant self.
Whether or not one favors this kind of psychological access to Plato, it
seems clear that the most satisfying way of accounting for Socrates'

inconsistencies is to assumethat Plato uses him not as a spokesman but

as a dramatic character. At least one Plato scholar has decisively
espoused this position on these grounds. Indeed it is after pointing to
"apparent discrepancies within those [the early and middle] dialogues
among Socrates' pronouncements on major issues" that Kenneth Sayre
concludes: "the views expressed by the major characters are not always
those of the author himself." And he adds: "We should be no more ready
to assume that Plato's Socrates is a spokesman for its author than to
assume that Thomas Becket was a spokesman for Eliot (in Murder in the
Cathedral) or Julius Ceasar a spokesman for Shakespeare (in his play by
that name)" (PL 5-6).
In the face of the evidence presented to this point, it may seem

surprising that a large number of Plato scholars continue
contemporary
to adhere to the Thus David writes, in a note
spokesman theory. Sedley
to an essay published as late as 1995: "I am reluctant to believe that we
have been entirely mistaken all these centuries to read off a Tlatonist'
ethics, psychology, or metaphysics. ... In practice it is often virtually
impossible not to assume the identity of Plato's own views with those
implicit in the questions asked by his leading speaker."20 If nothing else,
the sheer quantity of qualified commentators who have lately ex
pounded it surely proves that the nonidentity thesis is by no means
to assume." This exists
"impossible impossibility only for readers who
habitually disregard discursive form in favor of discursive content: a
tendency that holds true quite generally for the kind of philosopher
bent on perceiving and evaluating conceptual systems in the texts he
examines.21 Scholars of this type accordingly read the speeches of
Socrates in the manner they would read a treatise or commentary
penned by Plato himself. Not surprisingly, therefore, the attention given
to the Plato/Socrates has come almost exclusively from schol
problem
ars who understand Plato's dialogues as works of art, literary critics
trained to look at the "how" as well as the "what" of the texts
they
analyze.
But ifwe assume that the question of whether Plato's works are more
meaningfully assigned to philosophy or to literature can help us to
decide whether or not Socrates is to be understood as Plato's
spokes
man, we find that the latter question is thereby compounded rather
than resolved. For unfortunately theorists have given very little clarifying
attention to the relationship between these two disciplines. With views
ranging widely?from erasing the distinction between philosophy and
literature altogether to drawing a but borderline
sharp nonspecified
between them?there is no general agreement their inter
concerning
face. So far as Plato is concerned, those who reflect on this question at

all attribute to him a vaguely equivocal position as a kind of double
agent.22 The cryptic quality of this assignment may be gauged from a

statement by Paul de Man: grouping Plato with Augustine, Montaigne,
Rousseau, and Nietzsche he characterizes him as a writer "whose work
straddles the two activities of the human intellect that are both closest
and most impenetrable to each other?literature and philosophy."23
Without intending to inscribe this difficult disciplinary division firmly
and definitively on general grounds, I will merely attempt to view the
philosophy/literature problem in a perspective that may meaningfully
apply to the Platonic dialogue, even as I reflect on the ambiguities of
Plato's philosophical genre.
II
I take as my starting point a work not specifically

that?though
concerned with the relationship between philosophy and literature?
draws the frontiers of the literary domain itself on lines that are at once
firm and flexible: G?rard Genette's Fiction and Diction. Genette estab
lishes two criteria for deciding on the literarity of a text: a constitutive
criterion, which determines that all narrative and dramatic fiction must
be understood as literature; and a conditional criterion, which allows for
the assignment to the literary domain of any nonfictional text?
autobiographical, essayistic, historical, and so forth.24 By this token, any
work of philosophy?by Aristotle or Kant no less than by Pascal or
of its reader, be considered to
Rousseau?can, by the free judgment
possess aesthetic virtues that qualify it as "literature" and allow for it to
be examined on this basis. Which is not to say that certain philosophers
do not lend themselves more easily than others to an approach that
refuses to divorce their style from their thought.
Plato, even if we disregard his dialogic form and attend only to the
words he assigns to Socrates, is clearly a case in point. And Socrates'
frequent use of similes, allegories, and myths does at times induce even
philosophers who take him to speak for his author to grant Plato an
unfathomably "poetic" or "artistic" quality. Thus Giovanni Reale insists
that the Phaedrus cannot be understood correctly unless one attends to
the ways its "poetical message" supports its "philosophical message"; in
this dialogue, according to Reale, Plato manifests "his ability as an artist
and as a philosopher" by way of the "beautiful" prologue and inter
ludes.25 Though it may lead critics to devote special attention to
and/or moments in his work, such a conditional
imagistic mythical
assignment of Plato to literature does not fundamentally affect the
of his work or mark its structural peculiarity as distin
interpretation

guished from the work of such philosophers as Schopenhauer or

Nietzsche.
But in the case of Plato's dialogues?unlike, say, The World as Will and
Representation or Beyond Good and Evil?there appears to be not only a
conditional reason, but also a constitutional reason for assigning them to
literature: their dramatic presentation. It is this presentation that
establishes their fictionality, and that leads me to raise certain questions
regarding their difference and analogy with the literary dialogues
contained in dramas and novels.
We must first attend to the fact that Plato's dialogues, unlike literary
dialogues, deal primarily with philosophical questions: a fact reflected in
the generic label of "philosophical dialogues" that has traditionally been
applied to them. Even this term itself, combining as it does an adjective
that signals philosophy and a noun that signals literature, suggests its
nature.
paradoxical
It may be useful to recall at the start that,
though there are few post
Kantian philosophical dialogues, this form was not infrequently used in
earlier centuries: Saint Augustine, Thomas More, and Descartes wrote
philosophical dialogues, and the genre reached a veritable vogue in the
eighteenth century, with works by Shaftesbury, Diderot, Berkeley,
Hume, and others.26 Plato, to be sure, is the who
only philosopher
consistently chose the dialogue over the essay or treatise. It
philosophical
is accordingly Plato's work that brings up questions the
concerning
characteristics of this genre with particular urgency.
A comment Hume made ? propos of his Dialogues concerning Natural
Religion points to this philosophical genre's peculiar nature. Attributing
to his work a "restless inquiry," he indicates that the dialogue is most
meaningfully employed when a philosopher deals with questions "so
obsc\ire and uncertain" that the author can propose no definitive and
secure answer.27 By
using the dialogue form, in other words, a philoso
pher can keep his own views?even if he does hold definite views?to
himself, like the fabled "silence of God." This authorial silence is, as we
will see, the formal feature that the philosophical holds in
dialogue
common with drama (as well as with the of narrative fiction).
dialogue
But this structural analogy between the philosophical and the literary
dialogue also brings into view their crucial contrast: the first takes on the
meaning of an ideational search, the second partakes of a plot (in the
Aristotelian sense). The philosophical dialogue is contextualized in such
abstract questions as "What is justice (the good, the true)?" and framed
in an atemporal or gnomic present tense; it partakes of a sequence of
arguments that, without referring to mimetic events, are expressed by
disembodied speakers who stand for normative rather than
ideologies

human personalities; and it is aimed at (even though it may never

reach) a resolution that clarifies the matter at hand. In dramatic and
narrative fiction, by contrast, the dialogue is contextualized in such
questions as "What has happened and why?" or "What will happen
next?" and accordingly uses tenses (past, present, future) in their
temporal meaning referring to a psychosocial fictional world; it partakes
of a time-bound sequence of mimetic events, incarnated in the person
alities and existential situations of the characterswho are its speakers.
In this theoretical perspective, the philosophical dialogue thus figures
as a kind of foreign body within the literary domain. Even as it features
imaginary fictional figures addressing each other (rather than a real
philosophical speaker addressing his reader), its plot (if one can call it
that) remains impersonal, universalist, disembodied. No such abstrac
tion of the matter under discussion occurs when dramas or novels
present scenes in which their characters are engaged in ideological
discussions. Think, for example, of the final scene in Ibsen's A Dolls
House, where Nora and Helmer (the husband Nora is about to leave)
debate the proper role of women in marriage; this discussion, far from
remaining on a theoretical is in the self-referen
plane, highest degree
tial: fully contextualized in the past of their own unhappily conventional
relationship, it projects a potential future in which Nora may have
evolved out of her present existence as a "play-thing" into a true "human
being." Or think may well be the lengthiest
of what philosophical
exchange in narrative
fiction, the notorious dialogues between Settem
brini and Naphta in The Magic Mountain: the stake here is clearly the
education of the novel's protagonist, Hans Castorp, rather than the
resolution of the problems so fiercly discussed by his two antagonistic
mentors. Even the most confrontational scenes of so-called "dramas of
ideas" are tied to the past and future of the participants: the language of
the dream scene in Shaw's Man and Superman continuously refers to the
history and imminent choices (here between an afterlife in heaven or in
hell) of Don Juan, the Devil, Ana, and her father.
Granted that Plato's works on occasion integrate philosophical prob
lems into dramatized existential situations. The most extreme case is the
Phaedo: here we find ourselves in the final scene of a tragic plot, with
Socrates arguing for the immortality of the soul in direct relationship to
his imminent death. But this merely indicates that in practice the
philosophical dialogue may gravitate away from its pure or ideal form,
and contextualize itself fictionally (in a context that may, in turn, be
historically based). It may therefore seem appropriate to picture the
philosophical and the literary dialogue as two poles on a sliding scale,
where the two forms can be variously seen to gravitate toward each
other.

As previously mentioned, the structural distinctiveness of literary

dialogues is its exclusion of the author from the circuit of literal
communication he represents on
the page. Joyce's Stephen Dedalus
signals this when he says of the dramatic artist that "like the God of the
creation, [he] remains within or behind or beyond or above his
handiwork, invisible, refined out of existence, paring his fingernails."28
Ibsen insisted on the same distinction when he said ? propos one of his
plays (Ghosts) that "there is not in the whole book a single opinion which
can be laid to the account of the author."29 In this dialogic mode,
language is not directly addressed by an author-narrator to a reader, but
by one character to another; it remains "internal to the
interpersonal,
represented action."30 But at the same time, of course, this intratextual
exchange of words is meant to be apprehended extratextually by its
receiver, the reader, who is charged with the interpretion of its function
and its meaning. In dramatic and novelistic dialogues, in other words,
the author does not communicate explicitly on the level of the text, but
on a different and more problematic level, where the reader is left to
draw conclusions of his own concerning the implications of the text. He
must answer such questions as: which of two or more interlocutors
stands for the voice of truth? which character's value judgments are to
be most highly appraised? Because such questions?which become
especially acute when dialogues deal with ideological or ethical mat
ters?are left open, literary dialogues result in what one critic has called
"an immensely complex interplay of meanings."31
Clearly, there are ways in which an author who is bent on using the
dramatic form for moralistic or propagandistic ends can cut through
this complexity. Calling on certain devices, he can more or less forcefully
guide the reader to favor one dramatic figure over another, to believe a
character's pronouncements and trust his judgments. As one theorist of
drama has proposed,32 the potential perspectival structures of dramatic
texts are most clearly displayed on a scale, ranging from a
typological
type with closed perspectival structure?say, a medieval mystery play in
which angels and devils clearly stand for Good and Evil?to a type with
open perspectival structure?"absolute" modern plays, like those of
Chekhov, about which this author himself asked: "Am I not leading the
reader up the garden path since I do not know how to answer the most
important questions?"33
But playwrights and novelists rarely declare (intra- or extratextually)
where their works are to be placed on this perspectival scale, allowing
their readers alternately to attribute to them closed or open
perspectival
structures. The Tempest, for example, has traditionally been taken for a
drama where Prospero acts as Shakespeare's reliable mouthpiece; but
can also be (and has understood as a fallible
Prospero recently been)

dramatic character, whose final renunciation of magic (in act 5, scene

1)?"My charms I'll break"?prompts the reader to suspend his judg
ment on its ultimate meaning until the drama's conclusion (if not
beyond it).
The example of The Tempest also makes clear the tendency on the part
of the reader (a tendency we may assume to be known to the writer) of
associating the authorial perspective with the most central character of a
play, the character who is sometimes called its "focus." If one does
attribute perspectival partiality to Shakespeare's play, it is Prospero?
rather than Caliban, or Alonso, or Miranda?who will almost automati
cally figure as its It should be noted that this
ideological spokesperson.
choice does not apply exclusively to wise or virtuous characters: itmay
hold for such focal characters as Macbeth or Falstaff, at
especially
moments when they meditate monologically or dialogically on the
nature of human life. A drama, in other words, potentially opens not
only to the possibility of feeling pity and sympathy for a protagonist
whom the reader may regard as evil or foolish in daily life, but to
understanding such a figure as the mouthpiece of "truth"?the author's
truth.
The essential question that presents itself when we take the dialogic
form of Plato's works seriously, iswhether they lend themselves to being
understood as closed or as open perspectival structures. It will be clear
from what I have said above that th? diagnosis of a closed perspectival
structure corresponds to the identification of Plato's views with those of
Socrates, and the diagnosis of an open perspectival structure to the
nonidentifictation of their views, which in turn makes Socrates into a
dramatic character who speaks for himself, not for his author.
Itmust be acknowledged, I think, that there are strong arguments in
favor of the as closed structures.
understanding dialogues perspectival
Socrates holds a role in all but one of the twenty-five dialogues, whereas
the cast of other figures keeps changing. What ismore, in all but five late
dialogues he is clearly the leading or focal character who speaks more
volubly than his interlocutors. And he is of course not only featured
quantitatively, but qualitatively as well. Acting as the guide and leader of
the philosophical exchanges, and often also as the character who
initiates the problem under discussion and has the last word, Socrates'
presence exerts an immeasurable pressure on the other participants in
the dialogic scene. By the same token, he also pressures the reader, who
may find it difficult not to attribute to Socrates the truth, the author's
truth. Difficult, but not impossible. There are, as we have seen in the
first part of this essay, a number of reasons?both in individual dialogues
and in the juxtaposition of different dialogues?that can move a reader
to override the inducement exerted by Socrates' featured role and to

resist identifying his views with his author's. Like other authors of
dialogic texts, Plato does not tell us whether his works are to be read as
closed or open perspectival structures. The characteristic nature of his
philosophic genre is to provide no answer to this question, to desist from
imposing either choice on his reader. He gives us, in sum, no definitive
indication as to whether or when he does or does not identify (or even
sympathize) with the views of Socrates.
To conclude with one of the many questions that remain as I

approach the end of these reflections: why is the choice of reading Plato
in a novel manner?by dissociating Socrates from his author and
opening the perspectival problem posed by his dramatic structure?
such a recent critical happening? Any answer, clearly, would involve a
probing exploration of the present-day critical climate, taking into
account among other things its accrued theoretical awareness. All I can
do here is to suggest a larger context for this phenomenon, by relating
it to what Wayne Booth has called the "irony hunt" of modern
literary
scholars: their drive to distance narrators from their authors even when
the former are "most obviously omniscient and reliable."34 Indeed an
important corollary of the new way of apprehending Platonic dialogues
is that it introduces an additional level of irony?a level of dramatic irony
that is superimposed on (and independent of) the level of Socratic
irony. Whereas the irony of Socrates' language has been widely recog
nized and frequently analyzed, the irony one may attribute to Plato?to
which the term "Platonic irony" may meaningfully be applied35?does
not function by way of but of silence. It is not rendered
language by way
from within a dramatic character's spoken communication with other
characters but from within a drama's tacit communication from author
to reader (or spectator)?behind the characters' backs.
Unlike Wayne Booth, I would insist that the urge to discover unreli
able narrators where none was thought to exist before has led to
highly
persuasive new interpretations of literary masterpieces.36 As I have made
clear, I believe that it holds much promise for Plato as well. This is true
despite the fact that, on theoretical grounds, the problem of the Plato/
Socrates relationship must remain unresolved, that readers of his
dialogues cannot be spared a difficult choice that to each and all
applies
of his works. But even though I leave my titular Socrates
question?does
speak for Plato??unanswered, I would maintain that the question itself
can no longer be no matter how it
ignored, ponderously may weigh
down our interpretive understanding of this philosopher's oeuvre.
Harvard University

NOTES
1 Herman L. Sinaiko, Love, Knowledge, and Discourse in Plato (Chicago, 1965), p. 4.

2 L. Griswold,
Charles Jr., "Irony and Aesthetic Language in Plato's Dialogues," Philoso
phy and Literature, ed. Doug Boiling (New York, 1987), p. 76.
3 James A. Arieti, as Drama
Interpreting Plato: The Dialogues (Savage, Md., 1991), p. 4.
4 Platonic Writings, Platonic Readings, ed. Charles L. Griswold, Jr. (New York, 1988);
Methods of Interpreting Plato and his Dialogues, ed. James C. Klagge and Nicholas D. Smith
(Oxford, 1992); Plato's Dialogues: New Studies and Interpretations, ed. Gerald A. Press
(Lanham, Md., 1993); The Third Way: New Directions in Plato Studies, ed. Francisco Gonzales
(Lanham, Md., 1995); Plato's Dialogues: The Diabgical Approach, ed. Richard Hart and
Victorino (Studies in theHistory
Tejera of Philosophy, 46 [Lewiston, N.Y., 1997]).
5 This on the part of Plato scholars
shortfall an
advocating anti-mouthpiece theory has
been noted by Harry Berger, Jr.; see "Levels of Discourse in Plato's Dialogues" in Literature
and the Question ed. Anthony J. Cascardi (Baltimore, 1987), pp. 77-100; see
of Philosophy,
esp. pp. 80-81.
6 A number of modern critics who adhere to the spokesman theory resolve the problem
raised the critique of written discourse in the Phaedrus by resorting to the "esoterist"
by
hypothesis: Plato is a philosopher who did not reveal his true thoughts in his written work,
expressing them only in his unrecorded oral teaching to his disciples in the Academy. See
Luc Brisson's to L'interpr?tation
"Pr?sentation" ?sot?riste de Platon (Les Etudes philosophiques,
1-9; see
1998], esp. 4).
[Janvier-Mars,
7 See, for example, Ronna Burger, Plato 'sPhaedrus: A Defense of a Philosophie Art ofWriting
(Tuscaloosa, Ala., 1980), p. 6. An especially case is that of Paul Friedl?nder.
interesting
This critic
understands Socrates as Plato's most of his three
spokesman throughout
volume work; but one of the rare moments when he questions this assumption is when he
"
comes to discuss the latter part of the Phaedrus-. [Plato] wrote books throughout his long
life, whereas Socrates lived so completely in the medium of conversation that one cannot
even imagine him writing. Thus was not Plato farthest removed from Socrates precisely
where he depicted him most Indeed we encounter here, in symbolic form, an
intimately?
original difference between him and his teacher" (Paul Friedl?nder, Plato, vol. 1, tr. Hans
Meyerhoff [New York, 1958], p. 110; hereafter cited in text as P). Friedl?nder concludes
that the Phaedrus must be regarded as the work which the problem of Plato's
foregrounds
relationship to the fundamentally different Socrates?a problem he disregards through
out most of his work.
8 Charles S. Griswold, Self-Knowledge in Plato's Phaedrus (New Haven, 1986), pp. 217-18.
9 I quote the translation of the Phaedrus by Harold North Fowler from Plato, vol. 1 (Loeb
Classical Library Edition, Cambridge, Mass., 1914), p. 275A; hereafter cited in text.
10 The idea
that literacy caused a kind of conflict between fathers and sons in
Oedipal
the latter halfof the fifth century b.c. is suggested by Bennett Simon inMind and Madness
in Ancient Greece: The Classical Roots ofModern Psychiatry (Ithaca, N.Y., 1978), p. 189. Simon
refers in this connection to the thesis of Eric A. Havelock concerning the rise of literacy in
Plato's time; see Havelock's Preface to Plato (Cambridge, Mass., 1963), pp. 198-204;
hereafter cited in text as PP.
11 For me this valuation is not necessarily lessened by reference to the so-called "Seventh
Letter." If we take this text to be authentic (a matter still in dispute among Plato scholars)
it need not be read in the manner it has been read by most critics: as a confirmation of
Socrates' argument against written discourse in the Phaedrus. I am more inclined to agree
with Herman L. Sinaiko, who understands Plato's statement his own doc
concerning
trines?"There is no written work of mine, nor will there ever be; for they [my doctrines]

cannot be expressed in words"?as "quite literally true," in the sense that Plato never
to his readers" (Love, Knowledge, and Discourse in Plato, p. 11).
speaks direcdy
12 It is astonishing how rarely this fact has been noted. Of the very few critics who
mention it, I have found only one who perceives that it may lead the reader "to suspect
that the Socrates of the Republic does not speak for Plato himself but according to the
design of a dialogue he is in ..." (Victorino Tejera, Plato's Dialogues One by One: A Structural
Interpretation [New York, 1984], p. 110). Another critic who briefly relates the form of the
to the idea that Socrates must be understood as a fictional character is Ronna
Republic
see "Plato's Non-Socratic Narrations of Socratic Conversations," in Plato's Dia
Burger;
logues: The Dialogical Approach, ed. Richard Hart and Victorino Tejera, pp. 121-42.
13 I quote the translation of the Republic by Paul Shorey from Plato, vols. 5-6 (Loeb
Classical Library Edition, Cambridge, Mass., 1930 and 1935), p. 396 C; hereafter cited in
text as R
14 PaulFriedl?nder, Plato, vol. 3, tr. Hans Meyerhoff (Princeton, 1969), pp. 26-28.
15 See
Stanley Rosen's Introduction to his Plato's Symposium (New Haven, 1968), which
suggests that none of the Symposium participants is a spokesman for the author's views and
that a correct understanding of this work must recognize "the difference between Socrates
and Plato" (p. xxxv). See also Michael C. Stokes, Plato's Socratic Conversations: Drama and
Dialecticin Three Dialogues (Baltimore, 1986), a work that at one point advises the reader of
the Symposium to "reflect on the difference between the fictional and context-bound
Socrates and the philosophic dramatist Plato" (p. 172).
16 For Martha Nussbaum's interpretation, see the entitled "The of
chapter Speech
Alcibiades: A Reading of the Symposium" in The Fragility of Goodness (Cambridge, 1986), esp.
pp. 184-99; hereafter cited in text as FG.
17 For Jonathan Lear's see
the chapter entitled "Eros and Unknowing:
interpretation,
The Psychoanalytic Significance of Plato'sSymposium" in Open Minded: Working out the Logic
of the Soul (Cambridge, Mass., 1998), esp. pp. 156-66.
18 Kenneth M. Sayre, Plato's Literary Garden (Notre Dame, 1995), p. 5; hereafter cited in
text as PL.
...
19 See, for example, Albert Cook, who says at one point: "If Plato feels free to
change
his doctrines within a or to maintain doctrines we would feel to be
single dialogue,
contradictory, then he would be all the more free to do so from to dialogue" (The
dialogue
Stance of Plato [Lanham, MD., 1996], p. 21).
20 David Sedley, "The Dramatis Personae of Plato's Phaedo," in Philosophical Dialogues:
Plato, Hume, Wittgenstein, ed. Timothy Smiley (Oxford, 1995), p. 5.
21 See Berel Lang, The Anatomy of Philosophical Style (Oxford, 1990), pp. 11 ff. for a critical
perspective on this trend. Lang follows this up by referring to the philosophers'
pervading
standard disregard of Plato's dialogic form as a typical case in point
(pp. 14-15).
22 See, for example, Michael Frede, "Plato's Arguments and the Dialogue Form" in
Methods of Interpreting Plato and his Dialogues, ed. James C. Klagge and Nicholas D. Smith,
pp. 201-19; and David Halperin, "Plato and the Erotics of Narrativity," in the same volume,
pp. 93-129.
23 Paul de Man, Allegories of Reading (New Haven, Conn., 1979), p. 103.
24 G?rard Genette, Fiction and Diction, tr. Catherine Porter (Ithaca, N.Y., 1993), pp.
21-29.
25 Giovanni Reale, "Le Ph?dre, manifeste de Platon, '?crivain' et
programmatique
'philosophe,'" Les Etudes philosophiques (janvier-mars, 1998), 131-48; see esp. 132,134,141.
26 See Michael in the British Enlightenment:
Prince, Philosophical Dialogue Theology, Aesthet
ics, and theNovel (Cambridge, 1996). See also K.J. Wilson, Incomplete Fictions: The Formation
of English Renaissance Dialogue D.C., 1985).
(Washington,

27 Quoted in A. W. Levi, as Literature: The and

"Philosophy Dialogue," Philosophy
Rhetoric, 9 (1976), 12.
28 James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (New York, 1992), p. 209.
29 Henrik Ibsen, Correspondence, tr. M. Morison (London, 1905), p. 352.
30 Paul Hernadi, Beyond Genre: New Directions in Literary Classification (Ithaca., N.Y., 1972),
p. 158.
31 Jan Mukaovsky, The Word and Verbal Art: Selected Essays, ed. and tr. John Burbank and
Peter Steiner (New Haven, 1977), p. 114.
32 Manfred Pfister, The Theory and Analysis of Drama, tr. John Halliday (Cambridge,
1988), pp. 58-67.
33 Anton Chekhov,
Correspondence, tr. M. Morison (London, 1905), p. 352.
34 Wayne Booth, The Rhetoric of Fiction (Chicago, 1961), p. 369.
35 This term is used by Griswold in "Irony and Aesthetic Language in Plato's Dialogues,"
in Philosophy and Literature, ed. Doug Boiling, pp. 82-88. This author is, to my knowledge,
the only scholar who has clearly identified this dramatic form of irony in Plato.
36 This reading option is discussed in Dorrit Cohn, The Distinction of Fiction (Baltimore,
1999), pp. 123-31 and 179, and an of Thomas Mann's Death
exemplified by interpretation
in Venice, pp. 132-48.


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Does Socrates Speak for Plato?

Reflections on an Open Question

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Despite such prefatory announcements, however, the possibility of

much rather an alternative reading option opened up by the dialogic

New Literary History, 2001, 32: 485-500

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sorting out the complex relationship between philosophy and literature

No doubt the most striking incongruity between what Socrates says

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Plato to his protagonist would then correspond, in this respect, to the

play of language, the product of private,

Another powerful argument for driving a wedge between the author

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strictly formal sense

rupted quotation of seven speeches made at this banquet: six speeches

tophanes, Agathon, and Socrates?and Alcibiades' speech in praise of

ing those he attributes to Diotima?have nonetheless, almost universally

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But what strikes me as far more significant than momentary insights of

We may conclude that there are important reasons in at least three of

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in close chronological proximity. As one critic shows, in the Meno

gratitude" (FG 229).

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inconsistencies is to assumethat Plato uses him not as a spokesman but

In the face of the evidence presented to this point, it may seem

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all attribute to him a vaguely equivocal position as a kind of double

agent.22 The cryptic quality of this assignment may be gauged from a

I take as my starting point a work not specifically

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guished from the work of such philosophers as Schopenhauer or

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human personalities; and it is aimed at (even though it may never

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As previously mentioned, the structural distinctiveness of literary

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dramatic character, whose final renunciation of magic (in act 5, scene

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sympathize) with the views of Socrates.

To conclude with one of the many questions that remain as I

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1 Herman L. Sinaiko, Love, Knowledge, and Discourse in Plato (Chicago, 1965), p. 4.

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27 Quoted in A. W. Levi, as Literature: The and

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