Introduction

The main topic of this book is an examination of the interrelation for Plato of soul, the world of its experience, and the Ideas. I explore this relationship as developed in the Republic and Phaedo. But this exposition also reveals that images and our capacity for image-making play a key role in that triadic interrelationship. For it is in the exercise of this capacity that our world takes on its shape and meaning. In effect, we interpret our experience by telling ourselves a story about it. And some stories are more successful than others—some are more confining or limiting, some more illuminating and liberating. But these stories, these images, are not made out of whole cloth, as it were. They are not simply fictions, however rational, not simply subjective, useful impositions. For the world presents itself to us in its readability, it meets us halfway, so to speak. The question is which stories, which images, give a better account and why. Note that I am not claiming that we construct reality, impose identities. Rather, that identities are a result of successive, ever improving, interactions between soul (the interpretive agent), the world(s) of its experience, and the Ideas that give it meaning (the activities of dianoia and noēsis).

The simple, and certainly true, view of what Plato thought about images, of course, is that they are “less real than their originals,” less real, less true, etc. This negative view, I argue, needs to be supplemented by a positive one. A recurrent theme in what follows is an attempt to look at what else Plato thought about images, and our capacity for image-making taken in a larger sense. I examine Plato’s use of specific images—looking at why and how in a given context he uses them, offering interpretations of the key images themselves—as well as Plato’s view of images per se. It will turn out (particularly in the latter case) that the human capacity for interpreting images and for image-making of various sorts is rather different—more complex and philosophically important to Plato’s ontology—than the simple view would suggest. Images, and image-making, in short, will be seen to play an unexpectedly positive role in determining what is ontologically real. Paradoxically, the everyday version of the same activity, carried out unaware, is the pervasive source of just what keeps us from progressing towards knowledge, and changing the way we live. It keeps us in chains, as it were. Reading images is a basic activity of the soul. Reading them correctly is what in a sense distinguishes the philosopher from the lover of sights and sounds, knowledge from opinion. Learning to read them correctly is what underlies the education of the philosopher. The first and most important step in this, the fundamental ontological shift, is learning to see the many kinds of images precisely as images. By images, of course, I do not mean simply the literally visible, as will become clear in the development of my argument. The notion of image that I will claim for Plato is as far removed from the sense of visible/visual image (though beginning with that) as sight is from insight, speech, and speech acts from discourse as dialegesthai—that is to say, the dialogue of the soul with others, and with itself, about the various objects of its varied experience.

This is not as easy or as obvious as it sounds, as we shall see. The Republic takes us a good part of the way. To complete Plato’s story it is the Phaedo, filled as it is with images and talk about images, which will take us the rest of the way, before returning to the Republic. For the Phaedo deals in detail with the soul, and its reading of the presence or image of the Ideas in particulars. One consequence of my reading will be a rather different sense of the eternality of the Ideas, the immortality of the soul, and the intimate relation of the two. Finally, I should stress again that the study here of the meaning for Plato of image and image-making is not an end in itself, however interesting that might be. Rather, it is my claim that this is the way in to understanding the relation of Soul, World, and Idea, and what makes it all work.

Before beginning an analysis of text, I would like to comment on a methodological issue in the interpretation of the dialogues. Much of the writing about Plato in the past had focused on what might be called the propositional content of the dialogues, and often in the logical analysis of isolated passages. The rest, the dramatic details and the use of the dialogue form in particular, are in the extreme treated as so much literary window dressing (or worse still, as an occasion for Platonic obfuscation)—interesting, but not essential to the assessment of the philosophical argument. There is, however, a continuous tradition (increasingly rich) for taking the form of Plato’s dialogues as inseparable from the philosophical content. The views of several modern Plato scholars so inclined are instructive, and will help to situate my own approach. This is all the more important given that I will argue for the philosophical significance of images and image-making, an aspect of form, in the triadic relation of soul, world and Idea.

The excellent essay by Christopher Gill, “Dialectic and the Dialogue Form,”^[1] gives a clear summary of the variety of modern views “in which Plato’s use of [the dialogue] form is taken to be crucial for his philosophical objectives” (145). He then goes on to develop his own argument for exactly in what sense this is the case. His position is that there is continuity in the corpus of philosophy understood as dialectic as a “shared” investigation that is “ongoing,” with “objective knowledge of the essential principles of reality as the ideal outcome, and proper target of dialectic.” What Gill insists is that each dialogue couches this project in its own terms. What each dialogue represents is a particular take on a particular subject, and a form of dialectic that is bound by the particular immediate subject and the nature of the interlocutors—their interests, their strengths and weaknesses. Thus, the broader continuity of dialectic conceived in terms of objective and dialogical method is shaped and bound by the context of each individual dialogue. The ultimate result “if carried to completion, would lead through shared enquiry to systematic knowledge of the essential principles of reality and method.” Given the continuity of reader, each dialogue makes its particular contribution to the advance towards what remains an “ideal dialectic.” “The distance between represented and ideal dialectic is sometimes underlined by couching the ideal version in the guise of myth.” As a result of this emphasis on each dialogue as a “dialectical unit” that has to be understood in the contextuality that the dialogue form gives to it, Gill is wary of too ready an interpretation of Plato “across dialogues”—and gives some critical examples of this. He does not rule out looking to one dialogue for help in understanding another (as is indeed the case in my own reading) but rather insists that “our primary response should be to this piece of dramatized dialectic” before moving to comparisons.

So, for example, the role and function of an invocation of anamnēsis, and its relation to a theory of Forms, must first be carefully parsed for the differences determined by the context of each instance, the individual dialogue. Thus even Charles Kahn’s reading of the early dialogues as proleptic, in his Plato and the Socratic Dialogue; The Philosophical Use of a Literary Form^[2] is faulted by Gill for not treating each dialogue sufficiently independently before any interpretation across dialogues. “In responding to the aporia which is the outcome [of the Euthydemus] . . . it is crucial that we respond to this aporia, and do so in the terms in which it is framed,” rather than reading it proleptically, as anticipating a resolution of the aporia offered in the Republic. “It is not perhaps inconceivable that a Platonic dialogue could take up an aporia from another dialogue and resolve it. But Republic is very different in the issues it addresses and in the kind of argument by which it addresses these issues” (156). In my own case, the attention to just such a dramatic context in detail explains the length of my Phaedo chapters before returning to the Republic. (Considering passages in context however, including the context of the whole dialogue, does not in my case commit to a complete commentary on each of the two dialogues.) My text hopefully puts into practice what he counsels, and for the same reasons regarding the dialogue form—as well as a similar conception of dialectic and the distinction between dialectic as an ongoing dialogical praxis and an “ideal dialectic” that would be the completion of the philosopher’s project (as contrasted to a synthesized platonic doctrine per Kahn). I would say that the latter is approached asymptotically.

By contrast, Michael Frede, in “Plato’s Arguments and the Dialogue Form,”^[3] argues from the general formal characteristics of the dialogue form itself, the use of question and answer, and from Plato’s particular philosophical use of it. Frede rejects both “a merely literary use, a simple matter of presentation . . . for the [mere] sake of clarity and vividness for the sake of drama, or in a sense at the other extreme, the doctrinal view, that the dialogue form represents in the question and answer format an unambiguous presentation of what are closely knit, logically stringent arguments.” That is, on the doctrinal view, the dialogues present arguments the premises of which represent the actual views of either the historical Socrates, or whoever the questioner happens to be, or finally the beliefs of Plato. On this characterization of the platonic dialogue form, which Frede rejects in particular for the aporetic dialogues, the arguments would always be “didactic dialectic,” that is, Socrates/Plato knows, the respondent learns. The alternative is as follows: insofar as the elenctic question and answer results in an aporia the respondent is not converted to a new belief or doctrine, that of the questioner, but rather led by question and answer to see that his initial starting point, the belief from which the conversation begins, is itself contradicted by his other beliefs. As Frede points out, this belief or set of beliefs represents the contribution, as it were, of the respondent. The argument proceeds from the respondent’s ”own assumptions” or “original thesis.” Or, on occasion, it proceeds from the interlocutor’s report of another person’s beliefs, to be tested—as is proposed by the interlocutors in the Phaedo and the Republic. And, I will argue, at least to some extent and in some cases, reflecting their own views, or those by which they are tempted. Starting from this view, by question and answer about the respondent’s other beliefs, or by examining unintended consequences, the contradiction is produced. From this aporetic conclusion, he might be led, but more often rather the reader, to question which of two starting points, or another, is really preferable. That is, he is to start out on an exploration of which of two starting points can be both logically consistent and consistent with experience, in contradistinction to being accepted on the recommendation of experts or authority, whether that “of tradition, of the many, or of self-styled experts”—including that of the questioner, hence of Socrates, or of Plato. The literary form of question and answer is itself a protection against, and represents an argument for, the epistemic rejection of any blind acceptance of a particular view. Thus Frede’s reasons for rejecting the”didactic dialectic’” view invoke not only the usual arguments about the literary form and authorial anonymity but the very formal suppositional nature of question and answer itself.

The point is for the reader/listener to be engaged in an examination of his own beliefs and their coherence, and their implications for how the belief system informs and shapes how one lives. Elenctic dialectic is part of a search for a grounding of belief, and of action, in knowledge. But since the kinds of subject under discussion (e.g., virtue, reality, justice, evil) have a large potential for eventual aporetic contradiction, one is committed philosophically, not to epistemic skepticism, but rather to both modesty and continued examination of the arguments presented dialectically and their implications for one’s own beliefs. What the dialogue form provides then is a way for Plato both to present and to develop his own beliefs but with an implicit rejection of any claim to authority. This is reinforced by the drama, I myself would add, in those specific passages I examine here where the interlocutors are explicitly presented as either all too ready to hear Socrates opinion or belief on a particular subject-matter, or as already adhering to it. It is also for this reason, as Frede points out in general terms, that the “fictitious context of the individual interlocutor’s character, social position, belief system, etc. is so important, and not a mere ‘literary device’. To know, we learn from the early dialogues, is not just a matter of having an argument, however good it may be, for a thesis. Knowledge also involves that the rest of one’s beliefs, and hence at least in some cases, one’s whole life, be in line with one’s argument.” Clearly, as we shall see, Frede’s description above is the case with Glaucon and Adeimantus, Simmias and Cebes.

Frede concludes that Plato feared that the internal dialogue of the average soul with itself is prone to being self-satisfied and attached to its beliefs—and so he chose a form of writing that, within the literary context, engages the reader in evaluating the premises not only of the respondent but of the questioner as well, and by implication the reader’s own. At least that is the ideal. I would add only and perhaps this is obvious, that this position applies not only to the more official aporetic or so-called Socratic dialogues. It applies as well to those like the Phaedo and the Republic. These two dialogues contain elenctic and aporetic portions (as contrasted to what appear as expositional). More importantly, it applies to the whole corpus, inasmuch as at least the form of a dialogue is preserved, and in particular by Plato’s absence as a literary character (excepting the Letters, and even then).

Perhaps the most extreme version of the claim that the dialogue form or method and its content are inseparable is that the method in some sense is the content. It is the claim that the contents of Plato’s philosophy rightly understood is expressed in dialogues because it can only be expressed that way—and this is so because any claim that Plato’s philosophy, in whole or in part, could be expressed in propositions, or as a theory, is false. This view is defended by Francisco J. Gonzalez, in “Self-Knowledge, Practical Knowledge and Insight: Plato’s Dialectic and the Dialogue Form.”^[4] Gonzalez thus goes even further than Gill and Frede (whom he cites) in his claims for the strict necessity of the dialogue form. Plato had to write in dialogue form. He argues not simply, as others have, that the dialogue form itself has philosophical significance, but that it is necessary to Plato’s view of what philosophy itself is—and not just philosophizing, but the very contents of philosophy. He argues that the dialogues have a necessary “reflexivity,” by which he means that they embody or exemplify what they argue for or about, and that therein lies their truth, all real knowledge and its justification. This embodied or “exhibited” truth is also in a culminating insight — a kind of practical knowledge instructing us about how to live that is a mode of “knowing what” (a special kind of epistemic knowing how as contrasted to mere knowing that [Ryle]) to be contrasted to any propositional formulation. This, he claims, is what philosophy is for Plato (and tout court). Although later in the paper he backtracks to include argumentation—and that “philosophy clearly has some theoretical content” (183).

Gonzalez is led to this in large measure by his view that any propositional interpretation is “cognitivist,” hence dogmatic, hence not platonic (nor in even general terms truly philosophic)—philosophy “shows rather than proves, manifests rather than describes. It is primarily neither deductive nor analytic, but rather exhibitive” (162). This seems to me a simplification and a distortion of the alternatives. Boxing himself into a corner, it then turns out that there is no objective knowledge but what is in the exemplification. But then, one might well ask, of what is it an exemplification, if all is in the “showing?” For Gonzalez actually says at one point that,

But given what he argues it is hard to see what the origin or status of the truth would be. To see and assent to the truth of something is in a sense beyond or behind the propositions that formulate it. But this does not mean that that truth, of, for example, what learning is—of recollection or anamnēsis (exhibited in the Meno and argued for in the Phaedo) is somehow inseparable from its presentation in that context. The alternative, I would argue, is that Plato wrote in the dialogue form because while presenting an argument the dialogue form best illustrates the difficulties in coming to it, the obstacles to understanding it and the significance of assent (or denial). In short, it is not a necessity, as Gonzalez would have it, but a choice. That true knowledge, or we should say the most important knowledge (as contrasted to say, geometry per se), is life transforming should not have to commit us to rejecting all theory as somehow empty propositional formulations—as long as we distinguish between the formulations and what drives our assent. And that the dialogue form helps us to see more clearly surely should not be confused, let alone conflated, with what it is that we see.

G. Press, in “Plato’s Dialogues as Enactments”^[5] is not as extreme as Gonzalez, but is also out to reject the ostensible doctrinal interpretation, at least understood as a final position or “settled doctrines that could be written down or taught” (144). I support the notion that the dialogues are an invitation to reflection, an invitation to dialogue, and that conclusions are in a sense often, perhaps always, somewhat provisional, in that sense “open-ended” (Nails). Where I disagree is in the claim that undefended “recurrent principles” such as “that there is a soul, that it is more important than the body . . . the Ideas themselves . . . philosophy is the best way of life . . . there are such things as the virtues,” all serve as “general beliefs” that are the “premises of arguments and propositions to which Socrates insists on getting his interlocutor’s agreement,” and that Socrates’s “certainty [about these] is moral rather than logical.” But the dialogues surely do not just suppose the existence of these—they examine just what these really are, their natures, and in that examination is an argument for their existence or truth. Press’ interpretation does seem to me once again to take the doctrine of philosophers as meaning assertoric propositional conclusions rather than the argument or system that they elaborate.

As for Press’ sense of the dialogues as “enactments,” they are said to “embody” Plato’s “vision” of an ideal, of a life as lived—these are final truths that are “glimpses” and obviously non-propositional. But while I too argue that the dialogues show the lived consequences of interpreting the world in such and such a way, I argue that this is in addition to, and forms part of, an actual argument. Finally, Press seems to reduce philosophy to philosophizing, i.e., to the searching in authentic philosophical conversation, rather than producing attempts at credible logoi. Press explicates Plato’s fictive vision, (the enactments) as an appeal to our “feeling and imagination” as well as to our reason. But the rhetorical effect of Plato’s images, the portrayals (and the myths) as convincing, hence as part of the argument is, at least for the philosophical participant/reader, based on and in our intellectual perception of their veracity, as contrasted to the rhetorical effect on those interlocutors or readers for whom their feelings, and their beliefs, play an important role, and whose feelings and beliefs precisely get in the way of any other appeal. This is as true of the metaphysical or ontological portrait of the lived in world of our experience in general, as we see in part in Socrates’s intellectual biography recounted by him in the Phaedo. Otherwise, we might as well stick with the poets.

If the form and content are inseparable, as I too believe they are, our obligation is carefully to unravel the text by applying an interpretation of each specific dramatic feature to the logical or philosophical argument. The shortcomings of interpretations that fail to do so serve on a case by case basis to help make the argument for the validity, indeed the necessity, of such an approach. This is not to say that the work of scholars working primarily in the analytical tradition does not contain much analysis that pays careful and rewarding attention to the text, and from which we have much to learn. Rather, that where their insights and conclusions go astray (in my view) it can sometimes be traced to a neglect of the dramatic features and their direct influence on an understanding of Plato’s argument as addressed to the reader. This holds as well on occasion for those whose interpretative stance is closer to my own.^[6]

The commitment to interpreting the form and the content as a unity is often honored more in the breach than in the observance. Consider the following interesting and instructive historical case of where a general commitment to the importance of the drama still gives way to a philosophical preconception concerning Plato. Julius Stenzel, a scholar of an earlier generation, was notable for having stressed the form-content relationship. Stenzel also wished to fend off the view wherein the platonic Ideas are reduced to concepts, and he is right, in my view, to do so. Yet in its place he is keen to distinguish a Socratic skepticism regarding the achievement of an absolute knowledge from a Platonic home of absolute being. Thus for Stenzel,^[7]

According to Stenzel, the function of a Platonic portrait of Socratic irony regarding the mysteries is to render homage to his teacher’s original skepticism, skepticism of any literal interpretation of the mysteries that Plato shares. But this same Socratic persona of the dialogues, Stenzel holds, is also in tension with a Platonic claim for an absolute knowledge that, in the early and middle dialogues, is still a sort of faith, rather than articulated knowledge, albeit a faith in a rather different otherworldliness than the conventional one. The same distinction, between Socrates the wise moralist and Plato the over-zealous metaphysician, is first suggested by Nietzsche, in Beyond Good and Evil (section 191). This scenario explains for Stenzel, and many others since, why Plato drops the Socratic persona from those later dialogues which, for him, get down to the real business of sorting out “a clear view of the simpler discursive thought which finds relations between concepts.” But is this view really justified by the text? Is there an ironical Platonic mask behind which Plato would hide, or excuse, his “religious metaphysics,” or is the Platonic portrayal of a form of Socratic ontological skepticism actually consistent after all with Plato’s view of the Ideas in these dialogues, and indeed pointing us in the right direction. The answer, I maintain, is the latter. This claim can only be defended through the very reading of the text as a unity of form and content that Stenzel himself espouses but apparently did not implement.^[8] More recent writers who also urge the unity of form and content, seem to me to be open to the same criticism, as I note in places below. It is only the general fact of the dialogue form, and such features as the absence of Socrates from certain dialogues, etc. that is taken as significant.

A close reading of the actual details of key passages of the dialogue does indeed present us with a particular interpretation of the reality of the Ideas, of their relation to images, in particular a thesis concerning the Ideas and a positive view of image-making, and a resultant explication of Plato’s ontology (This is, of course, again in addition and in contrast to the usual, and obvious, staple of Plato interpretation that points to his standard contrast between original and image, or less real copy). It is only against the background of such an understanding derived from a reading that is both analytical with regard to the arguments and takes account of the literary presentation, that the Ideas make sense as precisely not a “religious metaphysic.” That is, I will argue that there is a more general epistemological and ontological need to see images as images rather than merely as “less real than originals,” and that this reading sheds light on the ontological argument. Furthermore, both the dialogue form, itself an image constructed of images, and the implicit reader-text relation, act out the far more fundamental relation of Ideas to human being. The method and content of the key images within the Republic and Phaedo provide insight into the relation of knower and known in the everyday, habitual image-world, as well as paradigms of the correct production and interpretation of a noetic world of images of much greater clarity (saphēneia). Human discourse itself, I argue, is to be seen as the essential, primary image-making, and revealed in these two dialogues as already metaphysical.

Some would even go so far as to deny that there is any other extra-dialogical correct notion of a platonic logos, or even of independent Ideas in any sense. They would claim that the dialogical form itself and the philosophical invitation to dialogue about key issues in a constant process of searching for the truth, and the examination of proposals for a logos to see how they hold up both logically and as measured against experience, is all that there is in Plato’s serious philosophy. The claim would be that philosophy truly understood is just this and, as contrasted to actual possession of knowledge, is limited by human existence to the eroticized pursuit of knowledge. For this view, see for example David Roochnik, The Tragedy of Reason: Toward a Platonic Conception of Logos.^[9] Roochnik tries to stake out a position for Plato seen as defending philosophy’s search for a logos as a truth—as a third position between the rationalism of truth as analytic, certain knowledge, propositional, and the anti-rationalism of relativistic valuations and/or emotive “poeticism” (Nietzsche, Heidegger, Derrida, Rorty). In so doing, he seeks to detach the real Plato from the Plato commonly imagined by philosophers and non-philosophers alike as the arch-rationalist, the impossible Realist, for whom there is in principle a science of knowledge, and whose model is best seen in the knowledge of science, underpinned by a theory of fixed rational entities (whether universals, concepts, or Ideas). While I agree in general with the opposition that he sets up, I think Roochnik goes too far, runs the risk of subjectivizing, or historicizing Plato, and in ways that the texts will not support. As for myself, I urge in what follows rather that Plato requires that the world be given its due, that it meets us halfway, and truth and knowledge of more than the natural world is not just provisional but rather also cumulative—which is not to deny the constitutive role of soul or consciousness.

Jill Gordon, in Turning Toward Philosophy: Literary Device and Dramatic Structure in Plato’s Dialogues^[10] argues for the philosophical value of the platonic images themselves. See her introduction, the section on Analysis and Argument-Focused Methods, pages 3-6, for a similar critique of method to my own above. “This approach tends to identify philosophical activity with making and analyzing logico-deductive arguments. While this is certainly a part of philosophical activity, and a part of Platonic dialogues, it cannot be the exclusive or even primary activity of philosophers” (3). Describing her own project, Gordon writes, “By focusing on the dialogues’ written style, written structure, content, and literary devices, I draw conclusions about how the written elements of the text engage the reader or audience in the activity we call philosophy. The elements that are considered nonphilosophical by contemporary approaches — or, at the very least, extraphilosophical or extralogical—are the very elements of Plato’s dialogues that can turn a soul toward the philosophical life” (5). This is not to say that we reach the same conclusions about the meaning of even the dramatical features of the text nor our respective conclusions about what Plato intends by the philosophical life.

Our take on the meaning and role of images for Plato has much in common, in particular the importance of seeing the image as image. See her chapter 6, entitled Image. And yet, there is a fundamental difference. Gordon argues that images themselves can be an extralogical means of argument, that is to say, a complement to straight out “logico-deductive argumentation.” And that it is the two taken together that effectively turn the soul towards a life of philosophy. I argue rather that the positive role of Plato’s own images is to illustrate not to convince. Gordon does seem to say something like this when she says that “the richness of an image, and therefore its philosophical value, are appreciated only on reflection” (164). Yet she believes also that the images themselves have philosophical content and that “images can lead to truth and philosophical insight” (165). As for their negative role, it is often to drive us to distinguish between the literal and the figurative, and sometimes precisely what by contrast is not the case, or not Plato’s position, for example, around the meaning of the eternality of the soul and both the reality and the independence of the Ideas. (I reject, and Gordon accepts, a two worlds view. See her 168, n. 38. And our treatment of Recollection and its implications, for instance, is different.) Gordon tends to focus on the literary image, I do discuss these in detail, while I focus on the onto-epistemological arguments themselves, extending to the claim that to see the image as image is the first step in philosophical ascent. Further, that this philosophical meaning of image is embedded in the use of discourse itself. In sum, Gordon stresses the human condition as one of limitation, cut off from a full insight into ultimate realities, but that this gap can be bridged to an extent through extralogical means, that is, through images. These are to serve not only as a bridge to the Ideas but to help us in turning towards the life of philosophy. I would argue that accepting this extralogical assistance is effectively turning away from philosophy, though indeed my own approach is certainly not to reduce the argumentation of the dialogues to logico-deductive treatises.

Concerning my analysis of Plato’s epistemological/ontological arguments, as contrasted to the dramatic elements, my exposition is not of what is ostensibly meant behind the scenes, as it were, but rather in careful analysis of what Socrates actually says. Often enough the views of the interlocutors serve as a starting point, and finally a contrast. But such exchanges are seen to lead to the so-called metaphysical books of Republic V, VI and VII, thus to Socrates’s development of the Divided Line, etc. I devote a whole long chapter to this, returning to Glaucon and Adeimantus only for a few comments at the end. The same holds true for my exposition of the difference between the true and the false philosopher, knowledge versus opinion, the cognitive faculties (dunameis) in chapter two, and the education of the philosopher in chapter five.

Finally, it may be useful to make one more comment about my method of exposition as compared to the so-called analytical approach. In these two dialogues there is of course at certain points criticism of the positions of the interlocutors, usually at a beginning of a new topic or transition, leading to an aporeia, from which Socrates then takes off into new territory. But the Republic in particular is in large measure descriptive or illustrative—even when it comes to the Divided Line, which is really just a sketch or outline. Concerning method, Plato even tells us as much in turning to the development of the image of the soul writ large in the image of the city, and the mention of the “longer way.” In this sense, I think that it is fair to say that there just are few positive, analytical, propositional arguments in these and other ostensible middle period dialogues. The argument is, as it were, by analogy, by the development (and appeal of) images, which make sense or are explanatory of our experience. This is not to say that all are like that, or that there are not passages of logical argument in the early and middle dialogues, though these passages are, on the whole, (though not all) negative or aporetic. For example, when it comes to Socrates’s discussion of the famous “three finger” illustration etc., my discussion is an exposition of the logical or analytical moves in the argument regarding conflicting perceptions/judgments and contradictory predicates and/or qualities. This is the first move towards the argument for the hypothesis of the Ideas. Another example would be my analysis of the same issue and methodology in the Phaedo passage concerning the “flight” of opposites when one approaches the ostensible presence of the other.

The kind of exposition that the analytical school favors, and that some readers may find lacking in my text, is perhaps appropriate to the later dialogues such as the Sophist, etc. My own method of exposition for the two dialogues that are my texts, on the positive side, is to try to make sense of what Socrates says in his descriptions, including the ontological and epistemological claims, and the unpacking of the images, along with original examples. On the negative side, I try to see just what metaphysical/ontological and epistemological assumptions are implicit in what the interlocutors say, as well as how they come a cropper. Further, I argue that a careful eliciting of these from the actual text (not ad hominem) can help us, by contrast, with an actual exposition of positive doctrines. But given the above, this expositional strategy has its limits—and so I turn for three whole chapters to the Phaedo, for a philosophical development of the concept of separation or chōrismos (around which there is controversy in the literature) in order to flesh out Plato’s claims (and my reading of them) about soul, and the Ideas. And with this I argue for a new and different interpretation of the immortality of the Platonic soul and the special kind of eternality of the Ideas.

In the process of constructing Plato’s argument, a dramatical reading of the dialogue is always attentive to the text to see in a passage that artful mimetic tone which will tell us just when, and how far, to take what is being said either literally or seriously—that is, the feature of Platonic irony. For, as has been pointed out each time by those who take the matter seriously, a conversation between Socrates and the interlocutors is not the same as whatever is meant to pass between the various readers and Plato. Irony aside, the conversation between a specific interlocutor and the platonic Socrates allows Plato to address specific subjects by engaging with the presuppositions (albeit often enough implicit), the starting points, of a particular point of view on the subject.^[11] The characters, even when corresponding to real people, are dramatic fictions, offered as types or kinds. It is a feature of the dialogue that the interlocutor has specific views and specific interactions with Socrates which are a function of these views—the characters are not interchangeable, abstract foils for Socrates. The reader/listener must always ask just why, philosophically, Plato employs images of just these specific individuals. It is only in taking such a question seriously in examining their image in the actual portrayal of their arguments, beliefs, emotions, and sometimes actions, in short, in examining their souls—that an answer can be found.^[12] But one thing is clear, it will not do to treat even agreement or consent by one of the interlocutors as equivalent to our own consent to the same proposition, nor to assume that Plato wishes it—and all the more so for simply equating what Socrates says in context, that is, in the presence of others, with Plato’s own address to the careful reader (nor for that matter to assume that all readers are addressed by the same text, as it were). I would argue that, given this caveat, the dramatic content (along with the analytical content seen in context) is precisely what does give us Plato’s own presence, presents his own views and engages the reader.^[13]

Again, if there is a fairly obvious gross flaw in an argument, for example the first argument for immortality in the Phaedo, or the less obvious ones that I deal with in the Republic, it makes more sense to assume, at least as a working hypothesis, that an author who could write the dialogues was capable of not overlooking such flaws, than the contrary, and that the dramatic nature of the dialogue is the reasonable explanation (always with the proviso that any such particular interpretation is without strain). In other words, the arguments are well constructed precisely because of the supposed flaw, and the reader is meant to ask just why this particular feature is appropriate for this character and/or at this stage of the dialogue—what is it meant to say, and what are we meant to ask or conclude? I do not suggest that all cases are to be treated this way, rather that it is a useful principle of interpretation. It is derived from premises concerning the author’s intelligence, the mimetic nature of dialogue, and most of all by consistent empirical observation. Nor do I mean to suggest that Plato uses Socrates against his own (fictive) will—rather quite the opposite. The Platonic irony is contained within the Socratic figure’s own speeches and actions—in short, that Socrates himself is portrayed as knowing quite well who in particular he is speaking with, and, while trying to move that person ahead in his understanding where possible (and in some cases it is conspicuously not), Socrates is acutely aware of the limitations of that person, including those who are his own associates, personal friends and/or “friends of the Ideas” (I leave open whether or how this applies to certain of the so-called late dialogues in which Socrates is present). It is because the role of the interlocutors has philosophical significance that they are never lost sight of in these two dialogues, and in my exposition. Indeed, the first chapter is devoted in large part to taking the exact measure of Glaucon and Adeimantus, to whom I return from time to time (as does Socrates) in order to position the argument of the text of the Republic. The same is true of Simmias and Cebes in my discussion of the Phaedo, and it is in chapter 7 that their views are a particular focus.

It is crucial that any such claims be worked out in a case by case interpretation, and one not based on shadowy assertions about what is ironical and what is not, what is to be taken seriously or literally and what not, what is an intentionally flawed argument or claim and what is seriously meant to be a sound argument. All of this can only be argued based on interpretations of what is actually said at a given moment (and sometimes what is done)—though this may also require setting the immediate text in the context of who is saying it to whom, and in the larger context of the progress and themes of the dialogue. The test is always whether there is sufficient evidence within the dialogue for the interpretative case to be made, while at the same time subjecting the argument presented at a given point to rigorous analysis. The point is that such an analysis is usually not in and of itself the end of the task. Rather, it can only be part of the process of assessing the Platonic argument, to be complemented by a critical reading of the context—before, during, and after the passage in question.

The program outlined above concerning the form/content issue and the philosophical significance of the dramatic aspect of the dialogues, along with the substantive examination of image and image-making in these two dialogues, results in a reassessment of certain traditional views concerning the soul, the Ideas and their interrelation. Much of my book is an interpretation of the Republic. But in order to develop and support my reading of soul and of the Ideas as interdependent, I do turn for three chapters to the Phaedo. Chapter 6 deals with the crucial notion of separation and our capacity for separating, as a special kind of image-making. Chapter 7 deals with image-making gone astray, or the problem of misreading the world. Chapter 8 deals with Socrates’s responses to Simmias and Cebes and his own “second sailing,” his own image-making. The famous hypothetical method and the Ideas as explanatory are read as dealing with the reality of the images of the Ideas in speech, hence with the relation of soul, knowledge and existence. I argue that both behind and through the myths and literary images (in the description of the dynamic of participation) there is another, different, and more serious argument—one in which the soul is indeed immortal, but has a form of immortality that is present in everyday life as an atemporality rather than a literal deathlessness—hence consistent with the soul ceasing to exist. Parallel is a notion of the Ideas that requires that they be efficacious and separate only within the context of lived human experience. It is this down to earth notion of soul and the Ideas that is both reflected in and a precondition of, language and inquiry. These activities are carried out in the production and response to images. The nature and significance of images per se, of the human capacity to read images and for image-making are interpreted as the key to Plato’s ontology as seen in these two dialogues, hence key to the nature of the soul, the Ideas and their interrelation in the world they inhabit. (I reject then a simple two worlds interpretation.) The various images in the Phaedo and the Republic are to be read as serious muthologia, distinguishing between the literal-mindedness dictated by the natures of the interlocutors in both dialogues, and the argument addressed to the reader. Read in this way, I argue, the Ideas are not to be conceived as independent substantial existences—in essence defending Plato, as does Gadamer, against Aristotle’s charge of reification (Meta, 1086a, 1087a). It is with these interpretations that I return to the Republic to explicate the notions of soul and Idea found in the closing books.

Perhaps the seemingly most radical or challenging suggestion in my interpretation is that the Ideas have something of a quasi-temporal dimension. This is not, of course, to deny or ignore those passages where the Ideas are explicitly said to be eternal, unchanging, stable—most often in contrast and over and against the aisthēta, the sensible, the changing, the context relative, etc. Ideas are invoked as causes and/or explanations in a wide variety of contexts over the corpus, an Idea “corresponding to each grouping of particulars to which we give the same name” (Rep. 596a). It would seem that a variety of Ideas are considered, corresponding to the variety of objects and contexts (see Peters, 48)—including ethical (Parm. 130b, Phaedrus 250d), natural (Tim. 51b, Soph. 266b), mathematical (Phaedo 101b-c), trivial (Parm. 130c), man-made objects (Rep. 596a, 597d, Soph. 265b) relations (Phaedo 74a-77a, Rep. 479b, Parm. 133c), and even negations (Rep. 476a, Theat. 186a, Soph. 257e). In most if not all of these domains, in addition to particulars being a plurality, a many as opposed to a one, it is “context relativity” that poses an obstacle to certain knowledge, and by contrast it is “invariance across context,” (Burnyeat, 2000) within a given domain that has been suggested as the feature that characterizes the Ideas. But what else do these various kinds of eidē corresponding to kinds of discourse have in common, and how is the search for stable knowledge to be understood in each context, and/or for the whole? What is the topos noētos (Rep.508c, 517b) where they are all to be located? What understanding of “participation” (methexis) can encompass or accommodate all these various sorts of experience—far more than merely sensible particulars? What is their relation to the various logoi of ongoing discourse in which we search out their right names? What account must we give for their presence even in everyday discourse? These are large and complex, if related, issues. What I will argue is that the realm in which the Ideas all have their being is revealed as inextricably embedded in the activity of discourse about these various worlds, and that the key to understanding how it all works, the common epistemic and ontological thread, is in our primary image-making. This linkage results in a certain necessary and permanent temporal horizon for being and our knowledge of it. From the analysis of the meaning and role of image and image-making in the intertwining of soul, world and Idea, it would seem that the content of an Idea must be conceived as both stable and flexible for knowledge to be possible. That is, it has to be flexible enough to embody and explain the evolving meanings of logoi, of the naming itself, while at the same time serving human discourse as a point of stability for interpreting our world as it presents itself to us in its various facets.^[14]

Notes

Christopher Gill, “Dialectic and the Dialogue Form,” in New Perspectives on Plato, Modern and Ancient (2002), eds. Julia Annas and Christopher Rowe (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2002), 145-71. Also Charles Griswold, ed. Platonic Writings, Platonic Readings (New York: Routledge, 1988, 2006). See especially the exchanges between Roochnik and Irwin (183 ff.), Dalfen and Dorter (215 ff.) and White and Gadamer (247 ff.).

Charles Kahn, Plato and the Socratic Dialogue; The Philosophical Use of a Literary Form, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996, reprinted 1999)

Michael Frede, “Plato’s Arguments and the Dialogue Form,” in Oxford Studies in Ancient Philosophy, Supplementary Vol., eds. J. Klagge and N. D. Smith (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992). Compare G. Press, “The Logic of Attributing Characters’ Views to Plato” in Who Speaks for Plato, ed. G. Press, (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2000), 27-38, who gives a long list of reasons why any and all interpretations that present what Plato said or meant rest on the undefended assumption that one can read back from the dialogues to Plato’s doctrine, beliefs arguments, etc. My approach is to separate the dialogue between the characters, including Socrates, and the dialogue between the author and the philosophical reader. This is with the caveat that the fictive Socrates as well is shown dramatically to be carrying on a conversation that is addressed to the astute listener within the dramatic context itself—which is the persistent reminder by Plato to the reader to read with attention to the images and text of each character.

For some comments on the dialogue of the soul with itself as contrasted with actual dialogue with others, or in this case of reader with text, see Monique Dixsaut, “What is it Plato Calls Thinking,” in Proceedings of the Boston Area Colloquium in Ancient Philosophy Vol. XIII (1999), 1-27, and in particular the Commentary by Klaus Brinkmann, revised version as “Qu’appelle-t-on penser? Du dialogue interieur de l’ame selon Platon, in Dixsaut, Platon et la question de la pensée , (Vrin, 2000). Dixsaut argues that Plato’s choice of the dialogue form has a platonic philosophical justification, which is that dialogue conceived as essentially the inner conversation of the soul’s reasoning part with itself is what all thinking (and not just philosophical thinking) essentially is.

Francisco J. Gonzalez, “Self-Knowledge, Practical Knowledge, and Insight: Plato’s Dialectic and the Dialogue Form,” in The Third Way, ed. F. Gonzalez, (Rowman and Littlefield, 1995), 155-87.

Gerald A. Press, “Plato’s Dialogues as Enactments,” in The Third Way, ed. F. Gonzalez, (Rowman and Littlefield, 1995), 133-52.

For a range of other defenses in English of the philosophical seriousness of the dramatic content see for example P. Friedlander, Plato: An Introduction (New York: Harper and Row, 1958), 122, 230,154, 230 ; W. K. C. Guthrie, A History of Greek Philosophy. Vol. IV (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1957), 56ff, 554 n.3.; S. Rosen, Plato’s Sophist (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1983), Prologue, esp. 12 ff.; Rosen, Plato’s Symposium (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1968), xi-xxxviii; Jacob Klein, A Commentary On Plato’s Meno (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1965), Introductory Remarks, 3-31; H. L. Sinaiko, Love, Knowledge, and Discourse in Plato (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1965) ch. 1; John Sallis, Being and Logos (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1975) Introduction, esp. 4 n.1, and section 3, (12 – 22); Ronna Burger, The Phaedo: >A Platonic Labyrinth (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1984) Introduction and 219, n.1 and esp. 219, n.12 where Burger comments on Eckstein’s and Dorter’s books on the Phaedo regarding this issue. More recently, C. Griswold, ed. Platonic Writings, Platonic Readings (1988, 2006); F. Gonzalez, ed. The Third Way (1995); G. Press, ed. Who Speaks for Plato: Studies in Platonic Anonymity (2000); and Drew Hyland, Finitude and Transcendence in the Platonic Dialogues (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1995).

Julius Stenzel, The Literary Form and Philosophical Content of the Platonic Dialogue, in Plato’s Method of Dialectic (New York: Russell & Russell, 1964), 1-22.

See Jacob Klein, A Commentary on Plato’s Meno. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1965), 19, n.51. “Paul Friedlander was the first in recent times to refuse to separate the allegedly ‘ornamental’ parts of Platonic dialogues from their philosophical substance. Attempts antedating Friedlander’s work . . . remained merely ‘programmatic’ or superficial.” Klein includes Stenzel in his list. For a more recent example of the same problem, see again the exchange between Dalfen and Dorter, in Griswold, Platonic Writings (225). Dalfen says of Dorter that “the dramatic interpretation . . . is only occasionally applied” (220-21). But see also Dorter’s reply.

David Roochnik, The Tragedy of Reason: Toward a Platonic Conception of Logos. (New York and London: Routledge, 1990).

10.

Jill Gordon, Turning Toward Philosophy: Literary Device and Dramatic Structure in Plato’s Dialogues. (University Park, Penn. Pennsylvania State University Press, 1999).

11.

See Christopher Rowe, Plato and the Philosophical Art of Writing (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 1-51. “It is not just that we need to understand the arguments in their literary and dramatic context, and understand how they relate to their ‘frames’. That we certainly need to do. But we must, I propose, also accept that the structure of the arguments themselves may be at least partly determined by extraneous factors like the state of understanding of the addressees (interlocutors, whether individuals or types) and that almost any statement Socrates or other main speakers make may require correction or completion from other contexts” (51). Thus Rowe, like myself, argues against a strict developmentalist position, certainly one that would contrast Socrates the moralist with Plato the metaphysician, and allows for a reading across dialogues (albeit limited and specific). Plato’s thought does of course “develop,” or change, over the course of his writings, but this is seen more as a development or exploration in detail of positions implicit from the beginning, and compatible with a platonic Socrates, even in the ostensible aporetic dialogues. For a discussion of the meaning of, and the distinctions between, Socratic irony and Platonic irony, as well as the uses and consequences of each, see Charles Griswold, “Irony in the Platonic Dialogues,” Philosophy and Literature vol. 26 no. 1 (April, 2002): 84-106.

12.

Gadamer contrasts conversations in which the participants are engaged in a truly productive examination of their respective starting points or presuppositions in a search for a better logos, with eristic conversations that are seeking only victory or comfortable rest in a reaffirmation of one’s convictions. See his Plato’s Dialectical Ethics, (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1991) and for the latter especially Part One, Section four, Degenerate Forms of Speech.

13.

For an approach similar to mine concerning the necessity of a contextual reading and its implications, see Norbert Blossner’s detailed remarks on methodology (Section IX) in his “The City-Soul Analogy,” in The Cambridge Companion to Plato’s Republic, ed. G. R. F. Ferrari (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 345-385. “What is said . . . [in addition to “certain argumentative goals”] . . . is also directed at the interlocutor’s level of understanding, since it is he whom the argument must convince, and convince in such a way that the argument continues to look realistic. But given that the argument develops and the level of the interlocutor’s understanding varies as the dialogue progresses, a correct understanding of what is said in the dialogue must attend at every point to the context of these utterances and to the argumentative goal at which they aim” (378). “Remarkably, many of these passages not only contain rhetorical ploys, but also are scripted in a way that makes the arbitrary and fallacious elements of Socrates’ argument leap to the eye—at least, to the eye of the viewer who does not insist on treating Plato’s text as authoritative on its surface and on seeking to protect it from all critique” (380-81). Similarly, see also Rowe, Plato and the Art of Philosophical Writing on the dialogue form and the Plato/Socrates, platonic Socrates, distinction in general. See also Griswold, who argues that Plato’s choice of the dialogue form is itself an implicit defense against anti-philosophy, including the current meta-philosophical opposition to the possibility of doing philosophy at all, as understood by Rorty, Derrida, etc. (“Plato’s Metaphilosophy: Why Plato Wrote Dialogues,” in Griswold, Platonic Writings, 143-68.)

14.

P. Christopher Smith comes closest to my own view in his Preface note to Gadamer’s The Idea of the Good in Platonic-Aristotelian Philosophy (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1986) 3, translator’s note, 2. “The question to be asked is not how consciousness constitutes reality, but how reality, being, presents itself in our awareness of it. The key here is language, in which that which is assumes its form for us. Language is the medium (Gadamer: Mitte) in which consciousness and world are joined. Hence it, not consciousness, is the ‘condition of the possibility’ (Kant) of anything being what is.” Compare Sallis, Being and Logos, 403. Sallis gives a description of the eidē in their activity or motion, as it were. “The idea is not necessarily something that is self-sufficiently one; it is treated as such, asserted as one over against a many. Perhaps it is even because it is asserted as one, that we address it with the honorific title ho estin. Perhaps its oneness (even if posed) is what determines that it is properly addressed by the name ‘that which is’.” Sallis is commenting on Rep. 507b. See also Monique Dixsaut, Platon et la question de la pensée and especially chapter II “Ousia, eidos et la question de la pensée,” (Paris: J. Vrin, 2000) quoted below in my text regarding the interrelationship of soul and Idea. Dixsaut speaks of a co-engendrement of essence and thinking, and distinguishes the role of idea from that of eidos. (Cf. 80, 86-89).