2008년 06월 03일
Interpreting Plato's Dialogues
Interpreting Plato's Dialogues / J. Angelo Corlett
The "Platonic Question" - how are we to interpret Plato's dialogues? Does he have a philosophical system which we can extract from his dialogues, or not? If yes, then how? Can we assume the main speaker to be Plato's spokesman? If not, should we reduce Plato's dialogues into mere drama? What are the limitations of either plans of attack, and are there any alternatives? Why did he write the dialogues in the first place? Questions that might be interesting to Plato scholars, but largely irrelevant to the general readers who want to benefit from reading Plato.
Some of his dialogues, say, Timaeus almost reads like a treatise on the natural philosophy. It looks like that we can take Timaeus as Plato's spokesman, but then the Dramatic Socrates recapitulates the contents of the Republic at the beginning. True, there are internal evidences suggesting an internal time gap between two dialogues, and even if Dramatic Socrates in Republic was really "Socratic", Timaeus suggests that this Socrates took the contents of the Republic as his own doctrine. So far, it looks like we can take these as doctrinal dialogues, but then next comes Critias. Is this merely an allegory? Another Platonic mythcraft? Is this myth any better than one given by Protagoras in the dialogue bearing his name? And we're to realise that this trilogy is a series of speeches of different characters, similar to that of Symposium. And well, even the setting is similar, it’s a banquet. If we take the outrageous story of Timaeus and Critias seriously, there is no reason not to take anyone else's story in the Symposium the same way. Does Timaeus then really expose Plato's view on the natural philosophy?
Similar arguments can be held on Sophist and Statesman. Why is there a sudden appearance of this unnamed Eleatic? Can this ”Visitor" be a moniker which Plato assumes? Why Eleatic? Unlike the Dramatic Socrates in Theaetetus, the Visitor is quite dry and dogmatic, who seems to follow a clear plan of attack on the questions at hand, as if he has the answer already - indeed, he asks whether he should deliver the answer in speech or questions. But even the Visitor is not infallible; he faces a seemingly unexpected obstacle during the session, where he ultimately commits "parricide" of refuting Parmenides. Is this another implicit demonstration of the superiority of dialectic over speech or a treatise? Or is it just a rhetorical device to make Parmenides refutation more dramatic? If we take this as a rhetorical device, then why shouldn't we take the entire Socratic method as a dramatic device to expose a Plato's own philosophy? But as it is evident, most Socratic dialogues fail to arrive at a positive conclusion. Maybe Plato is a noisy polemic who can refute everything without a positive doctrine - Socratic method becomes an instrument of Reign of Terror. Does it make sense?
Does Plato have ulterior motives? Does he want to steer us to arrive at some kind of conclusion in guise of objective pursuit, Socratic dialectic? There's no doubt Protagoras deals with Protagoras, but Theaetetus contains another more serious attack on Protagorean Homomensura thesis, along with a critique of Heracleitus. Parmenides bears the namesake of Parmenides, but isn't it Sophist where more serious Parmenides refutation take place? Dramatic Socrates attacks rhetoric in Gorgias, but Gorgias is strangely silent in this dialogue, whilst a better critique is in fact given in Phaedrus. Cratylus looks like a neutral inquiry into language, but at the same time it renders Prodicus, another fellow sophist who has some respect from Socrates, irrelevant. Can we take these ones with ulterior refutational motives to be expressing genuine thoughts of Plato? It's noticeable that these dialogues render some (however tentative they may be)positive conclusions. It's tempting to take these arguments as Plato’s own, but at the same time the purpose of the dialogue is to show the development of the arguments, not to present the doctrine as an end result. However definite their conclusions at times may appear to be(esp. as in Sophist), the dialogue itself remains open-ended.
But, do we need to know what Plato thinks in order to understand his dialogues? The attempt to extract the mind of Plato is equally impossible as to penetrate into his mind directly. In fact, we can never penetrate into the mind of our contemporaries with expositional styles either, not to mention some ancient Greek who didn't even write treatises. It seems to me that our reading would be more fruitful -although not necessarily accurate - if we just keep Plato behind the scene, as he wanted to be. Even the name "Plato" occurs only twice in the entire corpus of dialogues.
The "Platonic Question" - how are we to interpret Plato's dialogues? Does he have a philosophical system which we can extract from his dialogues, or not? If yes, then how? Can we assume the main speaker to be Plato's spokesman? If not, should we reduce Plato's dialogues into mere drama? What are the limitations of either plans of attack, and are there any alternatives? Why did he write the dialogues in the first place? Questions that might be interesting to Plato scholars, but largely irrelevant to the general readers who want to benefit from reading Plato.
Some of his dialogues, say, Timaeus almost reads like a treatise on the natural philosophy. It looks like that we can take Timaeus as Plato's spokesman, but then the Dramatic Socrates recapitulates the contents of the Republic at the beginning. True, there are internal evidences suggesting an internal time gap between two dialogues, and even if Dramatic Socrates in Republic was really "Socratic", Timaeus suggests that this Socrates took the contents of the Republic as his own doctrine. So far, it looks like we can take these as doctrinal dialogues, but then next comes Critias. Is this merely an allegory? Another Platonic mythcraft? Is this myth any better than one given by Protagoras in the dialogue bearing his name? And we're to realise that this trilogy is a series of speeches of different characters, similar to that of Symposium. And well, even the setting is similar, it’s a banquet. If we take the outrageous story of Timaeus and Critias seriously, there is no reason not to take anyone else's story in the Symposium the same way. Does Timaeus then really expose Plato's view on the natural philosophy?
Similar arguments can be held on Sophist and Statesman. Why is there a sudden appearance of this unnamed Eleatic? Can this ”Visitor" be a moniker which Plato assumes? Why Eleatic? Unlike the Dramatic Socrates in Theaetetus, the Visitor is quite dry and dogmatic, who seems to follow a clear plan of attack on the questions at hand, as if he has the answer already - indeed, he asks whether he should deliver the answer in speech or questions. But even the Visitor is not infallible; he faces a seemingly unexpected obstacle during the session, where he ultimately commits "parricide" of refuting Parmenides. Is this another implicit demonstration of the superiority of dialectic over speech or a treatise? Or is it just a rhetorical device to make Parmenides refutation more dramatic? If we take this as a rhetorical device, then why shouldn't we take the entire Socratic method as a dramatic device to expose a Plato's own philosophy? But as it is evident, most Socratic dialogues fail to arrive at a positive conclusion. Maybe Plato is a noisy polemic who can refute everything without a positive doctrine - Socratic method becomes an instrument of Reign of Terror. Does it make sense?
Does Plato have ulterior motives? Does he want to steer us to arrive at some kind of conclusion in guise of objective pursuit, Socratic dialectic? There's no doubt Protagoras deals with Protagoras, but Theaetetus contains another more serious attack on Protagorean Homomensura thesis, along with a critique of Heracleitus. Parmenides bears the namesake of Parmenides, but isn't it Sophist where more serious Parmenides refutation take place? Dramatic Socrates attacks rhetoric in Gorgias, but Gorgias is strangely silent in this dialogue, whilst a better critique is in fact given in Phaedrus. Cratylus looks like a neutral inquiry into language, but at the same time it renders Prodicus, another fellow sophist who has some respect from Socrates, irrelevant. Can we take these ones with ulterior refutational motives to be expressing genuine thoughts of Plato? It's noticeable that these dialogues render some (however tentative they may be)positive conclusions. It's tempting to take these arguments as Plato’s own, but at the same time the purpose of the dialogue is to show the development of the arguments, not to present the doctrine as an end result. However definite their conclusions at times may appear to be(esp. as in Sophist), the dialogue itself remains open-ended.
But, do we need to know what Plato thinks in order to understand his dialogues? The attempt to extract the mind of Plato is equally impossible as to penetrate into his mind directly. In fact, we can never penetrate into the mind of our contemporaries with expositional styles either, not to mention some ancient Greek who didn't even write treatises. It seems to me that our reading would be more fruitful -although not necessarily accurate - if we just keep Plato behind the scene, as he wanted to be. Even the name "Plato" occurs only twice in the entire corpus of dialogues.
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