[Authors and titles are listed at the end of the review]
‘Plato’s style’ as a theme encompasses, in the essays presented in this special issue, his use of the Greek language; his engagement with rhetoric (both his depiction of its practitioners and deployment of its tropes) and corresponding legacy and standing among ancient rhetoricians; the import of direct remarks in dialogues on the potential and limitations of writing and speaking; and most prominently the vexed and perpetual question of the relationship between the dialogue form and the philosophical content of the dialogues. It contains very useful summary essays as well as studies whose focus exemplifies some aspect of Plato’s style and of the complex role of the dialogue form in assessing the precise nature and import of philosophical argument; and it includes a first (slightly edited) French translation of Myles Burnyeat’s lecture ‘First Words’, explicitly recognised by other contributors as a signally significant intervention from (what is called here) the ‘analytic’ tradition. A table of contents is provided below. English-language abstracts of the first six studies are printed at the end of the volume.
Anthony Bonnemaison’s opening essay surveys major approaches to the literary question in Plato, noting that it is a live one already for early interpreters like Proclus, Olympiodorus and the anonymous author of the Prolegomena to Platonic Philosophy. Bonnemaison conventionally and acceptably locates the inauguration of a modern tradition of attention to the dialogue form in Schleiermacher’s early-nineteenth-century studies of Plato, and from there brings a summary of major contributions to the question up to the present day with a commendable blend of concision and detail. He advances a typology of approaches, dividing studies of individual dialogues which attend closely to dramatic features from overarching investigations of Plato’s literary technique, with the latter category subdivided into those concerned generally with the dialogue form and particularly with its philosophical implications, and those focused specifically on one or another aspect of Platonic writing. He expresses some general reservations about the literary approach. First, the balance between literary analysis and assessment of philosophical content sometimes shifts too much towards the former, where the latter should be the more natural object of the study of Plato. This leads to common attribution to Plato of contradictory positions supported by different dialogues. Bonnemaison sees this as a paradoxical legacy of the developmentalist approach (frequently reproached as naïve by those with a literary focus), and a claim not so clearly established as to be stated without considerable and comprehensive argument. Further, the approach taken to this extreme posits within the dialogues a mere plurality of voices or viewpoints, with no position determinable as Plato’s own. Bonnemaison insists this neglects fundamental and significant asymmetries within dialogues: they often conclude with the major speaker imposing his viewpoint on his interlocutors, and, while the recurrence of certain themes indicates their importance, there are definite indications that some arguments (and hence the positions they support) are presented as worse than others. The criticism is a salutary caution against forsaking the argumentative or conceptual dimension of the dialogues in favour of the dramatic, an approach that licenses interpretations that are, and are concerned with being, more ingenious than correct.
André Rebhinder’s essay is a variation on a familiar solution to the problem of how to read Plato if we cannot expect dialogues to present definitive doctrines. The dialogue form is intended both to be understood and experienced, to persuade and to produce emotional effects in the hearer/reader similar to live argument. The form allows for two key stylistic signatures: putting to the test certain positions or hypotheses, showing how a dialectician can always lead the professor of a false opinion into self-contradiction; and making the reader adhere or provisionally agree (faire adhérer) to Socrates’ propositions, while letting characters voice the readers’ doubts. In parallel, the form serves to induce the reader to exercise his understanding, to engage in reasoned reflection on the subject addressed by the dialogue. The dialogues could be said to reproduce in and for the reader the philosophical occasions and encounters they depict.
Karine Tordo Rombaut’s reading discerns in the second half of Phaedrus a fine example of such inducement of the reader’s reason: the rules for successful rhetoric laid out by Socrates clearly provide the methods the reader must apply to extract the meaning of the text and leverage its lessons. She finds expanded and restricted stages of investigation, into correct speech and writing, then into the rules for written discourse. The second is occasioned because the result of the first seems to indicate which discourses are worthy of preservation through commitment to writing; but writing them down complicates the very basis of evaluation. The material discourse (‘image-discourse’) is merely a prop for the ‘model discourse’, the activity of thought that animates true discourse as the soul animates the body. A discourse itself is not deceptive, save where undue trust is placed in it, excusing or inducing the suspension of vigilance in the reader or hearer. The soul must bring to its reception of discourse the attitude of critical assessment, which makes of the otherwise dead image again a living thing.
The myth that closes Gorgias, notes Létitia Mouze, is often understood as the unphilosophical recourse to myth as a means of swaying Callicles, with whom the appeal to reason is unavailing. Mouze’s contention that the myth ‘completes’ the dialogue, and responds to all three interlocutors, because Socrates fails to establish in argument the superiority of justice over injustice, with the philosophical assertion of this resting on belief or fundamentally on a wager, will leave many readers unsatisfied, as Callicles remains unpersuaded. More promising is the suggestion that the myth’s point is that one must live philosophically, i.e. in a just and temperate manner, and that it is potentially persuasive only to one who has acknowledged his refutation in argument; its acceptance is not separated from the philosophical intention of the Socratic elenchus, but serves to measure the propensity of a person to live thus.
Jérôme Laurent assembles the judgements on Plato from Demetrius, Dionysius of Halicarnassus, Cicero, Quintilian and pseudo-Longinus, and demonstrates how influential and unavoidable was his work for practitioners of the art which Plato did more than any other ancient author to discredit. Though Plato earns his frequent censure, Dionysius nevertheless owns to his admiration; the others held Plato among the greatest of authorities and exemplars in matters of style, from whom anyone who wished to speak and write well might learn much.
Jean-Pierre Juillet focuses on the emphasised bodily robustness of Plato’s Socrates, his ability to endure heat, cold and harsh conditions, or to consume wine without become drunk, and poses the question of the relation of this capacity for endurance to his peculiar virtues of soul. He posits that Socrates as an exemplar may imply the requirement for a ‘common regime’ of body and soul. The broad question is worth reflection, and illustrates how an emphasised dramatic detail can put common assumptions in question; but perhaps the dialogues furnish an answer here, on two fronts. Were we first to abstract to the level of the city in accordance with Plato’s procedure for investigating the soul in Republic, we see in the extensive gymnastic that complements the musical education in its programme that, on the plane of the political (styled as the soul writ large), this commonality is assumed. There can be no cultivation of soul unrelated to some training of the body. Equally, however, aspiration to separation of the soul from the body in part implies practising its liberation from the limits imposed by physical discomfort or desire, regardless of the natural strength or weakness of the body. Hence the import of Odysseus’ words (Odyssey 20.18) when approvingly invoked by Socrates at Republic 390d5 (and cf. 441b6; Phaedo, 94d8-e1): ‘Endure, O heart, you have borne worse at other times’.
Myles Burnyeat’s ‘First Words’, taking a cue from Proclus, attends to the opening words or statements and preliminary scene-setting portions of some dialogues, showing that these openings throw immediate light upon dialogues’ core themes. (We may presume they were revised on completion of the dialogues precisely to do so.) For example, Phaedo, concerned with self and soul, begins with the word autos; Gorgias, staging a rhetorical combat and replete with references to the Peloponnesian War, with polemos. Republic’s opening descent clearly foreshadows the image of the cave. Timaeus opens with reference to an absent fourth (person), a detail that already exercised the critical faculties of Neoplatonic commentators. Burnyeat likes and builds on the observations of Iamblichus that an absent fourth means the decad (1+2+3+4), the basis of mathematical harmonies and perfection, cannot be completed; chance, which has kept the absent interlocutor from attending, later met as the ‘wandering cause’ the demiurge cannot control, has thwarted the possibility of perfection. The gathering is ‘a miniature anticipation of the cosmos that will be revealed to us when Timaeus starts his discourse on physics’. (There is another explanation possible along the same lines, given we are missing not a fourth but, counting the counting Socrates, a fifth individual. We are reminded of the mysterious fifth element, the Platonic solid enigmatically said to be employed by the demiurge to give shape and coherence to his cosmos. If this fifth were missing, the cosmos would not ‘hang together’, so to speak: an opening statement of a ‘missing fifth’ thus may suggest we lack the means for accounts to cohere, and must rest content with the eikos muthos of Timaeus.) Burnyeat’s ‘Valedictory lecture’ makes its case – for attending to the openings of dialogues with an eye to discerning something of their core themes and concerns – concisely and successfully. Its sole jarring note is following an acknowledgement that the Straussian school has most focused on the importance of prologues with rather graceless remarks that grossly misrepresent the methods and motives of Strauss and his followers. (Straussian scholars indeed collectively had preceded Burnyeat in many of the talk’s core insights.)[1]
The closing interview with Monique Dixsaut, taking shape dialogically through questions submitted by Stéphane Marchand and Dimitri El Murr, displays her customary coupling of attentiveness to detail with expansiveness, ranging across relevant parts of the Platonic corpus. Recurring to ambivalent assessments of Nietzsche as a foil through which to focus questions of the works’ literary character, it touches on Plato’s relation to Attic tragedy, his use of Greek syntax and the grammatical idiosyncrasies of his style. It is the dialectical character of Plato’s writings that makes them irreducible to a ‘literary genre’ to stand alongside lyric, epic and tragedy, because they do not imitate or express matters in the same manner: they ‘speak only to the intelligence and force the soul to think intelligently’.
The collection ably accomplishes the task to which it is addressed, of initiating the general reader who may be interested in Plato into the controversy of Plato’s literary style and why it is so important to the study and interpretation of the dialogues. The combination of summary of historical approaches to the question, indication of its status in contemporary academic literature and original expositions of how particular dramatic detail might bear upon philosophical interpretation, makes for a more than adequate introduction. The reader whose interest is kindled to explore the matter further is provided with ample references through the essays to more concentrated academic studies, while the volume’s price when weighed against those others would serve further to recommend it.
Authors and titles
- L’approche littéraire et dramatique des dialogues de Platon, Anthony Bonnemaison
- La confiance dans un mythe comme fondement de la vie philosophique dans le Gorgiasde Platon, Létitia Mouze
- Platon dans l’ancienne rhétorique, Jérôme Laurent
- La leçon de style de Socrate (Phèdre2258d7–278e3), Karine Tordo Rombaut
- Style et argumentation dans les Dialoguesde Platon, André Rebhinder
- De l’excellence du corps de Socrate, Jean-Pierre Juillet
- Présentation de « First Words » de M. Burnyeat, Stéphane Marchand
- Les premiers mots, Myles Burnyeat
- Platon et ses styles, Monique Dixsaut
Notes
[1] Theos opening Laws: Leo Strauss, The Argument and Action of Plato’s Laws (University of Chicago Press, 1973), 2. Polemos opening Gorgias: Seth Benardete, The Rhetoric of Morality and Philosophy: Plato’s Gorgias and Phaedrus (University of Chicago Press, 1991), 7. Autos opening Phaedo: Ronna Burger, The Phaedo: A Platonic Labyrinth (Yale University Press, 1984), 7, 15, 207; the ‘missing fourth’ in Timaeus: the first lines of Benardete, ‘On Plato’s Timaeus and Timaeus’ Science Fiction’ Interpretation 2.1 (1971), 21–63