The Journal of Value Inquiry 27: 465-473, 1993. © 1993 Kluwer Academic Publishers. Printed in the Netherlands.

Plato on dialectic and dialogue

JAMES STEPHENS Department of Philosophy, Hillsdale College, Hillsdale, M149242, USA

Plato tells us throughout the dialogues that philosophy always consists in conversation. 1 In particular, philosophy always consists in Socratic elenchus, in question-and-answer. Dialectic, the method uniquely ap- propriate to philosophy, is, ". . . the discipline that will enable [philosophers] to ask and answer questions in the most scientific manner" (Rep. 534d); only by asking and answering questions can we come to the "full reason and intelligence" that is supposed to be philosophy's goal (Rep. 534b).

Richard Robinson, however, insists in Plato's Earlier Dialectic that this picture of philosophical inquiry gives rise to important problems - albeit problems "usually overlooked" by students of Plato - and that Plato nowhere provides good reasons for thinking that philosophy must be pursued through Socratic elenchus. 2 Robinson concludes that we can explain Plato's conviction only as an historical phenomenon: Plato thought of philosophical inquiry as Socratic conversation simply because the Athenian tendency to regard thinking as a sort of speech and Plato's own "Socratic pupilage" made anything else impossible for him (PED pp. 82-83).

I show in this essay that Plato can, and does, give considerably more in defense of his view of philosophical inquiry than Robinson recognizes. I suggest that if we find this hard to see, it is because Plato is concerned about aspects of the philosophic enterprise to which we ourselves - for reasons that can be understood as "historical phenomena" - sometimes pay insufficient attention.

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Plato did take dialectic to follow most of the same rules and to proceed in much the same way as did Socrates' elenchus. As it is depicted in the middle and later dialogues, dialectic involves a conversation between two

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persons in which the leader poses questions and the follower assents or dissents from given propositions. The follower must always answer and say what he or she thinks, and the answers given must agree with one another; eventually, both participants must come to agree (PED pp. 77-79). Socrates makes extremely strong claims on behalf of elenchus: thus the well-known statement at Ap. 38a that talking about virtue and similar matters - and not, therefore, discovering truths about virtue by other methods, or acting virtuously - is the greatest good for humankind. But Plato makes claims for the procedure that Socrates did not: dialectic alone is capable of taking us to knowledge of things that are (Rep. 533a); all persons besides dialecticians lack "full reason and intelligence" (Rep. 534b). The question is why Plato thought such claims were true.

Robinson looks first to the Phaedrus for answers. We are told there, he notes, that writing cannot genuinely teach because it makes people forget- ful, because it cannot answer questions, and because it cannot choose whom to address (Phdr. 274c-276d). In other dialogues Plato urges that question- and-answer allows us to confirm our discoveries with others (Prt. 348d), that it allows inquiry to proceed in a way clear to all (Grg. 453c), and that it removes the need for a third party to judge who "wins" the discussion (Rep. 348a-b; cf. PED p. 81). Robinson offers on Plato's behalf the additional claims that conversation is "the only way to keep ourselves reasoning in a straight line ... as opposed to stringing together a set of independent arguments or persuasions whose premises are not properly confessed," and that conversation is the only way to ensure that each step in an argument is genuinely intuited to be true (PED p. 82).

The difficulty is that none of these claims entails that philosophical inquiry must proceed by Socratic question-and-answer, or even that for inquiry to do so is best. Robinson highlights the difficulty by distinguishing methods of teaching from methods of discovery (PED p. 80). Plato takes dialectic to be, in part, a teaching technique; but why, asks Robinson, can we learn only by asking and answering questions? Why must questions come only from the teacher rather than the learner (PED p. 80)? When we turn to the project of discovery, of arriving at new intellectual truths, matters are worse still: why can we not discover new truths by ourselves (PED pp. 80-81)?

Robinson's answer, as suggested at the start, is that Plato has nothing to say in answer to such questions: "It is useless to look for sufficient reasons for the Platonic doctrine that the supreme method entails question-and- answer, because there are none" (PED p. 82). He concludes that we must explain Plato's commitment to the "elenchtic" picture of philosophical inquiry as an historical phenomenon. The phenomenon in question is twofold. First, the "fondness of the ancient Athenians for discussion" led

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them generally to regard thinking as a social affair and to interpret it in terms of dialogue (PED p. 83); second, Plato's association with Socrates led him unthinkingly to identify dialectic with Socratic elenchus:

Dialectic demands question-and-answer because it demands elenchus and elenchus demands question-and-answer. However, this was not a reasoned conclusion to Plato; it was an assumption carried over from his pupilage... The elenchus, which is a purely destructive instrument, went forward in the mind of Plato by its own inertia into Plato's new construc- tive instrument of dialectic; and managed always to avoid the exposure of its own unsuitability thereto. (PED p. 83)

Plato turns out in the end to have no reasons for his view of philosophical inquiry. His commitment to the vision of dialectic as dialogue is simply an artifact of his historical situation and a sentimental attachment to the procedure of his teacher.

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That Plato's view of philosophical method was a product of his historical and individual circumstances is plausible enough. But that is a far cry from saying, as does Robinson, that Plato has no reasons at all for thinking of philosophical inquiry as he does. The dialogues do contain a familiar explanation of why philosophical inquiry should be conversational, an explanation that bears reviewing here.

First, talk of dialectic as either a teaching technique or a method of discovery is Robinson's: Plato draws no such distinction. According to the middle dialogues, the problem that dialectic addresses is not simply ignorance, but ignorance that results from a pathological condition. Dialec- tic leads the individual to knowledge by working a katharsis, a purification, or a therapeia, a cure or healing, in the soul. Thus, in the Phaedo philosophi- cal "persuasion" liberates the soul from its contamination by the body and the senses (Phd. 66b, cf. 81bff., 82d-83a); in the Republic dialectic lifts the soul from "the barbaric slough of Orphic myth" (Rep. 533d); in the Phaedrus entry into the philosophic life is consequent on the power of evil in the soul being overcome in the philosophic conversation of the lovers (Phdr. 255b, 256b); and in the Symposium philosophical instruction about eros fills the "gap" in the soul that defined the erotic need (Syrup. 201b, 211d).

The ignorance that dialectic addresses, then, is a product of the soul's forgetfulness of the things that are and its kinship with such things, and its supposition instead that only sensible things and bodily pleasures are real and worth pursuing (Phd. 81b). This, in turn, is the product of an unnatural

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or perverted condition of the soul itself. In the Republic's tripartite psychol- ogy, the problem is that the rational "part" of the soul - which ought properly to rule and "exercise forethought on behalf of the whole soul" (Rep. 441e) - is instead subservient to other "parts" and their desires. Second, the soul's pathological condition is something that the soul has actively, if unconsciously, conspired to bring about. The soul's ignorance and contamination are "effected by the soul's own active desire" (Phd. 83a); in each of the transitions between different types of soul described in Books VIII-IX of the Republic, the individual "'turns over the government of his soul" to non-rational desires (Rep. 550b; cf. 553c-d, 554b, 561b).

Whatever the psychological process Plato has in mind in such descrip- tions may be, its results are specified clearly enough: the individual "does not accept or admit ... the words of truth ... but shakes his head at all such admonitions" (Rep. 561b-c). If dialectic is to effect a "conversion and turning about" of the soul, then, it will have to work against resistance. The third point is that dialectic alone is supposed to be able to overcome this resistance, because dialectic alone can supply the necessary motive:

They cross-examine a man' s words ... and easily convict him of inconsis- tencies in his opinions; these they then collect by the dialectic process, and placing them side by side, show that they contradict one another... He, seeing this, is angry with himself and grows gentle toward others, and thus is entirely delivered from great prejudices and harsh notions, in a way which ... produces the most lasting effect on the person... (Soph. 230b-c)

ff anything is historical in the portrait of Alcibiades in the Symposium, we have there a striking example of an individual - who tells us, incidentally, that there are "plenty like him" (Syrup. 216c) - who has turned over his soul to a mass of democratic desires, and who yet was made to feel shame by Socrates' questioning - something that Pericles and all the other great orators had never been able to accomplish (Symp 216a-b). Granted, not everybody will respond to elenchus as did Alcibiades, and still less will everybody respond in the way necessary to produce philosophers - but Plato never said that everybody would. His claim was not that dialectic was guaranteed to produce philosophers, but that only dialectic could produce philosophers.

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While the points raised amount only to a sketch of Plato's position, I am tempted to say that even a sketch allows us to answer Robinson's questions. If the business of dialectic is to bring about the conversion described, then

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Plato has given us good reason for thinking that elenchtic question-and- answer is necessary to the task: souls in the state Plato has described will not philosophize on their own. They lack any internal motivation for doing so, and are disposed, like Alcibiades in the Symposium, to run away from whatever external motivation presents itself (Symp. 216c). The soul's resistance needs to be overcome if the learner is even to give a first heating to the truths that Plato has to teach. Lectures, say, are ineffectual for this purpose, for they are the kind of admonition at which we fred it all too easy to shake our heads. Neither will questions from learner to teacher serve: the "learner" has a vested interest in avoiding the business at hand, which is precisely to turn her or his life upside down, and so has an interest either in asking hostile questions aimed at shoring up that way of life or questions that sidetrack the dialectical process) The soul's conversion requires a method by which we can be made to put our sense of self, so to speak, on the line, and by which the beliefs and values that underlie that sense of self can be confuted. I find it hard to imagine anything better suited to the task than Socratic elenchus.

Though a response to Robinson's questions along these lines is tempting, it is also, I think, inadequate. Seen from within Robinson's framework, the response has only to do with the soul's initial conversion to the philosophic life. But why, once the individual is embarked on the philosophic enterprise

- upon Robinson's twin projects of being taught and, eventually, of dis- covering truths about the forms independently - should question-and- answer still be necessary? Plato needs to give us good reasons for thinking that elenchus is needed, not merely as a precondition of the philosophic enterprise, but also within that enterprise itself; Robinson's objection is ultimately that no good reasons of this sort can be given. Aristotle, "unencumbered by a Socratic pupilage," could see clearly what Plato could not: once we are actually embarked on doing science,

• ..conversation is actually more liable to error than solitary thought; science does not proceed by question-and-answer; and dialectic, which does so proceed as its name implies, is not the method of science. (PED p. 84)

This is because:

By addressing itself always to this person here and now, elenchus takes on particularity and accidentalness, which are defects• In this respect it is inferior to the impersonal and universal and rational march of a science axiomatized according to Aristotle's prescription... (PED p. 16)

Most contemporary philosophers would probably be more suspicious than was Robinson of the view that philosophy - or science, for that matter - is

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best understood as the "impersonal and universal and rational march" of an axiomatized system. But Socratic question-and-answer is liable to err and to be misused, as even Plato admits, 4 and it is hard to imagine a science constructed entirely of the results of Socratic elenchi. What still remains to be explained is Plato's insistence that question-and-answer is essential at every stage of intellectual inquiry. We can establish here that the dialogues do present reasons of the sort for which Robinson asks and, roughly, what form those reasons take.

We begin with an observation of Robinson's, that Plato's (so-called) "constructive" project does have something in common with Socrates' (so- called) "destructive" project:

Plato does not regard the philosopher's or the dialectician's work as the construction or accumulation of something external to himself, but as the alteration of his own personality in a fundamental way... (PED p. 74, cf. pp. 15-16)

On the evidence of the dialogues, the alteration brought about by the soul's dialectical education is an extended and continuous process. Philosophy or dialectic, not some adjunct or preliminary discipline, first addresses souls sunk in the barbaric slough (Rep. 533d), "helpless prisoner[s], chained hand and foot to the body" (Phd. 82e). 5 Dialectic again, using the special sciences as "helpers and co-operators" (Rep. 533d), first turns the eye of the soul around to the region of things that are. 6 And dialectic, unaided now, guides the soul along the upward path, 7 up to a final vision of the Good. 8

The problem is to see why Plato thinks that elenchus must be employed throughout the soul's education. The description of dialectic as a purifica- tion is repeated throughout the account of the soul's education, and we know what Plato means by such talk. The soul is purified by elenchus in that, through refutation, it is relieved of the illusion that it knows what it does not know, and so is made able genuinely to benefit from the applica- tion of knowledge (Soph. 230c-e; cf. Men. 84a-c). If such refutation or purification is necessary at each stage of the soul's education, this is presumably for the reason that at every point in the soul's education - before the final vision of the Good? - is a temptation to assume that we know what in fact we don't know.

Plato makes this claim in one of the major discussions of dialectic: the Sophist identifies the belief that we know when we do not as the source of all the errors of the intellect, 9 and then recommends elenchus as the "greatest and chiefest" of purifications because it best removes this conceit (Soph. 230d). Other passages in the dialogues imply the claim. On Robin- son's account the mathematicians' problem at Republic 510c is that they take themselves to know their hypotheses, when in fact, never having given

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accounts of these hypotheses, they do not (PED pp. 155-156). Socrates tells us in the Phaedo, similarly, that in order to appreciate the aitiai of genera- tion and destruction he had to unlearn what he had taken himself to know (Phd. 96c). In sum, elenchus should be present at all stages of education because the temptation for which elenchus is the purification exists at all stages. This claim should strike most of us in the philosophical trade as intuitively plausible: we are familiar with the temptation to make a slapdash and unreflective grasp even of the most abstract issues do duty for articulate insight into those issues. So too, Plato was familiar with this.

Still remaining is the matter of what Robinson calls "discovery": elenchus may prepare us for knowledge, as the passages from the Sophist alluded to suggest, but how does knowledge itself come about from elenchus? The presupposition that lies behind such a question is at the root of Robinson's unhappiness with the method of question-and-answer. The presupposition is that the acquisition of knowledge is a different activity from etenchus, so much so that it requires a method of its own. Being refuted opens us up to the possibility of knowledge by removing an impedi- ment to knowledge, but - the impediment removed - the acquisition of knowledge requires that we do something further. This presupposition, however, gets little support from the middle dialogues. The Republic, for instance, does not picture the philosopher as doing anything in order to attain the vision of the Good after having completed the "many refutations" of dialectical training; having completed them, the philosopher is in a position to "raise his gaze" to the Good (Rep. 540a). Nor does the Symposium depict the philosophic lover as doing anything to gain the vision of the Beautiful after having been led through the various conceptions of beauty - the vision of the good "bursts upon him" after the lover has negotiated the steps of the ladder (Symp. 210e).

This is not to say that what elenchus effects in the soul is the mystical awakening of a spiritual faculty: as the philosophic lover's progress through the many logoi of beauty in the Symposium makes clear, the soul's purifica- tion by elenchus is identical with the development of its ability to reason abstractly. But the suggestion of both the Symposium and Republic, as far as they go, is that dialectic is best understood as a process of preparing the soul for a vision of the forms - not as a process of establishing truths about the forms by means of a proof-procedure. And if that is so, Robinson's worry vanishes. Knowledge comes of itself if the soul has been ap- propriately prepared; purification is the appropriate preparation; and purification is best accomplished by question-and-answer - j u s t as Plato would have it.

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4.

What I have offered is another sketch of Plato's position, more cursory than the first. But how far even a sketch takes us from Robinson's assertion that Plato's historical and individual circumstances are all that have shaped his view of philosophical method. No matter how we develop Plato's account of method, and no matter whether we accept it, we have no reason to accept Robinson's counsel that Plato has no account to give.

I conclude with a more general observation. If the history of philosophy teaches us anything, it is that the vision of knowledge as the "impersonal and universal and rational march" of an axiomatized science is at least as seductive as it is valuable. To the extent that we have this picture before our minds, we are likely to fault Plato - as does Robinson - for having an unsystematic and overly personal view of intellectual inquiry. But as we also know from recent work in the history and philosophy of science, preoccupation with Robinson's Aristotelian picture is dangerous: it tempts us to overlook what one recent writer describes as "the human side of our enterprise...as passionate creatures struggling with limited tools to under- stand a complex reality, not...robots programmed to convert objective information into immutable truth. ''10 1 do not mean by this that recent work in the history and philosophy of science is, in the well-worn phrase, nothing but a series of footnotes to Plato. But Plato has his eye squarely on the human side of the intellectual enterprise, and the personal nature of dialec- tic reflects the fact.

Notes

1. An earlier version of this essay was presented to the Pacific Division of the American Philosophical Association, March 1992.

2. Richard Robinson, Plato's Earlier Dialectic, 2nd ed. (Oxford: the Clarendon Press, 1953), pp. 75-84. In what follows, references to Robinson will be given in parentheses in the text as PED.

3. Both of which strategies Socratic interlocutors sometimes employ: compare Polus' behavior at Gorg. 426b--474b, and Meno's at Men. 75a-76b, 80d-e, and 86c--d.

4. Compare Plato's references to the danger of eristic at, for instance, Rep. 537dff.

5. The questions addressed to the lovers of sights and sounds at Rep. 479a-b and the puzzles proposed for believers in material aitiai at Phd. 96e-101d give us examples of the elenchi that might pry the soul loose from its infatuation with the physical, On the latter passage, see Gregory Vlastos, "Reasons and Causes in the Phaedo," in Platonic Studies, 2nd ed. (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1973), pp. 76-110, esp. pp. 95-102.

6. Compare Men. 85d on how geometrical knowledge is acquired: "this

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knowledge will not come from teaching, but from questioning." 7. Thus, for instance, Rep 538d-e, where Plato suggests that when they are first

tested with dialectic prospective rulers (1) will be asked and will have to answer questions as to the nature of the beautiful, the just, and so on; and (2) that upon giving their answers they will find themselves refuted often and in many different ways (... K~ ~rohh~L~ ~'~ ~ro2tttaX,~ ~lt~,X,.~v), 538d8-9).

8. Thus, at Rep. 534b-c, a necessary condition of apprehending the Good is supposed to be the ability to define the Good in conversation, to distinguish it from everything else, and to "run the gauntlet of all tests," as if in a battle, without making any mistakes in reasoning. To l~1 ~ereL~ora r~ ~ore~v eLNvat" ~L" o~ xtv~)vv~f~eL ~rd~ra 3¢a ~tavo,.'~ ~cb~X,kdt~eO~ y~'~veo'Oat rrao'tv, Soph. 229c5-6.

I0. Stephen Jay Gould, "Integrity and Mr. Riffdn," in An Urchin in the Storm (New York: Norton, 1987), p. 230.