Dialogue and Dialectics

In Greek literature, dialogue, or argument, is as old as Homer and the exchange between Achilles and Agamemnon in Iliad 1; it is a salient feature of both Attic comedy and tragedy. Philosophical dialogue began with the conversations Aristotle (384–322 B.C.E.) knew as the Sokratikoi logoi, a form of imitation (mimesis) that captured the conversations of Socrates. Although some of the dialogues of Plato and Xenophon (c. 431–c. 352 B.C.E.) claim to record a conversation of the historical Socrates and an interlocutor (or interlocutors), all the Socratic dialogues are literary fictions based on a reality we shall never recover.

The literary presentation of philosophical conversation had antecedents in the prose comedies of the Sicilian, Epicharmus (c. 530–c. 440 B.C.E.). Our first example of a Socratic conversation comes from Aristophanes's Clouds (423 B.C.E.), in which a fictional Socrates tests the intelligence and character of an older pupil. It is clear from their exchange that Socratic questioning was designed to test not only the intelligence but also the character of an interlocutor.

The "invention" of the dialogue form.

In antiquity there was a dispute over who was the "inventor" of the dialogue form as a vehicle for philosophy. Our knowledge of the rival claims to this honor goes back to Aristotle, who in his dialogue On Poets mentions Zeno of Elea (c. 495–c. 430 B.C.E.) as the founder of what he calls dialectic and an unknown Alexamenós as the "inventor" of the mimetic dialogue. According to Diogenes Laertius, a 3rd century B.C.E. Greek writer and source of information about the Greek philosophers, an Athenian cobbler called Simon was the first to represent the conversations of Socrates in "dialectic" form. Like Xenophon, Simon was regarded as a stenographer of conversations he merely overheard.

We know something too of the Socratic dialogues of Antisthenes (c. 445–c. 365 B.C.E.) and Aeschines Socraticus (4th cent. B.C.E.). Antisthenes certainly wrote before Plato. We have several citations from Aeschines' Alcibiades, which gives an example of the kind of characterization we find so brilliantly displayed in the Socratic dialogues of Plato. Xenophon's dialogues probably came after Plato's, during the long period of Xenophon's exile from Athens (a city he left in 401). These include his Apology, Symposium, Oeconomicus, the conversations of Books 2 through 4 of the Memorabilia (Memoirs of Socrates's conversations), and a brief passage from his Cyropaedia where we meet an Armenian Socrates (3.31.10–14;38). Both Antisthenes and Xenophon wrote quasi–philosophical dialogues in which Socrates was not a speaker; Antisthenes's Cyrus and Xenophon's Hiero are examples.

Thus, by the time he began to write his dialogues, Plato was one of many Socratics and writers of Socratic dialogues, but it was he who transformed the dialogue into a powerful instrument of philosophical inquiry. In his works, there is a distinction between the "Socratic" dialogues, in which Socrates figures as the principal speaker, and the late dialogues, in which he is either present but mainly silent (Sophist, Statesman, and the Timaeus/Critias) or from which he is absent (the Laws). Symptomatic of his disappearance in the Platonic dialogues are the long unbroken speeches of a dominant character that take up most of the Timaeus/Critias and the Laws, where we encounter Timaeus, Critias, and a stranger from Athens.

Alternatives to dialogue.

To appreciate the radical character of the Platonic dialogue, it is necessary to consider the alternatives to philosophical discourse available to Plato as he began to write his first Socratic dialogues, beginning perhaps with the Apology of Socrates, written just after the execution of his "older friend" in 399 B.C.E. In the context of the democratic culture of fifth–century Athens, alternatives included the long display speeches the sophists delivered before large audiences. Plato's Protagoras is a good example of this form of exposition given by a skilled speaker who brooks no interruption or interrogation. Another alternative was the philosophical treatise or poem. Anaxagoras (c. 500–c. 428 B.C.E.), a contemporary of Socrates, reveals no evidence of dialogue in his On Nature. The rhetoric of early philosophical poetry tends to unbroken hierophantic pronouncements by a philosopher poet who claims divine authority for what he says, as in the case of Parmenides (b. c. 515 B.C.E.) and Empedocles (c. 490–430B.C.E.), who actually claims that he is a god. Heraclitus (c. 540–c. 480 B.C.E.) claims his logos (discourse) is an expression of the higher Logos (principle of intelligibility).

As for "dialectic," the short anonymous treatise entitled Dissoi Logoi (Arguments for and against) is contemporary with the young Plato; but here, as in Protagoras's (c. 485–410 B.C.E.) more famous Antilogiai, dialectic or the art of argument serves as a primer for developing the ability to argue pro and con on any question. Some of the arguments of the Dissoi Logoi are important to the Platonic dialogues: for example, the question of whether virtue (aretē) can be taught is addressed in Plato's Meno. This handbook is an example of the training in logic given in the Academy and recorded in the eight books of Aristotle's Topics and Sophistical Refutations. All these works exercise the young in debate. They treat rules and types of argument (known as topoi), but these arguments are disembodied and lack the characterization that is so important a feature of the Platonic dialogues.