Uses of Dialogue; or, Why We Love Plato
The author would like to thank Kyrke Otto and the Splijtstof editorial team for their valuable comments on an earlier version of this paper.
Why do we love Plato? To the historian of philosophy, this must come across as a strange, if not out-of-place question. Not because he or she would necessarily deny its premise, but because our affective ties to the works of Plato are considered to be a private rather than a professional affair. Let us therefore slightly displace the question: why, after almost twenty-five centuries, do we still read Plato? Why is he still so prominent in philosophical research and study programs? Responses to such questions generally resort to one of two arguments, or a combination of those:
(1) We still read Plato because of the decisive theoretical and methodological mark he left on the further course of the history of philosophy. As The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy has it: ‘‘Plato […] is, by any reckoning […] one of the most […] influential authors in the history of philosophy’’ (Kraut 2022). In every historical period, philosophers have deemed Plato to be a valuable or even indispensable interlocutor. And as the Encyclopaedia Britannica endorses: Plato is ‘‘best known as the author of philosophical works of unparalleled influence’’ (Meinwald 2023). I will call this the historical resonance account. It is exemplified by Whitehead’s renowned witticism that ‘‘the European philosophical tradition […] consists of a series of footnotes to Plato’’ (Whitehead 1978, 39).
(2) We still read Plato because his arguments remain an indispensable point of reference in contemporary discourse. This rationale is illustrated by the effort of ancient philosophy scholars to reinsert and reevaluate Plato’s arguments in new contexts (such as his arguments against democracy in the context of political epistemology [Nawar 2023]). I will call this the argumentative touchstone account. The aim of this paper, then, is twofold: first, to demonstrate that both of these accounts are reductionistic; and second, to develop a more comprehensive justification for why we still read Plato’s dialogues today.
Such a comprehensive account is warranted because the present-day significance of Plato extends far beyond his historical importance and the relevance of his arguments. Departing from such theoretical accounts, I will turn to the work of literary scholar Rita Felski to sketch the contours of an aesthetic rather than theoretical account of why we still read Plato today: an account that revives the literary character of the Platonic dialogues so often neglected in philosophy. Felski’s work is well suited for such a task, since her intellectual project may be described as an attempt to supplement the detachment of academic practices of interpretation with the attachment characterizing our ordinary engagement with texts and other artworks (see e.g. Felski 2008; 2020). In remainder of this paper, I will employ parts of this project to argue that both the historical resonance account (§1) and the argumentative touchstone account (§2) fail to do justice to the rich aesthetic experience reading Plato is. Subsequently, I take inspiration from Felski’s theory of attachment to highlight some of the affective responses involved in the encounter with Plato’s dialogues (§3).
This paper is one of the first to transpose Felski’s efforts within the domain of philosophy. My hypothesis is that Plato is perhaps one of the best authors for doing so, since, as Vittorio Hösle remarks, his dialogues constitute a bridge between literary studies and philosophy in that the philosophical dialogue is, after all, a literary genre (Hösle 2012, xv-xvi). I will engage more extensively with Hösle’s study of the Platonic dialogues later. For now, I would like to warn the reader that this paper is not about interpreting the dialogues of Plato. Rather, it is about describing what these dialogues do (i.e. what responses they incite in the reader) and why they matter. Since Felski initially captured her project under the heading Uses of Literature, I have called the project initiated in this paper Uses of Dialogue.
§1. From Historical Resonance to Present-Day Relevance
That Plato is one of the most influential thinkers in the history of philosophy is undeniable. In nearly every period, from ancient to contemporary philosophy, his works gained traction as objects of inspiration, critique, commentary, exegesis, parody, deconstruction, and so on. Nevertheless, as an explanation for why we still read Plato today, such a historical resonance account is insufficient, because it relies on a narrow concept of history. In this section, I will argue for this claim by drawing on Felski’s article “Context Stinks!”, that tries to break the spell of the text/context distinction she believes is holding literary studies captive. My focus, however, will be on another central distinction in this text: the one between past and present.
Within philosophy programs, students’ first systematic encounter with Plato often takes place in a course on the history of ancient philosophy. The founding father of philosophy is situated in ancient Greece, alongside Socrates, Aristotle, the Athenian agora and democracy, the Peloponnesian War and the Greek pantheon at Mount Olympus. This is to say that Plato is located in his historical context, which is in many respects utterly different from our times. Literary scholar Wai Chee Dimock calls this phenomenon “synchronic historicism,” since a text and its meaning are deemed to be coextensive with their original context of production. “The object of inquiry is dated,” Dimock (1997, 1061) writes. “Its reference points are events that began and ended in its original context.’’ According to Felski, such a model of history takes context to be “a kind of box or container in which individual texts are encased and held fast” (Felski 2011, 577).
However, the historical resonance account goes beyond synchronic historicism, because it draws our attention to the fact that Plato’s ideas crossed the borders of ancient philosophy to resonate in other historical periods. This is reflected institutionally in that the name Plato often resurfaces in both historical and systematic philosophy courses in the wake of ancient philosophy. In this sense, the historical resonance account comes close to what Dimock calls “diachronic historicism,” which depicts texts as time travelers that speak differently to new historical audiences (cf. Dimock 1997, 1061ff). On this account, however, history is still perceived as a “vertical pile of neatly stacked boxes” (Felski 2011, 577) we tend to refer to as the past in contradistinction with the present.
Having arrived at this point, we begin to see in what sense the historical resonance account is reductionistic. Although it can very well explain the relevance of Plato for understanding the history of philosophy, it is hard-pressed to give an account of how Plato is able to create attachments in the present. With its gaze turned towards to the past, the historical resonance account fails to provide an answer to questions related to the present-day relevance of texts:
Why has this work been chosen for interpretation? How does it speak to me now? What is its value in the present? To focus only on a work’s origins is to side-step the question of its appeal to the present-day reader. It is, in a Nietzschean sense, to use history as an alibi, a way of circumventing the question of one’s own attachments, investments, and vulnerabilities as a reader (Felski 2008, 10).
Note that Felski does not consider history unimportant. The historical resonance account is not wrong, but incomplete, in so far as it evades “the question of why past texts still matter and how they speak to us now” (Felski 2011, 577). Hence, it cannot fully account for why we read Plato today.
In addition to its focus on present relevance rather than past resonance, Felski’s theory is also better equipped to explain Plato’s present-day appeal because of its concept of agency. The historical resonance account downgrades the agency of a text in favor of the explanatory power of context:[1] the reception of Plato in the middle ages, for example, is often explained by reference to the theological concerns that were central to the time, rather than the ability of Plato’s dialogues to elicit emotions and affections. In Felski’s account, the center of gravity is shifted to the agency or power of texts. Drawing on Bruno Latour’s Actor-Network Theory – originally developed as a methodology for social science studies –, Felski proposes to see texts as non-human actors rather than as objects to be explained (cf. Felski 2011, 582ff). This revaluation of agency then allows Felski to explain why some texts survive, and others disappear. That is, quite simply, because the former are much better at establishing connections: “Artworks can only survive and thrive,” Felski remarks, “by making friends, creating allies, attracting disciples, inciting attachments, latching on to receptive hosts” (Felski 2011, 584). But how do Platonic dialogues do this?
§2. From Theoretical Interpretation to Aesthetic Attachment
How do Plato’s dialogues create attachments? What is it in these ancient works that attracts present-day readers? We have arrived at the preliminary conclusion that for answering such questions, resorting to historical resonance is insufficient, since it fails to account for Plato’s contemporary appeal. Hence, we might better focus our attention on the dialogues themselves. In this respect, the argumentative touchstone account seems to be a better candidate than the historical resonance account to explain why we still read Plato’s dialogues today. This account emphasizes that since the arguments of Plato’s Socrates are still relevant for contemporary concerns and discourses, one should definitely take note of them within philosophical research and education. In this section, I will argue that such reasoning is aesthetically reductionistic, by drawing on Felski as well as others.
Why is the argumentative touchstone account reductionistic? First of all, because it tends to reduce Plato’s dialogues to their argumentative content. As the philosopher Lawrence M. Hinman has suggested in the 1980s, this tendency may very well be the product of the wide-spread assumption among especially analytic philosophers that “a philosopher’s style is, at best, something which obscures the structure of his arguments”. As a result, Hinman notes, some historians of philosophy tend to purify a philosopher’s oeuvre of its stylistic elements:
While no one claims that Plato was writing pieces for Analysis, many read and write about him as though he were doing precisely that. In a curious version of the patchwork thesis, the dialogues come to be treated as an aggregate of three and one half page articles which were presumably gathered together for Oxford University Press (Hinman 1980, 512).[2]
In this passage, Hinman mobilizes an equally widespread assumption among philosophers: that in isolating the argumentative content of Plato’s dialogues something essential gets lost; something which is often referred to as form, style, or more generally: poetics or aesthetics.
Hösle provides additional support for this assumption in his juxtaposition of theoretical and aesthetic analysis. Acknowledging that the Platonic dialogues have an aesthetic quality, he counts them among a small group of “philosophical texts that must be enjoyed as works of art, that is, to which injustice is rendered if only their argumentative content is analyzed” (Hösle 2012, 2; my emphasis).[3] This group includes texts that obviously are about something, such as rhetoric or poetry, but also have a rhetoric or poetic quality themselves. Plato’s Phaedrus is a strong example of this.
However, this is not to say that a theoretical analysis of, for example, Plato’s Phaedrus would be irrelevant. The Platonic dialogues do contain truth claims that any scholarly engagement with them should respect and account for. Hence the argumentative touchstone account is, just like the historical resonance account, not wrong, but incomplete, in that it rules out the aesthetic features of Plato’s work. Yet, these aesthetic features might not only be pivotal for explaining the present-day appeal of Plato, but also, as Hösle points out, for understanding his arguments in the first place, for example when literary devices are used to bestow certain claims with greater authority than others. Hence, the argumentative touchstone account is founded on a denial of its own conditions of possibility.
Felski’s analyses, in turn, render the argumentative touchstone account reductionistic in yet another, and perhaps even more radical sense. By operating at the level of the encounter between reader and text rather than that of the form and/or content of the latter, they debunk academic analysis, of both a theoretical and aesthetic nature, as just one aspect of our aesthetic engagements. This insight is first articulated in Uses of Literature, where “knowledge” is only one type of textual engagement amongst many others, such as recognition, enchantment, and shock. From this perspective, the argumentative touchstone account diminishes the Platonic dialogues to a source of knowledge – something which they obviously are, but not exclusively. Now this also means that the cognitive aspects of aesthetic response are absolutized at the expense of many affective ones (cf. Felski 2020, 16, et passim). As such, Plato’s lively corpus becomes a corpse; a dead body to be dissected (Felski 2020, 152).
However, Uses of Literature packs less of a punch than it could possibly deliver in the face of the argumentative touchstone account. This it because it fails to explain how the forms of textual engagement that it describes are connected. Hooked, Felski’s latest book, rectifies this shortcoming by revealing how interpretation and attachment, for example, are intertwined. Against the widespread view “that attachment is an obstacle to interpretation,” Felski argues that it is actually its condition of possibility: “What we choose to decipher, how we decipher it, and to what end—these decisions are driven by what we feel affinity for, what resonates. Interpreting is far from being a purely cognitive exercise” (Felski 2020, 126, 128). Affection precedes interpretation, given, of course, that one is free to choose what to read, interpret, and write about.
In this sense, the argumentative touchstone account simply defers the question of why we still read Plato today. It emphasizes that Platonic arguments are an indispensable reference point for contemporary scholarship, but it does not explain how we are driven to these arguments and the literary worlds in which they appear in the first place. To develop a comprehensive account of why Plato is so successful in “making friends, creating allies, attracting disciples, inciting attachments, latching on to receptive hosts” – to reprise an earlier quote –, it seems we must turn our attention to the affective rather than cognitive aspects of our engagement with Plato.
§3. From Authorial Intent to Readerly Response
In the preceding sections, I argued that both (1) the historical resonance account and (2) the argumentative touchstone account are reductionistic. Indeed, Plato is markedly influential in the history of philosophy, but what about his present-day appeal? Sure, Plato’s dialogues give us much to interpret, “but what about love?”, we might ask. “Or: “Where is your theory of attachment?” (Felski 2015, 17).[4] The upshot of our inquiry up to now has been that understanding Plato’s appeal requires an analysis of the affective responses involved in reading his dialogues. In this section, I will take a first step in this direction, by drawing on Hösle’s aesthetic analysis of the Platonic dialogues to elicit and explain such readerly responses. My hypothesis is that it is because of its literary qualities – use of characters, setting, style, etc. – that Plato’s oeuvre is so successful in creating attachments in present-day readers, and academics in particular.
First of all, what is attachment? Felski provides a bridge between the previous section and this one when she connects the supposed detachment of the academic world with a definition of attachment. “In its most obvious sense,” Felski writes, “attachment denotes an emotional tie: whether passions and obsessions or low-key moods and lukewarm likes.” A little later, she adds: “Against the usual portrayal of academia as an affect-free zone, I would venture that affective ties are often stronger in academia than elsewhere” (Felski 2020, 28). Against this background, let us now consider the case of Hösle’s study of the Platonic dialogues in a little more detail, since he holds an ambivalent position with regard to the affective power of Plato’s writings.
In his capacity as reader, Hösle is clearly affected, inspired, or energized by the dialogues of Plato. He uses words like “overwhelming,” “fascinating,” and “astonishing,” to describe the experience of reading Plato, which seem to designate not just a cognitive tie, but also an emotional or affective one. And Hösle makes no secret of his appreciation of Plato when he writes about the Charmides and Euthydemus that “they are so perfect that one is sometimes astonished that a human being was able to compose them” (Hösle 2012, 432). However, in his capacity as a scholar, Hösle does not account for this aesthetic experience. Most of the book is devoted to a formal analysis of the dialogues and their relation to the intentions of the composer (Plato). Thus, it treats the relation between the dialogues and their effect on the reader only indirectly, while from a Felskian perspective, affective readerly responses trigger such formal analyses of authorial intent in the first place: they are its unacknowledged condition of possibility.
It is about time, then, that we shift the center of gravity from authorial intent to readerly response; from aesthetic qualities to aesthetic experience. In doing so, we must not dwell on the cognitive dimensions of this experience. Admittedly, Plato’s dialogues incite us to think; they provide us with an indispensable philosophical vocabulary, but they also make us feel; they speak to our senses. Therefore, a comprehensive account of why we still read Plato today should “begin to engage the affective and absorptive, the sensuous and somatic qualities of aesthetic experience” (Felski 2011, 76). In the remainder of this section, I will therefore single out three types of textual engagement with Plato, combining the work of Hösle and Felski: (1) identification, (2) enchantment, and (3) shock. We might also call these aesthetic responses uses of dialogue.[5]
(1) Plato’s dialogues enable readers to identify with its characters. Though many of Plato’s characters were real historical persons, their realism is not a precondition for identification. “The draw of character,” Felski (2020, 80) notes, “has far less to do with realism than with qualities of vividness and distinctiveness,” and Plato is very good at staging both vivid and distinctive characters. Consider, for example, the speakers in Plato’s Symposium: Phaedrus, Pausanias, Eryximachus, Aristophanes, Agathon, Socrates, and Alcibiades. Each of them gives not just a distinctive speech about eros, but also has some character quirks of its own: standing still at random times (Socrates), being a weak (Eryximachus) or a strong drinker (Aristophanes), hitting on Socrates (Alcibiades), etc. It is precisely because of such literary descriptions that Plato’s writings are able to forge affective ties, from scholars identifying with Socrates’ lofty philosophical character to feeling compassion for Phaedo, Crito, or Apollodorus, when they are unable to restrain their tears at the moment this same character is forced to drink his cup of poison. Yet another example would be the famous part of the Meno where Socrates guides an enslaved boy in solving a geometry problem to show that learning is merely recollection. Socrates’ step-by-step instruction invites the reader to identify with this enslaved boy, thus making it easier to be convinced by Plato’s arguments for the immortality of the soul. Plato’s use of the literary genre of the philosophical dialogue is indispensable for rendering such forms of identification possible. While in Aristotle’s Metaphysics (and many other works of philosophy for that matter), there is little to identify with, Plato’s dialogues offer a wide range of possibilities for identification.
(2) Plato’s dialogues also have a distinctive capacity to enchant their readers. “Immersed in the virtual reality of a fictional text, a reader feels herself to be transported, caught up, or swept away” (Felski 2011, 34-5). In just a few paragraphs, Plato takes us to the Greek wrestling school (Lysis), Socrates’ death cell (Phaedo), the Athenian countryside (Phaedrus), or a formal drinking party (Symposium), offering us – for the time of reading – an escape to another world. Noteworthy, too, is the setting of the Laws, where the dialogue takes place during a pilgrimage from the city of Knossos to the temple of Zeus on Mount Ida, and that of the Protagoras. Before going to the home of Callias, where the great sophist Protagoras is staying, Socrates first needs to calm down his younger friend Hippocrates, who knocked on his door in the middle of the night to go and see Protagoras. During this initial discussion, it is difficult not to be affected by Hippocrates’ excessive excitement about Protagoras being in town. Interestingly enough, Hösle often invokes this “use” of the Platonic dialogues, such as when he remarks, though in passing, that Plato’s Symposium “still enchants us almost 2,400 years later” (Hösle 2012, 461). Another example can be found in his discussion of the Phaedrus in the chapter devoted to “The Space of Conversation.” In this dialogue, Hösle (2012) claims – again in passing –, “Plato offers one of the most enchanting descriptions of a landscape in all of Greek literature, which appeals in a few lines to the senses of sight, smell, taste, and hearing” (224). Here, it is Plato’s use of setting, which is a stylistic or literary device, that evokes the (sensuous) readerly response of enchantment.
(3) Plato’s dialogues, however, can also trigger aesthetic responses that are less pleasant: they can disturb or even shock us. Such responses can result from the extremity of positions defended by some of Plato’s characters, such as Thrasymachus in the Republic and Callicles in the Gorgias, who forcefully argue for the reason of the strongest. Or, they may be triggered by certain performative contradictions, such as when Socrates condemns writing at the end of the Phaedrus, while the reader has approximately 35 dialogues at their disposal that were written by Plato. Furthermore, disturbance or shock can also be the result of a clash between our current ethical milieu and the one in which the dialogue we are reading is embedded. Examples that come to mind are the references to enslaved people in Plato’s dialogues, and his treatment of the task and place of woman in the Republic, where Plato’s Socrates argues that they must be the joint property of the guardians (not to mention Socrates’ ideas about state-regulated human reproduction). Yet, as Hösle remarks, Plato’s position as an author may very well be ambiguous in such cases, as an initial disturbance or shock can be followed by a moment of critical reflection. “Plato doubtless considered the institution of slavery justified,” he writes, “but by showing that the slave in the Meno is capable of anamnesis, he unintentionally forces the reflective reader to ask why some people may be held as slaves, even if their intellectual gifts are not essentially different from those of free persons” (Hösle 2012, 461). This is an excellent example of how affective and cognitive responses; feeling and thought can become intertwined in the aesthetic experience of reading Plato’s dialogues.
In fact, Felski is well-aware that neatly separating different aesthetic responses or textual engagements fails to do justice to their relatedness and complexity. “I venture that aesthetic value is inseparable from use,” she notes at the beginning of Uses of Literature, “but also that
our engagements with texts are extraordinarily varied, complex, and often unpredictable in kind” (Felski 2011, 8). The three responses I discussed should therefore be elaborated and expanded upon, in order to provide a more comprehensive account of how Plato captures, enchants, shocks, interests, entertains, arouses, surprises, moves, and obsesses us – or at least many of us.
Conclusion
In this paper, I have mobilized the work of literary scholar Rita Felski to argue that both the historical resonance account and the argumentative touchstone account are deficient in their answer to the question why we still read Plato today. Furthermore, I have developed a more comprehensive justification for why Plato features so prominently in philosophical research and study programs. According to the historical resonance account, we still read Plato today because of the decisive mark he left on the further course of the history of philosophy. This answer is reductionistic, in that it fails to account for why Plato appeals to us in the present.
According to the argumentative touchstone account, we continue to study Plato because his
arguments remain for us an indispensable point of reference. This response is reductionistic as well, in at least two respects. First, in that it reduces the dialogues to their argumentative content, thus leaving their aesthetic features and appeal unaccounted for. Second, in that it reduces our textual engagement with Plato’s dialogues to one of theoretical interpretation. Hence, it fails to account for our affective rather than cognitive ties to the writings of Plato.
Vittorio Hösle’s study of the literary genre of the philosophical dialogue turned out to be a necessary, but insufficient condition for explaining Plato’s present-day appeal. Necessary, because he goes beyond the historical resonance account and the argumentative touchstone account in focusing on the form rather than the content of the Platonic dialogues. Insufficient, because he connects the aesthetic features of the dialogues solely to authorial intent. That is, according to Hösle, we still read Plato today because he is such a magnificent writer. In the end, this answer is reductionistic as well, because it fails to account for the relation between the literary character of Plato’s work and the affective responses it triggers in the reader. My hypothesis was that it is because of its literary qualities – use of characters, setting, style, etc. – that Plato’s oeuvre is so successful in creating various attachments in present-day readers.
To put this hypothesis to the test, I isolated three uses of dialogue; three aesthetic responses involved in reading Plato’s dialogues: identification, enchantment, and shock. Establishing a connection between the aesthetic value of the dialogues and their use, I argued, is the first step towards a more comprehensive account of why we still read Plato today. The Felskian perspective I adopted in this paper allows us to see that Plato’s present-day appeal does not lie in his historical importance or the contemporary relevance of his arguments. Rather, it lies in the fact that we can identify with Plato’s characters; that we can become enchanted by the settings of Plato’s dialogues; and that we can be shocked by the customs and values we encounter there. We still read Plato today because of the affective and absorptive experience he provides us.
In fact, a Felskian account is preferable, because it can incorporate the historical resonance account and the argumentative touchstone account, whilst having an additional advantage. First, it can incorporate and explain Plato’s transgression of temporal boundaries, by means of its methodological embracement of Actor-Network Theory, and its attribution of agency to texts in particular. That Plato has been markedly influential in the history of philosophy, is – from Felski’s point of view – because his dialogues have a distinctive capacity to attach themselves to other actors, such as readers and writers, copyists and publishers, translators and parodists. Second, a Felskian reply is able to incorporate and explain the argumentative touchstone account, by acknowledging that theoretical interpretation is one of our textual engagements with Plato, alongside many others. However, it also draws our attention to the affective ties underlying such analyses: that we continue to refer to Plato’s arguments, we might say, has much to do with the literary worlds in which they appear.
Besides its explanatory potential, a Felskian account also has an additional advantage, in that it enables us to answer the question with which we started this paper. Why do we love Plato? The historical resonance- and argumentative touchstone account are hard-pressed to provide an answer to such a question, consequently rendering the question itself misplaced. From a Felskian perspective, however, this question is only logical, while its answer is easy: we do not love Plato because of his influence or his arguments, but because of his vivid and distinctive characters with which we can identify. We love Plato, because his dialogues offer us an escape from our everyday reality and an acquaintance with a long-gone past. We love Plato, because after almost 2,400 years, his works have lost none of their capacity to enchant, amuse, disturb, or shock us. We love Plato, because his use of stylistic devices still hooks us.
In short, Plato’s dialogues deserve to be studied and taught, not because of their canonical status, but because they make us think and feel differently; because they cause perceptual changes and elicit our emotions; because they create affective ties and incite attachments. Their value lies not just their content or form, I contend, but also in their use – which is vital but understudied. My hope is that transposing Felski’s project within philosophy enables us to fill this lacuna.
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[1] Felski (2011) levels this critique against ‘‘Birmingham-style cultural studies and its model of articulation theory’’ (581), but I believe it can be applied to the historical resonance account as well.
[2] The ‘patchwork thesis’ is the idea in Kant-scholarship that Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason can be seen as a ‘patchwork’ of his earlier, pre-critical writings.
[3] See for this point, which is elaborated in the next paragraph, also Chapter 3: ‘‘On the Relationship between Form and Content in the Philosophical Dialogue,’’ especially 51ff.
[4] Felski raises these questions in the context of her polemic against engagements with literature that focus on ‘‘agon (conflict and domination) at the expense of eros (love and connection),’’ such as, for example, postcolonial-feminist critics. Here, I oppose them to the supposed detachment of interpretation.
[5] ‘‘Use’’ should be understood here in a broad sense, as having to do with the value of, in this case, philosophical dialogues for individual readers (which is my focus here) or society as a whole. Cf. Felski (2011), 7-8.