With Plato and the Elements of Dialogue, John Fritz continues the decades-long trend in Plato scholarship that attributes philosophical significance to the fact of the dramatic and dialogical form of Plato’s writings. He makes much of the fact that Plato does not write philosophical treatises that systematically argue for ideas directly put forward as his own, and that instead every utterance is subject to all the interpretive difficulties posed by the finite context of an oral discussion among particular characters who are situated in a particular time and place. Of course, it is no less important that readers consider the additional fact that Plato stands above the text with authorial control, imbuing all the apparent contingencies of human conversation with a deliberate significance that potentially transcends the conversation’s context. Readers’ interpretations must then constantly move between their awareness of the dialogue as an artfully crafted piece of writing by a single author and the content of that writing as nothing other than ex tempore speech among interlocutors.
For many readers, this approach to the significance of the form of Plato’s writings is already quite familiar. What distinguishes Fritz’s project is his concentration on the structural elements of the dialogue, namely character, time, and place, which have not as yet received the formal treatment he gives here. As opposed to conversational strategies a character might undertake in argument, Fritz focuses on the elements that shape what a character might be led to say, and the philosophical significance of this influence. He is not concerned with giving a thorough interpretation of a given text, but is instead showing how these elements can become causally effective in the direction and type of arguments made by specific characters.
The book is 193 pages long, including a 13 page appendix that puts forward a unique interpretation of the critique of writing in the Phaedrus as an example of what Fritz calls a “structural aporia” (181). The book is divided into seven chapters, with the chapter on character being by far the most substantial at 74 pages. His method proceeds by way of a general identification of the element in question, establishing its ubiquity in Plato’s corpus, and then demonstrating its importance by way of brief analyses of its operation in several selected texts.
In Chapter 2, on character, Fritz attributes significance to the exterior nature of oral speech, which gives only glimpses of a character’s inner life. The reader has little to no access to the inner monologue of the character, while particular visible signs, such as gestures, intonation, and other reactions give clues that possibly cast the character’s words in a different light. The possibility of a discrepancy between who a character is, his or her ethos, and the particular logos he or she says, leaves readers with an interpretative task that does not receive explicit direction from Plato as author. Fritz examines three possible types of relation between a character’s ethos and logos, namely identity, reciprocity, and rupture, each of which bear on how that logos should be interpreted. However, the most interesting component of the chapter is his analysis of displacement, which consists of a character speaking as though he or she were another person in his or her capacity to question or respond. Fritz shows the philosophical richness of this technique, which pushes the limitations that being a particular character places on the search for truth. In a certain manner, displacement models the very activity of thought understood as thinkers’ attempts to transcend their own limitations through dialogue with themselves, attempts that are only ever partially successful.
Chapters 3 to 5 examine time and place respectively. Here, similar considerations applied to the analysis of character are deployed with the necessary sensitivity to what distinguishes the elements. For example, Fritz shows how setting the Lysis partially outside the city has resonance and implications for our understanding of the dialogue’s theme: friendship. Likewise, he convincingly argues that setting the Phaedo in Socrates’ final hours ought to affect how we evaluate the success or failure of the arguments for the soul’s immortality. Of further interest here is Fritz’s reply to the objection that a text lacking any definite time or place, whose best example is the Philebus, somehow mitigates the importance of time and place for a dialogue’s meaning. A number of texts are indefinite with respect to their use of these elements, possibly suggesting the elements have a purely aesthetic significance for Plato’s thinking even when they are employed with more detail. Here Fritz shows how the nature of the Philebus’s discussion actually calls for this indefiniteness, making an apparent neglect of the elements philosophically significant.
Finally, Chapter 6 analyzes Plato’s use of frames, where a dialogue’s argument is situated within a different time and place and among different characters than those who open the dialogue. Like character displacement, this is another way that Plato is able to mitigate some of the limitations his commitment to the dialogue form imposes. He is able to bring factors technically outside the context of the drama’s argument to bear on our evaluation of it, without violating his adherence to human particularity that defines his conception of what philosophical activity is.
Plato and the Elements of Dialogue is accessible, intuitively structured, and would serve as an excellent preparatory text for those who wish to make use of the turn to the significance of Plato’s literary form of writing for the content of his thought. While some might question Fritz’s methodological suspension of key problems in Plato scholarship, he more or less maintains a critical distance from arguments over what Plato’s philosophical teaching is. This makes the book ideal for those hoping to equip themselves with interpretative tools before becoming too entangled in the sorts of controversies that destabilizing Plato’s texts by recourse to his form of writing tend to engender.
