Plato's Philosophers: The Coherence of the Dialogues is a deeply thoughtful work of extraordinarily careful scholarship, an 862-page book covering every one of Plato's thirty-five dialogues. And a book written by a good friend whom I've known for over thirty years. To treat it briefly is a daunting task, perhaps not tragic, but at the very least serious. On the other hand, the challenge is also liberating; the certainty of failure when faced with the impossible sometimes unleashes playfulness. Plato, at least, seems to have considered seriousness and play sisters.Footnote ¹

Let us, therefore, begin with an admittedly playful problem. Of the many people who have read Plato's Philosophers, very few seem to have read it straight through. Readers tend to start with the introduction, on Platonic dramaturgy, and then to turn to the interpretation of a specific dialogue, thereby conceding in principle its character as comprehensive while using it for specific purposes. Why? Some are puzzled about something in particular—to think about justice, for example, one might turn to chapter 5, section 3, on the Republic; some, pressed by time, might need help teaching a particular dialogue; some have a proprietary sense of “their” dialogue; some, not having read all of Plato, are wary doing things backward—of reading an interpretation before the text to be interpreted; some, skeptical of the general project of Plato's Philosophers, are keen to learn how it fails in the dialogue most familiar to them; some, of course, are just lazy—it is a big book. Each of these readers begins from a different place and then assumes that it is possible to understand a part, whether of Plato's or of Catherine Zuckert's writing, independent of the whole of which it is a part. And, of course, this assumption is neither uncommon nor stupid. Catherine Zuckert herself at one time had to have begun reading the dialogues one at a time. She almost certainly did not begin with the Laws and end with the Menexenus. Authors present their books to us as wholes. If we follow the rule of reading regularly invoked by Leo Strauss (on whom, of course, Professor Zuckert has coauthored two books),Footnote ² and we seek to understand authors as they understood themselves, should we not honor this wholeness?Footnote ³

And yet, even for Strauss, this rule is complicated. On the one hand, he speaks of the cosmos of Platonic dialogues, and his interpretations of one frequently allude to others, suggesting that they must be understood in relation to one another.Footnote ⁴ On the other hand, these interpretations often proceed as though each dialogue were a whole sufficient unto itself, providing internally everything necessary for a proper interpretation.Footnote ⁵ In addition, while Strauss does set as a goal to understand Plato as he understood himself, he nevertheless regularly invokes grand historical contexts alien to Plato to make the need for such understanding compelling—Ancients and Moderns, Jerusalem and Athens, the Crisis of the West.Footnote ⁶

In her way of reading of Plato, Catherine Zuckert calls our attention to the fact that a species of relation among certain of the dialogues is so explicit that it would be irresponsible not to interpret them in their connection to one another. However much the Sophist and the Statesman may be wholes, the two are clearly joined in a larger story. But, then, insofar as it is possible to provide dramatic dates for each Platonic dialogue, will not each be a piece of a larger story? Would it be so rash to suppose this to be the story of philosophy? Plato's Philosophers: The Coherence of the Dialogues means to tell us a long story by disclosing not some hypothetical order in which the dialogues were written, nor even an order in which it might be necessary to read them, but rather the order in which Plato himself indicates that they unfold dramatically in time. This is a larger drama in which each dialogue provides a scene. It takes as its protagonist, Socrates; as its plotline, his philosophical development; and as its theme, the superiority, in the end, of his mode of philosophy to that of other philosophers who have supporting roles—the Athenian Stranger, Parmenides, Timaeus, and the Eleatic Stranger. To take Plato seriously means to take seriously this poetry (Professor Zuckert, of course, has written a book on philosophy as literature).Footnote ⁷

On the one hand, that “it is not sufficient to read single dialogues in complete isolation from the others” (7) seems persuasive; on the other hand, we do, and must, read single dialogues as wholes independent of one another.Footnote ⁸ We must begin somewhere, and so, while we cannot know the part apart from the whole, it is equally true that we cannot know the whole other than by way its parts. And this perplexity with respect to knowledge shows up not only in how we read Plato but also in how we read Catherine Zuckert. Perhaps, then, we can begin to find our way into the whole of Plato's Philosophers by turning briefly to a part—Professor Zuckert's interpretation of the Platonic dialogue about knowledge, the Theaetetus.

Part 2 of Plato's Philosophers concludes with a reflection on the difference between Timaeus and Socrates. Professor Zuckert argues that in order to provide a cosmology, Timaeus understands generation as a form of intentional fabrication (586), thereby rendering the world too intelligible—too geometrical. While acknowledging his own erotic desire for learning, Timaeus does not sufficiently render the enormity of the power of eros, for if, under its influence, “all human sensation and cognition is affected, that is distorted, by time and space,” then, “rather than “look to the heavens,” Timaeus ought, like Socrates, to analyze “the structure and consequences of his own deepest and most distinguishing desire” (592). Philosophy, so understood, is the longing for self-knowledge. This contrast between Socrates and Timaeus introduces the final part of Plato's Philosophers, where “Plato … prepares his readers to ask whether the combination of speech (logos) and deed (ergon), sensation (aisthēsis) and intelligence (phronēsis or nous), motion (kinēsis or metabolē) and rest (stasis), represented by the dying Socrates does not give a better, because a nobler, more beautiful, and hence more attractive answer to the fundamental problems all of Plato's philosophers seek to address” (596).

Professor Zuckert begins with the question of the form of the Theaetetus, with the possible exception of the Symposium, the most complicated of any Platonic dialogue. The frame dialogue occurs long after Socrates's death, when seeing Theaetetus's life threatened by dysentery reminds Euclides that he is in possession of a written version of a conversation occurring years before between Socrates and the mathematicians Theodorus and Theaetetus (599). While in jail, Socrates narrated the conversation to Euclides, who then wrote down what he could remember restoring it to its dialogic form by removing all signs of Socrates's narration. Euclides then checked the result by questioning Socrates about what he had forgotten. An immediate experience is first mediated by narration and then edited by one for whom it was not an immediate experience so as to mimic the immediacy of the original. Euclides's own immediate experience, that is, the narration, is, in turn, mediated by way of his second visit to Socrates. He emends his own text. Of course, Plato is presenting the whole dialogue to us in a text, the Theaetetus, that gives the illusion of an immediacy, even though Plato is nowhere present. And finally, of course we experience the whole affair by way of a book. It is a wonderful Platonic joke that when Socrates asks Theaetetus from where he got his first definition of knowledge as perception, the strength of which is surely that it renders for us the way in which we somehow assume that true knowledge must be immediate and not mediated, Theaetetus immediately replies that he got it from a book.

Professor Zuckert sees many lessons to be learned from this formal complexity, but one stands out. Because “our knowledge of ourselves as well as of the world in which we find ourselves is necessarily and unavoidably mediated—by language as well as by written reports and our own faulty memories,” “our knowledge of the past is always going to be partial” (598). “We misconstrue what we have learned as an immediate impression rather than as the product of analyses and syntheses that occur in time” (598). This tension between knowledge as atemporal and knowledge as temporal, highlighted in the frame of the dialogue, foreshadows the epistemic tension within the dialogue between geometry and Socratic philosophy. Unlike Socratic philosophy, mathematical knowledge, or knowledge of things insofar as they are discrete and countable, seems unable to account for its own activity of questioning and opining, which, like closing one eye, and so simultaneously seeing and not seeing, require knowing that one does not know. Impressed by its own exactitude, geometrical knowledge reads its proofs backwards, as though the necessity admittedly present in the end applies as well to the beginning—as though every geometrical theorem admitted of only one possible proof. Socrates understands that even the knowledge of geometry comes to be in us in time, that proofs have to begin somewhere, and that even these beginnings depend on where the prover is—if Catherine (who, of course, also has written a book on postmodernity)Footnote ⁹ will forgive me, on one's Dasein, one's “being-there,” on the meaning of “mine.” It is perhaps not altogether accidental that in beginning to think about Plato's Philosophers, I should invoke a term from Being and Time, a book I have only just completed teaching. This, of course, need not mean that these thoughts on Zuckert have been diverted, not to say tainted, by my encounter with Heidegger. Still, it may have something to do with why, when tasked with thinking about Plato's Philosophers, I began from where I have begun. Even Socrates allows that man is, in some sense, the measure of all things. But if there is no privileged beginning point for learning, then understanding where we end up when we seek to know will involve investigating that, how, and why we began where we began. While this might seem to some insufficiently mindful of the eternal to be truly Platonic, at the same time, it is the way of every Platonic dialogue. The explicit question of a dialogue may never truly be answered, but the true origin of this question is nevertheless always disclosed. Self-knowledge stands in for knowledge. Lacking self-knowledge, mathematics, as impressive as it is, cannot be knowledge properly understood. Accordingly, “Socrates’ knowledge and investigations concern human characteristics and qualities—political and natural (or inherited). He has to ask not only about what is the case at present, but also about what people have been and can become in the future. His inquiries thus combine what is unchanging and therefore intelligible with what becomes” (604).

This is the problem of knowledge thematic not only in the Theaetetus but throughout Plato. To understand, “we have to organize things into types, which we mark by names.” We relate “the ever-changing character of sensible existence to stable, hence intelligible, types of being” (599). In the Theaetetus, this tension is taken up as the argument between Heraclitus and Parmenides. In the Sophist, it will show up most explicitly as the problematic togetherness of motion and rest, and in the Statesman, as the relation between the measure of the mean and the arithmetic measure, which, in turn, are echoed in the relation of the dialogue Statesman as a whole to the dialogue Sophist as a whole, which is to say in the relation of statesman to sophist, and so in the relation to one another of the two phantom images of the philosopher as a whole.

This is of course a very long story, too long to pursue here. In thinking, we pretend (perhaps even must pretend) that we are altogether at leisure. However, “Socrates knows that he is not at leisure; he has to go to the porch of the king to be indicted” (623). The Euthyphro is the next scene in Plato's epic drama. Socrates is on his way to court, and “those who speak in court have a set time in which to make their arguments” (623). But even if we are ignorant of its dimensions, do we not all have a set time for our arguments? It is because we are always in court that “reflections on the way human beings learn do not constitute necessary proofs” (638). An explanation of what a geometrical proof is “could not be given as a geometrical proof. … It would require a philosophical investigation of the kind in which Socrates engages” (639).

Catherine Zuckert has written a bold and ambitious book on Plato's philosophers—the Athenian Stranger, Parmenides, Timaeus, the Eleatic Stranger, and Socrates—that at the same time makes Socrates Plato's “chief philosophical protagonist” (861). In his thirty-five dialogues, Plato presents us with the philosophical unfolding of the life of Socrates. It is not clear that he means this to be the only way in which philosophy might have developed. Still, it does seem clear that Plato means to present us with a powerful representation of the way that the necessity for thinking to have beginnings, its unfolding in time, guarantees its incompleteness, for

Plato's account of Socrates's philosophical life, his “set time,” means to unfold for us that and why knowledge of the whole is not available to mortals. Try as we must to know the whole, we nevertheless only ever get parts masquerading as the whole. And yet at the same time, Plato's account shows us that and why, since it is not possible for mortals to live apart from some version of the whole in some way born of some version of “the desire to know,” grasping these parts sequentially and seeing their interrelation, we come to be aware of a partiality that would not be available to us without some intimation of the whole of which it is only a part. Understanding the necessary, albeit problematic, togetherness of this pair—of what moves us, on the one hand, to treat the Theaetetus as a whole and, at the same time, to understand it as the bridge between the Meno and the Euthyphro, on the other—is self-knowledge. This is the goal of Socratic philosophy, which is to say, for Plato, and (if I have understood her correctly) for Catherine Zuckert too, it is the goal of philosophy simply. Plato's Philosophers is an impressive book, from which one can learn much—whether by reading it through whole from beginning to end with some urgency and seriousness or by loitering at leisure playfully in one of its parts, or perhaps better still, by doing both, while at the same time remembering that we will always discover ourselves partly loitering when we think ourselves to be wholly in earnest.