The papers in this volume originate from a long-term research project in Bergen, which brought together a number of established and younger Plato scholars under the heading Poetry and Philosophy: Poetical and Argumentative Elements in Plato's Philosophy. The resulting volume comprises thirteen highly diverse chapters, all relating, in one way or another, to the literary aspects of Plato's dialogues, mainly as a means of illuminating philosophical or argumentative points. To give an impression of the range of this volume, I will briefly summarise the papers before discussing some aspects of the volume as a whole.
The volume is divided into four thematic sections, of which the first, ‘Genre and the Philosophical Dialogue’, focuses mainly on Plato and poetry. D.A. Hyland offers a detailed reading of Aristophanes’ speech in the Symposium, arguing that its view of eros is ultimately tragic because it cannot be fulfilled or understood and therefore consigns the human race to a form of resigned acceptance. E. Irrera sets out to demonstrate how the early speeches in the Symposium are to be read as a continuous progression that culminates in Diotima's speech and in turn reflects Plato's own philosophical writing as a ‘self-defending logos’ (p. 30). H.W. Ausland explores the (mis)use of Homer in the Apology and Crito in light of the accusations against Socrates, while J. Howland explores parallels between the censoring of the poets in the Republic and the theme of censorship in von Donnersmarck's 2006 film Das Leben der Anderen.
The second section, ‘Virtue and Soul-shaping’, opens with P. Woodruff's reading of Phaedrus 247a–b, the contemplation of the hyperuranian spectacle, as a theatre, which elucidates the ‘anti-tragic’ aesthetics of dialogue and the virtues it promotes. J.K. Larsen reads the Gigantomachia passage in the Sophist as an explanation aimed at Theaetetus, rather than a simple exposition of the Eleatic stranger's own beliefs, while Ågotnes offers an interpretation of the Symposium based on its use of encomium as a genre, which is inherently connected to honour and thus ultimately incompatible with Plato's own views (Ågotnes’ Plato therefore remains ironically distanced from his characters).
The third section, ‘Reason and Irrationality’, opens with K. Sampson's piece on music in Plato; this paper focuses on Plato's ambiguous attitude to music (rather than, say, technical or theoretical aspects). Next, C. Freeland examines Plato's view on pleasure across various dialogues; she argues that the view of pleasure in the Philebus makes room for a proper appreciation of art, unlike the replenishment view of pleasure in the earlier dialogues. Finally, Fossheim provides a reading of the Phaedo that explores the contrast between the rational outlook in the philosophical dialogue with the use of myth and charms, which, he argues, substantially circumscribes the role of reason in the dialogue.
‘Place and Displacement’, the fourth and final section, begins with a paper by E. Breidal on the significance of topos and atopia in the Phaedrus, first as described in the prologue and later as metaphors for the soul's place in the world. G. Rørstadbotten then argues, through a subversive reading of the prologue of the Sophist, that the Eleatic stranger is a sophist rather than a philosopher. This reading is immediately countered by J. Sallis who, in the final paper of the volume, takes the stranger in the Sophist to be a philosopher and goes on to discuss the appearance of the philosopher in the dialogue on this basis.
This brief overview gives an impression of the range and diversity of the book as a whole. This range is surely the volume's strength, but also reveals its weakness as a volume that purports to be about the interpretation of Plato. Thus, while all the pieces are rich in suggestions and worthy of attention in their own right, there is little general discussion of literary or cultural approaches to the analysis of Plato's text.
The introduction, where one could perhaps expect such a discussion, instead points to some very general ‘literary’ features of the Platonic texts, such as dialogue form and Plato's use of irony and myth, to show that ‘argumentation in the strict sense does not exhaust the philosophical meaning of the dialogue’ (p. 1). I found this level of generality somewhat perplexing in a volume that sets out to advance a literary approach to Plato. The dichotomy between literary and purely philosophical readings of Plato strikes me as a false one. No reader would disagree that the dialogues are literary constructs – or, as the editors put it, ‘vehicles of Plato's philosophical investigations’ – rather than historically true reports (p. 3), or that the dialogue form demands a different engagement with the text than would a philosophical treatise (p. 7). By focusing on the obvious fact that Plato's dialogues are literary constructs in this very general sense, the editors regrettably miss the chance to provide a more nuanced discussion of ‘literary’ approaches to Plato and to relate the contributions in the volume to the very substantial amount of scholarly work in the field that has accrued over the last four decades. I was, for instance, surprised not to find any discussion of the influential work of, for example, C. Kahn (Plato and the Socratic Dialogue [1996]), A. Nightingale (Genres in Dialogue [1995]) and R. Blondell (The Play of Characters in Plato's Dialogues [2002]) in a book about Plato's use of the dialogue form. Thus, if one reads the book with the expectation that it will provide some general reflection on the application of textual and cultural analyses to elucidate the meaning(s) of Plato's texts, one is likely to be disappointed.
This lack of a more detailed discussion is unfortunate because the papers, when read together, display an excitingly broad field of interpretation, and the differences between them often raise interesting questions about the application of cultural and literary analysis to Plato's texts, but it is left to readers to navigate this field on their own. For instance, the two pieces about speeches in the Symposium reach not only different, but diametrically opposite conclusions about the value and effectiveness of speeches as a means of philosophical communication: is Diotima's speech, as ventriloquised by Socrates, the ultimate philosophical logos (Irrera) or an inherently inadequate medium for philosophical communication (Ågotnes)? The answer depends, for the two authors, on whether we read Diotima's speech as an example of the ideal form of speech-writing discussed in the Phaedrus or as a piece of rhetoric that is as such inextricably linked to an essentially un-Platonic economy of honour and praise. These two very different perspectives on the same text raise interesting questions about the use and usefulness of literary and cultural analysis in the interpretation of dialogue. The Phaedrus provides a good model for Irrera's interpretation of Diotima's speech in relation to the previous speeches, but does not account for the dialogue as a whole (why, on her view, does Plato's text include more than Diotima's speech if it is indeed a self-defending logos, and, in particular, why did Plato end his dialogue with Alcibiades’ famously subversive portrait of Socrates?). On the other hand, the Phaedrus does provide a perspective on rhetoric used for philosophical purposes, which Ågotnes’ view of rhetoric does not take into account. One could also compare the Gorgias’ idea of rhetoric that aims at the good as an example of rhetoric which is not intrinsically opposed to philosophy.
Contradictory readings of the same text are also given in the two final papers on the Sophist. Rørstadbotten's subversive reading of the Eleatic stranger as a sophist contradicts Sallis's view of this character as a manifestation of the philosopher. Overall, Sallis's reading emerges as the more convincing because it adequately relates the prologue to the dialogue as a whole, while I found it difficult to reconcile Rørstadbotten's (overly) subtle intertextual and ironic reading of the prologue with the dialogue as a whole (and the stranger's role in the Statesman).
The interpretation of Plato's poetics is perhaps on firmer ground in the papers that explore Plato's own text in light of his critique of the poets. This might be a familiar approach to Plato's writing, though these chapters are evidence that it is still a fruitful one. Hyland finds in Aristophanes’ speech in the Symposium the same ‘classical conservatism’ (p. 16) that he also detects in Aristophanic comedy. According to Hyland, Aristophanes’ comical picture of the human race consigns the individual to a search for its lost other half, without any expectation of true fulfilment or even understanding of its desire. This resigned view on the human condition emerges as a fundamentally tragic one when read against Socrates’ account of eros as a force that leads to continuous understanding and self-knowledge. The tragicomedy for Hyland thus resides in the comic writer's inability to recognise and interrogate human desire. Woodruff's elegant reading of the hyperuranian spectacle at Phaedrus 247a–b as an ‘inverted theatre’ illuminatingly explains how the aesthetics of Plato's own myth in the dialogue is created in contrast to the Athenian tragic stage in order to promote a very different mythology and a divine paradigm for human virtue. Ausland's thorough reading of the Apology and the Crito illustrates the depth of this opposition to the poets by arguing that the perceived misuse of the poets was part of the charge against Socrates, and Ausland offers a subtle interpretation of the use of Homer in these dialogues in that light.
Finally, Freeland's piece on pleasure and images deserves mention precisely because it does not actually take the literary format of the dialogue into account at all, but rather focuses on the philosophical argument in a range of dialogues from the Phaedo to the Philebus. However, her argument that Plato develops his view of pleasure so as to account for the pleasures of the mind is careful and, to my mind, largely convincing. She reads passages from a number of dialogues to show that the Philebus’ account of the pure pleasures, which differs from the replenishment view of the earlier dialogues, is developed gradually in order to account not only for the pleasures of learning but also for the appreciation of art and images.
While the volume perhaps does not, then, offer new approaches to the interpretation of Plato, the range of approaches to reading within and across the dialogues offered here shows that we already have a lot to work with. The volume is therefore most likely to be of use to scholars who are interested in the individual topics covered.
