A note about the Socratic Dialogues. Plato wrote them,
but he seldom appears in them. Most of the dialogues feature Socrates. Scholars
have been arguing for hundreds, even thousands, of years about whether we’re
hearing the true Socrates, Socrates filtered by Plato, or just Plato with
Socrates relegated to the role of a marionette.
Since I listen to the Socratic Dialogues rather than read
them, I’m often very aware of the ambiguity of voice. Sometimes I hear Socrates
speaking. At other times, I hear Plato. Sometimes Plato speaks with someone
else’s voice. Sometime he speaks with Socrates’s voice.
There are moments this sounds unnatural. There are other
times that I can embrace the schizophrenia of the dialogue. Most often, that
comes when dialogue turns into monologue. Socrates, despite his distrust of
politicians, rhetoricians, and sophists, all of whom he condemned for making
long speeches, wasn’t above doing so himself. He definitely insisted that his
audience do as he said, not as he did. In those long speeches, for instance, in
Book Five of The Laws, Socrates goes
on and on, yet Plato sneaks in and out of the speech. At these moments, more
than the dialogues, I hear what the Russian theorists Michael Bakhtin called
“dialogism.”
Bakhtin argued
that every utterance is made up of the words of others. That there isn’t
any such thing as a single author, as single speech. If he was right, then the
monologues are dialogues. I wonder, sometimes, just how dialogic the dialogues
are, since often I hear Plato in Socrates’s interlocutors.
