The Invisible Plato

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.