Socrates/Plato and Writing

Much is made of the irony that in “Phaedrus” Socrates condemns writing in his writing. He sums up his disdain of writing by comparing it to painting, that “the creations of the painter have the attitude of life, and yet if you ask them a question they preserve a solemn silence.” They cannot defend themselves. (Derrida takes up and reverses this argument in Plato’s Pharmacy.) As dialectic, however, the Socratic Dialogues are a series of speeches interspersed with questions that are often challenges to Socrates. The dialogues can be seen as Plato’s attempt to ask questions, to change the monologue model of oratory to a dialogic interchange. Successful or not? Benjamin Jowett argues that Socrates’s interlocutors in the dialogues represent  commonplaces that circulated around Athens at the time. His argument is entirely speculative. We might ask ourselves whether these challenges to Socrates have been sifted by Plato to allow Socrates to conveniently dispute them, or whether they represent real challenges. How we answer that question tells us whether the dialogues are imitations of discourse or the real things.