The dramatism of dialogues in Plato's works

Several dialogues of Plato have a dramatic progression and present crises in the manner of plays. Sometimes the scenario is borrowed from everyday life, as in the Symposium where each of the guests, after drinking, praises love, sometimes from the dramatic events of the trial and death of Socrates; but sometimes the progression arises from the very character of the characters; thus it often happens that the dialogue is interrupted by the impatience of an interlocutor, who refuses to submit any longer to Socrates’ examination; when Socrates is dealing with a character of impetuous character, like Callicles in the Gorgias, the dialogue threatens to end at any moment[1]. It is the Gorgias, as a whole, which provides us with the finest example of a dramatic movement: three perfectly linked episodes: the three conversations of Socrates with Gorgias, with Polus, and with Callicles; Gorgias, seeing only the technical side of learning to oratory, is incapable of giving his art any moral purpose; Polus will not use rhetoric for evil ends; but this is solely because he is timid and respectful of prejudices; on the contrary, let a violent man like Callicles appear: he will find in Gorgias’s school not a restraint, but rather an instrument for exercising his violence. Thus, all the consequences of Gorgias’s intellectual attitude unfold in a vivid and dramatic manner.

Faced with such intensity of life, it has been wondered whether Plato, under the guise of Socrates’ interlocutors, most of whom had long since died, intended to depict living people. It is certain that Plato was not at all concerned with chronology, as one might expect if he had truly intended to portray figures from Socrates’ youth or maturity. Furthermore, some of these figures, even in the dialogues of the first and second periods, are unknown to us elsewhere, for example Callicles, or the sophists Euthydemus and Dionysodorus, to whom Plato gives the leading roles in the Euthydemus dialogue. However, we have no right whatsoever to assign a direct equivalent to each of these figures, whether known or unknown to Plato’s contemporaries. The truth seems to be that most of Plato’s portraits are stylized; they take on, though vibrant with life, a universal value, and Plato was thus able to naturally imbue these figures with the preoccupations of his time and his own.

Whether or not the dialogue has dramatic significance, its permanent and substantial component is, with few exceptions, discussion. To a question (for example: what is justice? can virtue be taught?), the respondent replies with a formula: it is this formula that is subjected to the test of discussion, according to the single rule indicated in the Meno (75d). “From the respondent’s perspective, discussion (or dialectic) consists not only in giving true answers, but answers that follow from what he acknowledges he knows.” Discussion thus presupposes a whole series of accepted postulates or hypotheses, with which the formula under discussion is compared to see whether or not it agrees with them. Once the first formula is refuted, the respondent proposes a second, then a third, and so on, often without arriving at any definitive result. Thus, Charmides, in the dialogue of that name, when questioned by Socrates about the nature of sophrosyne, replies that it consists “in acting with order and slowness” (159b), but since Charmides also acknowledges that sophrosyne is among the beautiful things, and that it is more beautiful to act quickly than slowly, it follows that there is a disagreement between his formula and what he himself recognizes as true. He must therefore abandon it and propose another.

The discussion or dialectic is therefore in no way, as in the contests of the Sophists, the confrontation of two opposing opinions, each supported by an interlocutor: only the respondent expresses positive opinions. Socrates, for his part, “knows nothing except that he knows nothing”; His only role is to examine or test the respondent, showing him whether or not he agrees with himself.