tricacy makes for seductive power. Bothered and intrigued by
the dialogues, we plunge into them, get to know them better—
and they begin to inhabit us.
Plato is also the most dramatic of philosophers. He says
almost nothing in his own voice, with the exception of several
letters of disputed authenticity. (The most famous, the Sev-
enth Letter, recounts his failed effort to educate his student
and later the tyrant of Syracuse, Dionysius, in philosophy.) All
is dialogue in Plato: brilliant, witty, touching, and complex.
From fourth-century Athens to the present day, readers have
pored over the Republic,theSymposium,thePhaedrus,and
other dialogues, searching them for clues to Plato’s opinions.
But the answers are to be found not in Plato’s definitive in-
tentions, supposing these were available, but instead in the
individual reader’s experience of the dialogues, with their dra-
matic twists and turns. He asks: What kind of soul are you,
reader? How do you respond to the drunken gate-crashing of
the handsome Athenian general Alcibiades, who bursts into
theSymposiumand recalls his attempt to coax Socrates into
seducing him both intellectually and erotically? Are you
shocked or pleased by the challenge to Socrates’ authority? Do
you approve of, or are you disgusted by, the proposals of
Socrates in the Republic:the ideal city that features coed naked
gymnastics, equal rights for men and women, and the poten-
tial for incest among boys and girls raised not by their parents
but in a collective nursery?
As we read Plato, our responses matter above all else. He
provokes our thinking by making us dwell on our feelings
about the characters and ideas of the dialogues. The Republic
depicts an ideal state that at times looks more like a cross be-
tween a Communist reeducation camp and a kibbutz gone
badly wrong; we are by turns enthralled and repulsed by it. By
142 Plato, Austin, Nietzsche, Freud