Alexander Nehamas explains how such a seduction might well occur.
“For in the process of producing in us a disdain for Socrates’ interlocutors, the
dialogues turn us into characters just like them. In observing Euthyphro de-
ceive himself in Plato’s fi ction, we deceive ourselves in our own life” (Alexander
Nehamas, The Art of Living: Socratic Refl ections from Plato to Foucault [Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1998], 44). Nehamas’s distinction between Pla-
tonic and Socratic irony does not take into account the distinction between
Socrates the character and Socrates the narrator, but when this distinction is
taken into account, Platonic irony becomes even more complex.
