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INTRODUCTION
noted, the dialogues employ a double irony: on the one hand, irony is
characteristic of Socrates’ posture toward many interlocutors, but it is
also a feature of Plato’s posture toward his audience, so that “as we watch
Socrates manipulate his interlocutors, we ourselves are being manipu-
lated by Plato.”^10
- Socrates may fairly be regarded as sometimes preachy and at
other times as unfair to his interlocutors, and he appears patently stub-
born in arguments with some people.^11 - One might conclude from reading some or all of Plato’s dia-
logues that Socrates learns very little about justice, piety, courage, mod-
eration, rhetoric, or friendship from his interlocutors. But he does learn
one important thing about wisdom, and this is that he is apparently
better off as he is, know ing what he does not know, rather than thinking
that he knows (see Apology 22e– 23b). Dialogues such as Symposium and
Menexenus may present counterexamples in which Socrates does seem
to learn from female teachers; but this learning is set in the distant past
and, by and large, if Socrates learns anything in the course of a Platonic
dialogue, one must look for what he has learned somewhere other than
in the conversation’s express content. - Finally, Socrates might be judged culpable by Plato’s readers
(though it is doubtful that this refl ects Plato’s own view) for his treat-
ment of his wife and children, both on account of his absenteeism at
home and because of his willingness to sacrifi ce himself for his cause,
whether or not his principled action was best for his family and friends.^12
This last point forces Plato’s audience to wonder whether Socrates’ life
is livable, whether it is amenable (as a whole) to imitation, or whether
Socrates is one of a kind, as is implied by the descriptions of him as ato-
pos (in all of its senses: unclassifi able, strange, and without place).
Yet the diffi culty in regarding Plato’s dominant philosophical
characters as philosophical exemplars or role models is not limited to
Socrates. It would seem that all of the philosophical characters in the
dialogues—Socrates, Parmenides, the visitor from Elea, the Athenian
Stranger, Timaeus, and Diotima—confess to a gulf between their own
wisdom and the wisdom they desire and believe they need. Many, if not
all of them, thus say things that downplay their knowledge or distance
themselves from the highest and most desirable kind of knowledge.^13
Add to this the fact that many investigations end in aporia (and in
the ones that do not, no one appears on the scene to tie together in
summary form what has been learned through the conversation), and
the task of ascertaining Plato’s views is rendered even more diffi cult.
In Plato’s dialogues, gods don’t appear or speak and there is no obvi-
ous “messenger” or “chorus,” as one often fi nds in tragedy, to supply