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INTRODUCTION
Socrates suggests (at 11e– 12a) that piety is a part of justice, but he and
Euthyphro are unable to determine the part of justice to which piety be-
longs because Euthyphro is in too big a hurry to get on with his prosecu-
tion, despite the fact that he still does not know what piety is. This shows
that the dialogue’s ending is probably not meant to suggest that there is
no way in principle to know what piety and impiety are. Similarly, in the
Lysis, Socrates explicates the reason for the inadequacy of the inquiry
into friendship when he expresses the need to fi nd older interlocutors
with whom to carry on the discussion begun with the two pubescent
boys (Lysis 223a). Such dialogues compel one to move from the level of
the drama to the level of the impact of the drama on the audience. This
two-level approach, as Holger Thesleff termed it, introduces another
series of questions about how the dialogues work. Readers or auditors
can learn from the mistakes of characters in conversation, or they may
be able to see why a given conversation stalls or a particular line of argu-
ment runs into diffi culty.
The more one studies Plato’s dialogues, the more one has the gath-
ering sense that Plato “knows” more than he reveals in his works. This
leaves the impression that Plato is cryptic, sphinxlike, reticent, or (to
borrow Diskin Clay’s word) silent. All serious schools of Plato interpre-
tation have to address this issue. Plato might have taken this approach
because he wanted his readers to do a great deal of diffi cult work on
their own (if they are truly to harbor any hope of understanding his
conception of philosophy), or because he has no dogmatically held doc-
trines that he wants his readers to share, or because the most important
things he knows—as the Seventh Letter suggests—are not things he will
write down, at least not in simple, pithy phrases or maxims, even if he
could, because the deepest insights are inexpressible in any simplistic or
formulaic fashion. This may be the principal reason why Plato cultivates
a pregnant silence in his dialogues, remaining immanent but ubiqui-
tous and forsaking the authorial prerogative to appear and speak as a
character, as Dante will later do.
It is not only that Plato chose the dialogue form in which to pre-
sent his philosophy and his conception of the philosopher, but also that
the kinds of dialogues he wrote do not lend themselves to straightfor-
ward exoteric readings. Plato chose to write open-ended, often aporetic,
dialogues in which the various positions taken and the many arguments
made are heterogeneous and always context-dependent; that is, the
views expressed are always tied to particular people acting in particular
situations. So one must justify or legitimate any attempt to detach these
views from their native context and render them absolute or abstract.^18
So why did Plato write dialogues? The simple answer may well be