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INTRODUCTION
way he crafts his dialogues. It is well also to keep in mind that Plato’s
“texts” were crafted, one might say, between orality and literacy, and
that they are set in the previous generation, in the fi fth century, when
only 5 to 10 percent of the population could read and the rest would still
have been quite mistrustful of letters. So the dialogues are “between”
orality and literacy in at least two ways: (1) they are set at a time when
the oral culture still fl ourished; and (2) they are between oral and liter-
ate traditions because they are written works in which characters recite,
compose, and rehearse aloud, but also discuss problems associated with
the written word (most notably at Phaedrus 274c ff.). Plato’s (written) dia-
logues depict characters reciting long passages from memory, rehears-
ing old myths and stories, or composing or memorizing long speeches.
The facile textbook treatments of Plato’s dialogues make a reconsidera-
tion of Plato’s many devices all the more urgent. The richness, open-
endedness, and literary brilliance of the dialogues are too often lost in
the reduction of these fi nely textured dramas to the set of arguments
and “doctrines” that are expressed in them by one character or another.
Even the obvious fact that Plato chose to write dramatic dialogues in
the tradition of sokratikoi logoi, rather than compose treatises or straight-
forward essays, has often been lost on readers and commentators alike.
Such interpreters proceed as though the many disclaimers, apparent
contradictions, Plato’s anonymity, or a dialogue’s inconclusiveness pose
no problem for understanding or interpreting the author’s “doctrines.”
So although it has been often noted, it bears repeating that Plato not
only wrote dramatic philosophical conversations, but if they champion
anything, it is the primacy of dialogue in the care of the self, because
dialogue is a fundamental human activity that forms and shapes one’s
character and thought.^27 This is perhaps Plato’s way of assigning pride
of place to the process over the product. Dialogue is itself a kind of spiri-
tual exercise (an aske ̄si s or techne ̄ to u b io u) that, at one and the same time,
is focused on the questions concerning how best to live, while exercising
one’s character and thereby improving it.
Because philosophy, in Plato’s time, was still very much a way of life
and therefore an inherently ethical activity, self-transformation needed
to be supported by a set of practices that functioned as “spiritual exer-
cise.” Paul Rabbow has shown that various forms of such exercise were
practiced in Plato’s Academy.^28 And the dialogues depict some of these
practices, perhaps most prominently the role of dialogue itself in form-
ing and shaping human beings.
Yet the care of the self in Plato’s time was certainly not divorced
from the philosophical content or subject matter of thought either, so it
would be a mistake to conclude that the philosophical content did not