CHRISTOPHER P. LONGin their own names, seek to philosophize about how to philosophize,
to reason about the limits of reason. In so doing, however, they inevi-
tably either fall into an infi nite regress—for metaphilosophical rea-
soning remains itself a form of philosophical reasoning—or beg the
question—for the metaphilosophical principles they allegedly discover
are presumptively posited as the very objective principles they seek.^4
This sort of philosophizing before beginning to philosophize is absent
in Plato because it is unnecessary. Philosophy has always already begun
at the very beginning of a Platonic dialogue. There is no question beg-
ging because the metaphysical principles are always introduced hypo-
thetically and couched within a determinate context that undermines
every attempt to render them objective and universal. There is no in-
fi nite regress because these contexts carry with them their own set of
themes and assumptions and so provide their own starting points. Yet
for all this, there remains the demonstrative dimension of the dialogues
in which something like a Platonic position begins to reveal itself not
through what is said directly by any of the characters, but through what
the action of the dialogues themselves shows.
To borrow Wittgensteinian vocabulary: the Symposium and Republic
show what cannot be said.^5 They embody a philosophical openness that
is ir reducible to systemat ic dog ma. This openness is at t he core of Plato’s
method. To focus philosophically on the playful dimensions of Plato’s
writing is thus not to deny that Plato has a defi nitive teaching; rather, it
is to recognize that this teaching itself had to be expressed in a playful
manner. By delineating how the distancing and grounding methodolog-
ical strategies dovetail with the playful dimensions of the Symposium and
Republic, a method in Plato will begin to come into focus that not only
addresses important metaphilosophical concerns regarding beginnings
in philosophy, but also establishes a powerful—because fundamentally
open—philosophical position.
The Symposium
No Platonic dialogue is embedded in a more complex, compelling, and
puzzling context than the Symposium. It belongs, with the Theaetetus and
Parmenides, to a small subset of dialogues related by a narrator who is
not portrayed as being present at the original discussion itself. By nest-
ing the dialogue in a series of secondary recitations, Plato allows the
author it y of the text to be called into quest ion.^6 The Symposium is unique