“TO SAY WHAT IS MOST NECESSARY”an ongoing practice, an always underway quite evocative of Diotima’s
description of philosophy in the Symposium that, far from calling for
fi nal decisions upon each individual matter of investigation or upon the
nature and structure of the world, instead calls for an understanding
that always approaches and then reapproaches its judgment concerning
the world. The richness of arguing both sides is revealed when all par-
ticipate in the inquiry, carefully examining what each thinks he under-
stands of the terms involved and their relations and then testing those
understandings, and in so doing, revealing heretofore unrecognized
complexities in their relations. Both Thucydides and Plato select exem-
pla exhibiting the particular problems necessary for them to address
dovxa, to witness or stand as evidence in the Greek sense for and against
our biases and prejudices. In that sense, “evidence” (tekmhvrion) is prom-
inently derived from logos that contradicts itself or is contradicted by ac-
tions—precisely what is offered in both the speeches in their relation
to the narrative, and so often in Socratic elenchus.^39 Both authors gloss
over problems that would controvert these efforts, but magnify prob-
lems when doing so furthers such aims. In neither case is the goal valid
generalizations from induction, but rather a process of seeking through
the problemata of the logoi what those tensions themselves can show.
In this way, the expositional strategies of both Thucydides and
Plato reveal a harmonious vision of the nature and process of human
understanding. One of the most remarkable aspects of his program-
matic statement is that Thucydides, who is a witness to the events he
seeks to witness to his readers, sets aside his status as eyewitness and
seeks logoi that will help his readers become the spectators/witnesses Plu-
tarch conjures. Like Thucydides, Plato, as a similar and similarly strange
witness to both Socrates and the beginnings of philosophy, seeks to show
his readers primarily themselves, by means of logoi that call upon them
to witness, as participants, their own search for wisdom and judgment,
striving for virtue, and the nature of understanding.
Notes
- In the past decade, scholarship that attends to Plato’s use of the liter-
ary and dramatic as critically important to understanding the dialogues has
multiplied in both quantity and quality. Indeed, it is now too voluminous to
cite in anything like an exhaustive fashion. However, the following represent
interesting and infl uential works in this new genre: Charles L. Griswold Jr., ed.,
Platonic Writings, Platonic Readings (New York and London: Routledge, 1988);
J. A. A r iei, Interpreting Plato: The Dialogues as Drama (Lanham: Rowman and
Little fi eld, 1991); Gerald Press, ed., Plato’s Dialogues: New Studies and Interpreta-