• The journey toward our own being
• The Philosopher unearthed
• The visible, the intelligible and the soul in between
• What does it take to become a ruler ?
• From illusions to dialectic
• Socrates' trial and Parmenides' "parricide"
• Between logical and physical death
• Logical and material center
• The parallels
• The seven speeches of the Symposium
• The seven steps of the dialectical trilogy
• The seven definitions of the sophist
• The short path of Isocrates

The journey toward our own being

The journey through the dialogues constitutes an educational process under the leadership of Plato/Socrates. It doesn't purport to give us ready-made answers, but rather to be the helping hand that wants to free us from our chains and lead us outside the cave, only to have us eventually come back dons in it to help in turn our brethren prisoners build a more palatable city where more people can live more happily (1). It thus requires an active participation from us readers, because what we are after is not Plato's truth, but our own truth, our own answers, our own being (2). Someone else, be it Plato or Socrates, can show us the way, may even at times, like Socrates' daimon, point at wrong directions and stop us before we take them, but nobody can step in our shoes and be ourselves in our place.

In that journey, Plato is no dreamer taking us with him in some kind of eerie heaven of eternal truth that he would mistake for the real world, but a man who understood that one cannot change society for the better, which is the sole worthy purpose for leaders and rulers, unless he first changes men themselves individually, beginning with himself ; and that the first step in that direction is education. But to make men happy in this world, you should know what man is, what this world is and what happiness is, and this is a long story...

The Philosopher unearthed

It is possible to look at the whole set of dialogues as constituting the Philosopher, that dialogue that was hinted at at the beginning of the Sophist (217a-b) and again at the beginning of the Statesman (257b-258a), but supposedly never written, or you might want to keep this title for the last tetralogy, which describes the trip back to the cave by showing us what it is to be a true philosopher-king :

• first setting the goal, happiness for man in this world, in the introductory dialogue, the Philebus ;
• then telling us how each part of our soul can contribute to the task at hand :
• the sensitive part (epithumiai) by seeking in the contemplation (the "theorization", in the etymological meaning of the Greek word theôrein) of the created world's order (kosmos in Greek) a god given model for our own building of the city, in the Timaeus ;
• the willing part (thumos) by making the right choices with a trained judgment (krisis in Greek), and not relying on gods' renewed interventions to clean up men's mess, in the Critias, whose intentional incompleteness is a test of the reader's own judgment at the end of the journey ;
• and the reasonable part (logos) by drawing the Laws that will bring order to the city and happiness to its citizen, while the whole body and soul are on their way up toward the "cave" of Zeus, the god of gods.

The visible, the intelligible and the soul in between

But, before reaching this conclusion, the journey proceeds through all levels of "being" shown by the analogy of the line at Republic, VI, 509d-511e, at all levels of apprehension made possible by the threefold structure of our soul displayed at Republic, IV, 436a-441c.

What does it take to become a ruler?

• synthetically first, through the example of Alcibiades at the dawn of his political career, questioned by Socrates on his preparedness for the job he is about to embark on ;
• analytically then, in the ensuing trilogy, which successively investigates the different parts of the words "philo-sophos aner" (wisdom-loving man) :
• philia, friendship, in the Lysis, at the level of that part of the soul which has sensations, feelings, desires and the like, and can alone get us on the move ;
• sophia, or, more fittingly for the youngsters Socrates is talking to, sôphrosunè, that is, temperance, restraint, which is the first step toward wisdom, in the Charmides, at the level of the reasonable soul ;
• and in between, andreia, that is courage, or, etymologically, manhood, at the level of the intermediate, willing soul, in the Laches.

Of course, this is only the first step and, to make the point, all these dialogues involve kids. And, of course, we are not given answers yet, but only food for thought, in dialogues that deliberately raise more questions than they answer (in what some call Socratic "aporia"), and are meant to shake some of our certitude, to amaze us and make us wonder (thaumazein in Greek), like Alcibiades at the beginning of the first dialogue (Alc. 103a), because, as we will be told much later, at the beginning of the Theaetetus (155d), amazement is the beginning of philosophy.

From illusions to dialectic

Between this introduction and the conclusion, the program unfolds in five steps : two tetralogies deal with he visible world, two with the intelligible realm (in the sense of the analogy of the line), and, in between, the central one deals with the soul which is the "bridge" between both "realms".

In keeping with the analogy of the line which inspires this layout, each pair of tetralogies dealing with either the visible or the intelligible includes a first tetralogy having to do with "images", either visible (illusions, such as those manufactured by the Sophists) or intelligible (words as "images" of thought and beings), and a second one dealing with "the real thing", facts in the realm of the visible, dialectical thought and forms in the realm of the intelligible. And in each tetralogy, the trilogy proceeds from the level of the feeling and desiring soul in direct relationship with the physical (from phusis, meaning "nature") world up to the level of the reasonable (logikos, at the root of the word "logic") soul through the level of the willing and choosing soul inducing our behavior in action (èthos, origin of the word "ethics") (3).

• As makers of illusions, according to the seventh and last definition given of them in the Sophist, the sophists are the target of the first of these steps (that is, the second tetralogy, first after the introductory one), dealing with the first segment of the line, the visible images and confronting the relativism of Protagoras and his peers in the introductory dialogue (Protagoras), the pretense of encyclopaedic knowledge of an Hippias as unable to raise from the illusory beauty he finds to the gold he gathers in huge amounts to the general idea of beauty (Hippias majeur) as he is unable to get away from his fascination for the Greek hero par excellence, Achilles, the one whose fancies and sulking wreaked havoc upon all his people and led to the death of his best friend (Hippias mineur), before exhibiting the vanity of the kind of logos Gorgias claims to teach in the dialogue bearing his name.
• Facts, and the pragmatism of those who don't care for such subtleties, are on display in a tetralogy that centers on Socrates' trial, the single most telling fact on the consequences of the deeds of the sophists and rhetoricians, at least from Plato's standpoint. Here, Plato opposes the materialistic view of the law taken to the letter by one who pretends to speak for the gods and cannot even explain what piety is (Euthyphro), to the noble defense of the spirit of the law by one who prefers to be wronged by it rather than "kill" it (Crito).
• Words, logoi, as intelligible "images" are at the heart of the fifth tetralogy through examples of various kinds of speeches we should be wary of : speech of the poet talking to the feelings and yet pretending to be the teacher of Greece in Ion, speech of the controversialists who play with words emptied of any "logos" for the sole purpose of winning private contests of "wit" in Euthydemus ; speeches of politicians using the fake art of rhetoric to justify their worst mistakes in the eyes of friends and parents of dead soldiers and give a seeming logos to their awful deeds in Menexenus.
• It is only with the sixth tetralogy that we move to the actual "forms" in a lesson of dialectic which starts by putting physical sciences, which all rely on sensations, at their due place at the level of the feeling soul (Theætetus), the place they eventually have with the Timæus in the last tetralogy, only to better show that the ultimate "science" is political science properly understood as relying on logos (no longer understood as mere speech, but as rationale) to give direction to all other sciences and techniques (Statesman), once man has become able to distinguish the true philosopher from the mere sophist and true speech from error (Sophist).

Socrates' trial and Parmenides' "parricide"

This design sets a parallel between

• the "physical" trial of Socrates by a number of his fellow Athenians ending in his actual death, the awakening fact in the visible world, and
• the "logical" trial of Parmenides by a single one of his fellow Eleans ending in a conceptual "parricide", the liberating deed in the intelligible world.

This is shown by the fact that the Apology and Sophist stand in the same position in their respective groups, that is, middle dialogue of the trilogy in the second tetralogy of the pair. Thus, Parmenides is seen by Plato as the spiritual father (willingly or not, this is another question) of a trend of thought that, by identifying thought and being, words and thought, led to sophistry and to the excesses of rhetoric, which, when put no longer in the hands of clowns such as Euthydemus and his brother, but in those of the likes of Callicles (who foresees the trial and death of Socrates at the very center of the Gorgias, see Gorgias, 486a-b), was eventually responsible for the death of Socrates.

Between logical and physical death

As regards the central tetralogy on the soul, it takes place between the "logical" death of Socrates (Socrates is all but dead at the end of the Crito, once he has definitely refused to escape and accepts his execution due the next day) and his "physical" death at the end of the Phædo. Now that Socrates has proven in his acts that he stands by his words, even at the price of his own temporal life, and even when he knows that somehow, he is wronged by his judges, he is a credible teacher for the highest truths on this life. And the trilogy on the soul can now unfold between one night in Socrates' life, enlarged to his whole "material" external life retold by a drunken Alcibiades, with whom we started the journey and who himself confesses he was unable to take advantage of Socrates' friendship (Symposium) and one day in Socrates' "death", enlarged to his whole "spiritual" internal life retold by himself to cheer his half-laughing, half-crying friends (Phædo). And the centerpiece of this tetralogy which is also the centerpiece of the whole set of dialogues, is the Republic, which displays justice properly understood as the ultimate "idea(l)" of man, and provides the keys needed to unravel the structure of the dialogues.

Logical and material center

Thus, the Republic, middle dialogue of the middle trilogy, is the logical center of the work, and delivers in its exact center Plato's deepest creed :

"Unless either philosophers become kings in the cities, or those who are now called kings and rulers sincerely and adequately get to philosophize, and there can be found in the same person both political power and philosophy, the crowd of those who are nowadays driven by their nature toward either one exclusive of the other having been forcibly set aside, there can be no end, dear Glaucon, to the evils in cities, nor, methinks, to those of humankind." (V, 473c-d)

But the material center of the set of dialogues so arranged falls almost exactly at the end of the Phædo (4), that is at the death of Socrates ! Socrates' death was probably the single most important event for Plato in his life, and the last words of the Phædo, the "visible" center of the dialogues, speak of him as

"the man of which we may say that, among those of his time we came to know, he was the best, in other words, the most sensible and  most just" (118a),

that is, the best visible image of a true man. Socrates, for Plato, is the closest thing he knew to the just man of the Republic, and that's why he, and not Plato, is our guide through the dialogues.

The parallels

But that is not all. The way we have been looking at the dialogues so far, stressing the symmetries around the central tetralogy is not the only one. There is at least another way to look at them which is suggested by several parallels that can be found between the set as a whole and individual dialogues or trilogies.

The seven speeches of the Symposium

One of these is the parallels between the seven tetralogies and the seven speeches in the Symposium :

• The first five speeches, which make up exactly one half of the dialogue, have always been seen as making a preparatory group separate from the ensuing speech by Socrates :
• In the first speech, Phædrus, who is introduced by Eryximachus at 177d as "the father of the topic", sets the stage for the ensuing speeches, as does the first tetralogy ;
• Pausanias' speech, which comes next, is but a sophistic apology of all the kinds of love based on the relativity of customs, in line with the theories of Protagoras, an able parallel to the second tetralogy, on the sophists ;
• Eryximachus has a very "pragmatic" and physical view of love, quite fit for the physician he is, which parallels the third tetralogy on "facts" ; and, besides, he is seen at work, curing Aristophanes' hiccup ;
• Aristophanes is the "anti-Socrates" in more than one way, beginning with his comedy, the Clouds, pinpointed by Socrates at his trial as the initial cause of the bad opinion Athenians had on him, which led to this trial. But he won't talk in third position, in parallel with the tetralogy of the trial (hence the story about his hiccup), but in fourth, in (anti)parallel with the middle tetralogy on soul, because Plato wants to go to the heart of the matter, to the "soul" of the misunderstanding, and unveil the "materialistic" views of Aristophanes, his negation of the soul and his explanation of man's behavior by his "original nature" and his desire to return to it (see the conclusion of the speech at Symp., 193d), which is the antithesis of Socrates' view and theory of the soul and the divine ascent ;
• Agathon' speech is a model of empty rhetoric where style is all and contents nothing, and thus parallels the fifth tetralogy on speech and its set of examples of "wrong" speeches ;
• Socrates' speech is the "dialectical" one ; it shows dialectically erôs as the "power" that can set us in movement toward dialectic and the higher truth it leads to, and parallels tetralogy 6, which offers the "theory" of dialectic ;
• Alcibiades' speech is the return to the cave for better and worse : it breaks the walls of the dining room and moves us into the whole life of Socrates, as seen by the one who was at the start of the journey but says himself he was not strong enough to follow on Socrates' footsteps, and who is not strong enough to resist the effect of wine ; thus it shows at the same time what the philosopher's life is (in the life of Socrates) and what should be avoided (in the example of Alcibiades unable to benefit from Socrates' friendship). It parallels the ultimate tetralogy whose purpose is to present the model of the true philosopher's life both individual and social.

The seven steps of the dialectical trilogy

Another parallel is between the seven tetralogies and the sixth trilogy, the one which is most clearly identified as a trilogy by the text itself, and which is sort of a summary of the whole journey, the trilogy Theætetus, Sophist, Statesman :

• The Theætetus can be viewed as a recap of the first five tetralogies :
• A prolog (142a-151d) brings us back in the "classroom" and the atmosphere of the Lysis and Charmides in the first tetralogy. It states the question at hand, what is knowledge, and has Socrates present his credentials as a "midwife of souls".
• The first part of the discussion of a first definition of knowledge as sensation, with Theætetus (151d-165e), brings us back to the relativistic theories of Protagoras, which served as an introduction to the second tetralogy on the sophists.
• After a transition which introduces the criterion of effectiveness as a substitute for truth (165e-168c), the second part of the discussion on the first definition, with Theodorus this time (168c-184b), shifts from the realm of pure relativity to the consideration of facts as a judge of worth. And, in the midst of this section, at what happens to be the exact middle of the whole dialogue, we find what is usually branded as a "digression" on philosopher and rhetorician (172b-177b). Without going into much detail at that point, let it suffice for the time being to say that this so-called digression doesn't oppose the "bad" rhetorician to the "true" philosopher as seen by Socrates, but to the equally "bad" philosopher as seen by Theodorus and the crowd, that is, the scientist withdrawing from earthly matters to look at the stars... and fall in a ditch. But, behind this apparent digression, which might well be the heart of the dialogue, lies the whole problem of Socrates' trial (the introduction let us know that the dialogue took place just before the trial, and at the end, Socrates tell himself that he leaves for a meeting with the judges) and of the misunderstanding of the Athenians as regards him. Thus we are back to the third tetralogy, on Socrates' trial.
• A second transition (184b-187a) moves us to a second definition of knowledge by introducing the soul as the place of opinions. The fourth part of the dialogue (187b-201c) discusses knowledge as right opinion by searching what the soul's structure should be for this definition to hold, bringing us back to the topics that were at the heart of the fourth tetralogy, on the soul.
• Eventually, the fifth and last section (201c-210c), after the failure of the previous attempts, tries to improve the second definition by adding logos to it (knowledge as right opinion accompanied with logos), but get stuck in the various meanings of the word logos without reaching a positive conclusion. And logos is what the fifth tetralogy is all about !
• But the parallel just displayed is redoubled by a similar parallel within the prolog of the dialogue :
• Before the dialogue with Socrates starts, there is a prolog to the prolog with different characters (142a-143c) to explain what the dialogue is all about and where it comes from ;
• Next, Socrates talks with Theodorus to get his opinion on Theætetus (143c-144d) ;
• There follows a trial of Theætetus' ability to solve a problem (144d-148e) ;
• Then Socrates introduces himself as a midwife of souls, judging them on their logos (148e-151d) ;
• The rest of the dialogue constitutes the logos that Socrates elicits from Theætetus.
• And now, back to the overall scheme : the Sophist is at the heart of the sixth trilogy, of which it is the masterpiece and somehow a summary, giving the key to dialectic. It thus stands for the whole sixth tetralogy in the parallel we are drawing.
• The Statesman announces and prepares the ultimate tetralogy by expounding the theory behind the practice that will be deployed in it (the parallel goes deeper, but that could only be shown by looking at the dialogue in more details than we can do here).

The seven definitions of the sophist

Yet another parallel is between the seven definitions of the sophist given in the Sophist and the seven tetralogies.

• The first five definitions look at the sophist as acquirer, either by capture (1st and 5th) or by exchange (2nd, 3rd and 4th) :
• Definition 1 makes him a hunter of rich young lads he pretends to educate for a hefty salary, as opposed to Socrates as pictured in the first tetralogy ;
• Definition 2 looks at him as a wholesale traveling merchant selling food for the soul he doesn't make himself but buys from others, a picture fit for the Protagoras of Abdera, Hippias of Elis, Prodicus of Ceos and other Gorgias of Leontium that crowd the second tetralogy, always moving from city to city to pitch their relativistic theories ;
• Definition 3 settles him as a local retailer of the same kind of food for the soul, again bought from others, thus submitting him to the "trial" of his fellow citizens and potential customers, as is the case for Socrates in the third tetralogy ;
• Definition 4, the shortest, has him as the producer of what he sells for the soul, making him closer to Socrates and his speeches on the soul in the fourth tetralogy, or rather of Aristophanes and his comedies ;
• Definition 5 has him as an antilogical debater, reminiscent of the Euthydemus and Dionysodorus of the fifth tetralogy ;
• the sixth definition makes him, not without some reluctance on the part of the speaker, a "critic", that is, someone capable of judgment, through refutation in his case though, not through dialectic, as the true philosopher who follows the lessons of the sixth tetralogy ;
• the seventh definition makes him a producer, like the true philosopher of the seventh tetralogy, but, in his case, only of illusions, not of laws and order.

The short path of Isocrates

The point is, in all these parallels, we see a pattern that separates the first five elements from the last two. Applying this same pattern to the tetralogies, and considering the first five aside from the last two, we see that they lead us to the doorstep of dialectic. As part of the whole journey they constitute a long preparation, a propaedeutic to the ultimate ascent toward the knowledge that will make us true philosophers. But what if we stop here and don't make it past Parmenides ?...

If we apply the same structural investigations to this truncated program we applied to the whole set, we find that its logical center is the trial of Socrates (the Apology is the middle dialogue of the middle trilogy, the third one, in the group made up of the first five), while its physical center is the end of the Phædrus (5). And what we find at the end of the Phædrus is a somewhat surprising "prophecy" of Socrates regarding a supposed beloved of his named... Isocrates !

The Phædrus is a critic of rhetoric and Isocrates happens to be the brightest pupil of Gorgias, the prince of rhetoricians at the time of Plato, and a prime rival of his, head of a competing school that precisely pretended to educate the young without "wasting" time in those dialectical exercises he assimilated to the kind of eristical tricks Plato makes fun of in the Euthydemus. A closer analysis of the short prophecy of Socrates shows that it is ironical and that Plato is subtly ridiculing his opponent with some of his (Isocrates') own words.

But the point is that the shorter path is the path that stops at rhetoric, the path that Isocrates proposes to his students, a path that leads to Socrates trial and death, and to the kind of politics that is portrayed in the Menexenus, the concluding dialogue of the fifth tetralogy, and thus of that truncated program : politics feeding on rogue demagoguery and interchangeable speeches written by professional speech writers, conducted by leaders ever ready to justify wars and crimes in the name of superior interests that only benefit themselves. And, if it were needed, we get a confirmation of this reading in the first words of Socrates in the Menexenus : "What did you specially have to do at the Council Chamber ? Obviously, you must think you have reached the term of education and philosophy, and, judging you have had enough now, you conceived to turn to more important business, and you try to govern us the elder, wonderful boy, in spite of your age ! " (Menex., 234a) The path that ends there is the path that confuses words and thought because it could not overcome Parmenides' legacy. In short, either you go all the way and end up drawing the Laws on your way toward god's place, or you stop at the end of the fifth tetralogy, like Isocrates, and must settle for the politics of the Menexenus, that of the Pericleses and their likes, or worse...

(1) See Republic, VII, 514a-521b for the famed analogy of the cave, that should be read all the way through, and not amputated of the most important trip back. (<==)

(2) By "our own truth", I don't mean that any "truth" will do, that each one can come up with whatever opinion he wants, which would be the relativism in the manner of Protagoras and his "man measure" that Plato fought so hard, but that we must be confident enough that the answers we accept or come up with are our best shot at the truth we are seeking to act accordingly in our own life, even if it means, as was the case for Socrates, accepting an unjust death. (<==)

(3) This shows how the tripartition of the soul introduced in the Republic may have been at the origin of the division of philosophy by Plato's followers into physics, ethics and logic. But going throught the dialogues associated with each level also shows that those words, especially "logic", should be taken here in a much broader sense than the one they took after Plato(<==)

(5) 454 Stephanus pages for all the dialogues up to and including the Phædrus, out of a total of 909 for the first five tetralogies, that is, within one page of the exact count ! (<==)

Plato and his dialogues : Home - Biography - Works and links to them - History of interpretation - New hypotheses - Map of dialogues : table version or non tabular version. Tools : Index of persons and locations - Detailed and synoptic chronologies - Maps of Ancient Greek World. Site information : About the author.
Tetralogies : 1st tetralogy : The start of the Quest - 2nd tetralogy : The Sophists - 3rd tetralogy : Socrates' Trial - 4th tetralogy : The Soul - 5th tetralogy : Speech (logos) - 6th tetralogy : Dialectic - 7th tetralogy : Man in the World

 - Last updated June 6, 2009
© 1996, 2005 Bernard SUZANNE (click on name to send your comments via e-mail)
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