Conversation and Self-Sufficiency in Plato by A. G. Long (review)

A. G. Long’s slender but significant volume traces a line in the Platonic dialogues from Socratic conversation to dialogical thought. Long’s broader project is to explore the concept that conversation is relevant to philosophy. However, the book’s main focus is more restricted to two ideas: first, whether one needs others to do philosophy, and if so, why; and second, how Socratic conversation connects to the self-sufficient exploration of ideas. Implicit in the book is perhaps also an exploration of how the form of Platonic dialogue fits with contemporary academic philosophy, in which we still pursue critical thinking but rarely write in the form of dramatic dialogue.

Long’s main line of argument shows that while in earlier dialogues, Socrates mostly practices philosophy as question and answer, in later dialogues he practices dialogical thinking. In thinking, Socrates still practices the same kind of critical approach to ideas as in philosophical conversation but instead provides his own criticisms of his opinions rather than relying on others to do so. Long’s book is organized according to different chapters that lead the reader from a more conversational Socrates to a Socrates more engaged in self-sufficient thought. Each chapter focuses on a different dialogue: the Phaedrus, Protagoras, Hippias Major, Phaedo, Republic, Theaetetus, Sophist, and finally the Laws. The book is well organized, clearly written, and attempts to take into account a variety of objections to the view that Long sets out.

Among the book’s strengths is Long’s careful attention to passages where Socrates discusses his approach to conversation or thinking, and how these passages are often at odds with the way that conversation actually proceeds. For example, in the Protagoras, Socrates hopes that the conversation with Protagoras will confirm ideas that one of them has discovered, but their conversation ends up testing ideas that Protagoras does not even believe (hedonism). Similarly, the Gorgias presents us with the difficulty of intractable interlocutors such as Callicles who lack certain philosophical virtues such as sincerity, patience, and a willingness to be corrected (48–49). A lovely moment in Long’s analysis occurs in his chapter on the Phaedo. There, he notes that while Socrates seems not to depend on his friends and encourages them to practice philosophy in the same way after his death as before, they nonetheless find Socrates to be irreplaceable as a friend (75).

Central to Long’s thesis is the claim that Plato progresses to the view that philosophy can “be undertaken ‘dialogically’ by one person” (3). While the claim that thought can be dialogical is well argued, there are deeper questions about the political nature of the grounds for the possibility of such dialogical thinking. Even if at the very moment of solitary thinking, I engage in the action of self-critical dialogue without another’s presence, this practice is also already deeply political because of the larger context that has grounded and developed the possibility of such thinking. Even when I come up with novel self-criticisms, the possibility of being capable of doing so is grounded in membership in a larger community. In the Crito, Socrates refuses to escape from prison on the grounds that the city has been his teacher and nurturer. Long’s chapter on the Laws begins to address such questions in arguing that Athenians need non-Athenian cultures, but not necessarily non-Athenian interlocutors (139). However, such a view treats other persons instrumentally as means to test my own ideas, and overlooks cases where Socrates questions others as a way to care for them, as per his insistence in the Apology that he acts as the gadfly of Athens, or his assertion in the Gorgias that he is the only true practitioner of the political art.

Long implies that the process of moving from interpersonal dialogue to self-sufficient thought is a maturation process. However, other dialogues suggest that Socrates’s movement between thinking and conversation is a constant dialectic...