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3. The Political Art in Aporetic Dialogues, or Plato’s
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The historical Socrates had searched for virtue amid the ethical and political practices and discourse of Athenian life. In doing so, he believed that his conduct consistently related logos and ergon. With Socrates’ trial and death, however , the gap between the effects of Socrates’ life and the political application of Athenian laws must have seemed to Plato to have become unbridgeable. Plato disagreed with the Athenians’ conviction of Socrates, but he had to comprehend its significance and aftermath. This raised an issue: How could one value the words and deeds of Socrates’ life when the practical embodiment of the polis, the apparent source and final court of virtue and justice, could not tolerate it? For Plato to solve his Socratic Problem, he had to redefine the conflict between Socrates and Athens. In the aporetic dialogues, Plato’s relationship to Socrates became itself a political and philosophical problem about the discordant relation between critical discourse about virtue and political practice. For there to be any solution to this problem, both the logos of Socratic virtue and the ergon of Athens had to be transformed. If any future reconciliation of the two was to occur, Plato became convinced that the meaning of virtue could not be wholly Socratic and the politics of a just society could not be conventionally Athenian. three T H E P O L I T I C A L A RT I N A P O R E T I C D I A L O G U E S , O R P L ATO ’ S S O C R AT I C P RO B L E M A M I D AT H E N I A N C O N V E N T I O N S 124 interpretations 1. For example, the teaching of virtue is the overt subject of the Laches, Euthydemus, Protagoras , and Meno, but their subtext is the relation of these discussions to the historical Socrates —in relation to the Athenians and Sophists—as teachers of virtue. The meaning of virtue simpliciter, or its exemplars of piety, courage, wisdom, and moderation, constituted the overt subjects of the Euthyphro, Laches, Euthydemus, and Charmides, but in their background is the question of how the words and deeds of the historical Socrates exemplified these virtues and virtue itself. 2. The latter position is the one taken by Gregory Vlastos and presented most fully in his last book, Socrates: Ironist and Moral Philosopher; he staked out this position, however, over twenty years earlier. It is generally followed by many of his students, some of whose names and works are Terence Irwin, Plato’s Moral Theory; Richard Kraut, Socrates and the State; Hugh Benson , ed., Essays in the Philosophy of Socrates. For a more detailed discussion of Vlastos’s perspective in relation to the concerns of this study, see my “Plato’s Socratic Problem, and Ours,” especially 379–82. 3. One might further specify the dialogic Socrates as follows. In the Apology (23b), a relatively historical Socrates reports that the oracle believed him to be a “paradigm,” or exemplar, of arete. In the Euthyphro (6d–e), Plato uses the notion of a “paradigm” to refer to an eidos, which is typically translated as “form” or “idea.” In the Laches (187a), Plato uses paradeigmos to signify an exemplar that serves as proof or evidence of the existence of a skill. For discussions of the meaning of Plato’s use of paradeigma in relation to the metaphysical status of his theory of forms, see William J. Prior, “The Concept of Paradeigma in Plato’s Theory of Forms,” and Richard Patterson , Image and Reality in Plato’s Metaphysics. 4. It is a conflict that his dialogues would only partially overcome. In emphasizing the limited solubility of this conflict, I differ from Hans-Georg Gadamer, who, throughout his long philosophical career, presupposed their reconciliation in Plato’s dialogues. See “Plato and the Poets” and “Plato’s Educational State,” which appear in Hans-Georg Gadamer, Dialogue and Dialectic—Eight Hermeneutical Studies on Plato, trans., with an intro. by P. Christopher Smith, 39–72 and 73–92, along with an 1989 interview, “Gadamer on Gadamer,” printed in Gadamer and Hermeneutics, ed., with an intro. by Hugh J. Silverman, 13–19. The problematic character of the historical Socrates functions as a subtext in virtually all of the aporetic dialogues.1 Rather than offering a series of authentic recollections of the historical Socrates’ own words or equivalent...