Being and Logos: The Way of Platonic Dialogue (review)

Book Reviews Being and Logos: The Way of Platonic Dialogue. By John Sallis. (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1975. Pp. xvii + 554. $20.00) This book is the thirty-third volume in the distinguished Dusquesne Philosophical Series. The series, long under the editorial direction of H. J. Koren, has been oriented mainly (but not exclusively ) to phenomenology and to the relationship of phenomenology to other disciplines. The preceding offering, Phenomenology and the Return to Beginnings, was also by John Sallis. A reader might therefore anticipate the sort of approach to an ancient philosophical text he will encounter in the present volume and he will not be disappointed. Some random example: "We have in mind a primordial 'experience' of language as 'gathering lay' an 'experience' in which the early Greek thinkers were caught up and from out of which their speaking proceeded" (p. 7). This puzzling sentence is part of Sallis's answer to the question, What is Logos? Or (describing the "Way of Platonic Dialogue" and exhorting careful reading): "Such reading is what really first exposes us to the exemplification of this way; . . . this way as such embodies what the dialogues themselves make manifest with regard to the connection between logos and the process of becoming manifest" (p. 13). The Heideggerean grin on the invisible cat does occasionally float into view: "The way of Platonic dialogue is, fundamentallyconsidered, the way in which the dialogues let the matter at issue become manifest. But the matter that is pre-eminentlyat issue is being itself, which, at the level of our reading thus far, means: the original gathering wholes" (p. 179). Such sentences, in fairness, must make sense to those who find the author's philosophical orientation congenial. Outsiders might perhaps be willing to follow the exposition with generous portions of what the late Martin D'Arcy termed "sympathetic understanding." A fair warning: for those who like their Plato distilled out of clear Attic prose into (presumably) even clearer logical notation, this book will prove to be an exasperation beyond enduring. Classical scholars will, I suspect, ignore the book altogether; it does not address them and makes no pretence of doing so. But for students of Plato who are still struggling with the dialogue form, and who have discovered for themselves that the dialogues are not Platonic position papers in aesthetic disguise, Sallis's book can be read with profit. Six dialogues (Apology, Meno, Phaedrus, Cratylus, Republic, Sophist) are given lengthy paraphrase, summary, and analysis. Sallis for the most part ignores (but is not unaware of) the considerable scholarship already devoted to each of them. His analysis has its own phenomenological purposes, and his devotion to these is fairly single-minded. It should also be mentioned that his introduction with the literature therein cited (including Schleiermacher, Friedl~nder, Philip Merlan, Edward Ballard, and Jacob Klein) provides one of the better treatments recently to be offered by a scholar who has taken seriously Plato's dialogue form and who appreciates the challenges and the burden it places on reader and commentator alike. The author is sensitive to the importance of the drama for the interpretation of any Platonic dialogue; he never forgets, nor permits the reader to forget, that it is a character in philosophical dialogue, and not Plato himself, who speaks. Sallis reminds his readers that the Platonic corpus does not contain a body of philosophical doctrine, at least not of a sort that lends itself to creedal summary, and that exegetes can never simpliciter attribute any statement in the text to Plato himself. At best some character in a particular dialogue, and therefore in a context often overlaid with irony and humor, is for dialectical [3431 344 HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY reasons made to say certain things in a certain way. All the heresies may turn up in the next dialogue , and indeed probably will. This sort of constant warning to new readers of the Platonic corpus is useful indeed. Any book that seeks to provoke a thoughtful return to Plato's text is a welcome addition to the Platonic literature. Sallis recognizes that it was Plato's intention that the readers (or, if Gilbert Ryle be correct, originally hearers in the Academy) become...