Implicazioni Etiche della Storiografia Filosofica di Platone (review)

Book Reviews Franco Chiereghin. Implicazioni Etiche della Storiografia Filosofica di Platone. Padua: Liviana Editrice, 1976. Pp. 134. In the opening section, on "how Plato wants to be read," Chiereghin claims that the "rules" according to which and the "levels" (regole e livelli) at which the reader is to read Plato are given to us at the end of the Phaedrus. Chiereghin makes this claim even though he is aware of the inextricable paradoxes and contradictions to which it leads (p. 2). Thus, if what Plato makes his Socrates say there (in response to the dialogical situation into which he has gotten himself with Phaidros) is taken as a binding prescription issued by Plato, then Plato is in contradiction with himself by having practiced the art of writing dialogues so skilfully and extensively--unless (the logician must add) the Phaedrus was Plato's last, self-silencing, written dialogue. But it is clear that the contradiction arises only because Chiereghin is not reading the dialogue as a dialogue, but as if it were an expository treatise. He has also assumed the Plato is speaking in his own voice, something Plato never does in any of the dialogues, since he is never one of the speaking characters in them. Chiereghin is led to infer that Plato resorted to writing as a remedy for his inability, in the face of circumstances and the savage hostility of his fellow citizens (p. 7), to practice a politics fully in accord with rigorous thinking. Plato's writing constitutes, for Chiereghin, a retreat into "doing his thing" in order to avoid committing injustice. But this answers, before it has asked them, the two questions of why Plato chose to write dialogues and what their relationship might be to the political and intellectual life around him. Still, though the written word cannot be serious, according to Chiereghin's reading of Plato, it has the "positive" function of being an asset laid up against old age and of being a verbal seed that just might flower again in the right soul and circumstances. Hence (quindi), Chiereghin concludes that the written word is a path that the reader must traverse to its suspended end, so as to arrive at the experience of the impasse, or disturbing difficulty, which is the real, open-ended, or problematical end of the dialogue (p. 8). Much as we would like to agree with this conclusion, Chiereghin omits the logic and the evidence by means of which he has reached it. Chiereghin makes the interesting claim that philosophic discourse is necessarily dialogical in its structure (p. 28). This is, he says, because the request for reasons is the generative starting point for both the sciences and the philosophical dialogue. Dialogue turns opinion into knowledge by insisting on reasons. These are brought out by the process of contradiction. And this process is maximized by a multi-model use of language which keeps it true to the fullness of experience. The resulting criticality of dialogue, according to Chiereghin, is the best proof of its constitutive ethical intent. Because asserted values must give an account of themselves, the result is an exercise in responsibility, and thoroughgoing responsibility is identical with freedom. Plato recognizes that discursive interaction can be a form of oppression, says Chiereghin, by distinguishing between a "rhetorical mode" and a "dialectical mode" of making distinctions. The former, as the oppressive mode, is the counterfeit of the latter. But Chiereghin does not cite where in the dialogues which speakers either make this distinction explicit or illustrate it in their practice; he just says "Plato frequently speaks of" it (p. 29). It is neither fair nor scholarly to turn the counterpart of dialectic, that is, rhetoric, into its counterfeit without qualification and without showing how it happens. Since Plato's Socrates, the ethical dialectician, is himself often [217] 218 HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY rhetorical, the distinction that should be made is between the ethical and unethical uses which speakers make of both dialectic and rhetoric in the dialogues. The way Chiereghin makes the distinction; rhetoric is bound to come out as always irrational. Yet, according to Socrates in the Gorgias, there is a true science of rhetoric when it knows...