Plato's Socrates as Educator (review)

Does Socrates teach? What does he teach? How does he teach? In depicting Socrates, what is Plato's aim? Gary Allen Scott's approach to these seemingly simplistic questions presents a nuanced, illuminating, and carefully researched study of a topic that has not been studied sufficiently in Plato scholarship. What concepts of teaching and learning do Plato's dialogues depict and, indirectly, propound? We know a great deal about the great subjects and themes of Socrates' teaching, but relatively little about what he thought teaching was. Scott draws on recent scholarship that approaches Plato's dialogues as dramatic and literary works; a noteworthy innovation is his definition of a four-level audience for the dialogues.

In addition to working simultaneously on discursive and dramatic levels, a specific conversation between Socrates and an interlocutor may have at least three distinct audiences, and what is said and done in the primary conversation may therefore need to work in as many as four different senses at once:

1. 1. Between Socrates and his target interlocutor;

2. 2. Between these primary interlocutors and any third parties gathered and "listening in";

3. 3. Between the primary conversation (in "real") time and anyone who might hear about the conversation or hear it rehearsed, or who might be rehearsing it themselves later;

4. 4. Between Plato and his audience (3).

Scott focuses on levels one and four in order to examine the dramatic action at level one and to ask why Plato might depict that action in the way he does to the Athenian audience of the time. The inner circle of Socrates' devotees, including Plato, is mentioned but its members never appear in the dialogues as interlocutors. Scott writes, "Why does Plato avoid depicting the philosopher in conversation with this group of regular associates? ...Does Socrates' method teach indirectly, not only in the sense that it teaches through questioning, but also ... in the sense that the ultimate targets of his method are not the people being directly refuted but rather the ones observing and listening to his refutations of others?" (230-31). In taking up this possibility as a central theme, Scott's study invites us to revisit two issues that he addresses more briefly than the rhetorical reader might wish for: Plato's attitude toward and use of rhetoric and his related depictions of writing: both are based upon the limitations of monologue discourse.

Rebuking Dion for writing a treatise about his teachings, Plato asserts in Letter VII that he would never write a treatise on philosophy because it is impossible. Even a spoken summary cannot represent the lifetime of viva voce exchanges required. Scott quotes from Plato: "If there were to be any oral or written teaching on the matter it would best come from me, and it is I who would feel most deeply the harm caused by inferior exposition. If I thought that any adequate oral or written account could be given to the world at large, what more glorious life-work could I have undertaken than to put into writing what would be of great benefit to mankind and to bring the nature of reality to light for all to see?" (341d). Alongside this repudiation of "an oral or written account" to be given to the world at large Plato provides the myth of the invention of writing in the Phaedrus. Both emphasize the impossibility of teaching and learning through "an account." In both texts the emphasis is that "an account, a monologue, whether spoken or written, will weaken memory and knowledge." What, then, is the form of teaching—if it is teaching—that Socrates practices and Plato portrays?

Scott focuses on the Lysis, Alcibiades I, and Charmides, with a follow-up discussion of the agon between Socrates and Alcibiades in the Symposium. Unlike the many exchanges in which Socrates is wooden, brutal, and unsuccessful, in these dialogues he achieves some degree of success, in each case with a very young man with whom...