Plato's Persona. Denis J.-J. Robichaud

no disgrace for a youth to study it, but when a man who is now growing older still studies philosophy, the situation becomes ridiculous, Socrates, and I feel toward philosophers very much as I do toward those who lisp and play the child. When I see a little child, for whom it is still proper enough (πρέπον) to speak in this way, lisping and playing, I like it and it seems to me pretty and ingenuous and appropriate to the child’s age, and when I hear it talking with precision, it seems to me disagreeable and it vexes my ears and appears to me more fitting for a slave, but when one hears a grown man lisping and sees him playing the child, it looks ridiculous and unmanly and worthy of a beating. I feel exactly the same too about students of philosophy. When I see a youth engaged in it, I admire it and it seems to me natural and I consider such a man ingenuous, and the man who does not pursue it I regard as illiberal and one who will never aspire to any fine and noble deed, but when I see an older man still studying philosophy and not deserting it, that man, Socrates, is actually asking for a whipping…. Now I am quite friendly disposed toward you, Socrates, and I suppose I feel much as Zethus, whom I mentioned, felt toward Amphion in Euripides. For I am moved to say to you the same kind of thing as he said to his brother, “You neglect, Socrates, what you most ought to care for, and pervert a naturally noble spirit by putting on a childlike semblance, and you could neither contribute a useful word in the councils of justice nor seize upon what is plausible and convincing, nor offer any brilliant advice on another’s behalf.”¹¹

      In this passage Callicles, claiming that Socrates will be like a child unable to defend himself, speaks proleptically about Socrates’ looming trial in Athens. Yet even more than a personal reference to Socrates’ fate, Callicles’ argument seeks to establish philosophy’s proper boundaries within the polis’ conventions and decorum (πρέπον). Its pedagogical curriculum should reinforce these boundaries, not transgress them. Old philosophers, he relates, in their ridiculous insistence on playing the part of children break decorum and invert their own nature. To make his case before the crowd, Callicles draws on what were probably commonplace anecdotes. First, a reference to Phoenix’s reproving speech to his former ward Achilles (Iliad 9.441) for his childish brooding and for his tendency to isolate himself from the other troops reinforces Callicles’ argument about decorum: that one earns distinction among the company of men with the business of politics in the agora, rather than secluded away in contemplation. One hears echoes of this debate in Socrates’ courtroom defence against the accusations of Meletus and the general slander of public opinion when Socrates compares his willingness to die for his just way of life to Achilles’ fearless choice to avenge Patroclus and face death.¹²

      Second, the quotation from Euripides’ lost Antiope casts Socrates in the role of Amphion and Callicles in the role of Zethus once more in order to reinforce Callicles’ agon between philosophical leisure (ἀπραγμοσύνη) and political activity (πολυπραγμοσύνη). The two brothers from Euripides’ Antiope came to represent for the ancients the contest of disciplines, with Zethus standing for the practical life of business and politics and Amphion for the contemplative life of music and philosophy.¹³ In the fifteenth century the Gorgias’s staging of the myth of Amphion as a dramatic contest between the contemplative life of Socrates and the active life of the busybody politician fascinated Marsilio Ficino, who recast the two brothers as personifications for Renaissance debates between the vita activa and the vita contemplativa. He compared, for instance, Amphion’s philosophical music to Orpheus, the Dionysiac poet Arion, the lyre-playing Pythagoras, Empedocles, and even the aged Socrates, and he was also in the habit of calling his friend Cristoforo Landino (1424–98), the Platonically inspired poet, humanist, scholar, and philosopher, by the name Amphion.¹⁴

      The Gorgias also stages an agon between dialogue and theater as forms of public education. Far from failing to realize that Socrates’ criticism of poetry’s prosopopoeic abilities in the Republic could be turned on his own dialogue form, Plato must have been acutely aware of the imitative and figurative implications of his dialogic personifications. Socrates often relates, as he does in the Gorgias, for example, that he would be useless in the public assembly—unlike the roars of the roaming lions Thrasymachus and Callicles or the frightful magic of Gorgias—since he is incapable of adopting the various rhetorical personae used to deliver different long speeches in courts and the agora. Philosophy, it seems, fails to meet the exigencies of varying public circumstances. In fact, such speeches, Plato warns semi-playfully in the Symposium, are capable of stealing the capacity of speech from others. Faced with the task of following Agathon’s speech in praise of love, Socrates compares his fellow symposiast to Gorgias: “For his speech so reminded me of Gorgias that I was exactly in the plight described by Homer: I feared that Agathon in his final phrases would confront me with the eloquent Gorgias’ head, and by opposing his speech to mine would turn me thus dumbfounded into stone.”¹⁵ With his playful pun on Gorgias/Gorgon, and more precisely in comparing Gorgias’s speech to the Gorgon’s face, Plato invokes the semantic range of the masks of the Gorgon and the mormolukeion. In seeing a likeness between Agathon’s speech and Gorgias’s rhetorical style, which he reinforces in producing word associations between head and peroration, Socrates in effect tells his audience that Agathon is covering himself with Gorgias’s prosopon (mask-face) to deliver his praise of love. So forceful is his delivery, Socrates jests, that he is almost dumbfounded into silence and petrified into stone.

      Like Perseus cutting off the head of Medusa, however, and just like the inversion of the mask of the mormolukeion in the Phaedo, Socrates’ discourse, which includes a long prosopopoeic personification of Diotima, overturns Agathon’s speech. In alluding to Gorgias/Gorgon in the Symposium Plato deploys rhetorical synaesthesia; Gorgias’s art is sonorous, reverberating the oral pronunciation of gorgos, but the force of the Gorgon’s face as a source of petrification and death is visual. The Gorgon is something visible that is not permitted to be seen, only heard. In speaking Agathon places the persona of Gorgias before the symposiasts’ eyes. The end result of the synesthesia of Gorgias/Gorgon is silence and lack of life: the exact opposite of Amphion’s and Orpheus’s musical voices, which were capable of enlivening stones. Like ancient visual depictions of Dionysus and the Gorgon, the rhetorician’s mask is also a frontal face. It stands before the crowd listening and staring in silence, unable to ask questions and converse in return. In its place, Plato confronts this form of discourse by proposing face-to-face dialogue as the central feature of philosophical communication. In doing so he revaluates the prosopon and the person.

      Instead of seeing only the outer surface of the speech, Plato tells us that one can find concealed behind the public display—behind the prosopon—either nothing or mind, soul, and logos. On the one hand, dialogue for Plato is the external rationalization through language of common meanings, but on the other, it is also the characteristic form of internal thought. The first understanding of dialogue is characteristic of the Socratic elenchus, the second of Platonic dialectic. The Sophist, the dialogue between Socrates (who plays a minor role), Theodorus, Theaetetus, and the Eleatic Stranger, a disciple of Parmenides and Zeno (Sophist 216a1–4), explains the analogy of the discursive structure of thought to dialogue:

      Stranger: Well, thinking (διάνοια) and discourse (λόγος) are the same thing, except that what we call thinking is, precisely, the inward dialogue carried on by the mind with itself without spoken sound.

      …

      Stranger: Well then, since we have seen that there is true and false statement, and of these mental processes we have found thinking to be a dialogue of the mind with itself, and judgment to be the conclusion of thinking, and what we mean by “it appears” (φαίνεται) a blend of perception and judgment, it follows that these also, being of the same nature as statement (τούτων τῷ λόγῳ συγγενῶν ὄντων), must be, some of them and on some occasions, false.¹⁶

      In fact, Plato makes the Eleatic Stranger agree with what Socrates said on the previous day (when the Stranger was not present) in the Theaetetus, which Plato stages the day before the Sophist. For there too Socrates interiorizes the logos, explaining discursive thinking as the soul conversing with itself.¹⁷

      The Theaetetus