Topics Philosophers

Question When Plato wrote The Republic did he ever spell out that he was expressing his own ideas rather than Socrates? Did people ever attribute the ideas in The Republic to Socrates? Did Plato in any way encourage that misunderstanding by not spelling out that The Republic expresses his own ideas? Why do we think that these weren't Socrates ideas if Plato presented them as such?

Accepted:
April 11, 2013

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This is an excellent question; but that doesn't mean it can be answered in a few paragraphs. Ultimately the question of Plato's relationship to the "Socrates" he presents in his dialogues can only be thought about with reference to detailed interpretations of many of those dialogues, and careful thinking about what their author might or might not be saying. Could Plato have written dialogues for fifty years all reporting on the actual views of Socrates? In principle, maybe so. In practice, it seems fairer to believe that he thought about what Socrates should say, and for what reason; and so his own views became closely entangled with those he attributes to Socrates.

But let's start with the Republic in particular. The earliest comments on that dialogue that we possess are found in Aristotle's Politics. Book 2 of the Politics begins its survey of political theories by considering the proposals in the Republic. And one of the striking things about this discussion is that Aristotle keeps attributing the claims to Socrates not Plato. It's not that Aristotle never attributes claims to Plato -- quite the contrary, his works are full of assertions about what Plato says or believes. But this particular discussion of a dialogue keeps saying "Socrates."

By later in antiquity, quite a few commentaries on the Republic had been written. And by that time it seems that commentators typically attributed claims in the Republic to Plato. So although Aristotle's counterexample is vivid, it's far from the last word.

So why separate the words attributed to the character Socrates to the author Plato who wrote them? The simplest answer is that it becomes increasingly implausible to think that the historical person Socrates said all the things that Plato has him saying in all the dialogues in which Socrates appears (which are all the dialogues of Plato's except the Laws). The various claims of this character Socrates do not all agree with one another; sometimes the Socrates in Plato says things that the historical character could not possibly have said or known about. And sometimes Plato seems to be deliberately telling his readers not to expect a literal recollection of a conversation.

One great example comes at the beginning of the Phaedo. The Phaedo purports to tell of the last day of Socrates' life, leading up to his death by execution. The character Phaedo is narrating. According to him, a number of the friends of Socrates had gathered in his jail cell to talk to him one last time. A few of them were absent, though. "I believe Plato was ill," Phaedo says. In other words, Plato has his character assert that what follows, a purportedly firsthand report about the last day of the life of Socrates, cannot be a report written by someone who was present. The author of the dialogue wasn't there. At best what follows is hearsay, and that almost certainly has to mean that its author embellished what witnesses to the conversation said. And now we already see the beginnings of a divide between the actual written words we have, words from Plato, and the alleged spoken words that Socrates said.