Textualizing Socrates: Plato’s Version

Abstract Plato famously opposed converting oral discourse into written text but also, no less famously, practiced it. To understand the rationale behind this apparent discrepancy we should look at the way in which Plato negotiates the relationship between the oral and the written discourse in his writings. The locus classicus is the rejection of the art of writing as a useful tool for communicating knowledge and truth in the Phaedrus . Textualization is only suitable for producing reminders ( hupomnēmata ) for those who are already aware of the true meaning of the messages delivered ( Phdr . 275d1-2, 276d2-3, 278a2). The process is described in detail in the prologue of the Theaetetus , in Euclides’ textualization of Socrates’ discussion with the mathematician Theodorus and his student Theaetetus; this is also what Xenophon seems to have been up to in his own Apomnēmoneumata . Although neither of these texts is claimed to be a verbatim record of Socrates’ words, both are unequivocally positioned as authentic. This agrees with the general attitude to the texts deriving from oral sources. But Plato goes even further, in that he identifies as authentic also what he calls the ‘offspring’ ( ekgonoi ) and ‘siblings’ ( adelphoi ) of the original discourse, that is, a discourse that derives from the original one without, at the same time, being unconditionally committed to all its tenets. This allows us to suggest that Plato regarded those of his dialogues in which Socrates plays a leading role as faithfully representing Socrates’ oral teachings. The fact that these teachings were seen through the prism of Plato’s own construction of their meaning not only conforms to the demand in the Phaedrus to keep the original message alive and relevant, but also anticipates the principal thesis of reception theory that there is no such thing as a self-contained text autonomously communicating its own meaning.