PLATO AND THE DIALOGUE

Why did Plato write dialogues? His motive for favouring this format has sometimes been construed as a kind of radical self-distancing: as the mere dramatist of the conversations rather than a participant in them, Plato enables himself to suppress his own authorial voice, avoiding any degree of commitment that might obviate further thought by himself or the reader. I am reluctant to go all the way with this. Plato is an overwhelming presence in his dialogues. Most of his readers over two and half millennia have found it hard not to speak of, think of, and criticise the ideas and arguments defended in the dialogues as Plato's own, and we too should feel no embarrassment about talking that way.

Plato's real reason for persisting with the dialogue form is, I think, a very different one, his growing belief – more than once made explicit in his later work – that conversation, in the form of question and answer, is the structure of thought itself. When we think, what we are doing is precisely to ask and answer questions internally, and our judgements are the outcome of that same process. Hence it seems that what Plato dramatises as external conversations can be internalised by us, the readers, as setting the model for our own processes of philosophical reasoning. More important still is the converse, that these same question-and-answer sequences can legitimately be read by us as Plato thinking aloud.