Problems of Plato's Poetics

Curry, Ruth Martin

doi:https://doi.org/10.21985/n2-v7ab-cr93

Work

Problems of Plato's Poetics

Public

Download PDF

Download All Files (.zip)

Plato's readers struggle to reconcile his combination of conceptual argument and mimetic fiction. In this dissertation, I suggest we can understand this discomfiting combination if we understand the dialogues as "the mimesis of people in speech." Because speech is both referential and performative, speech is a hybrid of thought and action. In order to represent speech in both its rational and transformational aspects, Plato uses both argument and mimesis. Importantly, I argue, Platonic dialogue differs not only from the logical structure of expository argument but from dramatic mimesis, or, the mimesis of "people in action." In composing the dialogues to mimic conversation, Plato represents human life in its ordinary temporal aspect, recasts what counts as significant action, and brings new aspects of human identity into view. Plato is therefore a literary innovator whose achievements have still not been measured. In Chapter One, I explain the "genre confusion" at the heart of Platonic dialogue. Because argument and fiction differ-incompatibly-in how their authors speak, how their texts mean, and how their readers treat them, we seem presented with a choice: We can read the dialogues as truth-seeking "arguments" (philosophy) or as meaning-making "fictions" (literature). In Chapters Two and Three, I suggest we "build up" a genre description of Plato's dialogues rather than impose a "top down" method of reading them. To this end, I use the tools of literary criticism to investigate the dialogues' form and effects. Using Aristotle's Poetics as a foil and Plato's Euthyphro as an exemplar, I contrast Platonic dialogue with tragedy and other forms. In Chapter Two, I demonstrate how Plato alternately assembles setting, characters and incident into a plot or plot-like structure-one which challenges narrative as a mode of explanation and prompts us to philosophical wonder rather than aesthetic katharsis. In Chapter 3, I show how, in imitating Socratic conversation, Plato reveals speech to be the fundamental site of human identity-and philosophy to be both a truth-directed and self-reforming process. Ultimately, I argue, the dialogues don't require us to choose between reading them as philosophy and reading them as literature, but require us to switch modes of perception, toggling back and forth between theoretical reasoning and imaginative understanding. The dialogues both present arguments- products of reason which stand aloof of time, person and place-and represent arguing-the temporal, characterological and socially-embedded process of reasoning. Moreover, the dialogues not only mimic but instigate the philosopher's necessary oscillation between the eternal and temporal, intelligible and particular, world of forms and world of flux.

Creator