Statement of Purpose

At this point the preferred course of action would be to move directly to Socrates' narratio and to begin establishing the preliminaries for our first encounter with eristic. But this direct approach is not possible, for it would disguise the fact that, in addition to presenting an analysis of the Euthydemus , I am also conducting, in I trust a respectful way, a polemic against the current trend in Euthydemian criticism. So I do not want to conceal, in eristic fashion, the nature of the challenge I am issuing. The results of my analysis point uniformly to the following observation: the near dismissal of the Euthydemus from scholarly discourse constitutes not only striking evidence that both it and its place within Plato's thought as a whole have been misunderstood and misvalued, but implies as well that if it is ever to be restored to its rightful position of value within the corpus, then the obstacles that continue to keep it in relative obscurity—its confinement within an Aristotelian context, our inability to appreciate the crucial significance of eristic, and the grip of the "early" or "transitional" hypothesis—must now be overcome. To achieve this end, I shall present an interpretation of the Euthydemus itself and assume that if it is judged to be correct to any appreciable degree, then the obstacles will have to disappear. Although I do not harbor illusions regarding the invincibility of my own analysis, I do believe that it is at least sound enough to clear

the way for a more accurate and more adequate understanding of this dialogue. But since the Euthydemus is so ambiguous, its irony so thorough and sustained, since it is so susceptible to misinterpretation even on the part of the most well-meaning critic—not to mention how easily it can become the plaything of this or that charlatan and obscurantist—I want to take this opportunity to state in brief compass and without ambiguity how I intend to proceed, the thesis that informs the whole, and the gist of my results.

Along with Harold Cherniss, I cannot believe that Plato "thought with his pen"^[64] So I maintain the position throughout that Plato has given us in the Euthydemus a faithful report of what he had already thought, and that he has conveyed that thought to us with the utmost care and perfect tact. I treat the Euthydemus as it deserves to be treated, as a complete and finished work of art, a whole that makes sense both in terms of itself and in relation to its author's other compositions. And I assume at the outset that the dialogue itself is the datum to be explained, that it has its own order which challenges our minds, and that with patient study we can articulate that order without having to resort to Aristotelian solutions.

From the beginning to the end of my analysis, I argue for a single thesis that is so far from being new or revolutionary that expressions of it can be found, without fail, in the literature of our learned tradition. For one fact continues to emerge with unanimity from a survey of scholarship on Plato's Euthydemus : eristic appears similar to, but is really different from, dialectic.^[65] Indeed, the similarity is so great that the distinction between the two can and did become blurred in the eyes of many, and so it has been argued that Plato composed his dialogue to distinguish the one from the other. Yet, at the same time, it has also been recognized that Plato has portrayed the differences between the two techniques of argument so sharply that any discerning critic can and should easily see that the two procedures differ from each other by the widest possible margin. Similarly, with one voice commentators agree that although the eristics who use this method may appear to be philosophers to undiscerning observers, still it is obvious that Plato has gone to no little effort to portray them as mountebanks, mere imitators and sophistic frauds, who in reality are false or pseudo-dialecticians.^[66] By the agreement of all, then, it can be said that slipping in under the mantle of dialectic as its understudy, eristic is capable of producing the shadow of sameness to, whereas in reality

it is altogether different from, dialectic. But what does this consensus omnium really mean, if we take it seriously and attempt to apply it consistently and systematically to the Euthydemus from beginning to end and in matters large and small? Much of what follows is dedicated to completing just this project. For I maintain that in the Euthydemus Plato does not present a simple contrast between eristic and dialectic, but that with some degree of precision, not to say exactness, he actually depicts eristic as the antithesis to dialectic, in fact, as the very paradigm of otherness. This thesis, however, has never been properly appreciated and cannot, so long as the meaning of this dialogue is controlled by a hypothesis that persists in allowing only its unsuccessful, aporetic features to come to light.^[67] But once it is recognized that Plato has used the occasion of the Euthydemus to fashion consciously and deliberately the antipode to his own philosophical method, then the overall design of this work becomes visible.

The Euthydemus is a dramatized dialogue between Crito and Socrates in which the latter narrates the story of eristic wisdom. In this story Socrates presents primarily, but not exclusively, the methodological features of conversational procedures, both eristical and dialectical, set within an apotreptic and protreptic context. For more than half of its content, the emphasis of his narratio is apotreptic; that is, the main burden of its function is to dissuade the reader from exercising a logical procedure that is perverse to the extreme, one which deserves to be ridiculed, but which cannot be swept aside with a casual nod in the direction of historical accidents: the rise of logic-chopping Eleatics or Megarians. For the mere fact that eristic was present in the Greek world during Plato's lifetime is all the evidence we require to give his work an anchor in horizontal history. But the activity itself Plato has resurrected from oblivion by transforming it into his negative paradigm. For once eristic has been severed from its origins in space and time and transfigured into a symbol, it can be operative whenever and wherever genuine philosophical activity veers from the true path and begins to degenerate into its opposite. Unleashing all the forces of his tragic and comic art, his powers of persuasion and dissuasion, his love of irony and satire, and even an impulse to slander and abuse, Plato has created for our inspection that measure of baseness and ugliness in all philosophy, and thereby transformed the brothers into types from which we are to turn.^[68] In this work Plato allows philosophers the rare opportunity to laugh at a grotesque car-

icature of themselves, but with his characteristic intelligence in these matters he also arrests the pain that such a confrontation with our own philosophical ugliness would cause by altering that experience into the ludicrous. In half of its intention, then, the Euthydemus is a comedy or, better still, a philosophical satire with a dissuasive aim; it thus demands for its comprehension that the reader interpret its symbols accordingly, or else risk misinterpreting it. And, make no mistake about it, the price we pay for misinterpretation is significant. For failure to attribute to the Euthydemus its due weight causes us to operate with a distorted, overly positivistic view of Plato's method that does not take into account the thoroughness with which he analyzed how not to think, to speak, and to act.

If the Euthydemus were exclusively a presentation of eristic wisdom, then there would be no way to establish its meaning, and any analysis of it would just drift to and fro like a raft on the fides of the Euripus. But it is impossible for Socrates to tell the story of eristic without, at the same time, including the story of his own wisdom, which then serves as the standard of comparison for us. Against that Socratic standard we can see eristic "wisdom" for what it is, a pseudo-wisdom that in reality turns out to be, by an ironical inversion, a real ignorance that can reside deep in the recesses of the philosophical soul.^[69] And how are we to conceive of that soul which possesses this ignorance and plies the eristic method? For that we can borrow a device used by Glaucon in the Republic . Picture, if you will, Euthydemus and Dionysodorus wearing Gyges' ring with reverse effect.^[70] Imagine them turned inside out, losing any inward depth of serious ethical character they might have had, and becoming, as it were, invisible even to themselves. At the same time, regard the pair as a phenomenon of only surface denotation, a flagrantly visible caricature of Plato's own devising. And, suppose that, like marionettes that gambol before the puppeteer's screen, Plato introduces the couple upon his stage to perform a philosophical dance. Then, throughout their pseudo-philosophical routine, Plato portrays them, in the concrete fashion of a comic artist, as a grossly exaggerated phantasm of what the philosopher should not be, or what is other than or different from the philosopher.^[71] Finally, to ensure that we can recognize the brother-pair for what they are, the disfigured, inverted image of the philosopher, Plato also provides us with a touchstone against which this two-

headed mutation can be measured, the unvarying standard of Socrates himself.

Once it is recognized, then, that Socrates' narratio contains not one but two, that the twofold pair, eristic and dialectic, so qualify each other by their sameness and difference that the one cannot be fully appreciated without the other, and that, in sum, Plato has used the occasion of the Euthydemus to combine a brilliantly crafted parody of sophistic antilogy with a remarkably subtle yet forceful exhortation that is designed to persuade all of us to pursue virtue and to love wisdom, then the "early" or "transitional" hypothesis that currently controls and limits most inquiry into this dialogue will be seen for what it is, an ill-chosen, lopsided method that is at variance with the very intention of the work itself. Furthermore, once we have descended into this eristical mode of argumentation and found therein that Plato is in complete control of what he is doing, that he not only allows each eristic argument to perform its own function within the whole, but also subsumes all twenty-one of them into a well-orchestrated, tripartite movement that is intended to illustrate the look of an illogical world diametrically opposed to his own, then our analysis will provide solid comfort for all of those who have become dissatisfied with the spectacle of a Plato who fumbles about in the dark, clumsily trying to discover "the relevant logical theory," that will turn on his lights, as well as our own, and who, frustrated, is content to leave behind a record of his failures in the form of sophistici elenchi that, he hopes, young schoolboys will someday be able to solve. We are confident, moreover, that if we complement our detailed analysis of the individual arguments with a sensitive literary treatment, demonstrating that Plato is again in complete control, that by clear techniques and for clear reasons he has presented to us this perfect intermingling of form and content, that, in short, nothing in his dialogue has been left to chance, nothing is a fluke, then the riddle of the Euthydemus will be solved, its importance for Plato's thought secured. Finally, I am assuming at the outset that Plato could not portray the antithesis to his own philosophical method and the two-headed antitype to the serious philosopher unless he himself were already in possession of the positive models. I am confident that this assumption is correct, for it is the very essence of the comic to undercut the presentation of a serious archetype.^[72]