Excerpt from The Phaedo of Plato: Edited With Introduction, Notes and Appendices

A careful student of the Platonic dialogues can hardly fail to notice a certain peculiarity in their structure he will observe that for the most part we find not one but several motives underlying the whole composition and artistically interwoven so that if we put the question, what was Plato's object in writing any one dialogue, the answer can rarely be a simple one. These several motives are indeed formally subordinated to one definite end - for a Platonic A670; is avvearés - but this end is not always, nor indeed often, the most im portant result of the dialogue or that which Plato had most at heart in its composition. A very good and simple illustration of this is supplied by the Sopfiz'sf. The declared object of that dialogue is to define the sophist (218 B) and this object, amid all the intricacies of the argu ment, is held steadfastly in view until its final accomplishment, when the sophist is tracked down, captured, and bound hand and foot in the humorously labyrinthine paragraph which closes the Eleate's discourse. But as a means of obtaining this definition Plato employs his method of Scar'pems; and the extreme elaboration with which this process is worked out, together with the high value which we know Plato set upon it, leaves no doubt that the exposition and illustration of this dialectical method is one of the motives of the dialogue. Thirdly, a point suddenly turns up, quite by accident, as it were, and without the slightest premeditation (236 D): the sophist, on the point of being convicted as a dealer in Shams, takes shelter in the old puzzle about m} 6'v: which puzzle must be solved before the definition can be accomplished. Now it will.be observed that the material and formal importance of these three motives are in reverse order. The definition of the Sophist, the formal object of the dialogue, is simply a piece of pungent satire; but the method by which this object is attained is a matter of high interest and significance. By far the most momentous issue, however, is that which turns upon mi 6'v: the searching criticism of 6'v and In} 6'v, as conceived in various philosophies; the masterlydefinition of the Sophist, which need not have arisen, had not the sophist turned out to be a sham. We see then how Plato proposes to himself an end mainly for the sake of the means: we may be sure that he cared little about defining the sophist, but very much about the metaphysical questions to which the process of definition was to give rise. Now this indirect way of going about his work is a peculiarity of Plato's which must be steadily kept in mind if we are to have any hope of understanding him at all. Also we must remember that Plato is before all things a metaphysician: ethics, politics, logic, physics are to him so many forms of applied metaphysics; and if we would rightly follow the current of his thought, it is from a metaphysical source that we must seek to trace it.

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