Thus, the Socratic dialogue turns out to be a kind of communal spiritual exercise. In it, the interlocutors are invited89 to participate in such inner spiritual exercises as examination of conscience and attention to oneself; in other words, they are urged to comply with the famous dictum, "Know thyself." Although it is difficult to be sure of the original meaning of this formula, this much is clear: it invites us to establish a relationship of the self to the self, which constitutes the foundation of every spiritual exercise. To know oneself means, among other things, to know oneself qua non-sage: that is, not as a sophos, but as a philo-sophos, someone on the way toward wisdom.
Alternatively, it can mean to know oneself in one's essential being; this entails separating that which we are not from that which we are. Finally, it can mean to know oneself in one's true moral state: that is, to examine one's conscience.90
If we can trust the portrait sketched by Plato and Aristophanes, Socrates, master of dialogue with others, was also a master of dialogue with himself, and, therefore, a master of the practice of spiritual exercises. He is portrayed as capable of extraordinary mental concentration. He arrives late at Agathon's banquet, for example, because "as we went along the road, Socrates directed his intellect towards himself, and began to fall behind." 91 Alcibiades tells the story of how, during the expedition against Poteidaia, Socrates remained standing all day and all night, "lost in thought." 92 In his Cloutls, Aristophanes seems to allude to these same Socratic habits:
Now, think hard and cogitate; s11in round in every way llH you concentrate. If you come up Rl(llini;t an inHoluhlc: ll11in 1 , jum1' to another
Spiritual Exercises
91
. . . Now don't keep your mind always spinning around itself, but let your thoughts out into the air a bit, like a may-beetle tie9 by its foot.93
Meditation - the practice of dialogue with oneself - seems to have held a place of honor among Socrates' disciples. When Antisthenes was asked what profit he had derived from philosophy, he replied: "The ability to converse with myself." 94 The intimate connection between dialogue with others and dialogue with oneself is profoundly significant. Only he who is capable of a genuine encounter with the other is capable of an authentic encounter with himself, and the converse is equally true. Dialogue can be genuine only within the framework of presence to others and to oneself. From this perspective, every spiritual exercise is a dialogue, insofar as it is an exercise of authentic presence, to oneself and to others.95
The borderline between "Socratic" and "Platonic" dialogue is impossible to delimit. Yet the Platonic dialogue is always "Socratic" in inspiration, because it is an intellectual, and, in the last analysis, a
"spiritual" exercise. This characteristic of the Platonic dialogue needs to be emphasized.
Platonic dialogues are model exercises. They are models, in that they are not transcriptions of real dialogues, but literary compositions which present an ideal dialogue. And they are exercises precisely insofar as they are dialogues: we have already seen, apropos of Socrates, the dialectical character of all spiritual exercises. A dialogue is an itinerary of the thought, whose route is traced by the constantly maintained accord between questioner and respondent. In opposing his method to that of eristics, Plato strongly emphasizes this point:
When two friends, like you and I, feel like talking, we have to go about it in a gentler and more dialectical way. "More dialectical," it seems to me, means that we must not merely give true responses, but that we must base our replies only on that which our interlocutor admits that he himself knows.96
The dimension of the interlocutor is, as we can sec, of capital importance. It is what prevents the dialogue from becoming a theoretical, dogmatic expose, and forces it to be a concrete, practical exercise. For the point is not to set fm:th a doctrine, but rather to guide the interlocutor towards a determinate mental attitude. It is a combat, amicable but real.
The point is worth stressing, for the same thing happens in every spiritual exercise: we must let ourselves be changed, in our point of view, attitudes, 11n<l con victions This means that we must dialogue with ourselves, and hence
.
wr tnllHI du baulc with ourselves. This is why, from this perspective, the mcthmlnlniry of t he Pliuonk di11lol(Ul' is of Much crucial interest:
92
Spiritual Exercises
Despite what may have been said, Platonic thought bears no resemblance to a light-winged dove, who needs no effort to take off from earth to soar away into the pure spaces of utopia . . . at every moment, the dove has to fight against the soul of the interlocutor, which is filled with lead. Each degree of elevation must be fought for and won.97
To emerge victorious from this battle, it is not enough to disclose the truth.
It is not even enough to demonstrate it. What is needed is persuasion, and for that one must use psychagogy, the art of seducing souls. Even at that, it is not enough to use only rhetoric, which, as it were, tries to persuade from a distance, by means of a continuous discourse. What is needed above all is dialectic, which demands the explicit consent of the interlocutor at every moment. Dialectic must skillfully choose a tortuous path - or rather, a series of apparently divergent, but nevertheless convergent, paths98 - in order to bring the interlocutor to discover the contradictions of his own position, or to admit an unforeseen conclusion. All the circles, detours, endless divisions, digressions, and subtleties which make the modern reader of Plato's Dialogues so uncomfortable arc destined to make ancient readers and interlocutors travel a specific path. Thanks to these detours, "with a great deal of effort, one rubs names, definitions, visions and sensations against one another"; one
"spends a long time in the company of these questions"; one "lives with them" 'l'I until the light blazes forth. Yet one keeps on practicing, since "for reasonable people, the measure of listening to such discussions is the whole of life." 100
What counts is not the solution of a particular problem, but the road travelled to reach it; a road along which the interlocutor, the disciple, and the reader form their thought, and make it more apt to discover the truth by itself: IOI
Stranger: Suppose someone asked us this question about our class of elementary school-children learning to read. "When a child is asked what letters spell a word - it can be any word you please - are we to regard this exercise as undertaken to discover the correct spelling of the particular word the teacher assigned, or as designed rather to make the child better able to deal with all words he may be asked to spell?"
Young Socrates: Surely we reply that the purpose is to teach him to read them all.
Stranger: How docs this principle apply to our present search for the statesman? Why did we set ourselves the problem? Is our chief purpose to find the statesman, or have we the larger aim of becoming beucr dialecticians, more able to tackle all questions?