Platono dialoginis kalbėjimas

Abstract

Plato was a thinker who initiated a specific philosophical discourse in the classical period of Athenian culture. He may rightly be called the creator of the philosophical dialogue as a genuine trend in Greek thought. The present research discloses the specificity of Plato's philosophical discourse by asking these questions: What is the specificity of Plato's dialogical philosophizing? In what sense can we speak of his dialectical path as a fundamental form of philosophical existence and philo- sophical discourse? The specificity of Plato's dialogical speaking becomes clear when the actual use of the conceptual words dialėgesthai, dialektike and dialektikos is analysed. The study shows that the Greek word dialogos, by which Plato's works are usually named, is a derivative from the verb dialėgesthai. This Greek word denotes the primary situation of Plato's philo- sophical thinking. In Plato's texts three semantic components which actualize the meaning of dialėgesthai may be distinguished: 1) 'to speak with somebody', 2) 'to speak about something', and 3) 'to speak in some way'. Plato's dialogical philosophizing is articulated not with the help of formal rules and definite terms, but in keeping with everyday language, Hellenic religious and literary traditions. It is true that the criterion of Plato's philosophizing is a rational argument as well as the imaginative dimension of language. The latter explains the specific property of Plato's philosophy, i.e. the concreteness of his thought. Plato's philosophical text is treated not only as a source of knowledge, but also as a source of spiritual exercise. It is important to stress that Plato's philosophy is the turning point from the fact of saying to the content of saying. In Plato's philosophical language the Greek verb dialėgesthai implies reflection as a decisive step toward an objective thinking of being. Moving in this direction, Plato emphasizes the semantic ambivalence which is characteristic of the word in everyday language. Moreover, the Greek thinker makes a radical division between the true (alethes) and deceptive (pseudės) speech. On the one hand, he implicitly claims that discursive grounding of the word's content must become an indispensable condition for the specificity of philosophical language. On the other hand, Plato stresses the boundaries of philosophical language and claims that some fundamental things in philosophy could not be expressed by any propositional statement. Plato not only created a dramatic and dialogical form of philosophizing, but also opened a way to Aristotle's post-dialogic and non-dramatic form of philosophical discourse. Possibly Aristotle was a thinker who conceptualized Plato's word dialegesthai and related it with the paradigm of formal logic. Plato's dialectic, however, must not be confused with Aristotelian logical argumentation. Nevertheless, the concept of rational and objective truth is the concept that bounds philosophical meaning of Platonic and Aristotelian word „dialectic". This concept historically is rooted in Greek philosophical thinking and is characteristic of the intellectual life of Western world.