If we are to avoid assuming that the dialogues are covertly univocal tracts—which is entirely different from assuming, as I do, that each text is a fixed communication composed in words by a single author—then it will be best to treat each dialogue as a separate text. In the current chapter, I look to Plato’s Republic in an effort to account for one dialogue’s literary features, without trying to circumvent them or otherwise explain them away. I choose to focus on the Republic for several reasons: its current popularity and influence make it an exemplary object of study, its length allows broad patterns as well as details to emerge as demonstrably significant, and its self-conscious procedural discourse (seen in characters’ frequent references to their own conversation) highlights waywardness as a thematic concern. This self-consciousness, or reflexivity, is itself a salient example of the now modern-seeming literariness that was already present in Plato’s writing.

For the sake of clarity, the kind of modern and literary rhetorical analysis I have in mind can be defined as the description of tropes and the interpretation of their functions. As in ancient rhetoric, the tropes described by modern rhetorical analysis are identifiable uses of language that deviate (turn away) from standards of literal, prosaic expression. They exceed and enrich the norm of literal, denotative expression. But if the effects created by the tactics of ancient oratory are measured by the extent to which they support a speaker’s ultimate, single-minded, pragmatic strategy of persuasion, the modern interpretation of tropes allows for their participation in multiple, simultaneous patterns of written language, so that currents and countercurrents of thought emerge through themes-as-expressed-in-language.

If not quite the enemy, overdetermination is at least the antithesis of univocality in rational argument and in figurative representation. The linear focus needed to pursue logical argument through the variables introduced by literary form must be narrow, and must remain insensitive to the potential for words to interact in unexpected and unpredictable ways. What Helen Vendler calls the “unifying play of mind and language” is inevitably the variable interplay between words, their meanings, and the constellations that emerge into the foreground between text and reader (1997:5). Similarly, as long as each element, combination, and text (like a word, a phrase, and a sentence) participates in different constellations, then forceful attempts to regularize the text’s combinatorial universe will result in nearsighted underinterpretation. Thus underinterpretation puts just as much of a strain on Plato’s language as does overinterpretation. And allegorizing treatments of figurative expression, by assigning a fixed group of meanings to a fixed grouping of figures, ultimately transform the figurative potential of manifestly nonliteral features into covert, univocal, and literal messages.

Even from this abstract overview, it should be fairly clear that I am describing literary practice as a dynamic process. While navigating through strikingly different types of evidence, one’s view of some evidence changes in view of other evidence. But it may not yet be clear where such an interpretation might lead, given my criticisms of the telos that guides expository approaches to the literary Plato. The task here is at any one time to reach a perspective on a theme as articulated in language by Plato, as opposed to a thesis that Plato supposedly held but left undeclared. In this regard, it is crucial to define some terms associated with theme. I take theme itself to denote an abstract topic that permeates a text, whether explicitly or implicitly. A theme is a topic of interest, a preoccupation that can emerge in different contexts and in different forms throughout a work—and which need not be addressed by the text in direct, linear discussion. So justice is a prominent theme in the Republic. A thesis is a proposition asserted as true by an author; this is the sort of claim typically advanced in expository writing. One thesis of my book is that the rhetorical patterning of Plato’s Republic expresses, among many other things, a critical or questioning perspective on the conventional methods of investigation pursued by Socrates and his interlocutors.

That said, the question of attribution is arguably less important than is the degree of Plato’s commitment to the propositions expressed by his characters. Plato wrote many things, which is to say that he authored many statements. Yet his commitment to these utterances, I will argue, is consistently and globally characterized by ongoing circumspection. When dealing with propositions, philosophers and linguists often focus on a statement’s truth value—whether the proposition expressed by a statement is true or false. And this is similar to the way professional philosophers are apt to judge arguments from Plato’s dialogues, as if abducting these arguments from textual slumber in order to interrogate their independent integrity according to absolutist standards of logical reasoning. But while propositions themselves may be judged true or false, the way a proposition is specifically formulated in language is also an expression of the speaker’s attitude. Through language, that is, “speakers commit themselves, to a greater or lesser degree, to what they are saying” (Matthews 1997, s.v. “assertive”). In linguistic terms, this degree of commitment, which contributes on a larger scale to our sense of the speaker’s or author’s cumulative stance and of the text’s overall status, is signaled by grammatical forms and constructions that are categorized under the heading of modality.

As a rule, conversation lends itself to specific grammatical constructions, and it becomes even more idiosyncratic in Plato’s portrayal of exchanges dominated by Socrates. Some general and commonplace modalizing expressions are ubiquitous and accentuated enough to be eminently familiar to readers of Plato’s dialogues. These include statements explicitly qualified by various lexical elements; questions, commands, and exhortations; and hypothetical conjectures, proposals, conditions, and forecasts. All of these constructions may be distinguished from straightforward declarative statements made in the indicative mood: they are forms of expression that do not communicate ideas, things, and situations as they are, but instead tender possibilities for consideration, describing what could or should be. Before undertaking a closer analysis of textual details in subsequent chapters, it will be worthwhile to survey briefly some of the ways that Plato’s dialogues, and the Republic in particular, are unusually saturated with expressions of possibility. As in English, modal expressions in Greek are often genteel and laden with potential irony. But the main function under consideration here is the sense of remoteness—the perspectival mediation of certainty, fact, and reality—that can accumulate under the weight of nondeclarative forms of speech.

Given Socrates’ obsession with questioning through conversation, a text such as the Republic naturally contains an extraordinary quantity of questions. Questioning is thus a foregrounded linguistic phenomenon in the text. It is also sometimes a debated topic in the conversation, as when Thrasymachus accuses Socrates of being an avid questioner but an evasive answerer (336c–338a). Some questions in the dialogue function as statements, others are really responses to questions, but the tone of questioning is often relentless. Imperatives of various sorts are also obviously much more prevalent in the conversation of the Republic than in, say, the nonfictional, historical prose of Thucydides. Characters urge themselves and the conversation forward in various indirect ways. “Is it resolved [dokei] that we must [khrēnai] try to carry this out?” asks Socrates at one point, questioning whether the group’s inquiry should continue, adding “I suppose [oimai] it’s no small job, so consider it” (δοκεῖ οὖν χρῆναι ἐπιχειρῆσαι περαίνειν; οἶμαι μὲν γὰρ οὐκ ὀλίγον ἔργον αὐτὸ εἶναι: σκοπεῖτε οὖν, 369b). While the legislative “is it resolved?” (dokeō) has a ring of decisiveness, the obligation of “must” (khrē) is softened by “try,” which prioritizes effort over success. Similarly, the resolution to accept the obligation is proposed in a question rather than declared outright. Then “I suppose” qualifies the litotes of “no small job” with an ironic recognition of the difficulty involved, and the imperative “consider it” offers the interlocutor Adeimantus a chance to back out. Along with commands (which are usually in the imperative mood), we have many hortatory uses of the subjunctive serving a similar function, particularly in the first-person plural. “Let us make [poiōmen] a city-state in discourse from the beginning” is a typically phrased Socratic exhortation (τῷ λόγῳ ἐξ ἀρχῆς ποιῶμεν πόλιν, 369c).

In their discussion of ideas and methods, the characters in the Republic spin out all manner of speculation: conjectures, provisional plans, and hypothetical scenarios (sequences of imaginary events constructed from nonasserted premises or conditions). Grammatically, these speculative ventures rely heavily on the optative mood. This question asked by Socrates is an interesting example:

For now, suffice it to observe that this overdetermined sentence may be read as a methodological, conditional, speculative, and rhetorical question. Having the force of a conditional statement, it describes a possible state of affairs: if one should do this, one would do that. At the same time, with the force of a question, the sentence outlines a possible course of action, taking on the guise of a proposal, an exhortation, and a supposition that could be accepted. The hypothesis is a theoretical possibility that could, in turn, be accepted as a practical possibility.

Indeed, the modality and temporality of making a city-state in discourse is more complex than it might at first appear. When planning city-states and their governments in the Republic, Socrates and his companions often use predictive, future-oriented constructions in ways that signal the theoretical force of their conversational practice. For example: “The farmer, as it seems, won’t make [poiēsetai] his own plow himself,” says Socrates at one point (ὁ γὰρ γεωργός, ὡς ἔοικεν, οὐκ αὐτὸς ποιήσεται ἑαυτῷ τὸ ἄροτρον, 370c). Even this apparently simple statement about an imaginary farmer is both a proposal for the city-state and a suppositional description of what would happen in the proposed city-state if it were ever made. Because Socrates’ proposal is looking for agreement, the sentence is also questioning; declarative rather than interrogative or conditional in form, but questioning and hypothetical in function. The sentence also happens to be qualified (“as it seems”) and negative (“won’t make”), features that further modalize its force. Meanwhile, because the speakers are making a plan rather than an actual city-state, what they are doing in the present (in the practice of actual conversation) keeps getting thrown into the future (toward the possibility of action). “We will also need traders,” remarks Socrates, for instance (καὶ ἐμπόρων δὴ δεησόμεθα, 371a). The plan needs traders in the present, but the planners would need traders if they actually were to make their city-state in the future.

Conditional constructions, which present one proposition as being dependent on (and thus subordinated under) another, are especially important for the interpretation elaborated in the second half of this book. Plato’s Socrates is fond of building elaborate sequences of argumentation that rest on hypothetical foundations. In grammar, where “a declarative main clause typically conveys the speaker’s commitment to the truth of the proposition expressed, such a commitment is often lost under subordination” (CGEL 174); even a statement like I know he is ill does not have the same force as he is ill. If there is indeed “a significant association between subordination and markers of modality” (CGEL 174), this is only compounded when an introductory main verb is itself explicitly modal in meaning (I doubt he is ill). My point here, though, is that the modalizing role of grammatical subordination can shed light on a related phenomenon in Socratic discourse, seen in theoretical experiments performed by way of words that accrete to form expansive chains of interdependent argument. In one basic pattern found in the Republic, interdependent claims (themselves often put forth as proposals, rather than firm assertions) derive from and refer back to a suppositional ground that is decidedly unasserted. When this happens, the hypothetical modality of the initial supposition can cast a persistent attitude of uncertainty over subsequent claims and conclusions.

All of the modalizing features just described, which are common enough in ancient Greek but endemic to Plato’s dialogues, accumulate in the back-and-forth of conversation, forming an important aspect of Platonic style by saturating the text with modal expressions. If the Republic as a whole does not come across as modalized by these local instances of qualified speech, this is largely because the conversation in the book has a strong heuristic pulse that propels it through compelling arguments and thematic statements. No matter how modalized it may be, these statements of opinion undoubtedly whet readers’ desire to possess a linear Socratic-Platonic message. For the Republic portrays the evolution of a conversation from disorientation and aimless small talk into a self-conscious project, in which the speakers adopt methods for the purpose of understanding justice and injustice, and these topics are treated as objects to be pursued, seen, and found. At the same time, however, the discourse of this heuristic project is globally modalized by tropes that rhetorically establish distance between the seekers and their goals. Where an interpretation focused on expository, linear argumentation in the text might insist that this is Plato’s real meaning—that the book’s pattern of distancing is meant to replace the conversation’s pattern of methodical seeking—the second half of my study observes that these are major dimensions of the Republic that both exist concurrently and have contradictory functions. In other words, a strong current of methodological self-examination (a countercurrent, if you like) accompanies the heuristic arguments found in the book, articulating a perspective in which fixed conclusions keep turning into ongoing questions.

Thematically, recursion in the Republic tends to emphasize the difficulties faced by human beings who are asking questions about the highest forms of knowledge. The closer the inquiry gets to talking about its highest goals, the more those goals are seen to recede from the seekers’ grasp. My analysis of the text will give special attention to interrelated varieties of recursion, notably fictionality, digression, reported speech, and hypothetical speculation. These are large-scale tropes that work in sequences of subordination—so subsequent events in a fictional narrative remain under the auspices of fictional premises; a digression is subordinate to a main topic; a report is subordinate to an original; and a speculative proposal is subordinate to a supposition. As recursive sequences (a digression in a digression in a digression, for instance), these tropes amplify modality by extending and persisting through longer stretches of text. The next three chapters consider different sequences: the Republic as a fictional narrative, the conversational inquiry into the ideal state, and the discussion of the Good as an ideal object of knowledge. In these sequences I discern a recursive, self-reflective, and modalizing perspective on methodical investigation that pervades the book as a whole.