a frontal face. It stands before the crowd listening and staring in silence, unable to ask questions and converse in return. In its place, Plato confronts this form of discourse by proposing face-to-face dialogue as the central feature of philosophical communication. In doing so he revaluates the prosopon and the person.
Instead of seeing only the outer surface of the speech, Plato tells us that one can find concealed behind the public display—behind the prosopon—either nothing or mind, soul, and logos. On the one hand, dialogue for Plato is the external rationalization through language of common meanings, but on the other, it is also the characteristic form of internal thought. The first understanding of dialogue is characteristic of the Socratic elenchus, the second of Platonic dialectic. The Sophist, the dialogue between Socrates (who plays a minor role), Theodorus, Theaetetus, and the Eleatic Stranger, a disciple of Parmenides and Zeno (Sophist 216a1–4), explains the analogy of the discursive structure of thought to dialogue:
Stranger: Well, thinking (διάνοια) and discourse (λόγος) are the same thing, except that what we call thinking is, precisely, the inward dialogue carried on by the mind with itself without spoken sound.
…
Stranger: Well then, since we have seen that there is true and false statement, and of these mental processes we have found thinking to be a dialogue of the mind with itself, and judgment to be the conclusion of thinking, and what we mean by “it appears” (φαίνεται) a blend of perception and judgment, it follows that these also, being of the same nature as statement (τούτων τῷ λόγῳ συγγενῶν ὄντων), must be, some of them and on some occasions, false.16
In fact, Plato makes the Eleatic Stranger agree with what Socrates said on the previous day (when the Stranger was not present) in the Theaetetus, which Plato stages the day before the Sophist. For there too Socrates interiorizes the logos, explaining discursive thinking as the soul conversing with itself.17
The Theaetetus warrants a pause, since the dialogue, which is often characterized as Plato’s investigation into epistemological theories of knowledge, does not in fact begin with the question “What is knowledge?” as one often hears but begins with the inquiry into whether or not Socrates and the younger Theaetetus resemble one another:
Theodorus: Yes, Socrates. I have met with a youth of this city who certainly deserves mention, and you will find it worthwhile to hear me describe him. If he were handsome, I should be afraid to use strong terms, lest I should be suspected of being in love with him. However, he is not handsome, but—forgive my saying so—he resembles you in being snub-nosed (σιμότης) and having prominent eyes, though these features are less marked in him. So I can speak without fear. I assure you that, among all the young men I have met with—and I have had to do with a good many—I have never found such admirable gifts. The combination of a rare quickness of intelligence with exceptional gentleness and of an incomparably virile spirit with both, is a thing that I should hardly have believed could exist, and I have never seen it before….
Socrates: You give him a noble character. Please ask him to come and sit down with us.
Theodorus: I will. Theaetetus, come this way and sit by Socrates.
Socrates: Yes, do, Theaetetus, so that I may study the character of my own countenance (τὸ πρόσωπον), for Theodorus tells me it is like yours. Now, suppose we each had a lyre, and Theodorus said they were both tuned to the same pitch, should we take his word at once, or should we try to find out whether he was a musician?
Theaetetus: We should try to find that out.
Socrates: And now, if this alleged likeness of our faces is a matter of any interest to us, we must ask whether it is a skilled draftsman who informs us of it.18
Plato’s memorable visual depiction of Socrates’ face is not simply decorative literary embellishment. Following various investigations into the nature of knowledge, the Theaetetus concludes with another bookended comparison of Socrates’ and Theaetetus’s faces. At this end point in the dialogue, the discussion has reached the following explanation for knowledge: if knowledge requires having a true belief with an account (λόγος), to provide such an account one needs to grasp the ways in which two things resemble one another, not only by way of what they have in common (τῶν κοινῶν) but also by their difference (διαφορότης). Yet even Socrates’ reasoning here leads to aporia, since it proposes a circular definition of knowledge: knowledge is true belief accompanied by an account, which is understood as knowledge of a thing’s commonalities and differences. The example that Socrates puts forward is once again the comparison of his snub-nosed face with Theaetetus’s snub-nosedness.19 In fact, the dialogic structure of the Theaetetus presents a similar aporia to the one Aristotle undertakes in book zeta of the Metaphysics, where he seeks to determine the essence of a thing according to a definition (ὁρισμὸς) with an added account (λόγος). It is no coincidence that Aristotle there uses the example of a snub nose (σιμότης), as he does elsewhere (De anima 3.7, and in the Categories, for instance). One can speculate whether Aristotle learned to employ examples like the comparison of Socrates’ and Theaetetus’s prosopa from Plato’s Academy. If so, such examples would stand behind the tradition in philosophical writing that seems to begin with Aristotle of using Socrates as an example of a particular man to argue per speciem—an example that even modern undergraduates hear all too often during their first (often tedious) encounter with syllogisms in the classroom, which typically begin with the first premise: “Socrates is a man.”
The Theaetetus thus provides an account of how one can attain self-knowledge through dialogue with another. Yet Plato’s Socratic conversations are not just between faces that share common ugly, snub-nosed, or even monstrous traits, as Nietzsche characterized Socrates’ appearance.20 The beautiful countenances of some of Socrates’ interlocutors—Alcibiades, Phaedrus, Charmides—equally mark outer differences. As the Phaedrus (255a–e) reminds us, the face is often the site of physical beauty, with the eyes being the most immediately acute of all senses through which the effluences of beauty, the visual eidola, are emitted and received. Thus the face-to-face dialogue also serves Plato’s metaphysics of presence; the prosopon becomes the medium through which one can arrive at and communicate truth, beauty, and goodness. The Republic’s cave myth reinforces this conclusion. Plato, one will remember, argued that the human condition is akin to prisoners who are not blind but who are only able to look forward toward shadows cast on a wall, that is, they are unable to turn their heads either to look behind them or to converse with each other face to face.21 The shadows in the cave remain shadows for the prisoners so long as they are unable to converse with one another face to face. The sight of each other’s countenance would serve as an illuminating lamp, so to speak, by which they could reveal shadows as shadows and begin to name the real objects. The prisoners are unable to turn their heads in the right direction.
Hence for Plato prosopon is closely related to prosrhesis (πρόσρησις): the act of identifying and naming something by way of identity and difference, as well as the act of turning the head toward someone to address him or her in speech. The Timaeus thus gives an explanation for the prosopon that agrees with intellection: “And as the gods hold that the front is more honourable and commanding than the back, they made us move, for the most part, forwards. So it was necessary to distinguish the front of man’s body and make it different from the back; and to do this they placed the face (πρόσωπον) on this side of the sphere of the head, and fixed in it organs for the soul’s forethought (ψυχῆς προνοίᾳ), and arranged that this our natural front should take the lead.”22 Agreeing with its etymology, the prosopon is turned toward the front to favor the gods and is bestowed with eyes
