What Did Diotima Say?

Plato and Indirect Discourse

Abstract

In Plato’s Symposium, there is the familiar setting of speakers taking turns discoursing on the nature of love, and among these speakers is Socrates. What is salient about Socrates’s discourse is not the usual discredit of epistemology, but the source of his language: Diotima. It is through hearsay, or, indirect discourse, that Socrates’s tale unfolds.

Indirect discourse has a long tradition. Beginning, in fact, with Plato in his Republic, the phenomenon of discoursing through the use of the others’ language received special attention in the twentieth century. The Russian thinker Mikhail Bakhtin understood indirect discourse as a form of transmission. Decades later, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, who cited Bakhtin in their collaboration A Thousand Plateaus, further developed the concept of indirect discourse to be a ubiquitous form of language. These thinkers argue that we as humans get our language from other speakers by retransmitting what we have already heard and discussed.

How does indirect discourse factor into the structure of Symposium? Moreover, does indirect discourse play a role in other Socratic works? If so, what is the nature of indirect discourse in Plato’s oeuvre? This paper sets out to investigate these questions and argues that indirect discourse is a part of human language in not just Plato’s works, but everyday existence as well.