The main difference between the method of Socrates and the philosophical system of Plato appears in Plato's concept of absolute forms, as best exemplified in the Allegory of the Cave. According to Plato, our impressions of such abstract concepts as truth and beauty are nothing but pale reflections of transcendental and absolute ideals. As a result of the Platonic dialogues, the figure of Socrates has historically been associated with this concept of absolute ideals. However, Elinor Jane Maddock West argues against such a trend and states that "what must be replaced is that traditional identification of Socrates with Plato which has made metaphysical systems out of dialectical conversations" (132).
Yet without Plato's infusion of absolute forms, how does the philosophy of Socrates differ from that of the Sophists? While Socrates criticized the Sophists for taking money for their services (Guthrie, The Sophists 39), their main disagreement concerned the Sophistic concept of linguistic relativity, to which Socrates responds in Plato's Cratylus. In this dialogue, Socrates debates the issue of names with Hermogenes, a follower of Parmenides, and Cratylus, a philosopher who, legend tells us, "came to mistrust language so profoundly that eventually he renounced speech altogether and communicated to others by means of gesture only" (Harris and Taylor 1-2). It is no coincidence that Socrates debates this issue with both an advocate of monism and an extreme linguistic skeptic; Plato undoubtedly meant to demonstrate in the Cratylus how Socrates' beliefs on language fell between the two extremes of his day, just as Bakhtin can be viewed as residing between the monologic tradition of Western thought and the extreme skepticism of deconstruction.
To summarize in full detail the debate of the Cratylus would be too lengthy for our present inquiry, but Socrates' conclusions can be summarized as an insistence that dialectic serve as the locus for all linguistic definitions and philosophical inquiries. The historical Parmenides no doubt argued that definitions stemmed from a divine source that never changed, whereas the Sophists believed that such definitions were a matter of kairos and were relative to a given culture or situation. Yet in the Cratylus, Socrates agrees with neither position and turns instead to the dialectic for his answer, as Roy Harris and Talbot J. Taylor have noted:
We must not forget that throughout Plato's dialogues Socrates is constantly engaged in verbal battles with the Sophists...and is especially concerned to discredit the Sophistic view, associated in particular with Protagoras, that truth is an illusion. Socratic inquiry is nothing else but a relentless pursuit of truth by the method of question and answer: if truth were an illusion this inquiry would be worthless. (18)Harris and Taylor believe that at the end of the Cratylus, we are "driven...to realize that language reaches both beyond our opinions and beyond itself" (19).
Though the question of where "beyond" language the truth resides is never resolved in the Cratylus, it is what undoubtedly led Plato to formulate his later concept of absolute forms. But as Eric Havelock reminds us, the Socratic method "stayed away from the [Platonic] problem of whether there existed a body of knowledge independent of the consciousness that knew it" ("The Orality" 88). While he remains uncritical of Plato's theories, Havelock's description of his textual eidos or absolute forms as being "so final, so definite, so ultimate as to turn into a reality beyond either linguistic or mental process" ("The Orality" 90) is reminiscent of Bakhtin's condemnation of the monologic tradition of Western philosophy.
Plato's system of philosophy, with its insistence on absolute forms, served for centuries as the very foundation of the monologic tradition that both Bakhtin and many poststructuralist thinkers have sought to overturn. As we have seen, Bakhtin's views of language are closely aligned with the views of Socrates, whereas deconstruction and poststructuralism have assumed positions clearly similar to those of the Sophists.
However, in his book Dissemination, Derrida warns against a "back-to-the-sophists" interpretation of his readings of Plato's Phaedrus (108) and attempts instead to describe Socrates as the "master of the pharmakon" and the "spitting image of a sophist" (117). Additionally, he is critical of the dialectic process espoused in the Phaedrus and takes issue with Plato's condemnation of writing. In fact, Derrida's reading of the Phaedrus is the primary foundation on which he builds his argument that Western philosophy has erroneously privileged speech over writing.
But there are problems with Derrida's reading of the Phaedrus, as Jasper Neel has pointed out. Neel, in his book Plato, Derrida, and Writing, finds much in Derrida's philosophy that is useful for modern composition studies, but he argues that Derrida has engaged in an oversimplified reading of the Phaedrus by ignoring the important metaphor of the two lovers, which demonstrates that "[t]ruth is a journey...[that] requires a lifetime of trying to know and come near the right, the beautiful, and the good..." (198). Neel feels that Derrida has erroneously viewed the Phaedrus as advocating a closed concept of truth, whereas Neel believes that if one reads Phaedrus as a "truly complex weaving of the play of meaning," then it becomes clearly evident that Plato was "a writer [who]...understood both the forever-playing nature of the search for meaning and the danger that writing presents in its ability to seem to end that play" (198-99). Indeed, the inherent danger of absolute closure presented by the written word seems to be the main message behind Plato's condemnation of writing in the Phaedrus and in other texts.
Neel believes that in condemning dialectic and attempting to equate Socrates with the Sophists, Derrida has missed the entire point of the Phaedrus. Plato may indeed privilege speech over writing, but to insist that the entire scope of Western discourse is "logocentric" is seemingly preposterous. Derrida simply overstates his case on this point, using as justification his reading of the Phaedrus and a few other select texts. Western philosophy has in no certain terms ever privileged speech over writing, but perhaps it should, which is Bakhtin's main point and that of Socrates as well.
While both Bakhtin and Derrida can be seen as working against the monologic tradition that stems from Plato's concept of absolute forms, Bakhtin's insistence on the dialogic nature of language differs from Derrida's extremely skeptical view that language is nothing but the free play of signifiers. In fact, just as Socrates stands at a point midway between the Sophists on the one hand and Plato on the other, so too does Bakhtin stand in the center of a linguistic spectrum that has at one end Derrida and at the other someone like E.D. Hirsch or the New Critics of decades past.
But to view such competing theories of philosophy of language as merely a static spectrum would be to perhaps misrepresent the situation, especially in light of what some consider to be historical cycles of philosophy. Classical scholar B. A. G. Fuller, in the second volume of his History of Greek Philosophy, states that all of philosophy is much like the stock market in that it experiences polarized swings between periods of
intellectual hope and enthusiasm and constructive activity, on the one hand, and intervals of mental depression, loss of confidence in the power of reason to deal with the problems of existence, and even out and out intellectual panic, on the other. (1)Indeed, Fuller believes such bi-polar shifts began with the highly constructive, Presocratic epoch, which he says later "crashed in a turmoil of skepticism" wrought by the Sophists (1). The Sophistic enlightenment was, in turn, followed by an "upward swing" of the Socratic era that culminated under Plato and Aristotle. Similarly, this second period of certainty lead to another, more prolonged round of philosophical skepticism, which then gave way to yet another constructive period that was kept in check by the moderate forces of the Stoics and the Epicureans. According to Fuller, it was not until Neo-Pythagoranism and Neo-Platonism combined with advancing Christianity that philosophy reached a relatively stable period that lasted for roughly a thousand years (2).
Though Fuller views the constructive periods of philosophy as highly productive, he is quick to point out the value of the destructive periods of skepticism, especially if they are dominated by acute and powerful critics. Fuller believes that such periods help to "deflate current dogma and pretension, and stand as a perpetual warning to constructive philosophers against overcredence and over-speculation" (2).
These philosophical mood swings that Fuller mentions shed a great deal of light on our current situation in philosophy of language and English studies. Just as the Sophists were responsible for overturning the extreme monism of the Presocratics, so too has Derrida been instrumental in clearing away the overly rigid views of language that existed throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries as a result of the Cartesian quest for certainty. But it appears that this recent cycle of skepticism has run its course, as witnessed by the declining critical influence of Derrida's ideas in English studies, though the impact of his thought can hardly be considered dead.
Likewise, as we have seen, there are also a great deal of similarities between the theories of Bakhtin and those of Socrates, whose ideas began the reconstructive period of Plato and Aristotle, which Fuller characterizes as "perhaps the most prosperous years that philosophy has ever known" (2). Bakhtin's position in modern philosophy resembles that of Socrates in that his views mark the beginning of a new reconstructive period in philosophy of language, one that hopefully will not lead us toward a new rigid and dogmatic system of philosophy. For such systems, though they provide us with a sense of certainty and stability, fail to reflect the dialogic nature of language itself.
These historical analogies can also help us position Bakhtin's theories of dialogics within contemporary rhetorical thought, for classical rhetoric has become increasingly important in composition studies during the past 30 years. One of the first rhetoricians to address Bakhtin's usefulness in rhetorical studies was Charles Schuster, whose 1985 College English article, "Mikhail Bakhtin as Rhetorical Theorist," set the stage for Bakhtin's assimilation into composition studies. Schuster sees Bakhtin's dialogics as modifying Aristotle's rhetorical triangle into a rhetorical circle, in which distinctions between speaker, listener, and subject (which Bakhtin called the "hero") are blurred:
According to Bakhtin, a speaker does not communicate to a listener about a "subject"; instead, "speaker" and "listener" engage in an act of communication which includes the "hero" as a genuine rhetorical force. The difference here is significant. In our conventional analyses of discourse...[s]ubjects are actually conceived as objects. They are passive, inert, powerless to shape the discourse. In Bakhtin's terms, the hero is as potent a determinant in the rhetorical paradigm as speaker or listener. The hero interacts with the speaker to shape the language and determine form. At times, the hero becomes the dominant influence in verbal and written utterance. (595)R. Allen Harris, borrowing Schuster's idea of a Bakhtinian rhetorical circle, applies dialogics to an analysis of the dialogue in Phaedrus and discovers marked diversity in the remarks of each speaker, which in turn demonstrates how "the authorial voice is a distillation of an untold number of prior voices" (172).
Viewed in Bakhtinian terms then, the "Socratic problem" is really no problem at all, for all communication constitutes a borrowing of other voices for purposes of individual authorial intent. Plato borrows Socrates to make a point, as Socrates during his lifetime borrowed and imparted, accepted and challenged, the thoughts of others in a never-ending, dialectical inquiry. "Truth" in the Phaedrus emerges only through the act of dialectic, and once that process stops, truth itself becomes suspect.
Schuster and Harris both give us an idea of how Bakhtin stands in relation to classical rhetorical theory, but what exactly is Bakhtin's standing within modern composition studies? Louise Wetherbee Phelps sees Bakhtin as one of four modern philosophers (Burke, Ricoeur, and Polanyi being the others) who have formulated positive, constructive ideas with great relevance for rhetoric and composition, as opposed to the thought of "poststructuralism, critical theory, Marxism, and 'edifying' philosophy that others find gloomy, skeptical, and paralyzing" (Composition 56).
Yet to answer fully the question of Bakhtin's influence in modern composition theory requires an examination of the various pedagogical views that have arisen during the past decade and now seem to be merging toward a unified paradigm. Lester Faigley has noted that during the 1980s, three competing schools of pedagogy vied for the attention of composition scholars: the expressive, the cognitive, and the social.
However, recent developments indicate that the expressive and cognitive views are moving increasingly toward a social view of language and literacy. Peter Elbow, considered to be the top practitioner in the expressivist camp, has throughout his work expressed an interest in how individual expression operates within a social setting, such as in collaborative writing and peer evaluation. As Stephen M. Fishman has noted, many critics have ignored the social emphasis of Elbow's work. Though the expressivist school indeed has roots in eighteenth-century German romanticism, Fishman argues that to "understand romanticism as championing the artist as a lonely, spontaneous genius is to adopt too narrow a view of romanticism" (649). Instead, he believes a central concern of romanticism was "finding common ground among individuals," and that by "seeing expressivism as isolating, Elbow's critics make it easy to neglect the communitarian objectives of his approach" (649).