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To be sure, the violence Socrates' interpretation inflicts upon the meaning and position of Simonides' words makes his exegesis of the poem no less implausible than his lecture on Doric philosophy. Moreover, his own subsequent rejection of discussions of poetry as analogous to the symposia of those unable to entertain one another with their own conversation (347Cf.) is a clear invitation to consider literary interpretation as a whole to be philosophically unserious. But the cogency of such an invitation would certainly be weakened if the only example of an extended interpretation the Protagoras supplied, namely Socrates', were obviously and irremediably flawed, for then it could not be excluded that some superior interpretation (potentially, the one Hippias offers, 347A-B) might still yield philosophically interesting results. The likelihood that, despite the many quirks in its details and conclusions, Socrates' analysis of Simonides' ode is intended by Plato to be serious, at least in certain regards,17 is increased not only by Socrates' pedantic care to cite and explain practically every phrase in the poem, but also by his extracting from it doctrines we can recognize as important tenets of Plato's own philosophy.18 From Plato's standpoint, the problem with Socrates' interpretation is not that it makes mistakes, but simply that it is an interpretation. For a non-Platonic analysis of the basic motives and mechanisms of literary interpretation, however, Socrates' exegesis may be considered paradigmatic. If, as Plato seems to suggest, Socrates' procedure of contextualization is not only just, but also inevitable, then the differences among various interpretations will be due to their different premises, modes of application, and degrees of expertise in deployment of that procedure, but not to its absence or presence or basic character. |
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This Platonic scene of a textual challenge consisting in context-free citation and of a response to the challenge formulated as a double contextualization, first external and then internal, may be considered representative of a whole class of problems that confront the philologist. For often the most perplexing difficulties are not posed by texts themselves, but by uncertainties concerning their contexts: one common way in which texts can become a challenge is that they become decontextualized, and efforts to meet this kind of challenge will usually consist in an attempt to recontextualize them. |
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Decontextualization can occur in several ways. It can be part of the author's intention: publication, for example, guarantees that a text will fall into the hands of people who have no idea of its original external context. On the other hand, even if a text was conceived entirely within the limits of a particular occasion, if it is literary it will exceed them and will invite future readers to contextualize it in new ways by applying it to situations the |
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17 See Gundert (1952) 8993 and Kleist (1880) 1012, 29 n. 34. |
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18 Especially the doctrine that no one errs willingly, 345Df. Gigon (1946) 1435 argues unconvincingly that such doctrines should be ascribed not to Plato but to Aristippus. |
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