Filosofia e narrazione. Il caso del "Fedone"

According to Plato, philosophy is not a practice of reading or writing, but it is structurally linked to dialogic orality: only by taking part in a dialogue it is possible to practice philosophy, and philosophy is a first-hand experience; that is the reason why you cannot read it or write it, or listen to it in a passive way. The visual writing of the dialogues is able to show the speakers of the dialogue and, moreover, is able to show what the characters are speaking about. Thanks to the visual writing, we, inasmuch as readers, can join in the discussion. In my opinion the readers, by reading the Phaedo, live an experience of participation in the discussion that resembles that felt by Echecrates when Phaedo tells him what Socrates told during his the last day of life. The text of Plato, i.e. a protreptic text, is capable of creating similarities and likely images. It fascinates the reader and makes possible the process of assimilation by inviting him to join a text that broadens minds and offers a reflection on a way of life. Echecrates is enchanted by the account. He feels, by listening, the same emotion of the characters of the story that he is listening to. The assimilation of the listeners to the protagonists of the story recounted and, in analogy to it, the assimilation of us, i.e. the readers, to the listeners, which are inside the dialogues, is just as an effect of the visual writing of dialogues. The boundary line among narrative levels may be broken in order to lead the audience to a narrative level that is inside another one (see James Henderson Collins). The dialogues belong to the genre of the Protreptikos logos and they are the result of a bold and successful Platonic attempt: they engage the readers in the practice of philosophy. As far as I am concerned, I try to show the mimetic operators of the visual writing that can be found in the Phaedo. One mimetic operator of the visual writing is ὥσπερ, the conjunction that has more than seventy occurrences in the Phaedo. It determines, with its scenic potentiality, a series of images that allows the reader and listener to look at and see what the characters are speaking about. The word ὥσπερ introduces a comparison and when something is compared to something else, that something else is added to the scene with all the visual semantic frills. The role of ὥσπερ in the Phaedo has not the aim to show existing similarities, already recognized, but, on the contrary, is to create innovative assimilations which have to reverse established values.