From the Beginning to Plato

PLATO: AESTHETICS AND PSYCHOLOGY 393
between the results of investigations into the chronology of the dialogues and
what has been seen as the gradual maturation of their ideas and arguments. A
typical overview will describe the Platonic corpus as falling into three parts:
early, middle, and late. The early period, on this account, broadly represents that
of the ‘Socratic’ dialogues, when Plato was by and large occupied with
representing and preserving the intuitions and arguments of his master Socrates;
the middle period shows him constructing those positive ideas which we most
closely associate with the name ‘Plato’ (‘Forms’, ‘philosopher-kings’, and so
on); while in the late period, he moves into a more critical and reflective phase,
perhaps rejecting or heavily modifying some of his earlier ideas. The pattern at
first sight fits quite neatly and easily in the case of Platonic ‘psychology’. In the
Apology, which all are agreed belongs to a time early on in Plato’s writing career,
we find Socrates at his trial expressing an agnostic attitude towards the fate of an
individual after death: either death is annihilation, or the soul is translated to
another place, where it will encounter the wise men of the past (if, as he says, the
stories are true). By contrast, in the Phaedo (assigned to the ‘middle’ period),
Socrates spends his last hours arguing rationally but committedly for the
immortality of the soul. It is in the Phaedo, too, that—on the account in question
—we begin to see the formation of a detailed theory about the soul and its
nature, which is developed further in the Republic (usually treated as the middle
dialogue par excellence) and elsewhere. Finally, in the late dialogues, signs of a
retreat have been detected from some aspects of the ‘middle’ theory, and there is
a reduction in emphasis on the immortal nature of the soul, even if the idea itself
is plainly not abandoned.
There are, however, a number of points on which a developmental
interpretation of Plato’s treatment of the soul looks vulnerable, or unhelpful. In
the Apology, where Socrates is (fictionally) addressing a general audience of
Athenian citizens, his description of the ‘other place’ to which the soul may be
translated after death is formulated in mainly traditional terms, which may
reflect more about what Plato considered appropriate to the dramatic audience
than about either his own or Socrates’ views. 2 Again, the fact that the Symposium
manages to discuss immortality at length without once referring to the soul as
immortal cannot reasonably be supposed to indicate that Plato has temporarily
given up the idea, which is heavily canvassed in other dialogues apparently
written at about the same time. This looks like a clear case of what we may only
suspect in the case of the Apology, namely of Plato’s deciding what to include
and what to exclude by reference to a dramatic audience—in this case, a tragic
playwright and his guests at a dinner-party. 3 In the Phaedo, he has Socrates
carefully skirt round the question whether the soul has parts, which becomes
central in other dialogues but in this context would impede the argument. This
does not mean that we must adopt a strictly unitarian approach; what it does
mean is that chronological arguments need to be used sparingly, and that there
are likely to be other factors at work in determining the content of any particular
dialogue.