Socrates by C. C. W. Taylor Christopher;taylor Read Free Book Online Page B

Charmides, Protagoras ) the conversation is represented as having taken place before Plato was born, and in others ( Euthyphro , Crito , Symposium ) the mise-en-scène precludes his presence. Mostly the dialogues contain no claim that they are records of actual conversations, and where that claim is made in particular cases, as in the Symposium (172a–174a), the claim is itself part of an elaborate fiction, in which the narrator explains how he is able to describe a conversation at which he was not himself present. The central point is that, for Plato’s apologetic and philosophical purposes, historical truth was almost entirely irrelevant; for instance, the main point of the dialogues in which Socrates confronts sophists is to bring out the contrast between his genuine philosophizing and their counterfeit, and in so doing to manifest the injustice of the calumny which, by associating him with the sophists, had brought about his death. For that purpose it was entirely indifferent whether Socrates ever actually met Protagoras or Thrasymachus, or, if he did, whether the conversations actually were on the lines of those represented in Protagoras and Republic 1. As with Xenophon, it may be that Plato makes some use of actual reminiscence; but we cannot tell where, and it does not in any case matter.
    So far we have considered as a single group all those dialogues which stylometric criteria indicate as earlier than the ‘middle group’: Parmenides , Phaedrus , Republic , and Theaetetus . Within that group any differentiation has to appeal to non-stylometric criteria. Here Aristotle’s evidence is crucial. Accepting as historical his assertion that Socrates did not separate the Forms, we can identify those dialogues frorn the stylistically early group in which Socrates maintains thetheory of Forms, viz. Phaedo , Symposium , and Cratylus , as dialogues where, in that respect at least, the Socrates of the dialogue is not the historical Socrates. This result can now be supplemented by some conjectures about the likely course of Plato’s philosophical development which have at least reasonable plausibility.
    It is reasonable to see in the attribution of the theory of Forms to Socrates a stage in the process of the transformation of Socrates into an authoritative figure who speaks more directly for Plato than does the Socrates of his earlier writings. This is indicated by some other features of these dialogues. The Symposium puts a good deal of emphasis on the individual personality of Socrates, starting with his unusually smart turn-out for the dinner-party (174a) and his late arrival as a result of having stopped on the way to think out a problem (174d–175b, a mini-version of the trance at Potidaea referred to later in the dialogue (220c–d)), and culminating with Alcibiades’ eulogy, which puts it squarely in the Socratic ‘Alcibiades dialogue’ tradition. But Socrates has another role in the dialogue, that of a spokesman who reports the speech of a wise woman, Diotima, to whom belongs the account of the educational role of love, culminating in the vision of the Form of Beauty (201d–212c). So, strictly, Socrates does not himself maintain the theory, but speaks on behalf of someone else who does. I think that Plato uses this device to mark the transition from the Socrates of historical fact and of the tradition of the Socratic genre (not explicitly distinguished from one another) to what we might call the Platonic Socrates. Socrates speaking with the words of Diotima is a half-way stage to the Socrates of Phaedo and Republic , who has now incorporated the theory of Forms as his own. As regards Phaedo , we saw that Socrates’ death depicted there was not his actual death, and it was suggested that Plato has signalled that the narrative does not reproduce what Socrates actually said. Another indication of this is the concluding myth of the fate of the soul after death, where Socrates steps out of his own person to tell