ABSTRACT
Plato’s early dialogues contain a moral psychology very different from that which emerges in the Gorgias and Phaedo and is elaborated in the Republic. We need not decide here whether they present the mature views of the historical Socrates or the early views of Plato himself; they may, of course, do both. Their conception of the nature and goal of desire appears at once attractive and alien: we, surely, cannot be quite like that. It has the corollary that most forms of mental conflict become an impossibility. It is thus highly relevant to our topic in an indirect way: we learn how we might be if we were to be less liable to mental conflict than we are. Socrates illumines the reality that he denies.
