Plato: Phaedo. David Gallop translation. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975.
Kenneth Dorter: Plato’s Phaedo: An Interpretation. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1982.
Ronna Burger: The Phaedo: A Platonic Labyrinth. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1984.
The most dramatic and therefore memorable Platonic dialogue consists of an account of Socrates’ last hours of life, after the death sentence meted out by the Athenian jury as punishment for allegedly teaching impious doctrines to the youth of the city. The narrator, Phaedo of Elis, an eyewitness to Socrates’ death, meets Echecrates, a Pythagorean, at Phlius, a small town on the Peloponnese and a center of Pythagoreanism. Pythagoreans divided into two camps: those who emphasized their teacher’s mathematical thought and the ones called the “Listeners,” who emphasized cult-like ritual and passive acceptance of doctrine. In this dialogue, Echecrates acts the part of a listener, interrupting Phaedo’s narrative only once. But the questions he asks initially balance an interest in argument and action. What did Socrates say? And “how did he meet his end?” (575a) As Gallop remarks, the Greek word Plato gives Echecrates means ‘end’ not merely in the sense of termination but of completion. How did Socrates ’round out’ his life? Did his actions fit his arguments, not only on this occasion but on the many dialogic occasions preceding it? Echecrates also wants to know something about the circumstances of the death: Why was Socrates’ punishment delayed?
Phaedo answers the last question first. The delay in Socrates’ punishment came about merely by chance. The day before the trial was the day the Athenians put a wreath on the stern of a ship they send to Delos every year in honor of Theseus, the founder of their polis, who (according to legend) sailed to Crete on a mission to rescue seven men and seven women from the Minotaur; every ninth year, in accordance with the command of King Minos, the monster was entitled to his payment of human sacrifices. Before leaving Athens, the citizens vowed to honor the god Apollo if he granted success to Theseus; hence the wreathed ship. The mission succeeded because Ariadne, King Minos’ daughter, gave the hero a ball of threat which he could use to find his way out of the Minotaur’s labyrinthine lair, bringing the prisoners with him. While the ship is away from Athens, the polis must be kept pure of bloodshed, so there may be no executions of prisoners. Purification will remain a theme throughout the dialogue, and the Pythagoreans made much of it in their own rituals. This will give Phaedo’s account an added dimension of interest for the Echecrates, the listener.
Like Athens itself, Socrates is described as Apollonian. One question that needs answering is: Who is the real Apollonian, the philosopher or the polis? Or are both Apollonian, albeit in different ways? Who is undergoing the true rite of purification? Moreover, Phaedo prefaces his reply by saying “it’s always the greatest of pleasures for me to recall Socrates, whether speaking myself or listening to someone else” (585d); anamnesis—literally, not-forgetting—or keeping some one or some thing present in one’s mind was another Pythagorean motif, and also figures in the dialogue, later on.
Just as Theseus and the rescued hostages add up to fifteen persons, at Socrates’ death there were fifteen named witnesses. If Phaedo plays the role of Theseus, bringing the story back alive, as it were, what role does Socrates play? Pointing to the description of Socrates as looking up at his jailer “from under his brows,” like a bull, at the moment before he drinks the poison, Burger slyly suggests that he is the Minotaur, “the mythical monster symbolizing the fear of death”; “perhaps Socrates succumbs to the fear of death, or at least… presents that appearance to his audience,” for one and only one instant (213). Then again, if Socrates represents philosophy and the jailer represents the polis, Athens, it may be that the monster, philosophy, does indeed threaten the polis and its myths. Does Socrates eye the polis as his next meal? Does the polis justly dispatch the menacing monster? Like all myths, this story also opens itself for interpretation.
Both Dorter and Burger take the Ariadnean role in interpreting this “Platonic labyrinth” of a dialogue. Neither takes the role of historian, claiming that the dialogue expresses the time-spirit of ancient Athens; rather, they insist on the philosophic seriousness of the dialogue as an effort to climb out of the ‘cave’ of its time and place. Dorter writes, “This book is an attempt to understand and explore the philosophy of Plato generally, by means of what I consider the most satisfactory way of approaching his thought: the careful reading of a particular dialogue,” one which “displays a greater range of subjects” than any dialogue of similar length (ix). He combines what he calls “analytic” method (discussing the logical merits and demerits of the arguments Socrates and his interlocutors make) with the “dramatic” method (a consideration of the setting of the dialogue, the characters of the interlocutors, and their actions) (ix).
Myths are for children, first and foremost. One of Socrates’ critics accused him of childishness, but Dorter suggests that the children here are Socrates’ friends, whose fear of death needs calming not only with reasoned arguments but comforting stories. This, Dorter thinks, accounts for the absence of Plato, no unphilosophic child. More accurately, Socrates’ friends are like adolescents, emerging from childish faith in myths but therefore inclined both to reject them skeptically and to long for them romantically. For his part, narrator Phaedo has stopped at Phlius on his way home to Elis, where he will found a school of philosophy. “If… we think of Phaedo not merely in terms of his historical personality but also in terms of the significance of his life then it is possible to see him as a symbol of the subject-matter of the dialogue, for his life was characterized by liberation from bondage” to the opinions, including the myths, of the polis. It may be that his school will generate a real philosopher or two, even as the ‘school’ of Socrates did (10). Near the beginning of the dialogue, Socrates announces that he has written a hymn to Apollo, following a command he received in a dream to make art and practice it. Previously, he had thought that in philosophizing he had obeyed the command, “since philosophy is a very high art form” (61a), but since his trial and sentencing he decided (he says) that the safer course is to take the command more literally. He does not recite the hymn, but it is based on one of Aesop’s fables—that is, upon a decidedly didactic myth. If education means ‘leading out,’ Socrates is as much his own Ariadne as his own Minotaur.
Socrates’ two dialogic partners are Cebes and Simmias, both of them Pythagoreans. They display no remarkable interest in mathematics, but neither are they passive listeners; this suggests that Socrates has already accustomed them to his own way of philosophizing, for which he offers an account, midway through. He will need to give such an account because his friends put him on trial for a second time. Why should philosophers “die lightly,” as Socrates seems willing to do? (62c10) Is Socrates not in the service of the gods? And if so, why should a wise man want to escape the service of his betters, the gods—”good rulers by your own admission” (63a9)? Socrates could answer, ‘Because the gods have signaled, through the Athenian jury’s sentence of death, that they no longer have any use for my services,’ but he steers the conversation away from personal gods, toward a defense of the philosophic way of life. Death is the separation of the soul from the body; the philosopher “differs from other men” because in this life he has undertaken an activity that “releas[es] his soul, as far as possible, from its communion with the body” (64e5-65a2). The body, with its senses, hinders philosopher inasmuch as the soul reasons best when unhindered by bodily pains and pleasures. Such ideas as the just, the beautiful, and the good cannot be perceived sensually, only by thought. “If we’re ever to know anything purely, we must be rid of [the body], and must view the objects themselves with the soul by itself; it’s then, apparently, that the thing we desire and whose lovers we claim to be, wisdom, will be ours” (66d9-66e3). In this sense, Dorter remarks, “death is generally preferable to life” (18); Socrates agrees that we are in the service of the gods but he defines the gods as ideas, as impersonal entities. Death is more ‘liberating’ than life if “we take the ‘other gods’ of Hades as symbolic of some philosophically conceived source of truth rather than as the traditional gods of the underworld” (22). One notices that this makes philosophy as Socrates conceives it similar to a Pythagorean ritual of purification, except that the action of the philosopher isn’t ritualistic but rather a way of life, a way of living one’s whole life, and not a rite ‘abstracted’ from the rest of life.
The man who resents death betrays himself a “lover of the body” (68c2). Bravery and moderation as conventionally understood are valorized precisely because most men love their bodies more than they love their souls. But the love of the honors the polis bestows upon its brave and moderate citizens merely overcomes one set of pleasures for another; in this Socrates also answers in advance the Epicurean defense of philosophy as the highest form of pleasure. This is not to say that Socrates lived ascetically, for as Dorter remarks, Socrates earlier had asked that his wife and infant son be removed from the jail; “Socrates had not given up sex even at seventy” (27). He defends the philosophic life with a teacher’s tactic: exaggeration for heuristic effect. The philosopher will not forego the senses or sensual pleasure but subordinate them to his quest for wisdom.
But then, why not just cut to the proverbial chase and commit suicide? Why hang on to life for seventy years, only to die at the command of Athens? Dorter offers, “It seems that devoting one’s life to the ‘practicing of death’ is not merely an attempt to approximate suicide without technically committing the offense,” although it is that. “It is in fact the resolution of the tension between our selfish fulfilment in death and our duty to life; for it not only accords with that fulfilment in that it is a practicing of it, but it is also equivalent to virtue or excellence, the highest manifestation of life,” the “conversion of our concern from the corporeal to the intelligible” (31-32). The philosophic life “resolves the antagonism between form and corporeality by placing them in an ordered relationship where form is the essential truth of corporeality” (32). It might be added that the Platonic dialogue itself effectively resurrects or reincarnates Socrates, transforming him from Socrates in the flesh to Socrates in writing, whereby he ‘comes alive’ for readers with ‘live minds.’
This satisfies Simmias, but Cebes is not so easily convinced. How do we know that the soul does not perish, too, if not along with the body then after having been reincarnated in several bodies? Socrates offers to “speculate” (70b6), quietly eschewing the certainty that the Pythagorean mind with its mathematical inclinations so often craves. Opposites, he says, are generated from opposites—smaller to larger to smaller, stronger to weaker to stronger. There is a coming-to-be via ‘progress’ and a coming-to-be from ‘return.’ Arguing by analogy (and therefore imprecisely), we see sleeping and wakefulness coming-to-be ‘from’ each other. Why not then dying and living? Further, if everything that died stayed dead, everything eventually would be dead. The latter claim amounts to the claim scientists make today, that the laws of physics put the cosmos on an entropic course, although some of those scientists posit a return to life after a collapse into primeval chaos. Dorter replies that the opposite of life is not necessarily death but non-living. Life and death may be contrary, but they are not mutually exclusive. An entropic cosmos would be neither alive nor dead but simply non-living (36-40). Dorter further suggests that Socrates’ argument actually “presents the most basic conception of soul” as “motive force, which dates back at least to Thales’ claim that the magnet’s power of moving iron is proof that it possesses soul” (41). Soul as a “principle of motion” or energy, a “world-soul,” amounts to a “non-religious conception of the soul” (44).
If so, how can the soul understood this way possess the wisdom that Socratic philosophers seek? This leads to the next step of the argument, the argument for the immortality of the soul founded upon ‘recollection’ or anamnesis. Cebes first mentions the notion that we learn readily because we are reminded of what we’d learned in a former life, as suggested by the way that well-stated questions elicit truthful answers. This time, Simmias is the skeptic. Socrates observes that we do learn by associations, as when the sight of a boy’s lyre reminds his lover of the boy himself (73d 5-10). He then raises the nontrivial point that to be ‘reminded’ in this way points us to the idea of identity—the ‘What is?’ question, the characteristic ‘Socratic’ question. To ask ‘What is?’ is to ask a person to (as we would say) abstract the general from the particulars, the idea from the facts. Things that are “equal” are not the same as “the equal itself” (74c5). Socrates then plays along with Cebes’ reincarnation argument, saying that we “previously” know “the equal,” and that such intellectual perception of what things are is superior to the sensual perception of things. Why, “we must have been born knowing” (75d8); learning is reminding ourselves of what we once knew but forgot at birth. Dorter calls this “noetic recollection,” as distinguished from “dianoetic recollection,” which is learning based on “relationships among things at the same level such as in mathematics and logic” (50); dianoetic recollection is the topic of the Meno. “Socrates is trying to show that the knowledge of equality itself cannot have been derived entirely from the knowledge of sensible equals that we acquire empirically” (56).
Dorter further remarks that human nature consists of “the composite of soul and body”: “Thus, to prove that our souls are immortal would not be equivalent to proving that ‘we’ are immortal” because ‘I’ am such a composite, one part of which surely perishes at some point. He summarizes that the doctrine of purification means that the soul strives to ‘be with’ the forms, strives to perceive them, whereas the doctrine of recollection means that the soul has the ‘memory’ of the ‘forms’ or ideas latently within it, which amounts to saying that the nature of the soul is to perceive ideas. The Phaedo is the only Platonic dialogue in which both of these claims are presented, neither of which is to be taken literally. It’s more literally the case that opinion, appetite, and spiritedness work together to “provide the initial impetus of the embodied soul toward truth” (68).
When Simmias and Cebes persist in wanting to know if the soul survives after death, Socrates illustrates the intellectual method of ‘abstraction’ by observing that if we lived lives in the past, we are at least likely to do so in the future, given the concession that our current lives were in the future when we were living our previous lives. He chides them for conceiving of the soul as if it might disperse, after several lives, like dust in the wind, and Cebes admits that this is exactly what “the child inside us” fears (77d5). Socrates rejoins that things liable to dispersion are composite. The ideas—the ‘whats’ sought when we ask ‘What is?’—do not change. (One might add that things change but the idea of change itself does not). Further, the unchanging ideas are invisible and ‘divine,’ whereas the changeable things are visible and mortal; the invisible and divine soul rightly rules the divisible, changeable, mortal body. Since the invisible is constant, the soul is invisible, and the invisible rules the visible, then the soul must have the power to be constant, immortal! Understandably, Socrates quickly away from this spurious argument to get to his real point, which is the defense of the philosophic life. “True philosophers” firmly resist “bodily desires,” abstaining from them not “through dread of dishonor or ill-repute attaching to wickedness, like lovers of powers and prestige”—the sort of men who accused Socrates before the Athenian jury, one recalls—but as escapees from the prison of the body and of mere opinion or convention (82c). Philosophy shows the soul that inquiry through the senses is deceiving, that the soul must trust its own resources, its own reasoning powers, rather than succumbing to bodily demands and allurements. “Securing rest from these feelings, by following reasoning and being ever within it, and by beholding what is true and divine and not the object of opinion, and being nurtured by it, [the soul] believes that it must live thus for as long as it lives, and that when it has died, it will enter that which is akin and of like nature to itself, and be rid of human ills” (84a-b).
At a minimum, one must observe that the soul is brought to believe or trust, not actually to know, that it will “enter” what is not even precisely a realm but a compatible (and impersonal) nature. More ambitiously, as Burger observes, the “true philosophers” described here are called lovers of knowledge, not lovers of wisdom—the latter being the Socratic philosophers. Are the “true philosophers” rather more like the Pythagoreans and the others we now call ‘pre-Socratics’? Burger will make much of this.
Dorter calls Socrates’ argument about the ‘What is?’ question regarding the soul the central argument of the dialogue. “When investigating what is not knowable intrinsically, three natural avenues of inference are, first, the processes of nature (which include recollection as well as the workings of nature)”—the “cosmological” proof—”second, the implications of our concepts”—the ‘ontological’ proof—”and third, reasoning by analogy from the known to the unknown”—the ‘analogical’ proof, in this case an ‘argument from design’ (72). “What is most remarkable is that the argument from design despite its lack of rigor seems ultimately the most persuasive of the arguments, to judge from the reasons most people actually give for affirming God’s existence” (72). “Nothing is rigorously demonstrated but our inner conviction is encouraged and articulated,” and this “incantation” is “effective… because it explores and develops the source of the belief rather than producing arguments that may be clear and impressive but somehow leave us untouched” (76). “Once one abstracts from the misleading connotations of popular religion conveyed by Plato’s unconventional use of ‘Hades’ and ‘the gods,’ one can see the Phaedo‘s arguments as furnishing us with a sense of immortality closer to the discovery of eternity within ourselves than to unending individual perpetuity in time,” the “consciousness of the eternal present” (77-78). The imagery of the Platonic Socrates’ religious language “bring[s] home to us the implications of our choice of a way of life, and of the kind of persons we are” here and now (81). One dimension of a regime is the way of life of the citizens; Socrates invites his dialogic partners to a regime that puts its ‘citizens’ at odds with the ways of life upheld by the poleis.
At this, Simmias and Cebes whisper to one another while Socrates falls silent. When he asks what they are conferring about, Simmias replies that they continue to “have difficulties” with the argument (and rightly so), but hesitate to “make trouble, in case you should find it unwelcome in your present misfortune” (84d7-8). Socrates chuckles at their over-courteous misinterpretation of his silence, giving them the example of another misinterpretation founded upon ‘projecting’ conventional human thoughts on a wiser being. Swans are said to sing before they die, but human beings have assumed that they are singing a dirge, when they actually “sing more fully and sweetly than they’ve ever sung before for joy that they are departing into the presence of the god whose servants they are” (85a1-3). Their all-too-human listeners (again, the Pythagorean motif) “don’t reflect that no bird sings when it is hungry or cold or suffering any other distress” (85a5-6). Socrates immediately follows this nature-based observation with a pious one: “belonging as they do to Apollo, they are prophetic birds with foreknowledge of the blessings of Hades,” and I, Socrates, “am a fellow-servant of the swans, consecrated to the same god,” “possess[ing] prophetic power from my master no less than theirs” (85b2-7). One must admire that phrase “no less than theirs.” Socrates then admits that there is no certainty in this prophecy, as certain knowledge in such matters is difficult, as indeed it is.
Simmias protests that a lyre is visible, its attunement invisible, yet if the lyre is destroyed the invisible attunement disintegrates with it. Cebes returns with his objection that the soul may survive several bodily lives but nonetheless perish eventually. At this point, Echecrates interrupts Phaedo’s narration with an even more damaging worry. The whole argument so far inclines him to mistrust argumentation itself, inasmuch as even Socrates seems incapable of formulating an argument that isn’t open to objection. How did he respond? “Well, Echecrates, often as I’ve admired Socrates, I never found him more wonderful than when with him then” (88e4-5), responding to his friends’ objections with “pleasure, kindliness, and approval,” noticing “how their speeches had affected [the rest of] us” present, and “finally his success in treating us”—the medical language is noteworthy—”rallying us as if we were fleeing in defeat”—the military language equally so—”and encouraging us to follow him in examining the argument together” (89a1-6). Socrates turned to Phaedo himself first, making not an argument but requesting an action: Do not cut your long hair in mourning, even if the argument dies. Phaedo replies with his own worry, not in terms of cutting hair on a head but in terms of cutting heads themselves: the argument, he says, resembles the Hydra Hercules confronted, a multi-headed monster which generated a new head for every one the hero cut off. Here, at the center of the dialogue, Socrates warns Phaedo (not Simmias or Cebes) against “misology” or hatred and distrust of rational argument, of logos. “There’s no greater evil that could befall anyone” (89d1-2). Misanthropy arises when you trust someone who betrays you; misology arises when you put too much trust in an argument that betrays you—both instances, one should notice, of generalization or ‘ideation’ gone awry, misapplied. The very human capacity to experience noetic perception may mislead us, but if we succumb either to misanthropy or misology we should blame ourselves. Hence Socrates’ own cautious refusal to claim certain for his arguments. Distrust of rational argumentation itself will lead to the deployment of arguments not as means of arriving at some notion of the truth, the ideas, however provisional, but at their deployments as weapons in struggles for victory—the practice of sophists and many rhetoricians ancient, modern, and indeed ‘postmodern.’ Do not argue like a sophist, ad hominem (even if you intend your argument kindly): “If you take my advice, you’ll care little for Socrates but much more for the truth” (91c1).
Dorter observes that the allusion to Hercules and the Hydra makes sense mythologically, inasmuch as the Theseus story with which the dialogue nearly began was modeled on it; in both cases, we see what in Christian terms would be considered a sort of harrowing of Hell. The arguments of Simmias and Cebes both rest “on the assumption that the relationship between soul and body is to be conceived as a cause and effect relationship on the model of observable phenomena” (86), but “as long as the relationship between body and soul is conceived on the model of perceived relationships in the physical world, no convincing model can be found to support claims of immortality” (87). We rest some of our most intense hopes on an analogical argument that may well be false, as analogical arguments often are. If the objections of Simmias and Cebes spring up like Hydra heads, misology resembles the giant crab which attacked Hercules during his fight with the Hydra. In this unique Platonic dialogue, the only one named for the narrator, Phaedo represents liberation from bondage, the “bondage to the physical” and to misconceived arguments founded on analogies to the physical, which must be overcome to some considerable degree if he, or anyone, is to follow the philosophic way of life. Socrates first will counter this anti-philosophic inclination with what Dorter calls the method of hypothesis, which includes the recognition that we cannot overcome all logical impasses, along with a certain attitude toward logical conclusions—cautious, undogmatic, ready to admit revision if a better argument comes along. Dorter recalls the Republic, in which Socrates discusses four dimensions of human thinking: eikasia, the naïve apprehension of the world infused by custom, habits, and expectation hopeful or fearful; pistis, one’s conviction that he has discovered the true chain of causation; dianoia, the method of mathematics and logic; and noesis, the intuition of the ideas, of pure intelligibility. At the center of his own book, Dorter suggests that, mindful of the characters of his interlocutors, Socrates will appeal to eikasia, a respect for the likelihood that personal immortality is a morally beneficial belief for almost all men. Sophistry? No: “Plato escapes the charge of sophistry… by virtue of his distinction among types of cognition: although sophistic techniques may be employed at the level of eikasia, they are vindicated by their prior grounding of their doctrines in the noetic or dianoetic realm (97).
Socrates now re-addresses Simmias and his argument about the lyre and its attunement. If the soul is like the attunement of a lyre, then it’s composite, but they have already agreed that the soul isn’t composite, so the analogy fails. Playfully called by Socrates “my Theban guest” (an allusion to the Theban goddess Harmonia), Simmias concedes this, and Socrates goes on to say that the soul itself can be attuned well or badly, be rightly ordered or wrongly ordered. Ignoring the possibility that this implies that the soul is composite (and therefore mortal?), Socrates observes that the soul can rule the body, and therefore cannot be ‘of’ the body, perishable. Dorter comments, “the incorporeal divine attunement (the paradigmatic form) does survive the lyre’s breakage, although the corporeal attunement within the lyre does not,” by which he means that the lyre was built for an attunement that was conceived independently of the lyre itself, prior to the construction of the lyre (112). “To speak of corporeal elements predictably organizing themselves into a body whose attunement gives rise to the soul is unintelligible without some conception of a purposive motive force, a ‘weaver,’ and thus already presupposes soul” (112).
Having placated the goddess Harmonia, Socrates turns to “Cadmus,” Cebes. Cadmus, husband of Harmonia and founder-king of Thebes, was credited with introducing the alphabet to the Greeks and also made a reputation as a monster-slayer before Hercules; Socrates jocularly alludes to the relationship between his two interlocutors. But he also invites Cebes to join with him in monster-slaying, and also in a form of bringing an ‘alphabet’ to philosophy. Letters are to verbal argument or logos what numbers are to mathematics; re-centering philosophy on words instead of Pythagorean numbers and ‘pre-Socratic’ nature-study generally will turn out to be Socrates’ next move.
Cebes continues to doubt that the soul is really immortal rather than merely long-lived. This problem “calls for a thorough inquiry into the whole question of the reason for coming-to-be and destruction” (95e10-96a1). One expects a nature-study type of inquiry but Socrates instead tells another story or mythos, this time about himself as a young man, seeking “the kind of wisdom known as natural science” (96a7). Such inquiries left the young Socrates “blinded” because the results were so uncertain (96c5). Both Cartesian mathematics and Baconian experimental science were intended to overcome the uncertain or speculative character of ‘ancient’ natural science, but it remains an open question whether they have done so, despite their impressive achievements, in the sense Socrates has in mind. For example, mathematics can’t say why, if 1 + 1 = 2, they were not ‘two’ before the addition. Pythagorean mathematics cannot give an adequate account of even its simplest operations. As for the materialists, Socrates finds them inconsistent. Anaxagoras, for example, cannot explain the ruling Intelligence that he posits as the first cause of matter. Neither mathematical nor physical science can account for what would later be called ‘metaphysical,’ ‘beyond-the-physical’ questions: first and final causes. (See also Dorter, 122).
For this reason Socrates undertook what he called his “second sailing” (99d1). He decided that the direct approach to studying nature resembled an attempt to study the sun during an eclipse; you will ruin your eyes, that way. He turned from direct observation to consideration of hypotheses. “Hypothesizing on each occasion the theory I judge strongest, I put down as true whatever things seem to me to accord with it, both about a reason and about everything else; and whatever do not, put down as not true” (100a). He proposes to illustrate this somewhat vague description of his philosophic method with a proof of the immortality of the soul, a proposal Cebes applauds. Very well then, Socrates begins, “It seems to me that if anything else is beautiful besides the beautiful itself, it is beautiful for no reason at all other than that it participates in that beautiful” (100c4-6). Dorter explicates: “If something beautiful is to be explained in terms of its coming to be, it must be said to come to be ultimately from elements that were not beautiful, otherwise the beauty is never explained; but it is not satisfactory to say that elements that are not beautiful give rise to beauty merely by being put together (efficient causality) or that beauty is beauty because of the non-beautiful (material causality). Primitive qualities like beauty no less than relations, cannot be satisfactorily understood without the introduction of formal considerations as well as efficient and material ones.” (130-131) Socrates concludes the point by saying that we “know no other way in which each thing comes to be, except by participating in the peculiar Being of any given thing in which it does participate”; in the mathematical example given earlier, 1 + 1 = 2 because they “participate in twoness” (101c), in the form of idea of ‘two.’ Socrates thus explains and justifies Pythagoreanism to Pythagoreans by providing it with a meta-mathematical account of itself.
So, forms or ideas must be added to any account of nature. Conversely, hypotheses concerning ideas cannot account for natural generation, for ‘becoming’ as distinct from ‘being,’ the ‘how’ as distinct from the ‘why.’ The physical sciences are weak where the method of hypothesis is strong, and vice-versa. Socrates needs a new formulation which will unify the virtues of these two approaches. Here is where teleology comes in. Efficient, material, and formal causes all point to a final cause, namely, ‘the Good.’ To understand any natural object requires knowledge of how it came to be, what stuff it’s made of, its structure, but also its purpose, what it (speaking anthropomorphically) ‘strives’ to be.
The idea of ‘participating’ in a form or idea provides the basis for the principle of non-contradiction. You can say ‘1 + 1 = 2,’ but you can’t say ‘1 = 2’ without contradicting yourself. Similarly, “largeness itself [is] never willing to be large and small at the same time”; “it is not willing… to abide, and admit smallness, and thus be other than what it [is]” (102d-e). “Nor will any other of the opposites, while still being what it was, at the same time come to be, and be its own opposite. If that befalls it, either it goes away or it perishes” (102e-103a). In the Republic, Socrates states the principle of non-contradiction more fully: the same thing will not do or suffer opposites, at the same time and with respect to the same part. Black and white can exist side by side and remain what they are, as on a zebra, or they can mix and become something other than what they are, as in a shade of gray, but there is no ‘blackwhite.’
What has any of this to do with the question regarding the immortality of the soul? An onlooker reminds Socrates that earlier in the discussion he had said that opposites generate opposites—the large becoming small, and so on. Socrates could simply point to his own formulation, that large cannot be small at the same time, in relation to the same thing, but he evidently wants to emphasize the ‘ideational’ quality of the question and downplay ‘things’ or empireia. “You don’t realize the difference between what’s being said now and what was said then. It was said then that one opposite thing comes to comes to be from another opposite thing; what we’re saying now is that the opposite itself could never come to be opposite to itself, whether it be the opposite in us or the opposite in nature” (103b). He then offers a syllogism about the soul. The body is mortal; the soul gives it life. As the ‘life-principle,’ the soul cannot “admit” its opposite, death. Ergo, the soul is immortal. In Dorter’s words, the soul is “the bearer of the form of life” (147), the sufficient and necessary condition of life. Socrates thus explains and justifies Anaxagoreanism, the stance of the young or ‘pre-Socratic’ Socrates, to himself and to his interlocutors. As the materialist Anaxagoras self-contradictorily said, “Mind is the arranger of and cause of all things’; “since for Anaxagoras as for Plato mind was a function of soul,” this suggests that the cosmos itself somehow consists of mind,” (158), at least in the sense that it is rational or non-self-contradictory. Dorter calls this the “world-soul,” saying that its presence “in our particular body… is the cause of our body’s being alive and our personal individual soul may be considered the manifestation of this union—the body being the principle of individuation” (160).
Socrates has argued for the existence of an immortal soul defined in a decidedly unconventional way, while convincing his two interlocutors of the existence of an immortal soul defined in the conventional way—as a disembodied person. He now arrives at the moral lesson he has intended to impart. If the soul is immortal, “then it needs care” (107c3). A prudent individual will not want to go through eternity with a soul rendered defective by habitual abuse. He devises a story or myth about the afterlife in which souls “must submit to judgment” (107d9), after being guided to Hades through what is “probably” and many-forked path (108a4). “The wise and well-ordered soul” will follows its guide, “but the soul in a state of desire for the body… flutters around for a long time, around the region of the visible” (108a-b). Both the path to Hades and Hades itself are parts of the natural cosmos, as is “the true heaven” (109e7), where the good souls will dwell.
Ever-practical Crito, seeing that the hour is late, asks if Socrates has instructions about his children or “anything else” (115b1-3). Socrates replies that the best service to him and to his family is for Crito and all his friends to “take care of yourselves” (115b6), to live as if their souls are immortal. Socrates is no respecter of promises, and therefore not obsessed with a ‘last will and testament’ or any executor thereof—although a little later, when his three sons and the women of his household are brought in and he says his farewell, he did give “certain directions as to his wishes” with Crito as his witness. His philosophic way of life is his real legacy. He cautions against worry about bodily things, as he isn’t his body; “you can be sure, my dear Crito, that misuse of words is not only troublesome in itself, but actually has a bad effect on the soul” (115e5-6). To confuse ‘Socrates’ with the living body now before them is to misuse words, a habit that can lead to misology when the words we have misused betray us. He calms his weeping friends after drinking the poison, and finally reminds Crito to pay a debt to the god of healing. Dorter interprets this (following Nietzsche) that Socrates regards the poison as a welcome means of purging his soul from the sickness of life.
If Socrates doesn’t believe that the soul survives death as a disembodied individual but rather as a well- or ill-formed pattern of energy reintegrated with the cosmos, why would the philosopher care about caring for his soul? Dorter suggests that “for a philosopher, the prospect of his identity’s becoming once and for all time inseparable from evil would be deterrent enough” from living badly (162). He elaborates: “it is possible to infer that what happens to the soul in this mythical earth” that Socrates sketches “may be a metaphor for what happens to the soul within the living body and that the rewards and punishments may be symbolic portraits of the rewards and punishments we experience during life as the concomitant of our behavior” (166). Good or bad, deeds in this life are “reflexive”; “they react upon us as well as acting upon others” (168). The Socrates who receives the cup of poison from his jailer and playfully asks if he might pour a portion of it on the ground as a libation to the gods gives every evidence of having a well-ordered soul, far removed from the anguish of guilt for the conventional crimes the polis has convicted him of. I once knew a man who said of Socrates’ punishment after his last speech to the jury, “If he had talked to me that way, I would have killed him, too!” He was less happy in the prime of his life than was old Socrates facing death.
Dorter concludes with some remarks on the character of the philosophic life. “Reason in its purest form has its interest not in its subject, the person thinking, but in its object, that which is being thought about, while passion expresses an egocentric motivation, a need or desire of the subject himself. Reason in its pure form concerns itself with what is true regardless of how it affects us.” (182). This notwithstanding, the philosopher never loses sight of his own embodiment. The soul’s tendency to reason and the body’s tendency to unreason reside together in his nature, as in every human being. Each part of our nature has a tendency, an energy, and this understanding of human nature contrasts with that of such modern philosophers as Leibniz, Kant, and Schopenhauer, who argue that the physical world “has no reality in itself but is merely the mind’s representation of the in-itself in the forms of space and time” (184). But “for Plato… the corporeal world, and therefore energy has intrinsic existence independent of a perceiving consciousness” (184). “One can impute reason to the natural order without conceiving this reason as personality or consciousness” (186). Morally, this requires human beings to align their souls as much as possible with the rational order seen in the cosmos, itself an all-encompassing pattern of rational energy ruling matter given form by that energy. This is ‘natural right.’
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