Phaedo
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| This article is part of the series: The Dialogues of Plato |
| Early dialogues : |
| Apology |
| Charmides - Cratylus |
| Crito - Euthydemus |
| Euthyphro -First Alcibiades |
| Gorgias |
| Hippias Major - Hippias Minor |
| Ion - Laches |
| Lysis -Menexenus |
| Meno - Phaedo |
| Protagoras |
| The Symposium |
| Middle dialogues : |
| The Republic - Parmenides |
| Phaedrus - Theaetetus |
| Late dialogues : |
| The Sophist – The Statesman |
| Philebus |
| Timaeus - Critias |
| Laws |
| Of doubtful authenticity |
| Second Alcibiades – The Rivals |
| Theages – Epinomis – Minos |
| Clitophon |
The Phaedo is a philosophical dialogue written by Plato sometime in the early 4th century BCE. Purportedly an account of Socrates' last day of life, the dialogue relates Socrates' argument that his soul will outlive his body and travel to exotic places after he dies. Socrates has trouble convincing his disciples that the soul is immortal, and ends up defining it to be what he wants it to be: imperishable. This dialogue is a key source for two well-known Socratic doctrines: the immortality of the soul and the so-called "theory of forms". It also contains the hemlock drinking scene and Socrates' last words.
Contents |
[edit] Characters
The story is related by Phaedo to Echecrates (two non-Athenian disciples), in a foreign land (probably Elis- a city with which Athens was at war at the time of the telling). Phaedo is able to give Echecrates a word-for-word account of Socrates' last conversation despite the fact that the execution took place many (uspecified) years ago. Even though the prison was supposedly crowded with disciples, both Athenian and foreign, the dialogue is almost entirely between Socrates and two more foreign disciples, the Thebans Simmias and Cebes. Simmias and Cebes are said in the Crito to have come to Athens with cash in order to help pay for Socrates' escape.
Somewhat curiously, Plato remarks that he himself was just too sick to attend. It is worth remarking that in no dialogue does Plato indicate exactly how he himself came upon the legendary conversations that he relates about Socrates and company. It is well to note that the Phaedo, besides being told to a foreigner by a foreigner in a foreign land, and concerning Socrates conversations with foreign disciples, is full of foreign ideas - the notions that Socrates tries to defend are not Greek, but in fact sound Hindu: karma and reincarnation(82a). The related doctrine that "knowledge is recollection" from past lives is also not Greek.
[edit] Prisons - real and metaphorical
Socrates is locked up in a real "bricks and mortar" prison awaiting his execution and has no desire to leave. In the Crito, Socrates insists against Crito's exortations that it would be wrong for him to leave the prison. In the Phaedo, he takes his logic in a new direction. This dialogue makes no reference either to the the injustice of his conviction (Apology)or to the injustice of escape (Crito), but concerns Socrates' calm in the face of death. Socrates explains to his disciples that he actually looks forward to dying because this will free him from the real prison. Socrates informs them that the body is the real prison, because it locks up the soul. Socrates thinks death will provide him what life did not: the opportunity for travel, and the chance to become knowledgeable.
Socrates makes death sound so attractive that the subject of suicide inevitably comes up (62a-e). He tells his disciples that while death is surely better than life, suicide is still impermissible. The gods, who are the masters of men, would frown upon their possessions taking it upon themselves to destroy themselves. A man who longs for death as he does must await a benefactor ("eu-ergeten") who will come along and kill him and set his soul free (62a).
[edit] Family frame
The story of the last day of Socrates is framed by scenes with his wife, Xanthippe. Phaedo says that when he arrived at the prison, Xanthippe was already there and sitting with a small boy on her lap. When she saw the disciples come in, she wailed that this would be the last time that Socrates be able to talk with his friends. Apparently unconcerned that she will be a poor widow and their three sons orphans, she is worried about her husband's young friends. Socrates greets his wife's self-abnegation with annoyance. Without even a glance at her, Socrates instructs Crito to have her taken away. Towards the end of the dialogue, Xanthippe appears again, and this time she is sent away with some instructions, the precise nature of which the reader is not told.
The implication of the frame elements is that the master-disciple relationship trumps the family relationship. Socrates' last day on earth is spent with the people who he cares most about, and these are apparently not his own young sons (two little, and one nearly grown, as we are told in the Apology), but the adolescent sons of other men. When Socrates is near death, his disciples weep that they are losing a father and will be orphans the rest of their lives (116a,b).
[edit] Inspired by Aesop
Socrates says that he has been spending his last few days before the execution making rhymes out of Aesop's fables. He tells the boys that he has had a recurrent dream that he may have misunderstood. The dream told him to practice music, but he took "music" as a metaphor for "the highest art", which he took to be philosophy. Now, he says, he fears he should have just taken the dream literally and been a song-writer/musician. Socrates says he is using material from Aesop because he is really not too creative when it comes to fictions. Aesop's fables, it might be observed, are not exactly highbrow literature.
Socrates invokes Aesop again later, but not by name. When the boys challenge his arguments about the immortality of the soul, Socrates chuckles about his failure to convince them that his faith is well founded. He teases them, saying that they must think he is inferior to the swan, who sings louder and sweeter than ever when it is about to die. He says he is a slave to Apollo, just like the swan. Both Socrates and the swan have prophetic foreknowledge of their own deaths, and know they will enjoy their travels in the afterlife (85). The fable of the swan, which gave rise to the expression "swan song" is about a man who buys a swan thinking to entertain his guests with its song. When the swan disappoints him, the man says that instead of asking the swan to sing, he should have choked it to death.
[edit] Life is preparation for death
Socrates explains to the boys why the philosopher is completely unlike the ordinary man who, steeped in ignorance, fears death. The philosopher welcomes death because he understands what others fail to grasp: that death is nothing more than the separation of body and soul. Socrates says that the body is an impediment to what the he cares most about, wisdom, and so he considers himself the enemy of his own body, and tries to have as little to do with it as possible. Besides requiring care and feeding, the body fills us with passions, desires, fears and phantoms, and distracts us from the truth.
The body also contaminates the soul, and this can impede a successful death, because the separation process is prolonged. He says that you'd think, to look at an Egyptian mummy, that it is the bones and sinews that are indestructible, but it is really the soul, noble, pure, and invisible, that is immortal. Socrates equivocates about the perfection of the soul and just how subject to contamination it is. He says that men who love life and physical pleasures "cling to the visible" and hang around graveyards as ghosts which are "shadowy forms of souls" (81c). Socrates thinks that these ghosts wander until their desire for the corporeal becomes strong enough for them to re-occupy some body, when they will occupy an animal with habits similar to theirs during their past life. He says that drunks, gluttons and wantons are reborn as asses (81e) and that tyrants become wolves, hawks and kites. Socially co-operative people become bees, wasps or ants, and only philosophers become gods. "Our bodies are prisons for our souls"
[edit] Pleasure and pain
An important, recurrent topic in the Phaedo is pleasure ("(h)edone")and pain. Right after Socrates' disciples are led into his cell, he sits up in bed and bends his leg. He rubs it and as he rubs himself he waxes philosophical about how intimately connected pleasure and pain are (60b). He says that if Aesop had noticed this, he would have composed a fable about it. The fable would teach that god could not stop pleasure and pain from quarrelling, so he lashed their heads together, so that we cannot have one without the other. Socrates will say later that pleasure should be avoided as assiduously as pain because both function as "rivets," that fasten a man to own his body (83d). This discussion is important because it may have provided the foundation of Epicurus' cult of Hedonism that recommended the intellectual pleasures over the physical ones.
[edit] The arguments
Socrates' argument for the immortality of the soul may be summed up briefly. He claims, first of all, that opposites generate each other, and that we can deduce from this that the living come from the dead just as the dead come from the living. Then he argues that knowledge is recollected, and that if you add these ideas together, you come up with the conclusion that the soul pre-exists the person. It occurs to Socrates and the boys that this does not give them exactly what they wanted. The goal of, course, is to show that the soul will not evaporate as most people think, but will either be reborn into another animal for or go on to hades, or go traveling to other lands.
Socrates and the boys agree that while the soul may have lived any number of lives, this does not reassure anyone that the soul will not have exhausted itself at some point and die. If this is so, no man can rest assured that he is not a fool to welcome death. Socrates sets a high standard that he never meets: he asserts that unless he can "prove" that the soul is wholly indestructible and immortal. his confidence is irrational (88a,b).
[edit] Misology
After his logic falters terribly, Socrates warns his disciples that they must not become "misologists" - haters of reason. He says that misology is like misanthropy - distrust of people. The problem is not that reasoning is bad or that people are bad, but that trust can be misplaced (90b-91a). He says that people who don't understand reasoning and who are constantly exposed to its misuse, may be duped by it, and then start to distrust the process. Socrates tells the boys that they should be suspicious of him rather than of reasoning. He admits that he is like uneducated people who are more anxious to persuade their audience than to get to the truth (91a). Don't think of me, he says, think about my logic.
[edit] Final presentation
Socrates says that if death were the end of all, the wicked would have a good bargain in dying. But it is not so. He says that souls take with them their education and culture into the next world, and that these things are a great asset on the afterlife journeys. On the otherhand, ignorant, wicked men struggle in distress. Socrates says that a friend has convinced him that we do not understand the lay of earth, but dwell in the bowels and hollows of it, imagining that we live on the surface. He descibes a fantasy earth where everything is lovely and does not decay, but catches himself up after awhile, admitting that a sensible person will not quite believe him. He says that nevertheless, it is worthwhile to stake everything on this belief.
[edit] Famous last words
After the end of this long and delightful conversation, the prison keeper enters with the hemlock. The guard gives Socrates high praise, saying that Socrates is the noblest, gentlest, and best man that has ever been in prison. Crito suggests that the men and boys present eat and drink heartily, but Socrates says nothing will be gained by this. He takes the poison, goes numb, and they cover his head with a sheet. Socrates uncovers his head and utters his famous, oft-discussed last words: "Crito, I owe a cock to Asclepius, don't forget to pay the debt." Socrates' concern about his debt to the divine healer has been the source of much speculation, most likely the Wisdom of Silenus. The Wisdom of Silenus is that the best thing for man is to never be born, and the second best thing for man is to die soon.
The most common interpretation of this remark is that Socrates was glad to be "healed" from the curse of having been born (Wisdom of Silenus). Because Asclepius has never been associated with a cult of death, this is probably not what Plato had in mind. Dying with debts to pay, however small, was disgraceful in Athens. When Socrates asks Cephalus in the beginning of the Republic what is the advantage of having money, the wealthy businessman says he appreciates not having to cheat anybody or having to remain in debt to some god for a sacrifice or to a man for money (Repub. 331b).
[edit] Immortality of the soul
One of the main themes in the Phaedo is the idea that the soul is immortal. Socrates offers four arguments for the soul's immortality:
- The Opposites Argument explains that as the Forms are eternal and unchanging, and as the soul always brings life, then it must not die, and is necessarily "imperishable". As the body is mortal and is subject to physical death, the soul must be its indestructible opposite. Plato then suggests the analogy of fire and cold. If the form of cold is imperishable, and fire, its opposite, was within close proximity, it would have to withdraw intact as does the soul during death. This could be likened to the idea of the opposite charges of magnets.
- The Theory of Recollection explains that we possess some non-empirical knowledge (e.g. The Form of Equality) at birth, implying the soul existed before birth to carry that knowledge. Another account of the theory is found in Plato's Meno, although in that case Socrates implies anamnesis (previous knowledge of everything) whereas he is not so bold in Phaedo.
- The Affinity Argument explains that invisible, immortal, and incorporeal things are different from visible, mortal, and corporeal things. Our soul is of the former, while our body is of the latter, so when our bodies die and decay, our soul will continue to live.
- The Argument from Form of Life explains that the Forms, incorporeal and static entities, are the cause of all things in the world, and all things participate in Forms. For example, beautiful things participate in the Form of Beauty; the number four participates in the Form of the Even, etc. The soul, by its very nature, participates in the Form of Life, which would mean the soul could never die.
[edit] External links
