Thoughts on Plato's Phaedo

My latest book is the Oxford World Classics edition of Plato’s Phaedo. This is a fairly short but dense dialogue describing Socrates’ last day alive and death (execution by drinking hemlock). I enjoyed this edition, translation and introduction—the introduction describes it as an immensely influential foundational document for the idea of dualism in western philosophy, so I perked up and paid attention! I found this to be the most enjoyable so far from a literary perspective. Socrates faces death with total bravery and stoicism—perhaps even some happiness. It is a heart wrenching scene, and it is impossible not to have immense admiration for Socrates and the authenticity with which he lived his life.

The main item up for discussion is life after death and the immortality of the soul, in which Socrates/Plato has a lot of confidence (I’ll simply refer to Socrates from here on). Dualism—the idea that the body and soul are separate, is essentially postulated, which was a little disappointing but also expected. We still get a lot of interesting arguments and conclusions. One thing I didn’t know which the notes told me is that Plato’s mention here (as in the Republic) of the cardinal virtues of bravery, temperance, justice, and wisdom were recurring in his work and later became cardinal virtues for Christianity.

Socrates argues that the path to true knowledge is through pure reason, without regard to the senses. I know that Kant has a book called Critique of Pure reason, and while I have no idea if it covers the same topic, I suspect this is going to be a recurring theme as I work through this canon. From this, Socrates argues that true knowledge is for the dead because in death the soul is freed from the distractions of the body and can more purely exist in the realm of pure intellect. True philosophers (should) spend life essentially trying to free themselves from the pleasures and demands of the body, and death at last frees them from this battle. A soul that is not overly attached to bodily and temporal things will do better in the afterlife and will not become a ghost (a lot to like in this bit for Christians). In fact, the body can be like a prison because the soul is constantly fighting against temptation.

As a result, death is not to be feared. This makes it sound like suicide is the correct course, but the book moves on from that quickly. If I understood the argument that suicide is immoral correctly, basically the idea is that your master, whether that’s the city or the gods, hasn’t given you permission to kill yourself.

Socrates’ argues that the soul must be immortal and reincarnation must exist because as sleeping comes from waking and vice versa, so does death come from life and vice versa. I don’t find this argument particularly convincing except in a more general sense that we survive through the death of others, or from the idea that is one generation dies out the next takes its place, but I also don’t think it’s a silly argument.

Another argument in favor of the immortality of the soul and reincarnation is the theory, originally expressed in the dialogue Meno, that learning is really recollection. Socrates gives the example of the idea or form of equality—when we see two sense objects that are the same, we essentially “remember” the idea of the form of equality, even though no sense objects could actually be perfectly equal and meet the standard set by the form of equality. In Meno, this is explained through geometric proofs that are not so much learned as recollected or perhaps discovered. Socrates argues that our souls must have learned these forms in a past life. This is not a persuasive argument for the immortality of the soul to me because Socrates never explains when or how the soul originally learned these things to begin with in the past life. However, the idea of inbuilt knowledge is a very interesting one that I think is going to be called a priori knowledge when Kant comes around. I guess I’ll find out when I get that far, and this argument seems to be a very important first development in this direction.

Other speakers in the dialogue make some interesting counterarguments to Socrates regarding the immortality of the soul. The first is that our bodies are to our souls as a tuned musical instrument is to the state of being tuned. If the body is destroyed, the soul is as well, just as if you smash a guitar, it’s not in tune anymore. The other is that even though Socrates might convince that there is reincarnation, he has not convinced that the soul is completely immortal and that this life isn’t the last. I didn’t see that Socrates made convincing arguments against these, although perhaps he does to the attunement theory, pointing out that it’s an imperfect analogy.

I was not convinced by Socrates’ theory of forms based argument for the immortality of the soul, which seemed to boil down to little more than saying that the soul is immortal because it’s not in its nature to not exist. The thing I enjoyed most in this dialogue is the Socrates idea that there is a non-sensory world of true knowledge and a sense world that is basically false and approximate. I tend to agree with this view at a level of pure mathematics (even though that’s not what Socrates has in mind), and it also matches with my views as a Christian.

Overall, a very enjoyable, well argued dialogue that leaves you in awe of Socrates.