Encyclopedia of Philosophy: THE PHAEDo of Plato

« THE PHAEDo The dialogue with which Plato concludes his account of Socrates' last days is called the Phaedo, after the name of the narrator, a citizen of Parmenides' city of Elea, who claims, with his friends Simmias and Cebes, to have been present with Socrates at his death.

The drama begins as news arrives that the sacred ship has returned from Delos, which brings to an end the stay of execution.

Socrates' chains are removed, and he is allowed a final visit from his weeping wife Xanthippe with their youngest child in her arms.

After she leaves, the group turns to a discussion of death and immortality. A true philosopher, Socrates maintains, will have no fear of death; but he will not take his own life, either, even when dying seems preferable to going on living.

We are God's cattle, and we should not take ourselves off without a summons from God.

Why, then, ask Simmias and Cebes, is Socrates so ready to go to his death? In response Socrates takes as his starting point the conception of a human being as a soul imprisoned in a body. True philosophers care little for bodily pleasures such as food and drink and sex, and they find the body a hindrance rather than a help in the pursuit of scientific knowledge.

‘Thought is best when the mind is gathered into itself, and none of these things trouble it – neither sounds nor sights nor pain, nor again any pleasure – when it takes leave of the body and has as little as possible to do with it.' So philosophers in their pursuit of truth continually try to keep their souls detached from their bodies.

But death is the full separation of soul from body: hence, a true philosopher has, all life long, been in effect seeking and craving after death. Hunger and disease and lust and fear obstruct the study of philosophy.

The body is to blame for faction and war, because the body's demands need money for their satisfaction, and all wars are caused by the love of money.

Even in peacetime the body is a source of endless turmoil and confusion.

‘If we would have pure knowledge of anything we must be quit of the body – the soul by itself must behold things by themselves: and then we shall attain that which we desire, and of which we say that we are lovers – wisdom; not while we live but, as the argument shows, only after death.' A true lover of wisdom, therefore, will depart this life with joy. So far, it is fair to say, Socrates has been preaching rather than arguing.

Cebes brings him up short by saying that most people will reject the premiss that the soul can survive the body.

They believe rather that on the day of death the soul comes to an end, vanishing into nothingness like a puff of smoke.

‘Surely it requires a great deal of proof to show that when a man is dead his soul yet exists, and has any strength or intelligence.' So Socrates proceeds to offer a set of proofs of immortality. First, there is the argument from opposites.

If two things are opposites, each of them comes into being from the other.

If someone goes to sleep, she must have been awake.

If someone wakes up, he must have been asleep. Again, if A becomes greater than B, then A must have been less that B.

If A becomes better than B, then A must have been worse than B.

Thus, these opposites, greater and less, plus better and worse, just like sleeping and waking, come into being from each other.

But death and life are opposites, and the same must hold true here also. Those who die, obviously enough, are those who have been living; should we not conclude that dying in its turn is followed by living? Since life after death is not visible, we must conclude that souls live in another world below, perhaps to return to earth in some latter day. The second argument sets out to prove the existence of a non-embodied soul not after, but before, its life in the body.

The proof proceeds in two steps: first, Socrates seeks to show that knowledge is recollection; second, he urges that recollection involves pre-existence. The first step in the argument goes like this.

We constantly see things which are more or less equal in size.

But we never see two stones or blocks of wood or other material things which are absolutely equal to each other.

Hence, our idea of absolute equality cannot be derived from experience.

The approximately equal things we see merely remind us of absolute equality, in the way that a portrait may remind us of an absent lover. The second step is this.

If we are reminded of something, we must have been acquainted with it beforehand.

So if we are reminded of absolute equality, we must have previously encountered it.

But we did not do so in our present life with our ordinary senses of sight and touch.

So we must have done so, by pure intellect, in a previous life before we were born – unless, improbably, we imagine that the knowledge of equality was infused into us at the moment of our birth.

If the argument works for the idea of absolute equality, it works equally for other similar ideas, such as absolute goodness and absolute beauty. Socrates admits that this second argument, even if successful in proving that the soul exists before birth, will not show its survival after death unless it is reinforced by the first argument.

So he offers a third argument, based on the concepts of dissolubility and indissolubility. If something is able to dissolve and disintegrate, as the body does at death, then it must be something composite and changeable.

But the objects with which the soul is concerned, such as absolute equality and beauty, are unchangeable, unlike the beauties we see with the eyes of the body, which fade and decay.

The visible world is constantly changing; only what is invisible remains unaltered.

The invisible soul suffers change only when dragged, through the senses of the body, into the world of flux. Within that world, the soul staggers like a drunkard; but when it returns into itself, it passes into the world of purity, eternity, and immortality.

This is the world in which it is at home.

‘The soul is in the very likeness of the divine, and immortal, and rational, and uniform, and indissoluble and unchangeable, and the body is in the very likeness of the human, and mortal, and irrational, and multiform, and dissoluble, and changeable.' Hence, Socrates concludes, the body is liable to dissolution, while the soul is almost totally indissoluble.

If even bodies, when mummified in Egypt, can survive for many years, it must be totally improbable that the soul dissolves and disappears at the moment of death. The soul of the true philosopher will depart to an invisible world of bliss.

But impure souls, who in life were nailed to. »