Hi guys!
I’ve changed the format of this thread. It was a reading group thread, but it’s evolved into just my notes and any comments or discussion they might inspire.
This dialogue revolves around Pythagorean concepts. Socrates, who has been sentenced to death, is surrounded by Pythagorean friends. They’ll be discussing the nature of oppositions, with the one of the biggies front and center: life and death.
So we’ll find intellectual oppositions, physical oppositions, and emotional ones. Plato weaves all of these into a singular moment: the last hours of the life of a good friend and mentor.
edit:
I read the AI summary of my OP, and it said:
“The dialogue captures the poignant final hours of Socrates, surrounded by his Pythagorean friends, blending philosophical inquiry with deep human emotion.”
That’s exactly what I was trying to say. This is an emotional dialogue. I think that philosophers who are able to handle emotion philosophically are rare. Plato is a master of it.
The above link is one source of the text with a preceding introduction.
We start with a conversation between Phaedo and Echecrates:
Phaedo of Elis: a follower of Socrates, a youth allegedly enslaved as a prisoner of war, whose freedom was purchased at Socrates’ request. He later founded a school of philosophy.[2]
Phaedo has committed to describing the scene in the prison, and relates this speech by Socrates, who has just been released from chains that were making his leg sore:
And when she was gone, Socrates, sitting up on the couch, bent and rubbed his leg, saying, as he was rubbing: How singular is the thing called pleasure, and how curiously related to pain, which might be thought to be the opposite of it; for they are never present to a man at the same instant, and yet he who pursues either is generally compelled to take the other; their bodies are two, but they are joined by a single head. And I cannot help thinking that if Aesop had remembered them, he would have made a fable about God trying to reconcile their strife, and how, when he could not, he fastened their heads together; and this is the reason why when one comes the other follows, as I know by my own experience now, when after the pain in my leg which was caused by the chain pleasure appears to succeed.
This simple statement, apparently made in passing by Socrates, is an expression of a principle that will become an abiding thread throughout the history of Western philosophy: oppositions are inextricably bound together. They are distinct, but each can only exist in the context of the other. This is an example of an opposition that belongs to the realm of sense and physicality.
The next paragraph is a segue into the reasons Socrates says all philosophers are willing to die. The segue itself is about Socrates’ recent interest in creating music. He says he has had recurring dreams encouraging him to write music, which he always took to be code for philosophizing.
My own thoughts strayed here to Bronze Age mythology in which dreams are often depicted as coded messages. The same thing appears in the Old Testament. We’re about 600 years out from the Bronze Age Collapse at this point, but just as that old mythology still haunted the Israelites, I imagine it’s haunting the Greeks, who are made up of waves of immigrants from the lost civilizations of the east. In other words, I think it’s likely part of Socrates’ worldview that dreams should be analyzed and addressed. Now, on the last day of his life, he’s tying up loose ends, and this is one of them: to take his dreams literally and follow them.
Next: why all philosophers long for death and what this issue has to do with the Tractatus.
It also features prominently in the later discussion of how the philosopher should seek detachment from bodily states altogether, so as to maintain equanimity, which of course Socrates exhibits in the face of death.
Most civilizations until recently took it as a matter of course that dreams were real. The details vary, but the assumption is common. It is alive and well in Western societies to this day.
By way of Aristophanes, we know Socrates supported a quasi-scientific view of things, apparently denying that Zeus causes it to rain and thunder, but instead blaming it on clouds.
We know Aristotle denied that dreams are divine messages. So why do you think Plato specifically depicts Socrates as being interested in obeying a command communicated in a dream?
Aristophanes chose Socrates as his target. But that doesn’t mean he is in any way a reliable source for what Socrates did and didn’t believe. There were people around who questioned or denied the traditional gods, but we can’t safely attribute that view to him on that evidence. At least, most people think that, as a caricaturist Aristophanes was not really interested in the accuracy of his picture. Plato and Xenophon are not particularly reliable either, but one can at least assume that they cared about what S actually believed.
Unless you have a better explanation, the obvious one stands. Given that Socrates cared enough about the oracle from Delphi to go around looking for a wise man making enemies all over the place, I think the face value explanation is far and away the best available.
Mind you, his taking up music so late in life is a surprise. One assumes that Plato thinks it is significant. But I’m not at all clear what he thought it meant. Perhaps that he was moving away from philosophy, in recognition of his looming death?
I don’t know. I think music and dreams are brought up in a Pythagorean setting because the Pythagoreans wanted to find a mathematical structure in music, and they supposedly used dreams to make new mathematical discoveries.
I had a little look. It seems to confirm my impression that since there are no reliable ancient sources, very little is certain about Pythagoreanism in general or about Plato’s links to it. There are various remarks about the Phaedo; they might be worth referring back to at appropriate points in the text. The only thing that seems to be certain is:
Plato never abandons this Pythagorean conception of value and it can be traced through the Phaedo and Republic to late dialogues such as the Timaeus , where the cosmos is embued with principles of mathematical order, and Philebus , where the highest value is assigned to measure (66a). The question is whether this emphasis on measure and order is uniquely Pythagorean in origin. SEP - Pythagoreanism 3.7
Neither of these points is marginal. The point about the cosmos and mathematics is still with us, of course. It was the basis of the mathematical turn in physics in the 17th century CE.
But it occurs to me that the scene-setting here is an announcement that Pythagoras is important in this dialogue but establishing exactly how seems to be contentious. That’s quite significant in getting a sense of the point at which the Character Socrates stops being at least based on a historical figure and becomes the mouthpiece for Plato that he seems in the later dialogues.
Socrates has asserted that all philosophers want to die. After touching on the reasons that suicide is prohibited, he launches into his explanation. He says that philosophers are fixated on the intellect, and in discovering truth. He points out that the testimony of the senses is dubious and requires vetting by the intellect. He says:
Then when does the soul attain truth?—for in attempting to consider anything in company with the body she is obviously deceived.
True.
Then must not true existence be revealed to her in thought, if at all?
Yes.
He then points out that we don’t see ideas like absolute justice with out eyes. These things are only available to the intellect. And then,
It has been proved to us by experience that if we would have pure knowledge of anything we must be quit of the body—the soul in herself must behold things in themselves: and then we shall attain the wisdom which we desire, and of which we say that we are lovers, not while we live, but after death; for if while in company with the body, the soul cannot have pure knowledge, one of two things follows—either knowledge is not to be attained at all, or, if at all, after death.
Socrates and music. Looking at this again, S seems to have a rather curious conception of music.
First I made a hymn in honour of the god of the festival and then considering that a poet, if he is really to be a poet, should not only put together words but invent stories and that I have no invention.
Which shows something of how closely music and poetry were linked in that culture. It makes the comment work better, I think, to read it in that context.
You might find it interesting to look up Apology 40c - 41d, to compare what Socrates says about death there. Of course, one would expect to talk about the commonly accepted view, rather than the more recherche view that he expresses here. Or is the Apology what he thought and this what Plato thought? We’ll never know.
Someone like me has to accept this argument as a report of what Plato/Socrates thought. I have nothing much to say about it, except that it shows how seamlessly philosophy was connected to life in those terms. It’s something we have lost; I guess the current popularity of Stoicism shows that people do miss that, now that theology has lost its hold on so many of us.
I see a parallel between Socrates’ argument that philosophers long to die and Wittgenstein’s over arching point in the Tractatus. We long to know truths that reason suggests are beyond our capabilities.
And in this the philosopher dishonours the body; his soul runs away from his body and desires to be alone and by herself? –Phaedo
What was the ancient view of the soul or psyche?
One of the oldest known references to a disembodied soul is in the Sumerian epic. Enkidu has a dream in which he has died and is taken to a dark place where the dead dwell. It’s called the “House of Dust” and it’s not for punishment.
The Homeric view is that the soul is like a ghost that separates from the body at death
Plato appears to have believed the soul is something immortal and rational. It’s the source of innate knowledge, and it moves from one life to the next.
So in this passage, Plato doesn’t see himself as introducing a new concept: the soul. It’s rather that he’s laying out several arguments for why we should think of this thing as immortal.
Soul (psuche) is nowhere described or thought of as a ‘thing’. Plato’s belief in the immortality of soul mirrors the common view in the ancient world, descended from the ancient Indo-European culture that was the common source of the civilisations of India, Persia, and Greece. (Fun fact: ‘Iran’ is a version of the ancient word, also co-opted by the Nazis, ‘Aryan’, meaning 'noble.)
Like many (or indeed all) sixth and fifth century thinkers who expressed views on the nature or constitution of the soul, Heraclitus thought that the soul was bodily, but composed of an unusually fine or rare kind of matter, e.g. air or fire. (A possible exception is the Pythagorean Philolaus, who may have held that the soul is an ‘attunement’ of the body; cf. Barnes 1982, 488–95, and Huffman.) The prevalence of the idea that the soul is bodily explains the absence of problems about the relation between soul and body. Soul and body were not thought to be radically different in kind; their difference seemed just to consist in a difference in degree of properties such as fineness and mobility.
So your view is clearly wrong. Just a note, Wayfarer, I changed this thread from a reading group to just a discussion about Phaedo. That’s why I changed the title and the first line of the OP.
the soul is proposed as a subject of experience whether it was thought to be composed of ‘fine matter’. Nowhere in that source you mention is it designated a thing, nor in the Phaedo. Not a hill to die on, but it’s a misleading way of depicting the matter.
Sparknotes on sections 62c-69c
In Phaedo 62c–69c Socrates begins by addressing an apparent contradiction. If death is beneficial for philosophers, why should they not take their own lives? He answers that human beings are in a sense the possessions of the gods, like servants belonging to a master. For that reason it is not permissible to leave life on one’s own initiative; suicide would be abandoning one’s post without divine sanction. Nevertheless, although one should not seek death, a philosopher should not fear it when it arrives, because it may bring a good.
Socrates then clarifies what death actually is. Death, he says, is the separation of the soul from the body: the body remains by itself while the soul departs and exists apart from it. This definition leads directly to his central point. If death is the soul’s separation from the body, then the philosopher’s life already involves striving toward that separation. Philosophy, properly understood, is a preparation for dying.
By this Socrates does not mean that philosophers desire destruction or extinction. Rather, they attempt to detach the soul from the distractions of bodily life. They care little for bodily pleasures such as food, drink, sexual indulgence, adornment, or wealth. Instead their concern is the condition of the soul and its capacity for understanding. The philosophical life therefore consists in withdrawing the soul, as far as possible, from the body and its preoccupations.
Socrates argues that the body interferes with the search for truth. Sensory perceptions are unreliable, and bodily needs constantly intrude in the form of desires, fears, illnesses, and distractions. These disturbances prevent the soul from achieving clear insight. Genuine knowledge, he suggests, arises when the soul considers things by itself, independently of the senses. The philosopher therefore tries to free the intellect from dependence on bodily perception so that it may grasp reality more purely.
From this perspective philosophy becomes a process of purification. The philosopher disciplines the soul so that it is not ruled by bodily appetites or emotions. Through reflection and detachment the soul becomes increasingly capable of existing in its own activity of thought. This purification prepares it for the moment when it will finally be separated from the body altogether.
For that reason Socrates concludes that the true philosopher should not fear death. Death simply accomplishes what philosophical practice has already been attempting to achieve: the soul’s release from bodily impediments so that it may pursue truth without obstruction. In this context Socrates also distinguishes genuine virtue from ordinary virtue. What people normally call courage or moderation often arises from balancing fears and desires—for example, fearing one pleasure more than another. But philosophical virtue is different: it is grounded in understanding and in the purification of the soul. Only those who pursue wisdom in this way attain the deeper form of virtue that philosophy makes possible.