Hi guys!
I’m going to be doing a reading of Phaedo. Join in if you’re interested. I plan to read sections and then explore background issues about the characters, the setting, and the themes.
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.