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.