24 - Famous Last Words: Plato's Phaedo
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In the Phaedo, Plato depicts the death of Socrates, and argues for two of his most distinctive doctrines: the immortality of the soul and the theory of Forms.
Themes:
Further Reading
• D. Bostock, Plato's Phaedo (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986).
• R. Dancy, Plato's Introduction of Forms (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004).
• D. Gallop, Plato's Phaedo (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975).
• A. Nehemas, Virtues of Authenticity (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999).
• D. Scott, Recollection and Experience (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995).
• D. Sedley, "Platonic Causes," Phronesis 43 (1998), 114-32.
• G. Vlastos, “Reasons and Causes in the Phaedo,” Philosophical Review 78 (1969), 291-325.
Comments
Socrates and definitions
Hey,
I assume you're monitoring all comments, so will see one back here, as easily as under the current episode?
Since all these Roman-era people keep citing Plato and Socrates, I thought I'd listen to the Socrates/Plato episodes again.
I have a question about Socrates' quest for a definition of Virtue. Actually, it's not so much a question, as a rant.
Socrates wants to know what Virtue is, and he specifically wants (it seems) a water-tight definition, not more than a paragraph long. But Virtue is a human concept and human concepts are not developed that way. A word is used to point to a cluster of characteristics, some of which are more central than others. A commonly discussed example these days would be a definition of life. You can come up with some important characteristics; like reproducing, being lower entropy than the surrounds, etc. But no-one has proposed a uniformly accepted version, as can be seen from arguments over whether or not viruses are alive.
Surely the same is true of the (human concept of) Virtue. And, if Socrates is thinking that Virtue is not a human concept but some external, objectively-real entity: he would presumably cite people's sense of Virtue as evidence for this external entity. So what people mean by the word is still the only evidence available.
So he could have spent the years (decades?) compiling a list of agreed characteristics, and a list of disputed characteristics. And these could have been used as a checklist for determining Virtue in any arbitrary situation, which I gather was one of his main goals.
So I guess my question is: why didn't he?
Marissa
In reply to Socrates and definitions by Marissa
Defining virtue
In reply to Socrates and definitions by Marissa
definitions
i suppose if someone asks you to give a definition, you could either give an exhaustive list of objects which meets this definition (e.g. all the beautiful things which will ever exist); or you could give an exhaustive list of the characteristics which any object satisfying this definition must have (e.g. any beautiful object must be symmetrical and look like me ...).
it seems to me that having given either of these lists, someone might ask 'suppose i don't agree with the list?' or they might say 'okay, i now know how to distinguish a beautiful from a non-beautiful thing but why did you put all those things under the category of 'beautiful'? you must have known or at least found out (while you were making the list) what beauty is -- it's this that i want to get at ...'
just to mention ... yes, it's true that when we 'ordinarily' apply these judgments -- beautiful, good etc. -- there are borderline cases and exceptions, but that doesn't seem to me to invalidate the wittgenstein-type argument that this is how things work in practice. in fact, this type of 'vagueness' seems to me integral to wittgenstein's exposition.
and finally, i'm confused over how the 'forms can 'cause' things to be a certain way. how does the form of beauty, which i guess is somehow 'in' beautiful objects, *cause* these objects to be beautiful? also (really finally), if the form of beauty is itself beautiful, is the form of beauty causing itself to be beautiful? if so, how?
In reply to definitions by peter
Forms as causes
That question about how Forms can be causes is a tricky one, and one that troubled Plato himself (see the later episode on his Parmenides, number 27). The basic answer is that particular things "participate" in Forms, but as Plato has Parmenides point out that can't mean literally having a chunk of, say, the Form of Beauty. Another idea is that the Forms are paradigms, and that the versions we see are copies or images of these paradigms. Whatever the details though, the intuitive idea seems plausible: things are beautiful because of the presence of beauty in them, so beauty is a cause for their being beautiful. This sounds a bit simple-minded yet hard to argue with as far as it goes - as Socrates himself says in the Phaedo.
Then with regard to definitions, Socrates actually repeatedly rejects attempts to define things by giving lists (I think I mention this in the episode on the Meno, probably). Rather what you are meant to do is articulate the character or nature shared by all the things described using the defined term. If you want to say that the collection of relevant things is "fuzzy" or vague (like Wittgenstein's example, "games") then you are probably going to want to reject the idea that there is a clear nature or character to be articulated, on the basis of which a thing is or isn't beautiful, a game, etc. But that may be problematic - imagine admitting, for instance, that there is no clear answer as to what justice is and that it is somehow vague which things are just and which unjust. Plato wouldn't like that! Also with some things, like for instance mathematical equality, it seems clear that things either have the relevant character or not, there is no ambiguity around the edges. So we might just need to figure out which terms are vague, and which not.
In reply to Forms as causes by Peter Adamson
Lists and forms
Here is my attempt at illustrating the flaws with lists.
Imagine that you want to discover the law that governs bishop moves in chess. You embark on making a list of all the possible moves. You are trying to be systematic, so you start from square one and try to make your way to the last square. At 150 items you feel that you are doing a pretty good job, even though the endless succession of letters and numbers is making the little buggers dance.
Along comes Callicles. He immediately points out that the conga line of symbols must have confused Polus because that bishop move from a1 to b2 is clearly wrong and should be from a2 to b1. These two moves seem to be mutually exclusive and indeed as you go over your list, he dismisses your every move.
There is no common ground because you started on the dark squares while Callicles set out from the light ones. Your systematic approach lead to a systematic error. The discussion is deadlocked because neither part sees the overarching pattern which - to add insult to injury - may prove both right.
A list can be woefully inadequate to answer the questions about cats when half of the items are dogs.
With regards to forms, am I completely wrong when I want to understand Plato's forms in terms of pattern recognition?
Along those lines, I don't see the forms actively injecting their quality into objects, but a rather more passive way of causation: Helena exhibits just enough keypoints in the pattern of beauty to launch a thousand ships, but not enough to match a goddess.
In reply to Socrates and definitions by Marissa
Virtue
Virtue may have characteristics but it is singular.
What counts as argument?
For example, the argument for learning being really a remembering of what we knew before we were born:
* in the steps of the argument, Socrates says that our seeing two sticks that are about the same makes us think of a concept of Equal. This has to be a remembering, bc seeing a cloak of a friend makes you think of them. But that's an outrageous stretch. Why not posit instead that the mind has a capacity for identifying relationships, like Equal? And the whole argument depends on this assertion!
* I can't see any advantage to pushing back the learning to before we're born. In fact, it seems to me to make a bigger problem. If explaining how we learn in this life is so hard, how can you hope to explain how we learn under circumstances you don't even have any data on? (Occam rides again)
* Surely we're not born with all kinds of knowledge? I doubt any of them were born with the knowledge that Athens would lose the Peloponesian war. If you can learn that, why not anything else?
In general, I feel that I haven't got a handle on the rules of this game. Arbitrary, unsupported assertions are (apparently) legal but the participants (apparently) take the resulting "proof" seriously. Maybe analogy had the weight of evidence in that culture? Or maybe only logical inconsistency counted as a counter-argument, not plausibility?
I think I need a culture transplant.
Marissa
In reply to What counts as argument? by Marissa
Plato's arguments
In reply to Plato's arguments by Peter Adamson
Plato's argument cont.
Well, I think I could argue the case for "innate capacity to abstract patterns" vs "innate knowledge of patterns". But I guess you read enough first-year papers already.
I am going to ask for two points of clarification, but:
* if we can learn historical facts then why posit either innate pattern recognition OR innate knowledge? We know about "equal" bc we heard people talking about it as children, and learnt the concept that way. Probably at the same time we heard them talking about the Peloponesian War.
* in response to my objection that we don't know anything about what happens before we're born, so we can't explain how learning would take place then, you said we could instead insist that "the soul has always existed and always had knowledge, so that learning is never necessary." But we don't know anything about what happens before we're born! We can't say anything about it! Can we?
Honest, I hope I'm not coming across as a self-opinionated pedant. It's bc I'm trying to take these arguments seriously that I just used two exclamation marks in one paragraph.
Any aids to comprehension gratefully accepted.
Marissa
In reply to Plato's argument cont. by Marissa
Innateness
Hi Marissa,
To your first point I'd say: remember that he has a specific argument against acquiring the understanding of equality from sensation, namely the point about compresence of opposites (the sticks and stones are no more equal than unequal). That wouldn't apply to the date of a War for instance, only to other general concepts. Actually though you might then come back and say that if this argument works at all it works only for comparative judgments, like "equal," "just," "beautiful"; thus he'd need other arguments to establish other Forms for non-comparative concepts (if there are any such Forms).
And on point 2, again he has a pretty detailed argument to give here: the argument is that (a) we know Equality, (b) we can't learn Equality from sensation in this life, (c) we can't learn it at the moment of birth, because that is the only moment for us to be shocked into losing our access to this knowledge, so (d) the only time the knowledge could have been "acquired" is before birth. And then my last post was trying to say that it is misleading to speak of "acquisition" here, because in fact if the story makes sense then we should always have had the knowledge, otherwise we would have "learned" it which seems ruled out by (a).
Does that help?
Peter
In reply to Innateness by Peter Adamson
arguments
Actually, I think it does help. I can finally see an outline of an argument, rather than arbitary assertions. Progress.
Part of the problem was that I blipped over compresence of opposites bc it made zero sense to me. So I didn't realise it was the starting point. This also explains why all his Forms are relationships (as in Largeness, which can only be applied to real things as "larger than"). That was bothering me.
Also, I find I'm still wedded to: if it's not falsifiable, it's not legal. This is my problem, I know, not Plato's. It's a hard one to give up, but I'll work on it.
Thanks,
Marissa
In reply to arguments by Marissa
Falisfiability and Forms
One last point I should add about Forms is that there are other reasons to posit them, e.g. the "one over many" argument (there must be something to unify all the things that have a given character), the idea that there must be unchanging objects of knowledge, and so on. These could get you Forms of non-relative concepts (for instance in the Republic he talks about a Form of Bed and seems to have in mind that this would be the object to which a craftsman looks in building a bed). In general I don't think he had just one single reason for positing Forms, he found them useful to deal with a whole range of problems, and the compresence problem is only one of these.
On soul
In the Meno Socrates pulls the concept of soul into his argument stating that some old priest or priestess says there is one. He does it without questioning old priests or the concept. That seems suspect. He questions everything his interlocutors say but not the phantasy of some old priest. Here in Phaedo he trips on the word 'soul' and slides into a substance 'soul' with nary a blink. Surly all those 'Forms' are just concepts. They can't be real things if for no other reason than there isn't a physical place for their substance to be and there isn't a time when that place existed/exists.
In reply to On soul by Steadfast
Sloppy Socrates?
Hi there. Yes, these are all significant worries. A few quick thoughts:
• Some people read the religious presentation of the theory of recollection as a sign not to take it seriously; but I wonder whether it may be a sign that we should take it seriously. Or something more subtle. Anyway it is hard to know what Plato is trying to signal with that but I assume it is supposed to signal the reader how literally to take what follows.
• I don't think he slides into talking about soul as substance, really; the one thing he does assume is that soul (psychê) is distinct from body. That is apparently uncontroversial, or he takes it to be so (and he marks that assumption more or less explicitly). Thus the question is whether this soul-that-is-distinct-from-body is going to die along with the body, or not.
• Your last point shows how radically our modern intuitions can differ from those of other periods. I agree that many people would now think that something that does not exist in a place cannot exist at all. But this immediately assumes that nothing non-physical can exist, which shows how controversial the intuition is -- it would immediately eliminate belief in (a) God, (b) an immaterial soul, (c) as you say, Forms, (d) other immaterial things like numbers, which some people think do exist in their own right. Time is a bit more complicated, it isn't clear to me that the Forms are supposed to exist outside of time. Anyway Plato does try to give reasons why we should in this case accept the existence of something immaterial, here in the Phaedo the reason is that they have to be invoked in causal explanations. And that seems like a good reason to accept that something exists, it is exactly the sort of reason a modern scientist would give for accepting the existence of some postulated entity of the physical world, like a subatomic particle.
Peter
Beyond Death
Thanks for these podcasts, Peter. 24 down and 76 to go to catch up with your current podcasts. I am enjoying them all! Yes, indeed, Plato’s Phaedo is just as real and vibrant as it was 2500 years ago since it speaks about what happens to us (our soul, in the Greek tradition) after we die and death is just as much a mystery to us as it was to cave dwellers 25,000 years ago. Is there any place in Plato’s dialogues where he envisions our experience after death as a dissolution into light, in other words, a realm of non-duel conscious awareness? Thanks.
In reply to Beyond Death by Glenn Russell
The afterlife in Plato
Glad you are enjoying them! I'd say the answer to your question is no. There are several dialogues which describe the afterlife but usually in highly physical terms (bodily punishments, for instance), albeit in the context of myths, as in the Phaedo, Gorgias, and Republic. I talk about these in a later episode. The idea that we would become purely immaterial is however suggested by the Phaedo too, when it says that the soul is akin to Forms (which are immaterial) and has seen the Forms before coming to be in the body.
Thanks!
Peter,
Thanks so much for creating these very informative podcasts. I'm currently a Philosophy major at The College of New Jersey and I am taking a "History of Ancient Philosophy" class--this podcast is a great compliment to our in class discussions. I look forward to future episodes!
"Evil" in Phaedo
Hello Professor Adamson!
I really found the discussion between you and Prof. Long on the word "soul" (psūkhē?) clarifying.
I had a similar question about the Benjamin Jowett translations of Plato, specifically the Phaedo translation I'm reading on Gutenberg.
Is "evil" the closest word we have to whatever Socrates is talking about (below)?
"Yes, that is very likely, Cebes; and these must be the souls, not of the good, but of the evil, which are compelled to wander about such places in payment of the penalty of their former evil way of life; and they continue to wander until through the craving after the corporeal which never leaves them, they are imprisoned finally in another body."
Jowett uses the word "evil" elsewhere, but it doesn't sound so moralizing as it does here. (Or maybe Plato is a big moralist and I've missed the boat by trying to read this without so many Sunday school voices raining down on me.)
In reply to "Evil" in Phaedo by Teresa
Evil
I actually talk about this in episode 90, where I look at Plotinus on evil, and in that episode (if I remember rightly) I talk about the fact that the word kakon in Greek might better be translated as "bad" since it has a broader use than just moral evil. Still there's no question that Plato and Plotinus would say that men can be evil, I think! I'm inclined to agree with them on that.
In reply to Evil by Peter Adamson
Oh no! I'm not that far yet!
Oh no! I'm not that far yet! Haha -- Okay. Thanks very much. Another thing to look forward to. Although, I did first discover your podcast thanks to the episode on Porphyry, and decided to start from the beginning because of the "I Porphyry" jokes.
Thanks again!
argument from opposites
Hi Peter, I'm really enjoying this podcast. I'm almost finished with the episodes on Plato. I just read the Grube collection of five of his dialogues and found them terribly exciting (I had read them in school a few years ago but their literary qualities went over my head). I used to dislike Plato because I'm a musician (enough said?) and I very much object to theories of art as imitation, and my previous education had given me an out-of-context, "face value" interpretation of his views on art as well as his supposed totalitarianism. But my brother (a philosophy prof. at the University of Dallas) and a book called Placing Aesthetics by Robert E. Wood have rehabilitated Plato for me by hipping me to his use of ambiguity and irony, and showing me a level of nuance in his views on art that I was previously unaware of.
Can you help me make sense of the argument for the soul's immortality in the Phaedo? It’s not so much that I disagree with the argument as that I don’t understand it. Socrates talks about things like snow having the quality of cold, which cannot admit heat and must be either destroyed or driven away if heat approaches. Similarly, the soul has life, which cannot admit death. If the soul cannot admit death then it must be deathless, and if it is deathless then it is indestructible. But… snow can be destroyed by heat despite that cold does not admit heat, so how is this an argument for the soul’s immortality, except by wordplay?
I asked my brother about this and he said, "The argument may not work in the end, but it's a bit better than that. The question is not whether something cold can admit of heat, but rather of whether the very principle by which the cold thing is cold can admit of heat. Socrates presents the soul not just as something living, but as the very principle by which living things are alive. So he is presenting the soul as something like a platonic form. For example, a just human being may become unjust, but the form of justice itself, by participation in which the just human being is just, cannot become unjust. The general idea behind the argument is that eternal things with fixed identities are the principles that give form and (temporary) identity to changing, destructible things. One way of starting to think about the philosophical status of this principle is to observe that Aristotle accepted it in its general form, while questioning the specific forms that Plato gave it in many of his dialogues."
I'm not sure that's what Plato was saying, however. It’s somewhat unclear because he describes the soul’s relationship to life in similar terms to three’s relationship to odd. He says that life is “that which [the soul] brings along,” and earlier he says that the triad “bring along the opposite of the Even." Socrates leads up to the discussion of the soul/life with a lengthy discussion of how three contains or brings along odd and snow contains or brings along odd. In the discussion of the soul, he says that “the soul will never admit the opposite of that which it brings along” – according to my brother's interpretation, if the soul is analogous to Even rather than to three, what Socrates should have said is “the soul will never admit its own opposite.”
P.S.: The only philosophers I've found who I think really understand the essence of art, largely because they listened to what actual artists had to say, are the 20th-century French thinkers Jacques Maritain (Art and Scholasticism, Creative Intuition in Art and Poetry, The Responsibility of the Artist) and Etienne Gilson (Painting and Reality, The Arts of the Beautiful, Forms and Substances in the Arts). Both of them did quite a bit of work in other areas, as well - I'm wondering if you're familiar with either?
P.P.S: I'm in the process of writing a series of articles on the Church Fathers for a Catholic website (for which I think your podcasts will be helpful). I'm only three articles in, having just finished writing about Clement of Rome. They aren't strictly focused on philosophy, but let me know if you want me to send you a link.
In reply to argument from opposites by Thomas
Argument from opposites
Thanks for your comment! Basically I think your brother is right: the argument is that since the soul is essentially alive and the source of life, it doesn't admit of death. It helps here to think of death as something like a feature or property, and we are asking whether death could arise in the soul. If soul is characterized by being alive the way that three is characterized by being odd, we can see that the soul could no more become dead than three could become even.
Already in antiquity this occasioned some criticisms. In a much later episode (97) I later discussions on the Phaedo arguments from late antiquity. One point that was made is that death isn't really an opposing feature that would need to arise in the soul, but sheer non-existence.
Does that help?
The Hemlock and the Mead of Poetry
I hope you see this eventually, Peter. It is once again your ardent friend Luke.
You helped me find purpose in life with writing. And I found inspiration in this book.
The Hemlock and The Mead of Poetry:
There are two good poisons. Both must be drunk. One must be spat out.
The hemlock is education. It sets the soul free. The animal in you dies and the human is free. Like Plato said but maybe not in the same sense, you can see the Forms.
You can see Beauty itself. Justice. Goodness. Knowledge. And it makes the soul/*nous*/mind well.
And then there is the mead of poetry. The mead is culture. And it is an alcoholic beverage with psilocybin (or another psychedelic) in it, the same as bards drank to make poetry.
The culture will make you hallucinate. It will make you drunk. You will want status. You will want all the things.
The culture contains everything that a person might need but it is a confusing experience. It can harm people and it does, all the time, everywhere. That is why we see soldiers sacrificed like humans and enemies sacrificed like animals.
You must drink the mead without fear. Then spit it out. And drink the hemlock after.
People only speak in metaphors so much, because ideas are beverages and some are strong.
We have a social network in our heads and it is called culture. It is our reflection upon other people. We are full of dead people in our heads.
The meaning of culture is that every person is a society.
Socrates was not offering death. He told you in the Apology, that to come after him with everything you've got is to truly be his friend.
Challenge the assumptions of others. Challenge your own. Ask all the questions. Especially the hard ones.
That is a life of philosophy, wherever in academia someone ends up. I want to drink the hemlock. Thank you Peter, I have loved you for giving me the hemlock. I am the swan and the animal has died. I am free.
PS
Btw, Peter you are receiving a dedication. You are an educator who richly deserves it.
You serve the hemlock. To people all over the world. Even if they are poor and cannot access education.
A Theory on the Phaedo
How would you assess the theory that:
In many respects Plato isn't merely talking about death as such. But that the Hemlock may also be a metaphor for education.
That philosophy as a preparation for death can be an expression of human freedom from the animal nature. Contemplation of nature with superlative awareness somehow.
I.e. that the Hemlock doesn't truly kill people, it makes swans. That education radically changes life.
In reply to A Theory on the Phaedo by Luke
Hemlock and swans
Well in a sense I think that is just an explicit message of the Phaedo: death is presented as liberation from the "prison" of the body (a clear analogy to the literal prison Socrates is sitting in) and the philosopher is "practicing for death" and looking forward to gaining fuller knowledge upon release. But in this process I would see education - or maybe something more like philosophical inquiry, since it is not clear that Socrates is imagining "being educated" given that there is no one in Athens who can educate him, as we learn in the Apology - as the preparation for the release, i.e. for death. In other words, we should be doing philosophy to be ready to depart from the body, whereas the hemlock moment is the moment of the actual departure. It is, in other words, the opposite of the moment where the soul first comes into the body and forgets what it knew before.
In reply to Hemlock and swans by Peter Adamson
The Apology
Peter I love that you mentioned the Apology in this context. Was enjoying a Pierre Grimes lecture and ran across the idea that Socrates wasn't even defending himself, per se.
That his arguments proved the affidavit true. And what was really on trial was the affidavit.
Part of me has to wonder at the strangeness of the Socrates and Plato relationship here, because: you're right Socrates suggested that no one could educate him and that he knew nothing.
But he espoused ideological concepts all the time in the dialogues! Perhaps Socrates already understood a thing or two about "the Forms" and was either feigning modesty, or essentially flipping the Athenians off for doing something so stupid as executing a gad fly.
After all, his response that they should let him live in the Perineum, was one of the ultimate pieces of flipping someone off if I've ever seen it.
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