The Phaedo VCE extracts
Introductory comments
- My particular focus
- The particular selection of texts
3 considerations
1. Bad arguments play a role
2. Bad arguments are where humans
are at!
3. Bad arguments can contain good
stuff!
1st Extract 78b – 84b
•
Divine/mortal (invariable/variable
distinction:
Soul (divine) = immortal, intelligible, uniform,
self-consistent
Body (mortal) = mortal, unintelligible, multiform,
inconsistent
Nature teaches this distinction. But how?
-
What is ‘nature’ here? The gods? The cosmos?
Nature v the‘popular view’? Which is?
The Iliad, Hades, the tragedians, the soul as
‘body-double’
Q: Why might Socrates (Plato) wish to develop this
Nature-based notion of the soul in the way that he
does? That is, not a question of how Socrates argues
for it (and whether the argument is sound), but what
might be the motivation for arguing towards this
notion in the 1st place?
Possible A: Because Socrates (and Plato) actually
want a notion of soul that is robustly ethical. What
does this mean? Cornford (Greek
scholar/commentator) wrote that Socrates’ discovery
was that the true self was the soul, not the body. And
by soul he meant ‘that faculty of insight which can
know good from evil and infallibly choose the good’
(Cornford, Before & After Socrates)
- A suggested ‘hidden premise’ operating in the
Phaedo:
An ethical entity, because it cannot be harmed or
destroyed while embodied, must therefore be
immortal
- Must this be so?
- A metaphysical/ethical confusion?
- Key distinction: Bodily evils/bodily death - bodily
evils do not harm or end the soul’s existence, bodily
death does not harm it either, but DOES end it?
- So, a charitable or sympathetic way of reading the
immortality argument? An (ultimately bad?)
argument driven by an ethically noble aim? Namely,
to shore up the soul as a thoroughly ethical entity,
untouchable by worldly, bodily circumstances
•
Philosophy as practicing death
- The soul needs to ‘shun’ the body, needs to ‘die’ as
it were to the bodily realm. Why? What is the fear?
- The fear of the ‘popular view’ contrasted with
Socrates’ fear
Three views of the soul
Body-double
A ‘tragic’ view
Soul-in-the-balance
between good & evil
Separate soul/
mind (Descartes)
(And Armstong’s view? How might you position this with
these views? Or indeed Locke’s? Hume?)
•
The chief enemy to practising death –
pleasure and pain
- How do they play this role of chief enemy?
- The heavy/light (mortal/divine) metaphor
- The weapons to defeat the enemy? Self-control
and courage, but ‘philosophers exhibit these not for
the reasons which are generally supposed’!
-
An (obvious?) Q: What sort of motivation is this
for these virtues?!
• A pause in the dialogue, a stepping back
-
How might we interpret this stepping back in the
discussion?
- A provisional dialogue? A kind of ‘playing with
ideas’?
- How seriously does Socrates (Plato) take these
arguments? (See the Apology etc.)
2nd Extract (86a-86d)
•
Cebes’ ‘tailor and his coats’ example
1. The soul is more durable than the body, continually
‘replacing’ the body with other ones - reincarnation. If a body
survives (for some period) after death (e.g. bones), then surely
the soul, being admittedly more durable than the body, must
still exist somewhere?
2. This ongoing existence of the soul can only be courtesy of a
complete lack of contamination from the bodily realm
C. The soul is utterly non-corporeal, and therefore not subject
to dissipation - i.e. immortal
Q: Which step in the argument does Cebes’ example
challenge?
3rd Extract (91d-95a)
(All depressed after Cebes’ apparently devastating critique! But Socrates
rallies them. A kind of courage to continue? (see the Laches))
•
The attunement idea/example of the soul –
the soul just IS attunement
1. Soul cannot be ‘more or less’ of a soul
2. If soul is attunement then it must be perfect attunement,
with no degrees
3. Good and evil are (respectively) attunement and discord
4. Soul containing good or evil must therefore contain perfect
goodness
C. All souls are equally good! (Reductio ad absurdum)
• Socrates alternative to the attunement
notion of the soul
- The soul as player of the instrument (and not the
instrument itself)
- Common ways of speaking support this; the soul
somehow directs itself
- So, an absurd conclusion (all souls are equally
good!), plus common ways of speaking argue
against the attunement idea
Q: Can we consider the attunement argument in
another way?
- How can/should we think about the relation of the
soul to good and evil? How does/can the soul
contain good or evil?
- Pushing the player/instrument analogy further?
- Does Socrates actually separate the soul from good
and evil?
What’s philosophically at stake here?
- The metaphysical coming apart from the ethical –
coming apart too far?
- Recall my suggested hidden premise:
An ethical entity, because it cannot be harmed or
destroyed while embodied, must therefore be
immortal
- Suggestion: Socrates’ concern is primarily and
overwhelmingly ethical (to be a good man, to do
no wrong), and he (or Plato?) confusedly or
unnecessarily attempts to support this concern with
an overly metaphysical notion of the soul.
Q: Why can’t we question step 1 above: ‘Soul cannot
be more or less of a soul’?
- Why not different ‘degrees’ (or types?) of soul?
- Recall the varied destinies put forward earlier in the
dialogue (decent citizens, ants, donkeys, dissipation)
- If we think primarily ethically, then this can make
sense? Think of developing a good (or evil)
character, for the soul indeed to be ‘in the balance’?
- Using what we know from elsewhere – e.g.
Socrates in the Apology
• Summing up by Socrates of where they’re at
in the argument, leading to the (supposedly)
clinching argument!
4th Extract (103c – 105e)
Soul – (accompanies) - Life
Opposite Forms
Opposite
Death
- Some key assumptions and questions
- That a man’s life is his soul, rather than being something
dependent on it – car/petrol analogy
- A personal soul, or a group or collective soul?
- Opposites cannot admit of each other. Is this always so, and
if so, does this depend upon a particular definition of
opposites?
- That life and death are opposites. Even accepting that
opposites cannot admit of each other, must death be seen as
an opposite of life? What about instead a transition? A part
of life even - we are ‘dying’ all the time etc.?
- So, the argument has its issues!
- But… being charitable, what can be said for it?
- Well, on its own terms perhaps not much, but let’s return
once more to the central concern in Socrates’ life – that of
living a good life, of having a pure soul. The argument as set
out doesn’t seem to have anything to do with purity of soul,
just with the basic fact of having one…. but what happens if
we tweak it a bit in the ‘purity of soul’ direction?
An Ethically - (accompanies) - A Good Life
Pure Soul
Opposite Forms
Opposite
A Bad Death?
Q: What does this version of the argument mean?
- Formally, it means if one lives a good life then one
cannot undergo a bad death. But what is a bad
death?
- Suggestion: a death where one dies having lived a
bad life. That is to be feared! (To die with ethical
regret?)
The Phaedo ends with Socrates serenely drinking the hemlock. His
apparent lack of any anxiety in regards to his death is of a piece with him
having (by his best lights) lived a good life, of indeed having a pure soul.
Remember Socrates’ contention from the Gorgias and the Apology that
‘nothing can harm a good man’. In terms of the Forms, nothing Bad can
enter into its opposite, the Form of the Good, at any time, either in life or
beyond it (if there is a beyond). Regarding the specific question of
immortality, Socrates in the Apology clearly strikes an agnostic stance; he
doesn’t know, but whether the soul be annihilated or immortal, either way
he has no fear, because he takes himself to have lived a good life.