Encyclopedia of Philosophy: THE PHAEDo of Plato

« the body by rivets of pleasure and pain, and are still wedded to bodily concerns at the moment of death, will notbecome totally immaterial, but will haunt the tomb as shadowy ghosts, until they enter the prison of a new body,perhaps of a lascivious ass, or a vicious wolf, or at best, a sociable and industrious bee.Simmias now undermines the basis of Socrates' argument by offering a different, and subtle, conception of the soul.Consider, he says, a lyre made out of wood and strings.

The lyre may be in tune or out of tune, depending on thetension of the strings.

A living human body may be compared to a lyre that is in tune, and a dead body to a lyre outof tune.

Suppose someone were to claim that, while the strings and the wood were gross material composites,being in tune was something which was invisible and incorporeal.

Would it not be foolish to argue that thisattunement could survive the smashing of the lyre and the rending of its strings? Of course; and we must concludethat when the strings of the body lose their tone through injury or disease, the soul must perish like the tunefulnessof a broken lyre.Cebes too still needs convincing that the soul is immortal, but his criticism of Socrates is less radical than that ofSimmias.

He is prepared to agree that the soul is more powerful than the body, and need not wear out when thebody wears out.

In the normal course of life, the body suffers frequent wear and tear and needs constantrestoration by the soul.

But may not the soul itself eventually come to die in the body, just as a weaver, who hasmade and worn out many coats in his lifetime, may die and be survived by the last of them? Even on the hypothesisof transmigration, a soul might pass from body to body, and yet not be imperishable but eventually meet its death.So, concludes Simmias, ‘he who is confident about death can have but a foolish confidence, unless he is able toprove that the soul is altogether immortal and imperishable'.In response to Simmias, Socrates first falls back on the argument from recollection which required the soul's pre-existence.

This is quite unintelligible if having a soul is simply having one's body in tune; a lyre has to exist before itcan be tuned.

More importantly, being in tune admits of degrees: a lyre can be more or less in tune.

But souls donot admit of degrees; no soul can be more or less a soul than another soul.

One might say that a virtuous soul wasa soul in harmony with itself: but if so, it would have to be an attunement of an attunement.

Again, it is the tensionof the strings which causes the lyre to be in tune, but in the human case the relationship is the other way round: itis the soul which keeps the body in order.

Under this battery of arguments, Simmias admits defeat.Before answering Cebes, Socrates offers a long narrative of his own intellectual history, leading up to hisacceptance of the existence of absolute ideas, such as absolute beauty and absolute goodness.

Only by sharing inbeauty itself can something be beautiful.

The same goes for the tall and short: a tall man is tall through tallness,and a short man is short through shortness.

An individual may grow or shrink, and indeed if he becomes taller hemust have been shorter, as was agreed earlier; but though he is first short and then tall, his shortness can neverbecome tallness, nor his tallness shortness.

This is so even in the case of a person like Simmias, who, as it happens,is taller than Socrates and shorter than Phaedo.The relevance of these remarks to immortality takes some time to become clear.

Socrates goes on to make adistinction between what later philosophers would call the contingent and necessary properties of things.

Humanbeings may or may not be tall, but the number three cannot but be odd, and snow cannot but be cold: these properties are necessary tothem, and not just contingent.

Now just as coldness cannot turn into heat, so too snow, which is necessarily cold,must either retire or perish at the approach of heat; it cannot remain and become hot snow.

Socrates generalizes:not only will opposites not receive opposites, but nothing which necessarily brings with it an opposite will admit theopposite of what it brings.Now Socrates draws his moral.

The soul brings life, just as snow brings cold.

But death is the opposite of life, sothat the soul can no more admit death than snow can admit heat.

But what cannot admit death is immortal, and sothe soul is immortal.

But there is a difference between the soul and snow: when heat arrives, the snow simplyperishes.

But since what is immortal is also imperishable, the soul, at the approach of death, does not perish, butretires to another world.It is not at all clear how this is an answer to Cebes' contention that the soul might be able to survive one or moredeaths without being everlasting and imperishable.

But in the dialogue Socrates' conclusion that the soul is immortaland imperishable and will exist in another world is greeted with acclamation, and the audience settles down to listento Socrates as he narrates a series of myths about the soul's journeys in the underworld.The narration over, Crito asks Socrates whether he has any last wishes, and how he should be buried.

He is told tobear in mind the message of the dialogue: they will be burying only Socrates' body, not Socrates himself, who is togo to the joys of the blessed.

Socrates takes his last bath, and says farewell to the women and children of hisfamily.

The gaoler arrives with the cup of the poison, hemlock, which was given to condemned prisoners in Athensas the mode of their execution.

After a joke to the gaoler, Socrates drains the cup and composes himself serenelyfor death as sensation gradually deserts his limbs.

His last words are puzzling: ‘Crito, I owe a cock to Aesculapius;will you remember to pay the debt'.

Aesculapius was the god of healing.

Perhaps the words mean that the life of thebody is a disease, and death is its cure (see Plate 1).The Phaedo is a masterpiece: it is one of the finest surviving pieces of Greek prose, and even in translation it movesand haunts the reader.

Two questions arise: what does it tell us about Socrates? What does it tell us about theimmortality of the soul?The narrative framework provided by Socrates' imprisonment and death is commonly accepted by scholars asauthentic; and certainly it is Plato's account of these last hours which has held the imagination of writers andartists through the centuries.

But several of the speeches propounding the soul's immortality are couched inlanguage more appropriate to Plato's own philosophical system than to the cross-examination techniques of thehistoric Socrates.

The confidence in survival expressed in the Phaedo is in sharp contrast with the agnosticismattributed to Socrates in Plato's own Apology.. »