The Phaedo VCE extractsIntroductory 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 Soul-in-the-balance Separate soul/ A ‘tragic’ view between good & evil mind (Descartes)

(And Armstong’s view? How might you position this withthese 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) - LifeOpposite 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.