Philosophy-RAG-demo/transcriptions/HoP 024 - Famous Last Words - Plato's Phaedo.txt

 Hi, I'm Peter Adamson and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast, brought to you with the support of King's College London and the Leverhulme Trust, online at www.historyoffilosophy.net. Today's episode, Famous Last Words, Plato's Phaedo. When a swan is about to die, it sings. It sings more beautifully than it ever has before, for it belongs to the god Apollo, and has the gift of prophecy. So the swan knows it will die, and sings with joy, because it is finally about to join its divine master. Or so it least says Socrates, who likewise dedicated himself to Apollo, and met death with hope rather than reluctance. He says as much to his friends, who gather around him in prison, in Plato's dialogue the Phaedo. It dramatizes Socrates' swan song, his final philosophical discussion, and his death upon cheerfully drinking down the hemlock. The Phaedo is a great work of literature, whose portrayal of bravery, even eagerness, in the phase of death, has inspired readers from the ancient world down to the present. From a philosophical point of view, too, it is one of Plato's greatest dialogues, in part because it is the first dialogue to set out the theory of forms. The theory of forms is usually taken to be Plato's most important doctrine, so some listeners may have been wondering how many episodes I was going to get through without mentioning it. But as it turns out, forms are not mentioned explicitly in all, or even most, of Plato's dialogues. They are absent from the dialogues we've looked at so far, like the Gorgias, Mino, and Theaetetus. And even in the Phaedo, the main topic of the dialogue is not forms, but the immortality of soul. This is a matter of some concern to Socrates, since each page of the dialogue is bringing him closer to his death scene. In what must be a swipe at Aristophanes, Plato has Socrates say that even a comic poet wouldn't blame him for irrelevant prattling when he takes up this topic at this time and place. It's typical of the way Plato handles the topic of forms, that even here in one of the handful of dialogues where they are discussed directly, they play only a supporting role. So let's start not from forms, but from this question of the soul's immortality. One might suppose that the first order of business would be to establish that we do have a soul. But Socrates and his friends simply take this for granted. Indeed, they seem to presuppose some kind of dualism as a basis for their discussion. By dualism, I mean just that they assume that the soul is one thing and the body another. But this is not to say that they assume that the soul is incorporeal or immaterial. Socrates suggests at one point that his friends may think our souls are like smoke that could blow away upon death. And even if the soul is immaterial, it might depend on the body for its existence, so that Socrates' soul will vanish when he drinks the hemlock. As one of his friends suggests, soul could be like the harmony of a tuned string instrument which would not be a body but would be destroyed when the instrument is destroyed. Socrates' task, then, is to show that the soul is not just distinct from the body, but is capable of surviving independently from the body. Along the way, he will show that it is indeed immaterial, invisible, all the things we expect a Platonic dualist to believe about the soul. So how should we prove this? To use a rather lame joke that Plato himself seems to find amusing, you will all recollect that in the Meno, Socrates has argued that when we seem to be learning, we are actually recollecting things we knew before we were born. After the characters remind each other about this idea, remind, get it? They realize that it implies that the soul existed before the body did. So obviously the soul can exist without the body, since it used to do so. Furthermore, the soul must be akin to the things it knew before birth. This is the cue for the forms to make their entrance. What we knew before birth, and now recollect, are things like the beautiful itself and the equal itself, or as we would usually put it when talking about Plato, the form of beauty and the form of equal. These are not physical objects, but the natures in which beautiful or equal physical objects partake. So, we already have another way to show the soul's independence of body, the so-called affinity argument. According to this argument, the soul must be akin to these things it knows, the forms. And since these things are eternal and immaterial, the soul too is eternal and immaterial. Notice again that these arguments are intended to prove the soul's immortality, not the existence of forms. In fact, it looks like we are just assuming the existence of forms to prove that the soul is immortal. So is the theory of forms something Plato wants us to take for granted, like the distinction between soul and body? And how does he expect us to know what these forms are like? It would be pretty disappointing if Plato gave us no reason to believe in them, and no explanation of what they are. But wait, there's more. Plato invites us to think more carefully about how recollection of forms would actually work. It might be helpful to consider other cases of being reminded. So imagine being reminded of your best friend. As Socrates points out, you could be reminded of him or her by something which is nothing like your friend, like a piece of their clothing, say. Alternatively, you could be reminded by something which is like the friend, say, a painting of the friend. In this second kind of case, it's natural to compare the two things. For instance, you will judge whether or not the painting is a good likeness of your friend. It's here that Socrates makes a really interesting point about forms. He suggests that when you see two equal sticks and are reminded of the form of equal, it is like seeing a portrait, which is in an imperfect likeness of your friend. The sticks do resemble the form of equal, because they are equal to one another, but they're also unlike the form because in some other way they are unequal. It's not totally clear what Socrates means here, but to me the most persuasive reading is this. Imagine two equally long sticks, and a third longer one next to them. The stick on the left is equal to the stick in the middle, and vice versa. But both are unequal to the stick on the right, which is longer than them. Thus, sticks number one and two, the one on the left and in the middle, are both equal and unequal, unlike the form, which is only equal. As a student of mine put it to me earlier this year, the form is equal, and the sticks are equal, but some equal things are more equal than others. This sort of example crops up in other Platonic dialogues too. For instance, Helen. You remember her from the Iliad, the one whose face was so good at ship launching. She is beautiful compared to other human women, but not beautiful compared to a goddess. She is thus both beautiful and not beautiful. Or take the example of repaying a debt. This is normally good. Suppose for instance you borrowed an axe from a friend and are going to return it. That sounds good, but suppose your friend has gone insane, and is now an axe murderer, wondering where he might be able to find an axe. These two examples, by the way, crop up in the Cradulus and Republic respectively. We'll be looking at both dialogues in later episodes. People in the Plato business have a nice bit of terminology to describe these cases. Com-presence of opposites. The basic idea is that the things in the world around us often have contradictory features, which especially emerge when we are comparing one thing to another. Things may be in one respect equal, in another unequal, in one respect beautiful, in another not beautiful, in one respect good, in another bad. Plato is convinced that our knowledge of things like equality and beauty is not just directed towards equal sticks and beautiful women, or for that matter beautiful sticks and equal women. Rather, equality itself and beauty itself must be somehow separate from the sticks and the women, and we must be judging the sticks and the women by looking to an absolute standard of equality and beauty. When we do this, the forms are the standard by which we judge. So this, along with the theory of recollection, introduces a further reason to believe in forms. They are standards of judgment and thus play a crucial role in our knowledge. But wait, there's still more. Because forms do not only play a role in Plato's theory of knowledge, his epistemology, they also play a role in his metaphysics, or to be more specific, his understanding of causation. His idea here is that the form of equal somehow causes equal things, like sticks, to be equal, while the form of beauty causes Helen to be beautiful. Socrates presents this idea in a kind of intellectual autobiography. I mentioned this passage in an earlier episode because in it, Socrates criticizes the pre-Socratic philosopher Anaxagoras. As you might remember, Socrates was disappointed that Anaxagoras invoked mind as if he would show that the universe follows a rational design, but then retreated into merely physical explanations. As Socrates says, this would be like his saying that he is sitting in jail because his bones and muscles are in jail, instead of saying that he is sitting there because he decided not to run away when he was offered the chance to do so. The examples show that for Plato, we need to satisfy very strict criteria in identifying the correct cause for anything. Whether we try to explain the cosmos, or why Socrates is sitting in jail, we should select a cause which must give rise to the effect we're trying to explain. The presence of the true cause shouldn't be compatible with other possible outcomes. So for instance, Anaxagoras' famous vortex seems on the face of it to be compatible with a badly designed chaotic world, as well as with the good world we see around us, and Socrates' bones and muscles would be involved in both running away and staying put. Another example. It would be wrong to say that one man is taller than another by a head, because it's also possible to be smaller by a head, so invoking the head doesn't explain being taller any more than it would explain being smaller. And by the way, there's another problem with invoking the head as a cause of tallness. The head itself is small. And Socrates finds it ridiculous to say that something small could be the cause of tallness. Plato is making a very strict demand here. To oversimplify a bit, the demand boils down to the following. The cause of, say, largeness should not be small, nor should it be able to cause smallness. The cause of equality should not be unequal, and should never cause inequality. And so on. Now, forms seem to satisfy this demand admirably. If things are equal precisely because they resemble the form of equal, it stands to reason both that the form of equal is not going to be unequal, and that the form of equal never causes anything to be unequal. But if the form of equal doesn't cause things to be unequal, what does? Well, maybe there's a form of unequal, too. Or maybe things are just unequal because they fail to be perfectly like the form of equal, the way your friend's portrait isn't perfectly like your friend. The same kind of logic will work for other forms. The form of beauty is not ugly, and cannot cause ugliness. Ugliness must be caused either by another form, the form of ugly, or by a simple failure to resemble the form of beauty. Notice one implication of what Plato is saying here. It sounds like he's saying not just that each form excludes its opposite, for instance, the form of equal is not unequal, but also that each form exemplifies itself, for instance, the form of equal would itself be equal, the form of beauty would itself be beautiful. This may sound reasonable enough, but we might worry that the form of large, for instance, can't really be large, since it's immaterial. And as we'll see, this assumption that each form exemplifies itself is going to cause trouble for Plato in another dialogue. These forms may satisfy Plato's demands for proper causation, but isn't this, well, cheating? Is it really informative to be told that the cause for Helen's being beautiful is the form of beauty? Plato is sensitive to this objection and has Socrates admit that when we invoke forms, we are giving what he calls safe, but simple-minded causes. Although it's safe to say that beauty makes Helen beautiful, it doesn't really seem to take us very far. On the other hand, it may take us further than we might think. Remember that the forms are not just causes, but are also the objects of our knowledge. So someone who knew the form of beauty would know exactly what it means to be beautiful. They would, after all, understand the nature of beauty itself. So they would be able to explain exactly what it is for Helen to be beautiful, and perhaps also why Helen is not beautiful compared to a goddess. Socrates also recognizes that sometimes we can give what he calls a clever cause in addition to a safe and simple-minded cause. For instance, if we want to know what has made something cold, we might play safe and say, the form of cold. But a more clever answer would be to say, snow. After all, snow satisfies the demands Plato has laid down. It is cold without being hot, and it cannot make anything hot. It is, therefore, just as good a cause of coldness as a form would be. We might still have some worries here, though. For instance, the form of cold will be involved every time something is cold. It's always okay or safe to invoke the form of cold as a cause of things being cold. But snow is not involved every time things are made cold. Sometimes the clever cause of coldness might be ice, or liquid nitrogen, or an insufficiently generous Valentine's Day present. So although the forms may be safe and simple-minded causes, they will be better than at least some clever causes because of their universal application. Now I know what you're thinking. I've been blathering on about forms for quite a while now. What happened to the immortality of the soul, which I was insisting was the main topic of this dialogue? Well, it turns out that what we've just been talking about is directly relevant to this topic. After all, what is the soul if it is not a cause of being alive? But if it is a proper cause that satisfies Plato's demands, then the soul will have to be only alive, not dead, just the way that, in order for snow to be a cause of cold, it has to be only cold and not hot. If this is right, then the soul can no more be dead than the number three could be even. The soul will have to be permanently alive by its very nature. This line of argument allows Socrates to ward off an objection which has been troubling him and his friends. Even if we say that the soul can survive the body's death, how do we know it won't wear out eventually? It might be like a weaver has worn out many cloaks. Just as the weaver survives while one cloak after another becomes threadbare and has to be discarded, so the soul might survive for a long time, wearing out one body after another. But eventually the weaver will die wearing his last cloak. Similarly, the soul may die after it leaves its last of many bodies. Happily, Socrates is now able to refute this. As a proper cause of life, the soul is by nature immune to death. Notice again how Socrates is assuming that the soul is distinct from the body, and then asking what this distinct soul is like. He doesn't really pay any attention to the possibility that he may die with his body, because he is nothing other than his body, which is the possibility that worries many of us nowadays. Instead, he worries that the soul itself may be a mortal being, which could die a second death along with the death of the body. Upon reflection, though, Socrates decides he does not need to worry after all. All the arguments at his disposal point towards the conclusion that his soul will live on. He might, of course, worry instead that his soul will live on but go to some horrible fate. Here again, though, Socrates is an optimist. He believes that he will be joining good divine masters, and if there are any other humans in the afterlife, they too will be good. If there is anything to fear, it is that we might come back into worse bodies after escaping from our current human bodies. But Socrates suggests that we are likely to receive the bodies we deserve. Violent people will get the bodies of wolves, orderly people will come back as well-organized insects like bees. And Socrates? He doesn't make a prediction, but I like to think that next time around, he was a swan. Before I close let me just say a little bit more about the theory of forms and the soul. As I've explained in this episode, forms help Plato with at least three interconnected problems. First, they give him appropriate objects of knowledge. When we recollect, it will be forms we are recollecting. Second, forms are free of the compresence of opposites. The equal things we experience are both equal and unequal, but the form of equal is not unequal in any way. Third, forms will be proper and universal causes of features like equality and beauty. That's a lot of philosophical payoff, but it still doesn't exhaust the usefulness of forms. For instance, in other dialogues Plato suggests that things in the physical world are constantly changing. Forms allow him to say that some things at least are stable and unchanging, a way of avoiding the total flux doctrine he ascribes to Heraclitus. He also invokes forms to explain the meanings of words, as we'll see in a future episode. It's easy to assume that Plato thought up his theory of forms and then engineered these puzzles so that the forms could be the solutions. But if we look at the way he actually uses forms, in the Phaedo and elsewhere, we see that he usually goes in the other direction. Plato was plagued by a whole range of philosophical problems, and he repeatedly found that forms could help him solve those problems. He was driven by the need to solve philosophical difficulties, not the desire to defend a doctrine for its own sake. Indeed, as we'll see in another episode in the future, no one has attacked the theory of forms more severely than Plato himself. And finally, back to the soul. To state an obvious but important fact, the soul whose fate is in question here is supposed to be not just a part of Socrates, but Socrates himself. At the end of the dialogue, his friends ask how they should bury him, and Socrates laughs, saying that they will do well to catch him. In other words, Socrates is not the body they will bury, but rather his soul. Now, the Phaedo, and especially its affinity argument, seem to suggest that the soul is a lot like a form. So if Socrates is his soul, he will be immaterial, indivisible, incorporeal, immortal. But doesn't our experience show that we, or our souls, are riven by conflict? That we are anything but simple, and are instead a mass of conflicting desires, experiences, and ideas? The Phaedo does not seem to recognize this fact, but Plato will make up for this omission in what is usually regarded as his greatest work, the Republic. There, Plato has Socrates argue that our souls are complex entities, capable of both internal conflict and internal harmony. Any and the soul would be nothing less than justice. The topic of the Republic as a whole, end of next week's episode on The History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps.