Socrates and the Soul
A Look at Plato's Phaedo
Dear Classical Wisdom Reader,
Even by Greek philosophy’s standards, they really are the BIG questions…
What is knowledge? What is the soul?
And is there an afterlife?
These are just some of the ideas that Plato deals with in the Phaedo, one of his series of dialogues dealing with the trial and death of his teacher and mentor, Socrates.
For Socrates, of course, these weren’t just academic abstractions: following his trial in ancient Athens, the question of whether or not there was an afterlife would have been a very pressing matter.
Yet his answers to these questions are far more serene than you might expect. Socrates himself disagreed with the Oracle at Delphi’s assertion that the philosopher was the wisest man in Athens, yet you might come away thinking he was exactly that.
Plato and Socrates are just two of the ancient figures we’ll be looking at in The Essential Greeks, our video course looking at some of the greatest and most influential thinkers and writers the world has ever seen.
Through a combination of videos, live webinars, quizzes, and more, it’s a fantastic way to discover more about ancient history, for both complete beginners and long-term lovers of the Classics.
The course is enrolling now, and starts on Monday, July 1st.
Best of all, for a limited time, we are offering a $50 discount!
You can enroll HERE.
We hope to see you there!
All the best,
Sean Kelly
Managing Editor
Classical Wisdom
Socrates and the Soul
by Anya Leonard
“Crito, we ought to offer a cock to Asclepius. See to it, and don’t forget.” – the Last words of Socrates, according to Plato.
Reading Socrates’ final utterance, one could be forgiven of thinking he was a practical, material man. Nothing, however, could be further from the truth. Socrates, as depicted in Plato’s Phaedo, was a gentleman who shunned the physical world and all thing corporeal. An individual who dedicated his life, and eventually lost it, in pursuit of wisdom and abstract ideals such as Beauty and Justice. In a word: Spiritual… even in the modern sense of the term.
But before we proceed, we must first dispense with the essential caveats that collocate with all Platonic/Socratic texts. As always, the distinction between teacher and student is a hard line to draw, as is the influence the former had on the latter. With time though, the mentor’s exact words started to fade and were replaced by the young philosopher’s own theories. This can be seen in Plato’s Phaedo, which was conceived much later than the Apology or Crito, though it still follows the tragic story of Socrates’ trial, imprisonment and eventual death.
Therefore, when Socrates speaks, we should see him more and more as a puppet for Plato’s words… a sacred protagonist.
So what does Plato’s frontman do in the final hours of his life? Bewail his fate? Seek the comforts of his wife and children? Or question and prove to his companions the existence of the immortal soul? Of course we can’t know what Socrates actually did while waiting in the shadows of his imminent execution… we only know how Plato wanted to envision it.
Of course, it isn’t a large stretch to imagine a thoughtful man pondering the future of his soul considering his situation. Surely the inmates in Huntsville, Texas’ death row are contemplating the same thing with their quickly diminishing lives. Will their spirit exist once their body has deceased? And, if that life force within us escapes its prison of flesh and blood, where does it go?
To these questions Socrates posits a few of his own suggestions. To begin with, he endeavors to prove the immortality of the soul with four theories.
Socrates’ first thesis is the Argument of Opposites. Everything comes to be from its opposite, in the way that ‘Tallness’ comes to be only from ‘Shortness’. With this logic, life can only come from death and vice versa. This would imply that life and death do not have a definitive end, but exist in a perpetual cycle.
The second, more famous concept, is the Theory of Recollection, which is dealt with much more thoroughly in Plato’s Meno. This argument is that we do not learn, only remember knowledge we’ve had before we were born. It can be hard for modern readers to swallow this thought, but it is important to distinguish fact from form. Socrates is not advocating that we ‘remember’ things like: when did the Peloponnesian War begin? Especially if it did not happen until after we were conceived. Instead, it is the idea that within us is an innate, built in ability to distinguish the essential concepts of Beauty, Equality and the like.
In regards to the immortality of the soul, this theory proves to Socrates and his friends that the soul existed before the body.
The third idea is the Argument of Affinity. It is the categorization of things that are invisible, indivisible and immortal versus those that are material, dissolvable and mortal. The body is of the latter, the spirit of the former. Therefore, the soul can not cease.
At this moment, the two other Pythagorean philosophers in the dialogue put Socrates on his back foot with strong rebuttals. Think about a musical instrument, says Simmias, the beauty of ‘Harmony’ only exists with the tangible structure of the lyre, same as the soul and the body. While Cebes agrees that the soul is long living and can exist after the physical form has died, he is not yet convinced that it is immortal.
Socrates concedes that these are excellent points, and so brings out his final and most formidable notion. The cornerstone of his winning argument is the Theory of the Forms. It is one of Plato’s most important contributions and it proposes that greater abstract concepts exist as immaterial and unchanging ideas, such as courage or Justice or Beauty or Goodness, and that all worldly items take in these forms.
The soul, therefore, partakes of the form of “Life” and is in fact an essential property of the soul. Consequently it can never die.
Socrates concludes his arguments with a myth that describes the concept of an afterlife. Throughout his whole conversation, however, he has sprinkled references to where he feels his spirit will go next.
Relaying:
“That soul, I say, herself invisible, departs to the invisible world to the divine and immortal and rational: thither arriving, she lives in bliss and is released from the error and folly of men, their fears and wild passions and all other human ills, and forever dwells, as they say of the initiated, in company with the gods.”
This is the reason why Socrates does not fear death. Like more contemporary believers, he is convinced that his future spiritual life will be better than his current physical existence. In fact, as a lover of wisdom and truth, his body only distracts him from finding reality.
“And thought is best when the mind is gathered into herself and none of these things trouble her-neither sounds nor sights nor pain nor any pleasure-when she has as little as possible to do with the body, and has no bodily sense or feeling, but is aspiring after being?”
Socrates spirituality was unlike the traditions of the Hellenic era, where the multitude of gods and the destination of Hades ruled over life and Death. Socrates never evokes the plethora of Olympian dwellers. He does refer to the underworld though… he paints a hell-like finale for those who spent their life impurely and committed to the physical.
And so, knowing his life has been dedicated to finding the truth, and that his soul will live forever in a heaven-like residence, Socrates bathes, bids his farewells, takes his hemlock and dies.
"Phaedo" is one of the great writings.
The human imagination can soar, explore unseen worlds. Can it truly envision what transpiration occurs as the expiration of a body into another realm is imagined by those witnessing death? It is pure conjecture based on hope.