Phaedo

Phaedo was written many years after the events it describes. It captures the contrast between the calm teacher giving his final lesson and the anxious students who grasp at the last interaction they will have with him. Socrates is the first philosopher to be executed for his beliefs; his serenity in the face of his own demise highlights one of the most dramatic moments in the history of philosophy.

The work begins in the style of a drama, listing the setting and the persons involved, and begins each spoken part by the name of the two opening speakers, Echecrates and Phaedo. Within a page or so, this structure falls away, and the rest of the dialog mainly consists of Phaedo’s report on the final conversations between Socrates and his students.

Echecrates is a follower of Pythagoras, who believed the soul moves to a new body after death, and that the stars and planets resonate to a kind of mathematical music. Socrates and his student Plato studied Pythagoras. (Every modern student of geometry knows him through his Pythagorean theorem, the formula for finding the area of right triangles.)

Athens had recently lost a decades-long war against Sparta, which caused the fall of the Athenian democracy and, for a few years, its replacement with a dictatorship. Democracy was restored, but meanwhile the leaders, chafing at constant criticisms of their work by Socrates—who preferred a government run by an aristocracy of wise men—had the philosopher arrested and put on trial on trumped-up charges. They accused him of refusing to believe in the Athenian gods and of corrupting the youth of the city. Against both charges at trial, Socrates made an elegant rebuttal, recorded in Plato’s essay the Apology.

While in prison, Socrates composes music and writes poetry, activities he was never known for. His philosophy places both arts into a strict regimen so that they will improve and not distort a city and its denizens; now freed from daily concerns by his impending death, however, Socrates’s mind ranges widely, and he finds himself willing to take up arts he’d previously ignored. In fact, the only written work by Socrates that survives is a poem. He mentions philosophy as “the noblest and best of music” (24); in that sense, music means the arts in general, activities controlled by their goddesses, the Muses.

On the last day of his life, Socrates and his disciples quite naturally bring up the topic of the afterlife. The philosopher uses his famed “Socratic method” of focused, pointed questions, one after another, that lead the student to a clearer understanding of the question or a realization that his thinking contains flaws. In Simmias’s case, for example, Socrates guides him to the realization that the search for truth is hindered by the distorting effects of the physical body, with its flawed senses and constant needs. Only beyond death could it be possible to perceive the ultimate truths. Thus, death isn’t to be feared but anticipated with eagerness.

Socrates is suggesting to his visitors that they needn’t be unhappy at the prospect of his imminent death, since he will be going to a place where he has a real chance finally of understanding “the essence or true nature of everything” (27). He overlooks that they might simply miss their great teacher.

Socrates emphasizes the “ideals” or “forms” that make up the qualities of objects and argues that no earthly thing ever contains those qualities to perfection. Qualities behave as definitions, and objects more or less conform to those definitions. Socrates asserts that objects are thus imbued from without by beauty, size, strength, and so forth. A modern linguistic philosopher might suggest that these ideals spring instead from the human mind as it makes generalizations, rather than from some divine alternate reality. If so, then Socrates’s argument for the soul’s immortality by virtue of our spontaneous “recollections” of qualities becomes suspect.

Socrates warns Simmias to be always humble in thought. Though Socrates is popularly assumed to have said, “I know that I know nothing”—a statement of humility in the face of the immensity of knowledge and the pitfalls of thinking—a stricter translation is, “What I do not know, I do not think I know,” or perhaps, “I don’t presume to have knowledge I don’t have.” This is similar to the old saw, “It’s better to know nothing than to know what ain’t so.” People cling to beliefs that satisfy them, whether they’re true or not; this leads to a great deal of foolish error and tragic mistakes. Socrates’s teaching methods are an attempt to minimize this all-too-human tendency.

Socrates invented one of the three main ethical systems that pervade the West. These are deontology, or rules handed down from an authority such as the gods; consequentialism, or rules based on what is found to work best for people; and virtue ethics, the approach developed by Socrates. In virtue ethics people are good not because they follow the rules but because they embody attitudes that result in virtuous behavior.

One trait especially virtuous to Socrates is the ability to apply reason to ethical quandaries. Other virtuous habits include honesty, humility, fairness, and compassion. Virtue, then, comes from having the right attitudes rather than merely the correct beliefs. It’s more “from the heart” than “by the book.” The virtuous don’t consult a set of rules to tell them what to do in ethical situations; they have an innate sense of what’s good and bad, along with a strong mind to help them resolve moral tangles.

For Socrates, the good life is achieved through virtue rather than striving after material things. Virtue, in turn, comes from self-inquiry and knowledge. Socrates’s student Plato, and Plato’s student Aristotle, expanded this idea, saying that virtue leads to “eudaimonia,” or flourishing—basically, a life well-lived.

No one is truly bad, they believed, but many are ignorant, and this results in bad acts. Perhaps, then, even criminals believe they’re doing the right thing, perhaps redressing perceived wrongs committed against them by a cruel world. This doesn’t absolve them of their crimes—Socrates believed such people would be punished in the afterlife according to standards handed down by their victims—but it helps explain their behavior and points toward a possible cure (i.e., the study of how the world really works).

The idea that people sometimes reincarnate as animals that reflect their previous behavior—wolves for the gluttonous and hawks for the tyrannical, for example—has a counterpart in Buddhism, which holds that the soul leaves the world for 49 days and then returns, perhaps as a fox if the soul behaved badly in its previous life. Different cultures regard various animals in different ways, with some considered bad by one culture and good by another. Thus, one society might consider becoming a wolf a punishment, while another might think it a reward for loyalty and intelligence.

Cebes’s doubts about the soul’s immortality are overturned by Socrates’s elegant argument that, like the number three that contains the quality of oddness and can never suffer that quality to be replaced by evenness, the soul contains the quality of life that can never be replaced by death. This argument hangs on his previous proof of qualities as essences that visit objects, an argument much criticized among philosophers who followed Socrates. Still, Socrates has touched on an important attribute of the soul, that, in a way, it is life and can no more cease to exist than death can come to an end.

Many modern thinkers question whether a soul exists at all. Socrates’s arguments, in that case, might apply instead to “awareness” or “consciousness,” which, Socratics might argue, by nature contain no boundary and therefore can’t collapse back into some ground state the way a body disintegrates back into the earth. The larger point isn’t that Socrates is right or wrong about personal immortality but that he has raised interesting questions that remain hard to solve even to this day.

Many of Socrates’s beliefs found their way into Christianity. He believed that the gods and their realm are exemplars of perfection, that the temptations of the flesh are impediments to spiritual goodness, that contemplation of the divine is the closest a human can get to godhood, that philosophy should be a way of life, and that philosophers should be willing to die for their beliefs. These ideals, or variations on them, are folded into Christianity, especially its monastic traditions of poverty, study, contemplation, and, occasionally, martyrdom.

Socrates also taught that the soul, on entering the afterlife, is judged; the good ones are befriended, while the wicked or greedy ones are spurned by others and must wander, lost and alone, some of them even relegated to the boiling center of the earth. A variation on this idea occurs in Christian thought, where the righteous are greeted by angels and the unrighteous are delivered into hell.

Socrates’s belief that the virtuous will be well-rewarded after death serves as a kind of Pascalian wager—Pascal, the early modern French philosopher, reasoned that it’s wise to worship God and Jesus to protect against the possibility that the Christian hell is real. However, Socrates was otherwise sincere in his belief that the good life is attained through study and self-abnegation.

Socrates’s philosophy isn’t carved in stone; it’s more a method of inquiry than any sort of dogma. Socrates does hold strongly argued philosophical beliefs, but as a teacher he is much more concerned that his pupils be good thinkers than loyal acolytes.

Almost all we know of Socrates comes from Plato’s descriptions of him and his philosophy in dialogs such as Symposium, Republic, and Phaedo. Did Plato tailor some of Socrates’s concepts to fit his own? Did he believe his own ideas were simply corollaries of Socrates’s philosophy and then put them in Socrates’s mouth? Did he, in one way or another, “improve” Socrates’s words, freshening them up for publication?

Few scholars believe Plato wrote down exactly what his mentor said; instead, he paraphrased the great master and perhaps twisted his words in the process. All good biographers struggle with the problem of distilling their subjects without distorting them; Plato, as one of the first to attempt it, likely fell some distance from perfection in trying to put Socrates’s ideas on paper. Where, then, does Socrates end and Plato begin? No one knows for sure. The safest course is to think of Socrates and Plato as two parts of a larger philosophical school.

Plato established an Academy—arguably the first university in the world—which provided instruction on mathematics, philosophy, and possibly science and politics. The founder would often lecture on Platonic philosophy, and he taught Aristotle, who, in turn, added glosses onto the ideas of his predecessors. It might be said, sardonically, that Socrates and Plato are two sides of a coin in Aristotle’s pocket. In any event, Plato’s Socratic dialogs form the chief foundation for the Western thought that followed, and they underlie Western philosophy to this day.

If, in studying Phaedo, the reader feels uncertain or confused by the whirl of ideas, and struggles to make sense of them, this is a good thing. Socrates’s purpose isn’t to ensure that his students agree with him but that they challenge themselves to think deeply. Uncertainty, doubt, skepticism—these are the wellsprings of philosophy, and they stand apart from the dogmas and arrogant assurances of so many belief systems. To wonder and question is to enter into the grand adventure of philosophy, a voyage through the world of ideas that always rewards the traveler.