33 pages • 1 hour read
PlatoPhaedo
Nonfiction | Essay / Speech | AdultA modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Themes
The Forms and Objects
Socrates teaches that the essences of things—greatness or smallness, beauty or ugliness, newness or oldness—exist apart from the world but imbue the objects of life, so that, say, a flower takes on the attributes of beauty, color, aroma, and so forth. Within objects, forms become visible: “these you can touch and see and perceive with the senses, but the unchanging things you can only perceive with the mind” (37).
These attributes, though they enter into objects, never achieve perfect representation in them. All things in the world, then, are imperfect; their beauty and color and hardness never quite approach purity in the ideals on which they’re based.
The forms are so fundamental that people are born knowing them. Though we never see true perfection in any quality, we can easily imagine it.
Attributes always appear as pairs of opposites: Light appears as a contrast to dark, cold stands apart from heat, and youth compares with old. Otherwise, for example, “if there were no alternation of sleeping and waking, […] all other things would be asleep, too,” and sleepers would “not be distinguishable from the rest” (32). Likewise, if everything were dead, there would no longer be a distinction between life and death.
These qualities cannot cancel each other out any more than odd numbers can cancel out even ones. The forms are immortal, and even when objects are destroyed or die, the forms that imbue them never die but merely retreat. For example, if heat meets cold, as when fire encounters snow, the result is that both attributes retreat from the objects they permeate, so that one ceases to burn and the other becomes water. This also is true of the one form that imbues human life, the soul, which retreats from the body at death but itself never dies.
The Soul and Immortality
When a person dies, the spirit, or soul, exits the body. But does it die too? Socrates argues that the soul cannot die, and he gives four main reasons.
First, the soul is the life force, the opposite of death. It may leave the body, but as death’s opposite, it cannot itself die. Thus, it persists beyond death and must exist in another realm, at least for a time, before it returns to inhabit another body.
Secondly, people are born with knowledge already inscribed in their minds. We know, for example, the forms that inhabit objects, such as size, number, hardness, color, shape, and so forth. Forms are elemental, their attributes added to objects but not deriving from them. We understand this from the beginning; we don’t learn it from objects themselves. Socrates asserts, “But this would be impossible unless our soul had been in some place before existing in the form of man; here then is another proof of the soul’s immortality” (32).
The third reason is that the things of the world are made up of items that can be torn apart. Death dwells in these events, but the forms, including the soul, are of a different material, so to speak, that is invulnerable to decay.
The fourth reason is that the soul can no more be subsumed into death than can the number three be subsumed into the even numbers. The soul is by its nature alive, so much so that, like the odd number that can never become even, its aliveness can’t ever become its opposite, death.
Souls, as eternal forms, revisit the earth, attaching themselves to living beings, including animals and people. After death, good souls dwell happily in pleasant circumstances among their fellow good spirits, eventually to return to earth in good forms—bees and ants, for example, which exemplify the social virtues of cooperation.
Souls that have participated in evil, however, often become ghosts, “prowling about tombs and sepulchres […] and they continue to wander until through the craving after the corporeal which never leaves them, they are imprisoned finally in another body” (39), often in the form of negative creatures like wolves and asses. Others dwell alone in the underworld for a long time—or, if irredeemable, they are thrown into Tartarus, the center of the earth that boils with fire, mud, and water.
The Virtues and the Purpose of Life
Striving after physical pleasures, fame, or fortune is a frivolous and unworthy pursuit; instead, declares Socrates, the true purpose of life is to be virtuous.
The virtuous don’t merely give lip service to goodness, like most people, but practice goodness every day. This involves giving up petty desires and setting aside comforts; most of all, it requires inquiry, study, and deep thinking on the most important issues. In effect, the best people become austere and disciplined philosophers.
With the habits of virtue in place—modesty, honesty, fairness, concern for others, contribution to society—good people don’t simply perform virtuous deeds; they are virtuous. Being virtuous gives them the ability to make wise decisions in the moment. This contrasts with those who behave in a virtuous manner because it’s required by some law or rule; it also differs from those who would do good because it seems like the reasonable thing to do.
The happiest people “are those who have practised the civil and social virtues which are called temperance and justice, and are acquired by habit and attention” (40). These souls find kindred spirits in the afterlife. For this reason, no philosopher need fear death, since only through that passage can be found the pure essences of truth, beauty, greatness, and all the other divine attributes that proper philosophy points to beyond this world.
Should the practice of the virtuous and philosophical life lead to a confrontation with the authorities, it’s vastly better, asserts Socrates, to persist in virtuous behavior even if it leads to one’s death. This isn’t to say that a person should commit suicide, as humans are the property of the gods and may not destroy that property. However, should others kill the philosopher because he stands up for his beliefs, the fault lies with the killers.
For these reasons, Socrates refused to back down from his beliefs, even when they resulted in his arrest, trial, and death sentence. He also refused to take an easy way out, such as running away, as his disciples wished of him. Always a man of his word, Socrates spoke his truth and took the consequences.
Related Titles
By Plato
