Introduction to Philosophy, Winter 2007

Platos Phaedo: Death and the Immortality of the Soul

The true philosopher, Socrates declares, strives to free himself from

subjection to the pleasures of the flesh. He strives to separate body from
soul: to purify his mind from the distorting influences of pleasure and pain,
for if reality and truth are to be known it can only be by pure thought. The
philosopher seeks knowledge of absolute truth, absolute beauty, absolute
goodness. These are not to be found in the world of sense experience. The
philosopher must seek them by pure reason unhindered by the senses. From
this it follows that the body is an obstacle to philosophy; the bodys needs
and its weaknesses distract us, pleasure and pain exercise and obsessive
influence on us which distorts our perception of reality.
The philosopher needs continually to avoid any unnecessary
involvement in the things of the body in order to attain the degree of
purification (katharsis) necessary to enable him to come to a knowledge of
the truth. Socrates points out, that there is no hope of our attaining to
knowledge of anything until we are liberated from the body by death. So
long as we live, if we are serious seekers for truth, we must engage in a
determined process of purification. Socrates as a philosopher, has prepared
himself for death. Death comes to him as the culmination of his
philosophical practice of self-purification: Why, then, as I said in the
beginning, it would be ridiculous for a man who has spent all his life
training himself to live in a state as near to death as he can, to become
disturbed at the approach of death.
Philosophy for the Socrates of the Phaedo is a systematic self
liberation from the influences of pleasure and pain which give to sense-
experience an intensity and vividness that deludes us into taking mere
sensuous appearance for reality. It is this ability of the philosopher to purify
his mind from contamination by bodily concerns that makes him truly
virtuous. He has transcended the fear of death and has freed himself from
attachment to physical things. Liberated from the obsessive and deluding
powers of pleasure and pain, the philosopher can face the worlds as he
knows it to be, freed from the desires and fears in which most of humanity
are trapped.
The philosophers life as Plato presents it in the Phaedo is a
determined quest for truth. The philosopher must detach himself from
bodily concerns can their propensity to distract from rational thought. In
detaching himself from the body, the philosopher becomes able to perceive
reality as it is; to die to the world of flesh and to attain an intellectual
insight into reality.
Socrates argues against suicide since this is an act of pain and is not
in accord with the philosophers quest for truth. Socrates is certain that
after death he will find himself in the presence of other gods both wise and

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good. This is of course far from an assertion that the soul is immortal, in the
sense of not belonging to a temporal order at all, or even that it will survive
throughout all time. But it does at least mean that the possibility of death
brining more than a dreamless sleep- one of the alternatives suggested in
the Apology. Socrates is also confident that it will be a better future for the
righteous than for the wicked.

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 Having shown that there is such a thing as death, Socrates
defines death as simply the departure of soul from body. Being
dead, consists does it not, in the body having been parted from the
soul and comes to be by itself, and in the soul having been parted
from the body, and being by itself. The body is a hindrance to the
attainment of truth: so long as our souls are befouled by this evil
admixture, we shall assuredly never fully possess that which we
desire, to wit truth. For by reason of the nurture which it must have,
the body makes countless demands upon us, and furthermore any
sickness that my befall it hampers our pursuit of true being. Then too
it fills us with desires and longings and fears and imaginations of all
sorts, and such quantities of trash, that, as the common saying puts
its, we really never have a moment to think about anything because of
the body.
The following facts are clear: If we are to have clear
knowledge of anything we must get rid of the body, and let the soul by
itself behold objects by themselves....For if we cannot come clearly to
know anything when united to the body, there are two alternative:
either the attainment of knowledge is altogether impossible for us, or
it can be ours after death; for then, and only then, will our souls be by
themselves, apart from our bodies.
Therefore: While we are alive we shall, it would seem, come
nearest to knowledge if we have as little as possible to do with the
body, if we limit our association therewith to absolute necessities,
keeping ourselves pure and free from bodily infection until such a
time as God himself shall release us. And being thus made pure and
rid of the bodys follies we may expect to join the company of the
purified, and have direct knowledge of all truth un-obscured.
To fear death is to be a lover of the body: Then if you see a man
about to die complaining, is not that good evidence that he is not
really a philosopher, a lover of wisdom, but what we may call a lover
of the body? And probably he will be a lover of riches too, or honors,
or maybe of both.
Socrates asks, What must come to be present in a body for it to
be alive? The answer is: SOUL. The soul always brings life along with
it to anything that it occupies. If the deathless is also imperishable, it
is impossible for the soul to perish when death approaches it, for it
follows that the soul cannot die, will never be dead, any more than
three, and of course oddness, will ever be even or fire, and of course
the heat in the fire, ever be cold. Inasmuch as the deathless is also
indestructible, the soul is also indestructible. So when death
approaches a person, his/her mortal part dies, but their immortal part
gets out of the way of death and takes its departure intact and
indestructible. The soul which is the life principle cannot become its
opposite; the death principle.

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 In the final scene Crito asks Socrates, But how are we to bury
you? Socrates answers, However you like, provided you can catch
me and prevent my escaping you... You know, I cant persuade Crito
that I am the Socrates here present, the person who is now talking to
you and arranging the topics of our conversation; he imagines that I
am the dead body which he will shortly be looking at, and so he asks
how he is to bury me.....When I have drunk the poison I shall no
longer be with you, but shall have taken my departure to some happy
land of the blest....But I want you to pledge yourselves under oath
that I will not stay where I am after I have died, but will take my
departure; that will make it easier for Crito: when he sees my body
being burnt or put under ground he wont have to distress himself on
my behalf, as though I were being outraged, and wont have to say at
the funeral that it is Socrates whom he is laying out or carrying to the
grave or burying.

The Theory of Forms or Ideas

The theory of forms or ideas claims that there exists above and
beyond the world of sensible objects a world of supra-sensible objects
which are the ideal forms of sensible objects. Hence the Theory of
Ideas may also be referred to as the Theory of Forms. Another way of
explicating the theory is to say that sensible objects are the mirror
images of the ideal forms.
Platos complaint against the world of sense may be stated in
this way. Animals and plants, stars, rocks, tables, nature and all of our
artifacts are subject to change. The world of sense is a world of
growth and decay, multiplication and disintegration, time and
passage. The world of sense is a world of impermanence. Since it is
always subject to change, no knowledge of this world can be certain.
Plato is thought to have made use of the Theory of Ideas as a means of
escaping Heraclitus conclusion that everything is in flux. There are
some things that are not in flux- IDEAS. So the claim that knowledge
is impossible, since all there is to know is the unknowable sensible
world is refuted. Platos account of the Forms of Ideas can be
summarized as follows:

1. Truth cannot be attained by the senses: reality can be apprehended

by a process of intellectual reasoning.
2. The Just, The Beautiful, The Good, etc, all exist as realities
inaccessible to the senses
3. The world of sense experience contains likenesses of realities (e.g.
of Equality itself) which have no perfect manifestation in the material
world.

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4. When we recognize that something in the world of sense-
experience resembles Equality Itself, our knowledge of Equality Itself
has not come from sense experience: we are recollecting it from
knowledge of Equality Itself which we acquired before birth.
5. Realities such as The Beautiful Itself, The Good Itself or Equality
Itself are eternal and unchanging.
6.These eternal realities are the FORMS or IDEAS which instances in
the world of the senses resemble, and in which they participate
(share, take part in).
7. The IDEAS of FORMS are intelligible.
8. TRUE knowledge is knowledge of the eternal Ideas