Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Plato Phaedo
Plato Phaedo
1
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.
2
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.
3
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 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:
4
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