Phaedo
Plato, 360 BC
In the evening Socrates is to drink poison, and all day he argues with his friends about whether the soul will outlive the body. Four proofs, two strong objections, and a conversation about what to do when an argument you trusted gives way. This is a book about a man for whom the truth matters more than comfort.
Who it is for
For those who want to see how Socrates argued about the soul and death on the last day of his life, and to learn to test their own convictions without losing faith in reasoning.
When pleasure or pain is at its strongest, the soul of a person regards the object of that feeling as the clearest and the most true, but this is not so.
He came to his dying friend and could not pity him
In the town of Phlius, a local man named Echecrates meets Phaedo, a young man who was with Socrates in the Athenian prison on his last day. Echecrates asks him to tell everything in order. Plato wrote the dialogue “Phaedo” in the form of this account.
Phaedo begins with a feeling he cannot explain himself. He came to a dying friend and did not pity him. Socrates held himself so fearlessly and spoke so calmly that he seemed happy. But there was no ordinary joy of philosophical talk either. All day the friends alternately laughed and wept, and Apollodorus, the most impressionable of them, lost all self-control.
In the morning Socrates’ fetters were taken off. Xanthippe, his wife, was sitting beside him with a child in her arms, and on seeing the friends she cried out that today he was speaking to them for the last time. Then Socrates rubbed the leg where the chain had been and marvelled: pleasure and pain seem to be opposites, yet they always come one after the other. If Aesop were here, he said, he would make a fable about how a god, unable to reconcile them, tied their heads together.
Soon the friends will ask why he waits for death so calmly. Socrates will promise to defend himself before them better than before the judges, and he admits that he has a good hope. Then he will argue, and the friends will doubt, and Plato does not hide a single blow against the teacher’s arguments. Ahead lie four proofs of the soul’s immortality, two cracks in them, and a lesson about what to do when the thought on which everything rested gives way.
The philosopher spends his whole life practising dying
Socrates begins with a daring thought: a true philosopher strives for death all his life, so why grieve when it has come? Simmias laughs: in his own country people would say that philosophers really do want to die and fully deserve it. Socrates replies that people are right in their words, but do not understand what kind of death is meant.
First he agrees with Simmias on what death is: the separation of the soul from the body. Then he asks whether the body helps in the search for truth. Sight and hearing, he says, bear witness inaccurately, and the other senses are worse still. The body demands food, falls ill, and fills a person with desires, fears and empty fancies. And even when time to think appears, the body breaks into thought and knocks it off course.
Hence Socrates’ conclusion: we think best when we are least dependent on the body. No one has seen justice or beauty with the eyes; they can be grasped only by thought. So the philosopher, all his life, gradually gathers the soul into itself, and that is a practice in dying. It would be absurd to prepare for this all your life and then be frightened when death comes.
The sharpest point concerns courage. Ordinary people, Socrates observes, are brave out of fear: they go to death because they are afraid of a still greater evil. And they are temperate out of intemperance: they give up some pleasures because they do not want to lose others. This is an exchange of fear for fear and pleasure for pleasure, like exchanging coins. The genuine coin, for Socrates, is only one: understanding. Without it, courage and justice are left as nothing but a shadow.
If we carry this over to today, and this is already a practical step proposed by Livria, not Socrates’ own words, then enduring a hated job only from fear of being left without money is not yet courage but a calculation: one fear has beaten another.
Cebes agrees with almost everything, but names a common fear: what if the soul, once it leaves the body, scatters on that very same day, like smoke? To answer this, proofs are needed, and Socrates undertakes to give them.
About the author
Plato was an Athenian philosopher and a pupil of Socrates. He wrote his works in the form of dialogues, and in “Phaedo” he tells of his teacher’s last day through the voice of his friend Phaedo.
All books by this author: Plato
Terms from the book
- Socrates
- Odysseus
- idea
- Penelope
- Homer
- Phlius: A small ancient Greek town in the Peloponnese. In the framing of the dialogue, Phaedo tells of Socrates’ death there.
- Phaedo: A young friend and pupil of Socrates, who was with him in prison on the last day. In the dialogue he is the narrator, and his name gave the dialogue its title.
- Echecrates: A man of Phlius who asks Phaedo to tell him about Socrates’ last day. From time to time he interrupts the account with questions.
- Apollodorus: A friend of Socrates, very impressionable. In the dialogue he weeps all day and sobs loudest at the end.
- Xanthippe: Socrates’ wife. On the morning of the last day she sits beside him in prison with a child in her arms.
- Crito: An old friend of Socrates, an Athenian. In the dialogue he looks after practical matters and closes Socrates’ eyes after death.
- Aesop: An ancient Greek author of fables, short instructive stories, most often about animals.
- Simmias: A companion of Socrates from Thebes who, together with Cebes, is the chief arguer of the dialogue. He raises the objection that the soul is a harmony of the body.
- Cebes: A companion of Socrates from Thebes, a friend of Simmias. Socrates says he is hard to persuade with the first argument. The objection about the weaver and the cloak is his.
- lyre: An ancient Greek stringed instrument, played by plucking or striking the strings.
- recollection: In the Phaedo, Socrates’ idea that when we learn we recollect knowledge which the soul had before birth and forgot at birth. This is Socrates’ doctrine as Plato presents it, not a scientific term.
- harmony: For the ancient Greeks, a well-tuned sound, the agreement of parts. In the dialogue it is the tuning of the lyre’s strings, and in Simmias’ objection the right proportion of the parts of the body.
- misology: Hatred of reasoning. The word with which Socrates in the Phaedo names distrust of all arguments, born of disappointment in some of them.
- Anaxagoras: An ancient Greek philosopher of the fifth century BCE. He taught that mind orders everything in the world.
- Tartarus: In ancient Greek myth, the deepest abyss under the earth. In Socrates’ myth underground rivers flow into it, and the souls of those who committed the gravest crimes fall there.
- the Eleven: A board of eleven Athenian officials who ran the prison and carried out death sentences.
- Asclepius: The ancient Greek god of healing. People offered sacrifices to him in thanks for a cure.
All terms
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