Crito then reveals his plan for an escape. And Socrates argues the question in the old familiar way. “Crito's zeal is excellent, and most men would think his object right. But the few who think soundly say that it is wrong to return evil for evil. The laws of Athens (through the fault of men) are doing Socrates harm. But ought he therefore to infringe the law? Might not the laws of his country plead with him and say: ‘You owe to us your birth and breeding; and when grown up you voluntarily submitted to us. For you might have gone elsewhere. But you preferred us to all other laws, and have been the most constant resident in Athens. Even at the last you accepted death rather than exile. If you now break your covenant you will ruin your friends and will be rejected by all well-ordered cities. You might be received in Thessaly, but could only live there by cringing to foreigners for food. Where in that case will be your talk about virtue? You would not take your sons thither. And your friends would be equally kind to them if you were dead. Think not of life and children first and of justice afterwards, but think of justice first, that you may be justified in the world below.’ ”
Crito admits these arguments to be unanswerable.
The Meno referred to the immortality and pre-existence of the soul as a traditional doctrine, and it was there associated with the possibility of inquiry.Phaedo, In the Phaedo Plato undertakes to substantiate this belief and base it anew by narrating the last hours of Socrates, who is represented as calmly discussing the question with his friends when his own death was immediately at hand. The argument turns chiefly on the eternity of knowledge, and is far from satisfying. For, granting that eternity of knowledge involves eternity of mind, does the eternity of mind assure continued being to the individual?[1] Yet no unprejudiced reader of the Phaedo can doubt that Plato, at the time of writing it, sincerely believed in a conscious personal existence after death. The words of Socrates, when he declares his hope of going to be with other friends, are absolutely unambiguous, and his reply to Crito's question, “How shall we bury you?” has a convincing force beyond all dialectic: “I cannot persuade Crito that I here am Socrates—I who am now reasoning and ordering discourse. He imagines Socrates to be that other, whom he will see by and by, a corpse.” This and similar touches not only stamp the Phaedo as a marvel of art, but are indisputable evidence of the writer's profound belief. They may be inventions, but they have nothing “mythical” about them, any more than the charge of Socrates to his friends, that they would best fulfil his wishes by attending to their own lives.
The narrative, to be appreciated, must be read in full. But a short abstract of the argument may be given here.
1. Death is merely the separation of soul and body. And this is the very consummation at which philosophy aims. The body hinders thought. The mind attains to truth by retiring into herself. Through no bodily sense does she perceive justice, beauty, goodness and other ideas. The philosopher has a life-long quarrel with bodily desires, and he should welcome the release of his soul. Thus he alone can have true courage, even as temperance and all the virtues are real in him alone.
But does the soul exist after death?
a. An old tradition tells of many successive births, the soul departing to Hades and returning again, so that the living are born from the dead. And if the dead had no existence, this could not be, since from nothing nothing can arise. Moreover, experience shows that opposite states come from their opposites, and that such a process is always reciprocal. Death certainly succeeds to life. Then life must succeed to death. And that which undergoes these changes must exist through all. If the dead came from the living, and not the living from the dead, the universe would ultimately be consumed in death.
This presumption is confirmed by the doctrine (here attributed to Socrates, cf. Meno) that knowledge comes from recollection. What is recollected must be previously known. Now we have never since birth had intuition of the absolute equality of which (through association) we are reminded by the sight of things approximately equal. And we cannot have seen it at the moment of birth, for at what other moment can we have forgotten it? Therefore, if ideals be not vain, our souls must have existed before birth, and, according to the doctrine of opposites above stated, will have continued existence after death.
b. To charm away the fears of the “child within,” Socrates adds, as further considerations:—
i. The soul is uncompounded, incorporeal, invisible, and therefore indissoluble and immutable.
ii. The soul commands, the body serves; therefore the soul is akin to the divine.
iii. Yet even the body holds together long after death, and the bones are all but indestructible.
The soul, if pure, departs to the invisible world, but, if tainted by communion with the body, she lingers hovering near the earth, and is afterwards born into the likeness of some lower form. That which true philosophy has purified alone rises ultimately to the gods. The lesson is impressively applied.
2. A pause ensues; and Simmias and Cebes are invited to express their doubts. For, as the swan dies singing, Socrates would die discoursing.
a. Simmias desires not to rest short of demonstration, though he is willing to make the highest attainable probability the guide of life.
If the soul is the harmony of the body, what becomes of her “when the lute is broken”?
b. Cebes compares the body to a garment which the soul keeps weaving at. The garment in which the weaver dies outlasts him. So the soul may have woven and worn many bodies in one lifetime, yet may perish and leave a body behind. Or even supposing her to have many lives, does even this hypothesis exempt her from ultimate decay?
Socrates warns his friends against losing faith in inquiry. Theories, like men, are disappointing; yet we should be neither misanthropists nor misologists. Then he answers his two friends.
a—i. The soul is acknowledged to be prior to the body. But no harmony is prior to the elements which are harmonized.
ii. The soul has virtue and vice, i.e. harmony and discord. Is there harmony of harmony? Cf. Rep. x. 609.
iii. All soul is equally soul, but all harmony is not equally harmonious.
iv. If the soul were the harmony of the body they would be agreed; but, as has been already shown, they are perpetually quarrelling.
v. The soul is not conditioned by the bodily elements, but has the power of controlling them.
b. Cebes has raised the wide question whether the soul is independent of generation and corruption. Socrates owns that he himself (i.e. Plato?) had once been fascinated by natural philosophy, and had sought to give a physical account of everything. Then, hearing out of Anaxagoras that mind was the disposer of all, he had hoped to learn not only how things were, but also why. But he found Anaxagoras forsaking his own first principle and jumbling causes with conditions. (“The cause why Socrates sits here is not a certain disposition of joints and sinews, but that he has thought best to undergo his sentence—else the joints and sinews would have been ere this, by Crito's advice, on the way to Thessaly.”) Physical science never thinks of a power which orders everything for good, but expects to find another Atlas to sustain the world more strong and lasting than the reason of the best.
Socrates had turned from such philosophers and found for himself a way, not to gaze directly on the universal reason, but to seek an image of it in the world of mind, wherein are reflected the ideas, as, for example, the idea of beauty, through partaking of which beautiful things are beautiful. Assuming the existence of the ideas, he felt his way from hypothesis to hypothesis.
Now the participation of objects in ideas is in some cases essential and inseparable. Snow is essentially cold, fire hot, three odd, two even. And things thus essentially opposite are inclusive of each other's attributes. (When it was said above that opposites come from opposites, not opposite things were meant, but opposite states or conditions of one thing). Snow cannot admit heat, nor fire cold; for they are inseparable vehicles of heat and cold respectively. The soul is the inseparable vehicle of life, and therefore, by parity of reasoning, the soul cannot admit of death, but is immortal and imperishable.
3. What follows is in the true sense mythological, and is admitted by Socrates to be uncertain: “Howbeit, since the soul is proved to be immortal, men ought to charm their spirits with such tales.”
The earth, a globe self-balanced in the midst of space, has many mansions for the soul,[2] some higher and brighter, some lower and. darker than our present habitation. We who dwell about the Mediterranean Sea are like frogs at the bottom of a pool. In some higher place, under the true heaven, our souls may dwell hereafter, and see not only colours and forms in their ideal purity but truth and justice as they are.
In the Phaedo, more than elsewhere, Plato preaches withdrawal from the world. The Delian solemnity is to Socrates----
- ↑ In the Timaeus immortality is made to rest on the goodwill of God, because “only an evil being would wish to dissolve that which is harmonious and happy” (Tim. 41 A).
- ↑ Cf. Milton, Il Penseroso, 88-92—
“To unsphere The spirit of Plato, to unfold What worlds or what vast regions hold The immortal mind that hath forsook Her mansion in this fleshly nook.”
