Plato's Phaedo for Seekers

Dear reader — it isn't, which is weird, and that's most of what makes it worth reading. The Phaedo is a dialogue by Plato set on the last day of Socrates' life, in the Athenian prison in 399 BCE. A friend named Phaedo tells the story some time afterward to a man named Echecrates in a town called Phlius. Socrates spends his last hours with his friends talking about whether the soul survives death and why a philosopher shouldn't be scared of it. At the end he drinks the hemlock. If you've read the Apology and want to know what he said in his final hours, this is where it is. Fair warning: the middle is the hardest stretch in the book, so there's a trick for reading it, which I'll get to.

Why Did It Take So Long

First question Echecrates asks is why the execution happened so long after the trial. Answer: every year the Athenians send a sacred ship to Delos to honor Apollo and commemorate the voyage of Theseus, and while it's away the city can't carry out public executions. The trial landed the day after the ship's stern was crowned for the trip, so Socrates sat in prison for about a month waiting for it to come back.

In the room: Crito and his son, Apollodorus, a handful of Athenians, two Thebans named Simmias and Cebes, a couple of visitors from Megara. And, almost as an aside, Phaedo says Plato, if he's not mistaken, was ill. That's the only place Plato mentions himself in the whole dialogue, and it's to say he wasn't there. Whether that's literal fact, a literary device, or both, it makes the author an absent witness, which is one reason scholars still argue about how much of this is Socrates and how much is Plato.

Phaedo's main impression, before the story even starts: he didn't pity Socrates, because Socrates died so fearlessly, his words and manner so gracious, that he seemed blessed. The whole dialogue is a defense of that calm.

Pleasure, Pain, And A Dream About Music

When the friends arrive, Socrates has just had his chains taken off. Rubbing his leg, he says how strange pleasure is, always tied to pain, never present with it but anyone who chases one usually ends up with the other, as though their two bodies were joined by a single head. Aesop, he says, would have made a fable out of it.

Cebes asks why Socrates, who never wrote poetry, has lately been turning Aesop's fables into verse and writing a hymn to Apollo. Answer: all his life he's had a recurring dream telling him to cultivate and make music. He assumed it meant philosophy, the noblest music. But since he wasn't certain, and had a delay on his hands, he decided to obey the dream in the ordinary sense too, just in case.

You Can Be Calm About Dying And Still Not Do It Yourself

Socrates tells a friend to follow him soon, but adds that a philosopher won't take his own life. Cebes asks why. Socrates gives a doctrine "whispered in secret," that we're prisoners who have no right to open the door and run away, and a more familiar image: the gods are our guardians and we're their possession. If your ox killed itself without your say-so, you'd be angry. So a man should wait until God summons him.

Simmias says he should defend himself to his friends the way he did to his judges. Socrates would be wrong not to grieve, he says, if he weren't persuaded he's going to other wise and good gods, and maybe to better men than the ones he's leaving. But he has good hope there's something for the dead, and something far better for the good than for the evil.

Then the big claim. Death is the separation of soul and body. A philosopher is already busy with the soul, not the body, and the body is a hindrance to knowing. Sight and hearing are inaccurate witnesses, and thought is best when the mind is gathered into herself. So the soul that's pure at departure has spent its whole life practicing dying. "Is not philosophy the practice of death?"

Three Arguments, Two Objections, And One Warning

Cebes asks whether the soul really survives or disperses like smoke. Socrates makes three arguments.

First: opposites come from opposites. Waking comes from sleeping and sleeping from waking, with falling asleep and waking up as the processes in between. By the same logic life comes from death and death from life.

Second: learning is recollection. Is there such a thing as equality itself, not one stick equal to another, but absolute equality? We know what it is, but we never saw it. We only saw equal sticks and stones, which are sometimes equal and sometimes not, and we reached from them toward the idea they imperfectly resemble. So we must have known the Equal before we were born.

Third: the soul is like the invisible, unchanging things (the Forms), and the body is like the visible, changing ones. A soul that's been pure goes to the invisible, divine, immortal world. A soul that's been bound to the body is weighed down.

Then two serious objections, and credit to both: Simmias says maybe the soul is a harmony, an attunement of the body's parts, like music on a lyre. Beautiful, invisible, divine, and when the lyre breaks, the music's gone. The theory had a good Pythagorean pedigree and Socrates takes it seriously. Cebes brings the weaver. An old weaver dies. Someone says he can't be dead because look, the coat he made and wore is still whole. But the weaver wore out lots of coats and outlasted them until the last one outlasted him. The soul might wear out many bodies and still perish at some point.

The room gets discouraged. And Socrates warns them against something worse than a failed argument: becoming a hater of arguments. Misanthropy comes from trusting people too much and getting burned. Misology comes from trusting arguments too much and getting burned. Fix is to see the fault is in us, not in reasoning, and keep looking. That's the trick for reading the middle: when it gets tough, it's literally the point of the section.

The Myth

After the arguments, a story, and Socrates says outright it's a story, not an argument. A picture of the true earth, of which ours is only a hollow, with great rivers underneath: Acheron, Pyriphlegethon, Cocytus, the Stygian river. Souls arrive where their guiding spirit leads them and are judged by how they lived. Middling souls go by the Acheron to the lake and get purified. The incurable are thrown into Tartarus for good. Those with serious but fixable crimes, like violence done in anger and repented, go to Tartarus for a year and then back to the lake, where they plead with their victims for mercy.

He ends with an exhortation. Be of good cheer about your soul if you've set aside the body's pleasures and ornaments as foreign, and dressed the soul in her own proper jewels: temperance, justice, courage, nobility, and truth. "Hope, not proof" is the right way to hold this. He calls the myth a venture, something to comfort himself with, and tells his friends to keep testing his arguments and to care more for the truth than for him.

The Last Hour

Crito asks if he has any last orders about his children or anything else. Nothing new, says Socrates, just what I've always said: take care of yourselves. Crito asks how they should bury him. "In any way you like, if you can catch me." Then he smiles and tells the others that Crito still thinks he's the corpse he'll be looking at.

After the bath and saying goodbye to his sons and the women of the family, he sits with his friends as the sun sets. The jailer comes in, weeping, calls him the noblest, gentlest, and best of all who ever came here, and says it's time. Socrates answers with courtesy and asks for the cup. Crito urges delay. Socrates says sparing a life already forfeit would only make him look ridiculous. He drinks.

Up to then most of them have held their sorrow in. When they see him drink, they can't. Phaedo covers his face, Crito leaves the room, Apollodorus, who's been crying the whole time, breaks out in a loud cry that makes cowards of everyone. Socrates is the only calm one. "Be quiet, then, and have patience." He sent the women away exactly to prevent this, he says, because he's been told a man should die in peace.

He walks until his legs get heavy, lies down. The attendant presses his foot and finds it cold and stiff, and the cold works its way up. Then he uncovers his face and says his last words: "Crito, I owe a cock to Asclepius; will you remember to pay the debt?" Crito says it will be paid and asks if there's anything else. No answer. A minute later there's a movement, and Crito closes his eyes.

Phaedo ends with one sentence about the man: of everyone he's known, he was "the wisest and justest and best." No moral drawn, no summary of the proofs.

What To Do With It

People have argued about the last words for ages. One ancient reading: he's thanking the god of healing because death cures the illness of life, which Nietzsche later turned into a criticism. Another: he's cured of doubt, or of what his friends have been going through. Another: it's just what it says, a debt to be paid. I don't know which. I can see all three.

On the arguments, the honest answer is they don't hold up. Aristotle criticized the harmony theory and the idea that the soul could exist without the body. Modern philosophers generally find each argument flawed, but they value the dialogue for how good the objections are and how a person handles them. That's true to the book, since Socrates praises Cebes for not being easily convinced.

If you want a plan: read the opening, the death scene, and the myth first, then go back to the arguments. It's two to three hours total. The translation quoted here is Jowett's, which is free and flowing and a little formal. And notice who's in the room at the end. The friends come every morning, bring their questions and their sorrow, and get looked after to the last minute by the man they came to console. His final instruction is to take care of themselves and his last words are about a small debt.