Summary
Echecrates presses Phaedo of Elis to give his account
of Socrates’ death. Socrates had been condemned to commit suicide
by drinking hemlock, and a number of his friends and fellow philosophers
had gathered to spend his last hours with him. Phaedo explains that among
those present with him were Crito and two Pythagorean philosophers,
Simmias and Cebes.
In Phaedo’s account, Socrates explains to his friends
that a true philosopher should look forward to death. The purpose
of the philosophical life is to free the soul from the needs of
the body. Since the moment of death is the final separation of soul
and body, a philosopher should see it as the realization of his
aim. Unlike the body, the soul is immortal, so it will survive death.
Socrates provides four arguments for believing the soul
is immortal.
He bases the first, known as the Argument from Opposites,
on the observation that everything comes to be from out of its opposite. For
example, a tall man can become tall only if he was short previously.
Since life and death are opposites, we can reason analogously that,
just as the living become dead, so the dead must become living. Life
and death are in a perpetual cycle such that death cannot be a permanent
end.
The second argument, known as the Theory of Recollection, asserts
that learning is essentially an act of recollecting things we knew
before we were born but then forgot. True knowledge, argues Socrates,
is knowledge of the eternal and unchanging Forms that underlie perceptible
reality. For example, we are able to perceive that two sticks are
equal in length but unequal in width only because we have an innate
understanding of the Form of Equality. That is, we have an innate
understanding of what it means for something to be equal even though
no two things we encounter in experience are themselves perfectly
equal. Since we can grasp this Form of Equality even though we never
encounter it in experience, our grasping of it must be a recollection
of immortal knowledge we had and forgot prior to birth. This argument
implies that the soul must have existed prior to birth, which in
turn implies that the soul’s life extends beyond that of the body’s.
The third argument, known as the Argument from Affinity,
distinguishes between those things that are immaterial, invisible,
and immortal, and those things that are material, visible, and perishable. The
soul belongs to the former category and the body to the latter. The
soul, then, is immortal, although this immortality may take very
different forms. A soul that is not properly detached from the body
will become a ghost that will long to return to the flesh, while the
philosopher’s detached soul will dwell free in the heavens.
