Notes and Comments on Phaedo -- 1

23 May 2023

Notes and Comments on Phaedo – 1

I’ve decided to go through Phaedo, posting, from beginning to end, small portions of the dialogue, together with notes and comments.  My feeling is that in many ways Phaedo is the central, or seed, dialogue of Plato’s works.  I say this because many of the themes mentioned in Phaedo are taken up and expanded in other dialogues; I’m thinking of recollection, rebirth, the nature of the soul, the nature of the afterlife, the defining purpose of asceticism for a philosopher, the nature of causation, etc.  I suspect you could say the same about other dialogues, but the longer I live with Plato’s work the more I find myself seeing Platonism in general, and Plato’s dialogues specifically, through the lens of Phaedo.

These notes and comments will be impressionistic rather than scholarly; what I mean is that I won’t be commenting on Greek terms and other insights that scholars familiar with these aspects can intelligently remark upon.  My comments will be more like a conversation (a ‘dialogue’, if you will) with the text which has become a good friend to me in my journey to the Good, the One, the Beautiful, to that which is eternal.

I will be using the Loeb Classical Library translation by Harold North Fowler.  The ISBN is 0674990404 and last time I checked is available at reduced, used book, prices.

I am assuming readers know the circumstances of the dialogue; that Socrates has been arrested and convicted by a large jury of the crimes of atheism, or impiety, and in general corrupting the youth of Athens with his argumentative behavior.  Socrates’s sentence was death.  The dialogue Phaedo is an eyewitness report of the last day, the last hours, of Socrates life.

 

Echcrates:  Were you with Socrates yourself, Phaedo, on the day when he drank the poison in prison, or did you hear about it from someone else?

Phaedo:  I was there myself, Echecrates.

 

1.  According to Diogenes Laertius Echecrates was a Pythagorean: “He (Pythagoras) flourished in the sixtieth Olympiad (began in 540 BC), and his community endured for nine or ten generations.  For the last of the Pythagoreans, whom Aristoxenus knew, where Xenophilus of the Thracian Chalcidice, Phanton of Phlius, Echecretes, Diocles, and Polymnestus, also of Phlius, who were students of Philolaus and Eurytus, both of Tarentum.”  (Diogenes, Lives of the Eminent Philosophers, translated by Pamela Mensch, Oxford University Press, 2018, page 414)  In a footnote to this quote the editors note that Diogenes, in his section on Plato, notes that Plato met Echecrates around 400 B.C. 

2.  It is intriguing that the first character we meet in this dialogue is a Pythagorean.  I see this as a symbol of the antiquity of the teachings that will be presented in this dialogue, that they are rooted in the past wisdom of the ancient world.  Echecrates is a symbol of that past.  Socrates is the symbol of the present; a present that all of us will face at the end of our lives.  And the closing, mythic, sections of Phaedo symbolize the future all of us will face as we traverse the after-life realms that will determine our next birth, or, if we have been practicing the purification offered by philosophy, the final return to the One.  In this way the dialogue transcends time and steps into eternity.

3.  Regarding Phaedo, Diogenes Laertius writes, “Phaedo of Elis, of the Eupatridae (likely refers to aristocratic descent), was taken prisoner when his native land was conquered, and was forced to stay in a brothel.  But he would close its door and take part in conversations with Socrates, until the latter induced Alcibiades or Crito to buy his freedom.  From then on he studied philosophy as a free man.” (Ibid, page 112) Phaedo set up a school of philosophy in Ellis which seems to have lasted several generations.  Phaedo likely wrote dialogues, but by the time of Diogenes only a few remained and their attribution was in dispute.

4.  I see Phaedo as a symbol of the freedom that philosophy brings to its practitioners.  Phaedo was freed from slavery by Socrates.  And it is the purpose of philosophy to free us from being slaves to material existence.  This is symbolized by Phaedo and Socrates having philosophical discussions in a brothel.  They closed the door of the brothel in order to converse about philosophy.  Phaedo is the symbol of the ascetic commitments that are the foundation of the Platonic spiritual journey.  (This reminds me of how Alcibiades relates in the Symposium how he tried to seduce Socrates, but was unable to do so.)

5.  Notice that it is Phaedo who was present at the passing of Socrates.  I think this symbolizes the intimate connection between philosophical practitioners, how they share the same kind of life.  Echecrates is a bit removed both by living in Phlius and because he has his own understanding of philosophy which, while closely related, is not as close as that of Phaedo.  Hence it is Phaedo who will be transmitting the teachings Socrates offers in his final hours to Echecrates, and to us.