Notes and Comments on Phaedo -- 10

26 June 2023

Notes and Comments on Phaedo – 10

This post continues with quotations from the Classical commentaries on Phaedo.  This post will quote from the commentary of Olympiodorus; he lived from about 500 – 570 C.E.  Olympiodorus was the last person to hold the chair at the Alexandrian Academy of Platonic philosophy.  As with Damascius in Athens, Olympiodorus directly felt the impact of the final closing of centers of Classical learning and study.  Olympiodorus wrote commentaries on Plato’s Dialogues such as First Alcibiades, Gorgias, and Phaedo.  He also wrote a Life of Plato.  The difficulties of teaching in an increasingly hostile environment are perhaps reflected in this quote from his commentary on Gorgias:

“So too if they accuse me, asking why I am teaching the youth, will they ever be persuaded that I do this in their interests, in order that they may become men of true quality?  So under such a constitution, one must create a fortress for oneself, and live quietly within it all the time.”

(Olympiodorus, Life of Plato and On Plato First Alcibiades 1-9, translated by Michael Griffin, Bloomsbury, New York, 2015, page 1, ISBN: 9781472588302)

Here is a quote from Olympiodorus’s commentary on Phaedo that pertains to the topic of purification:

“’The philosopher, apart from the absolutely necessary, disdains the care of the body’; and he establishes this premise . . . in this way.  There are three kinds of activities, (1) those natural and necessary, such as feeding and sleeping, (2) those natural but not necessary, such as copulation, (3) those neither natural nor necessary, as the concern for elegance and colorful clothing etc. (that these are neither natural nor necessary is seen from the fact that other animals do not have them); those that are natural but not necessary and those that are neither natural nor necessary, he will even resist them forcibly (for secretion of semen the natural emission during sleep will suffice), while with the first kind he will deal briefly and perfunctorily, not to the point of repletion.  ‘If this is true, the philosopher, apart from the absolutely necessary, disdains the body; he who does this will be ready to die; therefore the philosopher prepares himself for death’.

(Olympiodorus, Commentary on Plato’s Phaedo, translated by L. G. Westerink, The Prometheus Trust, Wiltshire, UK, 1976, page 72, ISBN: 9781898910466)

1.  Olympiodorus uses the same structure to analyze different kinds of bodily activities as Damascius; but Damascius divides bodily activities into four kinds and Olympiodorus into three kinds.  I think this indicates that this way of commenting on this part of Phaedo preceded both of them, but I am not aware of when this kind of analysis first took hold.  I assume it arose in a teaching context and as a way of categorizing different ascetic practices.  My feeling is that it was a good way of framing class discussions on asceticism and its specific techniques.

2.  A phrase like ‘disdain for the body’ is a difficult one for those of us living in modernity to approach.  Yet there are many ordinary instances in life when people reject the demands of the body in order to achieve some purpose.  Anyone who has been on a diet knows how demanding the body can be; but people overcome this demand for the sensory pleasure of eating because they want to lose weight either for health reasons, or to look better, or a combination of both.  Similarly, in sport athletes often push themselves beyond what the body is comfortable with; sometimes suffering numerous aches and pains after an exercise session.  They do this because they want to achieve athletic goals and/or prominence.  In order to achieve these the athlete ‘disdains’ the body’s natural desire for relaxation and leisure.  Examples like this are very numerous; the alcoholic who overcomes the bodily desire for alcohol, the drug addict who does the same in his context, the student who pushes aside sleep in order to study, etc.

The difference with the philosopher is that the philosopher seeks to overcome bodily desires and demands, to ‘disdain’ the body, in order to separate the body from the soul.  This is a different kind of goal.  In modernity it is not even clear to many people that there is such a thing as a soul.  If you think the soul does not exist, then it makes no sense to overcome bodily desires to separate the body from the soul.

The ascetic ideal appears when we have a realization of the existence of the soul.  I refer to this as a realization of the presence of eternity.  The soul is the presence of eternity in the ephemeral individual.  The body and its desires are ephemeral and cannot lead us to that which is eternal.  But the eternal is not absent from the body because eternity is omnipresent/everywhere.  Being present everywhere, it is present in all things, including the body of the individual.  But as long as we are distracted by that which is ephemeral, the body and its desires, that which is eternal remains hidden and difficult to access.  It is difficult to access because it is non-sensory; sensory objects are all ephemeral.  Ascetic practice is the steady whittling away of, and withdrawing from, the fascination with sensation so that access to that which is eternal is opened.

3.  The philosopher is ‘ready to die’ because the philosopher has had the experience of the eternal, is at rest in the eternal.  All things pass away in this third hypostasis of becoming and begoning.  But we have the possibility of transcending becoming and begoning as such by following the teachings of the ascetic ideal and stepping into the deathless and unborn, that which lies beyond becoming and begoning, the Good and the One.