Notes and Comments on Phaedo -- 30

5 September 2023

Notes and Comments on Phaedo – 30

Continuing with my notes and comments on Phaedo; I am using the Harold North Fowler translation published by the Loeb Classical Library:

“’Very well,’ said Socrates, ‘Harmonia, the Theban goddess, has, it seems, been moderately gracious to us; but how, Cebes, and by what argument can we find grace in the sight of Cadmus?’

“’I think,’ said Cebes, ‘you will find a way.  At any rate, you conducted this argument against harmony wonderfully and better than I expected.  For when Simmias was telling of his difficulty, I wondered if anyone could make head against his argument; so it seemed to me very remarkable that it could not withstand the first attack of your argument.  Now I should not be surprised if the argument of Cadmus met with the same fate.’

“’My friend, ‘ said Socrates, ‘do not be boastful, lest some evil eye put to rout the argument that is to come.  That, however, is in the hands of God.  Let us, in Homeric fashion, “charge the foe” and test the worth of what you say.  Now the sum total of what you seek is this: You demand a proof that our soul is indestructible and immortal, if the philosopher, who is confident in the face of death and who thinks that after death he will fare better in the other world than if he had lived his life differently, is not to find his confidence senseless and foolish.  And although we show that the soul is strong and godlike and existed before we men were born as men, all this, you say, may bear witness not to immortality, but only to the fact that the soul lasts a long while, and existed somewhere an immeasurably long time before our birth, and knew and did various things; yet it was none the more immortal for all that, but its very entrance into the human body was the beginning of its dissolution, a disease, as it were; and it lies in toil through this life and finally perishes in what we call death.  Now it makes no difference, you say, whether a soul enters into a body once or many times, so far as the fear each of us feels is concerned; for anyone, unless he is a fool, must fear, if he does not know and cannot prove that the soul is immortal.  That, Cebes, is, I think, about what you mean.  And I restate it purposely that nothing may escape us and that you may, if you wish, add or take away anything.’

“And Cebes said, ‘I do not at present wish to take anything away or to add anything.  You have expressed my meaning.’

“Socrates paused for some time and was absorbed in thought.  The he said, ‘It is no small thing that you seek; for the cause of generation and decay must be completely investigated.  Now I will tell you my own experience in the matter, if you wish; then if anything I say seems to you to be of any use, you can employ it for the solution of your difficulty.’

“’Certainly,’ said Cebes, ‘I wish to hear your experiences.’

“’Listen then, and I will tell you.  When I was young, Cebes, I was tremendously eager for the kind of wisdom which they call investigation of nature.  I thought it was a glorious thing to know the causes of everything, why each thing comes into being and why it perishes and why it exists; and I was always unsettling myself with such questions as these: Do heat and cold, by a sort of fermentation, bring about the organization of animals, as some people say?  Is it the blood, or air, or fire by which we think?  Or is it none of these, and does the brain furnish the sensations of hearing and sight and smell, and do memory and opinion arise from these, and does knowledge come from memory and opinion in a state of rest?  And again I tried to find out how these things perish, and I investigated the phenomena of heaven and earth until finally I made up my mind that I was by nature totally unfitted for this kind of investigation.  And I will give you a sufficient proof of this.  I was so completely blinded by these studies that I lost the knowledge that I, and others also, thought I had before; I forgot what I had formerly believed I knew about many things and even about the cause of man’s growth.  For I had thought previously that it was plain to everyone that man grows through eating and drinking; for when, from the food he eats, flesh is added to his flesh and bones to his bones, and in the same way the appropriate thing is added to each of his other parts, then the small bulk becomes greater and the small man large.  That is what I used to think.  Doesn’t that seem to you reasonable?’

“’Yes,’ said Cebes.

“’Now, listen to this, too.  I thought I was sure enough, when I saw a tall man standing by a short one, that he was, say, taller by a head than the other, and that one horse was larger by a head than another horse; and, to mention still clearer things than those, I thought ten were more than eight because two had been added to the eight, and I thought a two-cubit rule was longer than a one-cubit rule because it exceeded it by half its length.’

“’And now,’ said Cebes, ‘what do you think about them?’

“’By Zeus,’ said he, ‘I am far from thinking that I know the cause of any of these things, I who do not even dare to say, when one is added to one, whether the one to which the addition was made has become two, or the one which was added, or the one which was added and the one to which it was added became two by the addition of each to the other.  I think it is wonderful that when each of them was separate from the other, each was one and they were not then two, and when they were brought near each other this juxtaposition was the cause of their becoming two.  And I cannot yet believe that if one is divided, the division causes it to become two; for this is the opposite of the cause which produced two in the former case; for then two arose because one was brought near and added to another one, and now because one is removed and separated from another.  And I no longer believe that I know by this method even how one is generated or, in a word, how anything is generated or is destroyed or exists, and I no longer admit this method, but have another confused way of my own.’”

(Ibid, Fowler, pages 327-335, 95A-97B)

1.  This section is a fascinating intellectual autobiography by Socrates.  It starts when he is a young man, just beginning his intellectual and spiritual journey.  I’m going to divide this section into several posts because each stage is fairly well-defined and because a single post covering the whole journey would simply be too long and complex.

2.  The section starts off with a brief bit of banter by Socrates who makes a pun on the word ‘harmony’, central to the previous discussion, and the goddess Harmonia.  Harmonia was the Greek goddess of harmony and concord.  Like many Greek deities there are multiple stories about the origins of Harmonia, but one account portrays Harmonia as the daughter of Ares and Aphrodite.  Harmonia was the wife of Cadmus who was the founder of the Greek City of Thebes.  Both Simmias and Cebes were Thebans, hence Socrates’s playful bringing up Cadmus and Harmonia.  Herodotus states that Cadmus introduced the Phoenician alphabet to the Greeks.  Cadmus was considered to be one of the great heroes of Greece, having participated in significant battles and disputes.  Perhaps when Socrates refers to finding ‘grace’ in the presence of Cadmus he is using the heroic reputation of Cadmus as a symbol of the kind of heroism it takes to pursue philosophical disputes to their conclusions.  This kind of imagery continues with Socrates’s reference to Homer and how they should, in Homeric fashion ‘charge the foe.’

3.  Socrates offers a summary of the position that Cebes remains committed to; namely that the soul may be reborn a number of times, or even very numerous times, but at the end of a series of rebirths the soul will, eventually dissolve, and that is what death is.  Cebes demands proof that this is not the case.

What is interesting to me is that Socrates has previously provided arguments, logoi, that undermine the position that Cebes holds.  The most significant one, I think, is the cyclic nature of material existence, or the third hypostasis.  I’ve mentioned this before, but in the context of this part of the dialogue it is worth bringing up again.  The cyclic nature of existence means that life and death cyclically generate each other and are intimately intertwined (like samsara in Buddhism).  But for some reason Cebes simply does not comprehend how this applies to his persistent question.

4.  “Socrates paused for some time and was absorbed in thought.”  My feeling is that this pause was Socrates considering what other approach might speak to Cebes more clearly, or address the concerns of Cebes in a manner that Cebes can access.

5.  This is the point where Socrates shifts the discussion to his own autobiography which depicts his own journey through a number of philosophical options.  The passage is very helpful in understanding the intellectual development of Socrates.

6.  The central idea around which the intellectual journey of Socrates revolves in this telling is the understanding of causation.  Each turn in the journey of Socrates is marked by a shift in, and deepening of, his understanding of causation.

7.  “It is no small thing that you seek, for the cause of generation and decay must be completely investigated.”  The understanding of ‘generation and decay,’ what I like to call ‘becoming and begoning’, shapes how someone will view various philosophical issues.  Socrates is diving deeper into the source of the misunderstanding that Cebes holds.

8.  As an aside, I spent a long time studying the Buddhist understanding of causation (Sanskrit: Pratityasamutpada, which in English is often referred to as Dependent Origination) and how it shapes virtually every significant doctrine of Buddhism.  This includes the Buddhist view of rebirth, no soul (anatman), emptiness, and the nature of the path and purification. 

In a similar way, the Platonist understanding of causation is a ground for many Platonist views.  If I were to contrast the two theories, I would say that the emanationist view of causation in Platonism is a vision of a primal, immaterial source from which all things emerge, both material and immaterial.  For this reason, Platonist spirituality is a ‘return to the One,’ a return to this primal source.  In contrast, the Buddhist understanding is that primal causation has no central source or focus; rather it is spread out through the cosmos like the nodes of a vast net.  For this reason Buddhist spirituality is about dissolution into emptiness.  (I realize that this is great simplification for both Platonism and Buddhism.)

9.  Socrates says that at first, when he was quite young, he was eager for the investigation into nature, searching for the causes of material things in material things.  In addition, he tried to give an account for how things came to be and how they disappeared (generation and corruption, becoming and begoning, appearing and disappearing).  (The discussion of this particular topic was taken up by Aristotle in his treatise ‘On Generation and Corruption’ or ‘On Coming to Be and Passing Away’; but I won’t be going into Aristotle’s treatise as it would make things too complicated and it has been many years since I read it.)

What Cebes is asking about is the coming to be and the passing away of the soul; that is why Socrates shifts the focus of the discussion to causation in general, as this will be the best way for Cebes to access what Socrates is saying.

10.  Socrates then shifts focus to more abstract considerations such as how numbers relate to each other and how two number 1’s can become the number 2.  In other words, Socrates moves from causation in a material context to causation in an abstract context.  Notice how much more puzzling the question of causation is when considering numbers and their relationships.  That is because numbers reside in the noetic sphere whereas material objects reside in the third hypostasis, the cyclic realm of soul.  I think Socrates is attempting to draw Cebes into noetic considerations to help him deepen his understanding of causation.  The soul is more like numbers than it is like material things.  Cebes has been treating the soul as if the soul were material, like rocks and clouds and trees and mountains.  These things come to be and pass away.  In contrast, numbers are immortal; they do not come to be and pass away.  Instantiations of numbers come to be and pass away, but numbers as such remain in the noetic sphere untouched by becoming and begoning.  By shifting the discussion to numbers and their relationships Socrate is inviting Cebes to see the difference.

11.  Socrates tells us how he used to relate to numbers and, as I read it, he was treating the instantiations of number as if they were numbers themselves.  This gives rise to confusion. 

The overall approach Socrates was taking at this time is what we would call ‘naturalism’ which is a type of materialism.  The view is that analysis of material things, what they are, how they come about, how they disappear, is a sufficient explanatory apparatus for everything that exists.  This is a view that is explicitly held by some materialists today, but it is clear that it has ancient roots. 

Platonism rejects naturalism as offering sufficient explanations for existing things, both material and abstract.  Lloyd P. Gerson, who led a team that translated the Enneads of Platonis, has written an entire book on this topic called Platonism and Naturalism: The Possibility of Philosophy. 

12.  Socrates concludes by saying that he is far from knowing the causes of any of these things and he no longer admits (or uses) this ‘method’ (of naturalism).  Instead, Socrates says he has a ‘confused’ method of his own.  I don’t know if Socrates is being kind to Cebes by making statements like these or if he is indicating that the method Socrates now uses is ‘confused’ if you look at it from the point of view of a naturalist or materialist.  I tend to the second, but I think patience and kindness also play a role at this point.