Notes and Comments on Phaedo -- 37

22 September 2023

Notes and Comments on Phaedo – 37

Continuing the series on Phaedo; I am using the Harold North Fowler translation published by the Loeb Classical Library:

“’Then,’ said Socrates, ‘please begin again at the beginning.  And do not answer my questions in their own words, but do as I do.  I give an answer beyond that safe answer which I spoke of at first, now that I see another safe reply deduced from what has just been said.  If you ask me what causes anything in which it is to be hot, I will not give you that safe but stupid answer and say that it is heat, but I can now give a more refined answer, that it is fire; and if you ask, what causes the body in which it is to be ill, I shall not say illness, but fever; and if you ask what causes a number in which it is to be odd, I shall not say oddness, but the number one, and so forth.  Do you understand sufficiently what I mean?’

“’Quite sufficiently,’ he replied.

“’Now answer,’ said he.  ‘What causes the body in which it is to be alive?’

“’The soul,’ he replied.

“’Is this always the case?’

“’Yes,’ said he, ‘of course.’

“’Then if the soul takes possession of anything it always brings life to it?’

“’Certainly,’ he said.

“’Is there anything that is the opposite of life?’

“’Yes,’ said he.

“’What?’

“’Death.’

“’Now the soul, as we have agreed before, will never admit the opposite of that which it brings with it.’

“’Decidedly not.’

“’Then what do we now call that which does not admit the idea of the even?’

“’Uneven,’ said he.

“’And those which do not admit justice and music?’

“’Unjust,’ he replied, ‘and unmusical.’

“’Well then what do we call that which does not admit death?’

“’Deathless or immortal.’

“’Yes.’

“’Very well,’ said he.  ‘Shall we say then that this is proved?’

“’Yes, and very satisfactorily, Socrates.’

(Ibid, Fowler, pages 363-365, 105B-106A) At th

1.  One of the interesting things about Platonist discourse is how that discourse is framed depends on the cosmological placement of what is being asserted or discussed.  For example, when talking about beauty, how Platonists talk about beauty will depend on which hypostasis the beauty is manifesting in.  Beauty in the material realm is impermanent.  Beauty in the noetic realm is permanent.  There are many examples like this.  In many Platonist writings the author makes the assumption that the audience understands this; for that reason this is not very often explained.  Rather this way of dealing with realities reveals itself to the contemporary reader only after some familiarity that is born out of repeated reading of various Platonic source texts such as the Dialogues of Plato and the Enneads of Plotinus.

In this part of Phaedo Socrates is shifting back to causation observed at the material level, but the level of reference is actually the elemental realm rather than sensation-based materiality.  Before Socrates said that he had found a ‘safe’ answer for how causation happens; that something is beautiful due to Beauty as such, meaning noetic beauty.  Here Socrates is saying that he has found ‘another’ which rejects the idea that something is hot due to heat as such, meaning noetic heat.  Here Socrates says that the cause of heat is ‘fire.’  I understand this to mean elemental fire, the kind of fire that Heraclitus and Empedocles refer to in their Presocratic works. 

This is yet another level in which Platonic discussion operates at.  Elemental realities usually consist of four types: Earth, Water, Fire, and Air.  Empedocles added two other elementals, Love and Strife, to make six.  These elementals were understood to combine in various proportions to make up the sensory world that we observe.  But the elementals themselves are not observable, they are inferred.  The elementals function a little bit like the various atoms in the periodic table, though I don’t want to overstate the similarity.  Greek elementals are based on metaphorical inference rather than scientific, or experimental, observation.  In addition, elementals are stated by philosophers like Heraclitus to transform into each other in a cycle of elemental creation and destruction.  From this perspective, elementals are more like types of energy.

But the elementals are found in the third hypostasis; they are not noetic forms.  In a sense, elementals are a material explanation for things.  The elementals are a vehicle for understanding why sense-based materiality has the variety of manifestations that it has.

Socrates is suggesting that an elemental explanation for heat, the presence of elemental fire, is ‘safer’ at this juncture of the discussion than a strictly material one, or a noetic explanation.  I believe this is because Socrates has shifted the discussion as to why things seem to appear and disappear, why they are at one period of time ‘seen’, and then at another period of time they are ‘unseen,’ in the material world.  The flow of elemental presences offers an explanatory framework for why and how this happens.  Sense based materiality does not do so because it is simply too coarse.  Noetic realities does not do so because noetic realities are unchanging.  But elemental realities do offer a vehicle for this kind of discussion.

2.  In the Fowler translation Socrates says that his previous explanation about heat was ‘safe but stupid.’  In the Focus Philosophical Library translation Socrates says that his previous answer was ‘safe but unlearned.’  This is a significant difference.  I think that Socrates is saying that his previous answer was unlearned because he had not taken into consideration elemental realities before and so his answer was not complete.

(Plato’s Phaedo, translated by Eva Brann, Peter Kalkavage, and Eric Salem, Focus Philosophical Library, and imprint of Hackett Publishing, Indianapolis, 1998, page 87, ISBN: 9780941051699)

3.  Seeing things, and understanding them, from an elemental perspective is very helpful for understanding the third hypostasis in which we live.  It opens up the underlying fluid nature of our existence as the elementals transform into other elementals and thereby transform our sensory world.  It is helps us to understand things like seasonal flow and change, the stages of human life, geological shifts, and, which ultimately the goal of Socrates, the appearance and disappearance of living manifestations such as human life.  Human life is observed to appear and disappear in this elemental flow.

But there is an aspect of human life that lies beyond elemental change.  That is the soul.  Socrates likens the soul to oddness in the number three. Just as three will always be odd, the soul will always be life as such, a living reality. 

4.  At the conclusion of this part of the dialogue Socrates asks if the deathless nature of soul has been ‘proved.’  The response is that it has been proved.  This opens the question of what Socrates, and the participants in the dialogue, mean by proof.  The core of the approach Socrates takes in his arguments (logoi) is what I have previously referred to as metaphorical inference, which also includes devices like simile and allegory.  Here Socrates is saying that the soul, because of its nature, cannot admit the presence of death, and this is like, or resembles, the musical not admitting the unmusical, and the odd not admitting the even.  (In some sense the implication is that musicality and the evenness of numbers like two, are immortal, or deathless in the way that the soul is.)  This is an argument from pointing to resemblances that can be observed or understood, but which then implies that there are other resemblances that are significant but have been overlooked.  That is to say, one resemblance leads us to another resemblance, the one we are more interested in.

This is what Socrates is using to convince his listeners.  I think it is helpful to understand this, otherwise we might think Socrates is using some more modern structure of inference, or some more formal structure of inference, and look for it in vain. 

Do we find such arguments convincing?  I think the way to answer that is through contemplating the arguments, logoi, which means at least allowing yourself to be open to them.  As I mentioned in a previous post, these arguments can be used as the basis for contemplation; from a contemplative perspective much of their meaning becomes clear.