Notes and Comments on Phaedo -- 40

2 October 2023

Notes and Comments on Phaedo – 40

Continuing with my posts on Phaedo, I am using the Harold North Fowler translation published by the Loeb Classical Library.

“’If I may tell a story, Simmias, about the things on the earth that is below the heaven, and what they are like, it is well worth hearing.’

“’By all means, Socrates,’ said Simmias; ‘we should be glad to hear this story.’

“’Well then, my friend,’ said he, ‘to begin with, the earth when seen from above is said to look like those balls that are covered with twelve pieces of leather; it is divided into patches of various colors of which the colors which we see here may be regarded as samples, such as painters use.  But there the whole earth is of such colors, and they are much brighter and purer than ours; for one part is purple of wonderful beauty, and one is golden, and one is white, whiter than chalk or snow and the earth is made up of the other colors likewise, and they are more in number and more beautiful than those which we see here.  For those very hollows of the earth which are full of water and air, present an appearance of color as they glisten amid the variety of the other colors, so that the whole produces one continuous effect of variety.  And in this fair earth the things that grow, the trees, and flowers and fruits, are correspondingly beautiful; and so too the mountains and stones are smoother, and more transparent and more lovely in color than ours.  In fact, our highly prized stones, sards and jaspers, and emeralds, and other gems, are fragments of those there, but there everything is like these or still more beautiful.  And the reason of this is that there the stones are pure, and not corroded or defiled, as ours are, with filth and brine by the vapors and liquids which flow together here and which cause ugliness and disease in earth and stones and animals and plants.  And the earth there is adorned with all these jewels and also with gold and silver and everything of the sort.  For there they are in plain sight, abundant and large and in many places, so that the earth is a sight to make those blessed who look upon it.  And there are many animals upon it, and men also, some dwelling inland, others on the coasts of the air, as we dwell about the sea, and others on islands, which the air flows around, near the mainland; and in short, what water and the sea are in our lives, air is in theirs, and what the air is to us, ether is to them.  And the seasons are so tempered that people there have no diseases and live much longer than we, and in sight and hearing and wisdom and all such things are as much superior to us as air is purer than water or the ether than air.  And they have sacred groves and temples of the gods, in which the gods really dwell, and they have intercourse with the gods by speech and prophecies and visions, and they see the sun and moon and stars as they really are, and in all other ways their blessedness is in accord with this.

“’Such then is the nature of the earth as a whole, and of the things around it.’”

(Ibid, Fowler, pages 377-381, 110B-111C)

1.  Socrates states that he is telling a ‘story’ about ‘the earth below the heaven.’  Socrates then offers a vision of great beauty which is an earth that is ‘there’; this is contrasted with the earth that is ‘here'.  The vision of the earth that is ‘there’ is almost hallucinatory, or like a dream vision, or something seen in a trance.

2.  Often in Platonic literature the use of ‘here’ and ‘there’ refers to the material realm, which is here, as opposed to the noetic realm, which is ‘there.’  In this instance what Socrates depicts seems to me to be a kind of visionary experience so that ‘there’ in this context refers to this visionary depiction as opposed to our ‘here’ which is our ordinary experience of earth.

3.  I once knew a Professor of Buddhist Studies.  He passed away years ago.  He was a specialist in Pure Land Buddhism.  He became very ill but, in keeping with his rather cantankerous personality, he denied the reality of his situation which was that he, at most, two months to live.  He was regularly visited by nurses and Hospice workers at his home who were very blunt about his situation, but adamantly continued to dismiss their messages to him.

One night he had a dream.  He was on a path through a field, with trees in the distance.  The path meandered and went up and down hills.  It was excruciatingly beautiful.  And there were others on the path who greeted him, informing him that everything would be fine and not to worry.

The dream completely transformed him in his final days.  He completely accepted his situation and had a beatific calm; even his face had a glow about it that shone through his steady bodily deterioration.

I think that what Socrates is offering his students at this time is a similar kind of soothing revelation, a way of communicating to his students that there is another reality, another ‘earth,’ that is of surpassing beauty and it is in that direction that a practitioner will travel when the time arrives for their departure from the material realm.

4.  The commentary on Phaedo by Damascius says the following about this section:

“Why do we enjoy stories?  Because we have innate notions that are pictures of reality.  Or else, because our chosen level of life is dominated by generation and imagination, we have a preference for fictions.

“You could also say that stories are a kind of casual and playful earnestness; and the reason why we like play is that we want to have pleasure without pains, in other words, illusory pleasure.

"Why this mixture of cosmography and mythology?  To point beyond physical science to a more divine reality, which has a more rightful claim to be the home of souls."

(Damascius, Commentary on Plato’s Phaedo, translated by L. G. Westerink, The Prometheus Trust, Gloucestershire, UK, 2009, page 266, ISBN: 9781898910473)

5.  Dreams and stories are a way of communicating knowledge and understanding.  In some ways depictions through the methods of stories, myths, and dreams can be more motivating, and more convincing, than demonstrations based on analysis and inference.  The shift at this point in the dialogue to mythic presentations happens after Socrates uses multiple approaches based on reason and inference.  I see these reason-based approaches as clearing the air for presenting a mythic reality than is more intimate, but needs the space of the mind to be cleared in order for it to have an impact. 

6.  Stories and allegories were, prior to modernity, greatly admired as means for communicating deep truths.  A good example is Paul Bunyan’s A Pilgrim’s Progress; an allegory that had wide appeal in England.  It was so admired by Christian culture in England that there was a period where most people would have a copy of it next to their Bible.  Today it has lost its place and religious or spiritual allegories are thought of as not being as valuable as an analytical approach to spiritual and religious issues.  For example, religious apologists almost never defend their tradition using allegory; rather they try to frame a defense in logical, inferential ways.  My feeling is that by doing so they have already ceded a great deal of ground to their opponents.

7.  The Platonic tradition is, I think, primarily grounded in the allegories of the Dialogues of Plato.  It within Plato’s great allegories that Plato presents his philosophy, his way of life, and his vision of the divine ascent.  Platonists are capable of using inferential structures of all kinds, and they were often advanced mathematicians, but those structures are used in the service of drawing out the meaning of the allegories.

8.  Reading these stories and myths resembles listening to music.  Music is meaningful, but musical statements are neither true nor false in the sense in which conceptual assertions are.  If we shift our mind to the kind of mind that we have when we listen to music, then this part of Phaedo will speak to us in the way that a profound piece of music speaks to us and guides us to deeper understanding.