The Last Days of Socrates

by Plato

  In a sense the work is about the process of the soul’s withdrawal and release rather than about its immortality. One might consider why this work is called Phaedo: Platonic dialogues are not ordinarily named after the narrator, yet Phaedo plays only a small part in the conversation which he narrates. Why is it his dialogue? Dialogues tend to be named after the participant who seems to possess, in an ordinary, everyday way, the quality or skill or whatever which the dialogue makes its principal theme. Phaedo of Elis had himself been released in a way analogous to the release of the philosopher’s soul, for Phaedo had been captured, enslaved, and pressed into service in a brothel.1 He had used his philosophic contacts to have his freedom purchased, and seems to have remained a follower of Socrates, making his own contributions to Socratic literature. Phaedo had been rescued from the pursuits and distractions of the flesh in a very concrete manner.

  Another case of such a release had been the release of Theseus and his followers, and of Athens as a whole, from the perils of the Minotaur’s labyrinth and Minoan Crete. His story is briefly recalled at 58a–b. The Minotaur itself, half man and half bull, can be seen as a symbol for the ways of the flesh and for sexual pleasures in particular. Considerable ingenuity has recently been spent in spelling out the possible significance of this background story for the dialogue as a whole.2 The underworld that Socrates later envisages is itself a labyrinth. At the end of the work Socrates’ outward self can glare like a bull about to charge (117b), but his inner self is without aggression. Has he slain his minotaur? Certainly he would hope to have delivered us from a rather different bogey – the fear of death that lurks in the recesses of our minds (77e).

  PLEASURE AND RELEASE

  The main release theme concerns the philosopher’s release from the preoccupation with the body – having constantly to satisfy its needs, only to find them recurring a short while later. In the background lies the notion that earthly pleasures are just the satisfaction of needs, and pains the growth of these needs or the needs themselves. There can be no satisfaction without the initial need, so pleasure and pain are linked, often observably linked (59a, 60b–c); and assuming that the strength of the pleasure is in proportion to the strength of the need that has been felt,3 it is futile to pursue a balance of earthly pleasure over pain. The philosopher must free himself from this purposeless alternation of pain and pleasure, illustrated by the example of Penelope’s weaving (84a) – undoing by night what she had woven in the day.4 The philosopher pursues this freedom during this life in so far as it is possible for a man, and indeed much of the message of the Phaedo is for us who live this life, suggesting how best we might fulfil our intellectual goals here and now. It is not merely the immortality of the soul which would lead us to follow the writer’s advice.

  However, Plato must have been aware that without some life after death Socrates’ own goals in life could look just as vain as that of the profligate who nurtures nagging desires merely for the sake of the pleasures of their satisfaction. At least the profligate has led an active life; what has the philosopher been achieving?5 Why struggle to acquire knowledge and virtue, if these are both terminated as a result of one’s earthly conduct: conduct which one had undertaken in the name of knowledge and virtue? Furthermore, Socrates had been committed to the doctrine that just and honourable conduct was also good conduct, i.e. advantageous, and advantageous not just for society but for the individual as well. Assuming that Socrates’ death was honourable, can it also have been advantageous for Socrates to die if there was no after-life? He might still achieve freedom from pains which would soon plague him, but that is merely an absence of disadvantage. Socrates had to be dying for some purpose if the conduct leading to his death were to be seen as (i) good, hence (ii) honourable, hence (iii) just.

  DESIRING DEATH AND SUICIDE

  So we meet in the Phaedo a further Platonic treatment of the notion that conduct leading to one’s own death can be just, honourable and good. But this has to be carefully distinguished from ordinary suicide, to which Plato felt unable to give his approval. And to convince his friends, Socrates will give a new defence speech, answering Simmias’s charge that he is recklessly complying with those who would separate him not only from fine friends but also from fine masters in this world (63b ff.).

  We may pause briefly to consider the issue of the ban on suicide. Cebes finds some difficulty in two premises to which Socrates subscribes: (A) that the philosopher desires to be released from this world, and (B) that he should not take his own life. If it is also granted (A2) that death is good for him, why ought he not to pursue death? Here David Bostock has an interesting discussion in Plato’s Phaedo (Oxford, 1986; pp. 16–20), but one which leads to the notion that, for Plato, an element of altruism enters into such conduct. Genuinely altruistic action, such as Christianity approves, seems not to be part of Greek ethics, and caution is required.

  To help reveal a difficulty in reconciling A2 with B, Bostock supplies the additional premise that (C) if somebody ought to follow a given course of action, then that course of action must be good for him. This seems a Socratic enough premise, effectively identifying what is morally correct with what is advantageous. But if it is right, then not taking one’s life will also be good for one, and there is apparently a contradiction with A2. Bostock thus demands some reason, besides self-interest, why the philosopher does not take his own life. It is not enough, he argues, that God bans it, for God must himself be basing his decisions on moral grounds.6 If God (or the gods – Socrates is rather more inclined to use the plural) bans suicide for the sake of other men, fearing for instance that there would be no philosophers left, then it is for the sake of other men that it is ultimately avoided.

  The point which should not have been admitted, however, is that C and B together are in contradiction with A2. C and B establish that it is in the philosopher’s interests not to take his life. A establishes that it is in his interests to be dead. That it is good to be dead does not entail that it is good to become dead by any means, even unjust or impious ones. To incur divine displeasure may challenge the very serenity which he thinks he will enjoy on death. He acts in his own interests by waiting for another means of death, just as a slave who is promised freedom tomorrow acts against his own interest if he annoys his master by running away today. So he waits for self-interested reasons, not for altruistic ones, even though his master may have the interests of the rest of his household at heart when he bans premature escape.7

  THE SECOND APOLOGY

  Socrates is virtually accused of being far too ready to desert both good friends and good divine masters. He cannot argue that he will not be upsetting his friends or that it is in their interests for him to die; and he does not choose to argue that his conduct is pleasing or helpful to the gods either. He argues, in fact, that it is in his own interests. He expects to have a further existence in which he will again have fine friends and fine gods for his masters, and that death, as separation from the body and its needs, will merely be the natural culmination of everything which he had been pursuing in this life too. Thus it will be only a slight step further along the path which he was already travelling. At the end of the work we meet an excellent illustration of the slightness of this step as Socrates fades gently out of this life, the soul leaving the body from the feet upward. As Christopher Gill has pointed out, in ‘The Death of Socrates’, Classical Quarterly 23 (1973), pp. 25–8, this is not an illustration of the normal effects of hemlock poisoning, but a piece of idealistic fiction illustrating the main message of the dialogue. Socrates is released, and released without violence, because he had practically released himself already.

  THE SOUL

  In order to appreciate why Socrates sees death as the natural goal of his life’s work one must appreciate what it was that he thought survived death. The Greek term psyche, usually though not invariably translated ‘soul’, did not represent a fixed concept. It is reasonable to suppose that the average Greek in Plato’s day would have ha
d a rough idea what he meant by it, something like the inner person, one’s intellectual and emotional self; but there would have been plenty of questions about it which he would never have tried to answer. The concepts of soul proposed by Greek philosophers vary considerably, but all of them see it as principally responsible either for motion (including growth), or for sensation, etc., or for both. It could be distinguished from the body either by its being non-material or by its being a finer, more mobile type of matter. But in general it was contrasted with our bodies and with body in general.

  The idea of an inner self which survived death, a continuing person who might experience good or bad fortune in another world, was deeply implanted in the Greek consciousness. It was there in Homer in the form of the ‘shades’, which experienced a dark existence in the underworld kingdom of Hades. It was there in the Orphic poems, which had special influence on the more religious minds of the Classical period. It was there in the expectations of those about to die in Greek tragedies. The term psyche was not always used for this entity, but was fluid enough to be so used. It was natural for Socrates and his friends, acutely conscious as they were of their mental endeavours, to presume that such an entity existed, in much the same way as it is easy for us to assume that we have a mind. Sometimes, in fact, the term can most easily be translated as ‘mind’, though this has been avoided here in the interests of consistency. Sometimes it tends to be identified with the person – with the continuing entity which underlies all changes to our physical and mental being through growth, injury, learning or character degeneration.8

  Thus at the end of the work Socrates indicates that he is to be identified with his soul; his former body is no longer Socrates (115c). Death is viewed as the moment of separation of soul from body, after which the body begins to decay and the soul continues its existence, complete with memory, thought, and powers of communication, though without the organs of sense. It goes on experiencing the society of other souls, and is able to suffer emotional trauma though not physical pain, and inner contentment though not physical pleasure.

  There are a number of issues concerning the soul which the dialogue does not, perhaps cannot, clarify. Since late antiquity Platonists have debated whether Plato intended that the whole soul should be seen as immortal, whether only the rational part was to have that status, or whether some third possibility should apply. In fact the work makes no explicit division of the soul into ‘parts’ (such as are found in Republic 4), but much of the discussion is carried on as if the entire human soul were in its true nature capable of functioning as a totally unified rational being which retained both motivation and feelings.

  Obviously Plato wanted to promise us a genuinely attractive life hereafter, and this had to involve a range of activities: the promise of a life of perpetual mental calculations would not be any comfort to the majority of men. On the other hand for Socrates’ case to work, what he met in the other life had to be such as to free him from the more immediate influences of sense-perception and from the demands of desires associated with our life in the body. Does that mean that he should have no emotions at all in that world? Does it mean that he should have nothing akin to sensation: no awareness of the present, no interaction (philosophic or not) with other disembodied souls, no power to reflect on sensations remembered from this life? That would mean that we have two competing versions of the nature of the soul’s immortality in the one dialogue, one traditional, generously postulating the continuity of a wide range of faculties, and one philosophical, postulating the continuity of mind alone. The latter is what Socrates promises himself, and the former is what he offers the ordinary reader.9

  This cannot be right. The Apology shows that Socrates’ philosophy was no ‘practice of death’, if death is merely detached contemplation. Nor is he content to discover without the satisfaction which results from discovery. He hopes for something akin to hearing by which he will ‘listen to’ famous men of old (Apology 41a–c). And he can scarcely continue to be the same person without the memory of what he experienced in this life or the ability to experience new surroundings there. He does not need to leave behind all these functions of the soul; what he must leave behind is the direct influence of the body, and the sensations to the extent that their intensity and their preoccupation with physical reality interferes with his mental processes – processes which will lead to the cognition of a higher reality. The philosopher has to give up no more than a soul must inevitably give up if it leaves its body to lead a discarnate life.

  Once this is appreciated there are fewer problems with Plato’s theory regarding the future of the common man’s soul. The common man, we are told, has much greater difficulty leaving the body behind (81c–e); his soul has to be purged of the body’s effects. He has not managed to draw together all the threads of the soul, some of them deeply involved with the body, and to unify them as Socrates requires (67c, 70a, 80e, 83a). Whether his soul is really capable of overcoming the divisions induced by the body is unclear, but there seems little doubt that he will not spend much time in philosophy in the other world even after purification. Physically the body is no longer with him, but through memory and through habit its influence can still be felt. Wedded as it was to sensation and without the ability to lift its mind towards the ‘Ideas’, one can imagine that it will find Hades a dark world indeed. Among these souls the philosopher will stand out as fully in control of all available faculties, like Homer’s Teiresias among the other dead (Meno 100a).10

  POPULAR AND SOCRATIC MORALITY

  The Meno had used the contrast between Teiresias and other dead souls to contrast virtue based upon understanding the right course with ordinary virtue which relies upon intuition or guesswork. Clearly Socrates had always hoped for the former type, but the latter was all that men were normally able to achieve. The Meno was probably the first dialogue to distinguish between the philosopher’s virtue and ordinary virtue, but it leaves much of the detail of the distinction to our imagination. The Phaedo again takes up this theme at 82a–b and, more interestingly, at 68b–69d. The philosophers are actually said to be particularly brave and particularly temperate even according to popular criteria, facing death cheerfully and not being excited by physical desires. By contrast other people are brave only because they fear other things more and temperate only because they fear that profligacy will later deprive them of other pleasures for which their desire is greater. These people have neither mastered fear nor mastered desire. They may be choosing the same course of action as the philosopher, and doing exactly what they ought to be doing, but their motivation is not much different from that of the coward and the profligate. They too think in terms of avoidance of pain and pursuit of pleasure.

  How then does the philosopher differ? A fearfully obscure passage of text (69a–b) has concealed the details from us. Ordinary virtue seems to be compared with a system of barter in which goods of a similar kind are exchanged for one another. The philosopher’s virtue, however, introduces wisdom (phronesis, that particular kind of ‘knowledge’ that was conceived of as an appropriate guide to behaviour) as the equivalent of a system of currency. He will brave dangers and sacrifice pleasures in order to obtain wisdom. So far, so good. It seems that the philosopher is going to be aiming at wisdom rather than at a balance of pleasure over pain. But a system of currency is not an end in itself; money is valued because it can be used to purchase other things, and if the analogy is to hold, then wisdom must in turn become a purchasing agent, selecting what it is right for the individual to experience. This has not escaped Plato’s notice, for he speaks of buying as well as selling, and it seems that what are to be ‘bought’ with wisdom are again pleasures and fears. We select our pleasures and our fears with a view to wisdom; we use our wisdom to select our pleasures and fears – to perform for us a hedonistic calculus.

  At first sight this will not do. The philosopher will seem to be operating with the same hedonistic motives that the common people have employed. Indeed from 69b5–6
it might seem that it is less the hedonistic motivation that Socrates objects to, but the fact that wisdom is not overseeing the process. On reflection, however, where wisdom controls the process, it will do so only in such a way as to encourage the acquisition of further wisdom. All pleasure-seeking and pain-avoiding has wisdom as an aim; the converse does not have to be true. Pleasures may not have been given up, but they have become subordinated to the search for wisdom, as one would expect in the case of the philosopher (who is literally a ‘wisdom-lover’). Hence it is possible for Socrates to represent true temperance, justice and courage as cleansing operations that sweep away hedonistic motivation, and wisdom as the cleansing agent.

  There will of course be scepticism as to how far Socrates has painted a picture of virtue which should be admired. There seems to be a rigorous pursuit of the philosopher’s own interests and of the particular activity which brings him satisfaction (pleasure, even!). Even within Plato’s Academy Eudoxus was to take the view that all creatures, including philosophers, pursued pleasure and avoided pain.11 Bostock feels that Socrates’ self-seeking, ascetic ‘virtue’ is a recipe for injustice (Plato’s Phaedo, p. 34), but this overlooks the fact that wisdom will control conduct, and wisdom can never (almost by definition) behave in a manner which is to the detriment of its possessor, nor (by the Socratic equation of what is good with what is honourable) disgraceful.

  ARGUMENTS FOR IMMORTALITY: AN OUTLINE