The practice of a philosopher

DES LU A Gxfoto FXuyres IN Pac pu Lost THE PRACTICE OF A PHILOSOPHER RAPHAEL WOOLF IN a competitive field, Socrates’ pronouncement that the philosopher practises dying and being dead (Phaedo 64 a 5-6) must rank as one of the most startling in all of Plato’s works. What does he mean by it? The following, at least, seems tolerably clear. Death is the release or separation of the soul from the body (64 c), so that one who practises death strives even in life to effect this separation to the greatest possible extent. Given that the soul is one's true self,' the philosopher's task is to keep his soul—i.e. himself—free from his body. This in turn seems to encompass two related forms of disengagement. Firstly, the philosopher avoids the snares of bodily indulgence. He has no interest in the pleasures of food, drink, sex, fine clothing, and so on (64 D-65 A). At best these are a matter of indifference to him, and at worst a positive distraction from the philosopher’s goal, which is the attainment of wisdom. Secondly, the philosopher makes minimal use ofsense perception in his enquiries (65 a-66 a). The senses are a poor guide to the truth. The latter is instead to be found in the contemplation of eternal, unchanging Forms (‘the things that are’), and these are discovered by the use of reason rather than perception. Reasoning is what the soul does, or does best, all by itself. In both ways, then, the philosopher in pursuit of truth must free his soul from his body, and to that extent be practising death. But in what sense are we talking of separation here? Death itself provides the literal separation of body from soul. When I die, my body is no longer animated by my soul, which is the bringer of life (71 D-E, 105 C-D). It is a lifeless corpse destined to decay (80 B-D, © Raphael Woolf 2004 I would like to thank Gabriela Carone for helpful discussion and David Sedley for patient and generous criticism, This paper was written during my tenure of a Mellon Fellowship for 2002/3 at the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton. ' Socrates can speak interchangeably of the soul not associating with the body (e.g. 65 c 8-9) and of ‘we’ (philosophers) not doing so (e.g. 67 A 3-4).

115 C-E). Whatever happens to my soul, it is no longer interacting with my body. But what could it mean to approach this state in life? What is it to live, as far as possible, without the body? Let me suggest that there are two main ways of reading Socrates’ discussion of this issue. The first I will call the ‘ascetic’ reading, the second the ‘evaluative’ reading. Both, I think, have their attractions and both their weaknesses. I shall claim, in fact, that we are not supposed to make a firm decision between one reading and the other. Each has its own, distinct purpose: the first to provide reassurance in the face of death: the second to tell us how to live. But it is the latter that has priority in Plato's thinking, even in a work as overtly concerned The Practice of a Philosopher 99 any strikingly austere way from those activities that require association with the body. It is, rather, that he should adopt a certain evaluative stance towards those activities. Certainly, Socrates’ remarks are peppered with evaluative terminology. We noted above that his opening gambit is to mark not exactly the philosopher’s avoidance of bodily pleasures but his lack of zeal for them. He goes on to ask rhetorically, about other bodily indulgences, whether the philosopher considers them of value (évriuous, 64 D 9; cf. riuav 7 ariualew, D 11). The philosopher in fact ‘disvalues’ (arabe, 65 D 1) and ‘belittles’ (cf. dAcywpotow, 68 © 11) the body. Similarly, at 69 A-B, we are warned against regarding virtue as the exchange, like tokens of currency, of pleasures for pleasures or pains for pains. with death as the Phaedo. The philosopher's virtue of wisdom (¢povyats) is the only true currency (uovov TO vououa öphov, I Let me begin with the ascetic reading. It provides an obvious way to interpret Socrates’ remarks on bodily pleasure. Socrates opens his discussion of practising death by making it clear that the philosopher has no enthusiasm (£omovdarevar, 64D 2-3) for the socalled pleasures of eating, drinking, or sex, that unholy Trinity of Platonic suspects, or indeed for other bodily indulgences such as the wearing of fine clothes or shoes (D 8-11). We might, then, be tempted to infer that Socrates conceives of the philosophical life as one that involves the avoidance of such pleasures. Being concerned with higher things, the philosopher will practise abstention from gross corporeal activity, and to this extent live a life that can be reasonably described as ascetic. With bodily indulgence kept to an absolute minimum, his time will be spent in abstract reasoning.’ The evaluative reading makes a somewhat weaker claim. Here the point is not that the philosopher refrains (or should refrain) in 1 The term ‘ascetic’ has often been used by commentators to capture at least part of the Phaedo’s philosophical vision. David Gallop, for example, writes that ‘Nowhere else in Plato is asceticism so uncompromisingly extolled’ (Plato: Phaedo (Oxford, 1975), 88). Though by no means universal, this is not an unusual view. It finds recent echo, for example, in Dorothea Frede (Platons ‘Phaidon’ (Darmstadt, 1999), 173); and Michael Pakaluk takes it as read that the true philosopher in the Phaedo is an ascetic (‘Degrees of Separation in the Phaedo’, Phronesis, 48 (2003), 89115 ate.g. 99, 100). Since supporters of an ascetic reading rarely consider alternative possibilities, it can be hard to determine what their view amounts to. But not even its detractors (some of whomI shall discuss below) have, it seems to me, adequately marshalled the evidence on both sides, and this will be one of my main tasks here. A9-10). Whatever the precise import of this passage, its main message seems clear. The metaphor of currency shows how Socrates’ concern is to emphasize the gulf in value between activities involving the body and what the soul pursues by itself.’ This emphasis on value is not itself a decisive strike against the ascetic reading. One obvious motive for leading an abstemious life would presumably be that one put no value on, or positively disvalued, the kinds of activities in question. But at the same time it certainly leaves room for a non-ascetic reading, one which makes the issue less one’s behaviour than one’s attitude. A comparison with Kipling’s famous remarks on triumph and disaster might help explain what I am getting at. The poet is not recommending that one avoid triumphs and disasters. It is precisely because, in some measure, most human lives must encounter both that we are told to regard them as impostors—in the modern colloquial sense, to * For a more detailed reading of the passage, see R. Weiss, “The Right Exchange: Phaedo 69a6—c3', Ancient Philosophy, 7 (1987), 57-66. Weiss argues that certain of its features positively rule out an ascetic reading. In particular, she claims that at 69 A 9-10 ‘Socrates recommends that we be indifferent to the passions . . . not that we avoid all intercourse with them’ (58-9). Now the key phrase at a 10 (avri où dei mavra ravra raraMarecda:) certainly fits better with the rest of the passage when translated, with Weiss (her brackets), as ‘for the sake of which all these things (pleasures, pains and fears] ought to be exchanged [with each other]’, the sense being (roughly) that the passions are a given and one’s ‘traffic’ in them should be whatever most conduces to the acquisition of wisdom. Yet in isolation the phrase is more naturally translated ‘ascetically’ as ‘in return for which fi.e. wisdom] all these things should be exchanged’, and I suspect that one reason for the linguistic murkiness of the passage as a whole is precisely Plato’s desire to avoid closing off the possibility of an ascetic reading.

be ‘philosophical’ about them. So too, I think, with Socrates and the body. What is important for him is not that one avoids bodily pleasures and pains (the latter first mentioned at 65 c 6) but that one does not misread them—they too are impostors, presenting a false picture of reality, and it is a mark of the philosopher to be aware of that. In fact, as far as I can see, there is only one place in his initial exposition where Socrates uses language explicitly suggestive of asceticism. This is at 65 A 5, where he speaks of the philosopher taking no part in the relevant bodily activities (undé peréxe: aurr). But it is notable that this occurs as part of Socrates’ report of what the many think is a life not worth living. For the many the issue is perhaps not the relatively subtle one of one’s attitude towards pleasure (though even they talk in terms of one who does not care for bodily pleasures at A 6-7), but rather of whether one is getting a good share of bodily pleasures or not. Socrates had earlier emphasized (648 7- 1) that the many tend to get the wrong end of the stick with regard to the philosopher’s practice of death. So we should place no great weight on what Socrates presents as their formulation of the philosophical life.* On the evaluative reading, then, Socrates’ talk of keeping oneself away, or freeing oneself, from one’s body would be interpreted as the injunction to place no value on the body and its works, without this entailing, as an embodied human, that one not take part in the usual range of human activities. A defender of the ascetic reading might object that, in his frequent talk of freeing the soul from the body, Socrates must be referring to something the philosopher does with regard to the body, or at least intentionally avoids doing. But one should not beg the question in advance. How to interpret this central idea is precisely the point at issue. It seems to me that, in principle, one’s adoption of a scornful or belittling stance towards the body and its works—a ‘Kiplingesque’ attitude—might be a The Practice of a Philosopher 101 reading in a little more detail. I begin with a preliminary remark of a methodological nature, and then offer three points on which the evaluative reading seems to me to score well, and considerably better than the ascetic reading. The preliminary remark is that we need to find a single interpretation of what it means to be free from the body that will fit what Socrates says both about pleasure and pain, and about perception. For he gives no indication that we are to take this to have one meaning in the case of the, as it were, ‘affective’ component and another in the case of the ‘cognitive’ component. The way he feels able, without strain, to bring them under a single head suggests rather the opposite. Thus at 65 C 5-9 he says that the philosopher reasons best ‘when neither hearing nor sight nor pain nor pleasure gives the soul any grief, but the soul gets to be by itself as much as it can and leaves the body alone’. So too at 81 B 4—6 Socrates warns that association with the body leads one to believe that ‘nothing else is true but the bodily—what one touches, sees, eats, drinks or uses for sex’. In the light of such formulations, and in the absence of explicit evidence to the contrary, we ought to seek a unitary interpretation of what it means for the philosopher to have separated himself from his body—and ultimately, therefore, what it means for him to be practising death. This bears directly on the first of my substantive points against the ascetic reading. For it is very hard to apply the ascetic reading to Socrates’ remarks on sense perception without a degree of absurdity. It is reasonable to conceive (whatever Socrates’ own view may be) of a human being who indulges minimally in the pleasures that Socrates associates with the body. But what would it mean to indulge minimally in sense perception? Socrates is surely not suggesting that the philosopher walk around with his eyes shut and his ears plugged. Of course he specifically targets his remarks about the senses to their role in philosophical enquiry. But then to sugperfectly viable way of construing what it means for the soul to be gest that the philosopher sit in his study blindfold would be equally free from the body. So I want now to make the case for the evaluative absurd. No, Socrates’ point is that the senses are unreliable. They * The many also make the somewhat different point that a philosopher finds or takes no pleasure in these activities (undev 780 r@v roroérwr, 65 A 5). While doubtless true of such things as the wearing of fine clothes, this seems less plausible in the case of the ‘biological’ activities of eating, drinking, and sex. As I discuss further below, there is no reason to suppose that the philosopher is mysteriously immune to (say) the pain of hunger or the pleasure of eating. What distinguishes him is that he does not take these responses as a sign that the body has any great importance. offer nothing ‘accurate or clear’ (65 B 5). We should not trust their evidence, which is full of deception, but rise above them (83 A). We as philosophers must (so to speak) see through the imposture of perception, its pretension to present reality, and hold it in the low regard it deserves. The evaluative reading, then. fits what Socrates has to say about

perception much better than the ascetic reading does. The philosoat 83 B-D. The main problem with intense bodily indulgence, he 102 pher exercises his senses, but allots little or no philosophical utility to their reports. Perhaps, given that in the normal course of events one has functioning senses when embodied, they can provide a kind of stimulus to more abstract thought. According to the Recollection Argument, objects of perception put us in mind of Forms, which we must (therefore) have been originally acquainted with before birth. But the senses play no essential role in the acquisition (or reacquisition) of truth,’ which is an activity that reason performs best on its own.* There is no reason to think that Socrates would regard anyone who lacked the use of his senses as hampered with regard to philosophical activity. They are, so to speak, the rotten 103 says, its ‘greatest and deepest evil’ (83 C 1-2), is not that it might make us sick or poor, but that it may cause us to identify the real with the perceptible or material (c 7-8, D 5-7). It is interesting that Socrates lays this problem specifically at the door of ‘intense’ (cf. opoôpa, 83 B 8) feelings of pleasure, pain, or fear. There is no question, then, that the philosopher will avoid such intensity. One may speculate whether for Socrates (as, perhaps, for us) intensity of response is not just a begetter but a function of the evaluative stance one adopts towards the relevant sources: a kind of mutually reinforcing circle. But even if we take him, as seems plain, to be here warning us off bodily activities that produce such responses, this of core of embodiment, dangerous precisely because they encourage course does not in itself turn the philosopher into an ascetic. With misleadingly that that is all there is.” has in mind is a way of life whose condemnation would be quite the false identification of reality with the sensible world, suggesting Philosophy’s job, then, is to ‘gently persuade’ (83 A 2) the soul that the senses are deceptive, and not to be trusted.* And of course to recognize a thing as deceptive is to neutralize (or take a large step towards neutralizing) its power to deceive however much it presents itself. Philosophy does not come along and, in some absurd or perhaps sinister fashion, deprive us of the evidence of our senses. What it does is reform our attitude towards that evidence. Under the unitary constraint, we should apply the same reading to bodily pleasures. As an embodied human one will take an embodied human’s share of them. As a philosopher, one will realize that they are not just of little worth, but liable to give a highly distorted view of u reality. This is something that Socrates emphasizes with great vividness * At 75 A Socrates is already dealing with the case of our getting it in mind that the equal perceptibles fall short of equality when he says that we could not (a 6) get it in mind other than by perception: a trivial truth given that the comparison involves perceptibles. So at A 11-B 2 it is from the senses that it is necessary (dei) to get in mind that their objects fall short of the Form. How we manage to get equality itself | in mind by this route is what recollection then so neatly explains. ® One might imagine that this is still to give the senses a utility that sits at odds with Socrates’ earlier scathing comments about their accuracy. But even in the Republic's famous ‘finger’ passage (7, 523-4) the senses act as a stimulus only to the extent that reason recognizes that they offer a confused picture of reality, and so realizes it must rely on its own resources to derive the correct one. | | > Compare here the lovers of sights and sounds in Republic 5, whose cardinal error is to conflate beauty with the beautiful perceptibles (476 c-p). | * This suggests in turn that stimulus by the senses is not sufficient to bring Forms to mind. The contribution of philosophical insight is required. his mention of illness and poverty Socrates indicates that what he consistent with, say, the recognition that moderate pleasures and pains are an acceptable part of an embodied existence.” Thus Socrates makes it clear that the reason why intense indulgence is to be regarded as the ‘imprisoning’ (cf. xaradetra:, 83 D 1) of the soul by the body is that it causes the soul to become bodily (owuaroeıön, D 6), where this in turn is explicated as the soul’s judging that what is real is what the body says is real (83 D 6-7). As with sense perception, then, so too with pleasure and pain, what matters is the attitude one ends up taking towards the bodily realm. Release or freedom from the body will on this view be the adoption of the correct attitude towards it and its kin. The task of philosophy is to prevent us from being taken in by the body and to recognize the radically subordinate place of the bodily in the nature of things. The message of this section is not that there is no linkage at all between behaviour and attitude (Plato is too acute a psychologist to countenance that) but that for the philosopher it is the attitude that “ So at 82 c the motive of the philosopher for not surrendering to bodily desires is contrasted with that of those who want to avoid material rack and ruin or a bad reputation, suggesting that the desires in question are of a fairly extreme sort (even though Socrates actually refers to all bodily desires at c 3-4). It is striking that Socrates here seems to countenance the possibility of the philosopher having such desires which he would then need to resist, despite this being bracketed with his declaration that the philosopher actually ‘abstains’ from them (cf. dréyovrai, € 3, 8; anéyera, 83 B 6). Even the latter may simply mean (as 82C 4-5 suggests) that the philosopher keeps them at arm’s length by not giving in to them. If there is a whiff of asceticism about such language, it is a sign that an ascetic reading is not to be ruled out of court, as I argue more fully in sect. 11 below.

is important, not the behaviour. If one somehow never indulged of his way to avoid the bodily, even if he could, precisely because in bodily pleasures but still thought that the material world was he recognizes that its claims are no more than imposture. Returnreality, one would score no points as a philosopher. The second strike against the ascetic reading is that it signally ing from fierce battle in Potidaea at the start of the Charmides, he fails to resonate with the life of Socrates. Why is this important? ades, he remains chaste the night through (Sym. 219 c-D). But it 104 105 is calmness personified (153 8). Alone with the handsome Alcibi- Socrates’ overall purpose in the Phaedo is to explain to his comis hard to describe this exactly as a case of asceticism. It would, at panions why a philosopher should look forward to death, and in least, be an unusual ascetic who put himself so blatantly in harm’s particular why he, as a philosopher, should be looking forward to way. Alcibiades sees Socrates’ behaviour as an act of hubris, a kind death (61 c, 63 B-C, 63 E-64 A). The philosopher looks forward to of scorning and mocking of the former's charms (Cc 4-5). So what death because he practises death even in life. He does so by keeping galls Alcibiades is that Socrates does not care—and it is not, as one his soul, so far as is possible, separate from his body. Our task is might say of an ascetic, that he does not care for sex, forswearing to understand what this means. If it means being an ascetic, then indulgence on principle. Such an attitude might, for Alcibiades, be Socrates himself (being no ascetic) has not being practising death. baffling, but ought not to occasion the sense that he is being person- He has not, therefore, been a true philosopher. The ascetic reading ally mocked. What more plausibly explains Alcibiades’ frustration thus commits us to the uncomfortable hypothesis of a Socrates who (and his language) is that Socrates does not care about sex. Whether (unwittingly) demonstrates that he has not led a philosophical life. he desires Alcibiades or not, Socrates communicates loud and clear Moreover, Socrates repeatedly presents the practice of death as a that a physical relationship with the Adonis of his age would be a necessary ‘purification’ for that communion with true being that is matter of supreme indifference to him.'' to come. On the ascetic reading he will have failed to purify himself What is striking about Socrates is not that he never indulged, in life, and so will have excluded himself from what he tells us he or (contrarily) was never exposed to material hardship, but that it anticipates with great confidence. seemed to have so little effect on him. In the Symposium (220 A-B), These unhappy consequences of the ascetic reading rest on the Alcibiades goes on to report Socrates’ capacity to outdrink anythesis that Socrates (as depicted by Plato) was no ascetic, but the one without getting drunk, as well as his great endurance of cold thesis seems undeniable. He married, he had children.'” He went weather on campaign. He enjoys (amoAavew, 220A 2) a feast, but to symposia; he went to war. In short, he played a full part in the can endure food shortages better than anyone. It is not, as these social and cultural (if not political) life of his city. It is not just that last examples indicate, a question of Socrates being mysteriously Socrates is not portrayed as an ascetic. There is, I think, something immune to pleasure and pain. In the Phaedo (60 B-c) he himself about asceticism that is contrary to the spirit of Plato’s Socrates. remarks on the pain of being shackled and the consequent pleasure He has more important things to do than make an idol or fetish out of release. But even here the observation is merely a cue for some of withdrawal from bodily activity. At one of the tensest moments philosophical remarks on the relation between the two. Rather than in the Phaedo, Socrates is to be found stroking Phaedo's hair (898 being immune or even especially abstemious, it seems best to read 2-4)—a habit of his, we are told, and an unmistakably sensual one, Socrates as fundamentally indifferent to his bodily pleasures and though used here as an artful preface to the rallying of his companpains, in the sense of regarding neither as of great significance in his ions. On the broader scale, he is indeed Kiplingesque, not going out life. What matters is the quest for wisdom. It is in this sense that TM As Kenneth Dorter points out (Plato’s Phaedo: An Interpretation (Toronto, '" Richard Bluck has suggested that the Phaedo itself advocates ‘not strictly speak. 1982), 27), Socrates has an infant (60 A 2-3), so he has not forsworn sexual relations ing asceticism, but a sublimation of desire’ (Plato's Phaedo (London, 1955), 5). This well into his seventh decade. In fact two of his three sons are described as ‘small’ reading brings the Phaedo into line with what both the Sympostum and Republic pre- (11681; cf. Ap. 34 D 7-8). Dorter identifies Socrates’ stance as indifference to (rather sent as the philosopher directing his passion away from the body to higher things. than avoidance of) bodily pleasure and pain but characterizes this, in an unfortunate To say that the Phaedo offers an account of ‘sublimation’, though, still leaves us phrase, as ‘moderate asceticism’ (29), which has no more conceptual content than (say) moderate alcoholism. The dialogue’s ascetic elements need a different account. account. needing to get clear about the respective roles of attitude and behaviour within that

he is detached from his body, purified and more ready than anyone for the reward that awaits the philosopher on death.'? The evaluative reading succeeds, as the ascetic reading does not, in capturing need to separate oneself from a body whose threat has already been 106 Socrates as a model philosopher. The third point that tells against the ascetic reading is in a way the most basic: it actually fails to make sense of the idea that the philosopher strives to separate himself from his body. What the ascetic does is essentially shut down his body as much as he can. This is, if anything, a separation of one’s body, and then (at one remove) oneself, from the material world, not a separation ofoneself from one’s body. The ascetic reduces his bodily urgings, or at least their gratification, to an absolute minimum." One might certainly 107 neutralized by being made subject to the rigours of asceticism. The true ascetic, one feels, would be the only person who could (if such a thing were possible) keep his body after death and still be in a position to contemplate real being fully and uninterruptedly. By contrast, only someone who takes part in the full range of human activities—such as Socrates, for example—will need, one way or another, to separate himself from his body, The body of such a person 7s a threat to philosophical activity simply by being a body through which one maintains and indulges a normal range of appetites. Its demands distract, and what one experiences through the body may make one prone to the philosopher’scurse, a distorted represent this as a release from the demands of the body. Indeed what the idea of release suggests is precisely that one is trying to get away from something that is perceived as harmful to oneself, or one’s true interests.'* If so, then what the ascetic is really doing view of reality. How, then, is one supposed to achieve the necessary is pre-empting rather than effecting separation. For there is no body.'* 2 Pakaluk claims that with a merely metaphorical detachment from the body ‘a philosopher would not be one jot closer to the condition of being dead than anyone delegating these experiences to the body, such that the body can get detachment? There is certainly no suggestion in the Phaedo that the body can function as an autonomous subject of experience. It is the soul that perceives, and experiences pleasure and pain, not the Hence separation cannot be interpreted as, so to speak, the soul else’ (‘Degrees of Separation in the Phaedo', 100). But the text of the Phaedo begs to differ, for at 65 A 6-7 one who cares nothing for bodily pleasure is said to be getting close (éyyus) to having died. That this is part of Socrates’ description of the many's view (though not, I think, a point on which he takes issue with them) at least indicates that the understanding of a certain evaluative attitude to the body as a kind of closeness to death is ordinary enough. Pakaluk’s appeal to Socrates’ use of ‘phrases that are typical for expressing a difference in degree among things similar in kind’ (101) does not help. It is true that Socrates often speaks of the philosopher separating himself ‘as much as possible’ from his body, and so on. But that leaves open the question of what Socrates conceives the possibilities to be, and (therefore) on with them while the soul does philosophy. The leading contrast is between what the soul does by itself (ad77 xa0’ aurnv, e.g. 65C 7, 79D 1) and what it does with (uerd, e.g. 65 B 10) or through (da + genitive, e.g. 79€ 5) the body. This language suggests not that the soul is the proper subject of some activities (namely those involving the exercise of pure intellect), and the body of others (perceiving and experiencing certain kinds of pleasure and pain). Framed in these terms, the contrast makes no sense unless the soul is the of what their maximization would consist in. That Cebes goes on to question, at subject of both, but needs a body for the latter and not (according 69 c, not the separability but the survival of the soul on death is no objection to a non-literal reading, as Pakaluk holds (101). Death is accepted as the separation of soul from body at 64 C, so no expectation is raised that Socrates will need to defend separability further, by showing, for example, that the embodied philosopher can to Socrates) for the former. selves as operating through the body, which suggests that they are already achieve a degree of literal separation. not literally faculties of the body. In fact the official antecedent of 11 [ assume that the successful ascetic is one whose abstention suitably regulates his bodily desires, at least to the extent that resistance of them gives extra space in his life for other things. Arguably one who continued to be preoccupied with the not press Socrates’ terminology too hard here. Clearly the physibody’s unsatisfied demands would be less free of the body than one who simply gave in to them. But the former could not be described as an ascetic, and would be prone, in the long run, to indulge the body’s demands more intensely than would Thus at 65 D 11, for example, Socrates refers to the senses them- ‘sense’ (aloßnaeı) at D 11 is ‘eyes’ (é#8aluois) at D 9. But we should cal organs are parts of the body, not things which operate through the body. So aisfycet probably means something like ‘sense facotherwise have been the case. ulty’, with Socrates (in lieu of a sharp technical vocabulary) sliding '* Socrates sometimes uses a neutral word such as ‘separation’ (xwpeoués and its cognates) to describe the nature of death and the philosopher’s aim, but still in conjunction with the more loaded ‘release’ (Avo) at 67 D 4-5, D 9. His most frequent rather loosely from organ to faculty, or perhaps using ‘eyes’ to usage is the similarly loaded araAdayn and its cognates. (Plate: Phaedo, 89). '* So David Bostock (Plato’s Phaedo (Oxford, 1986), 26-7) and David Gallop

stand as much for faculty as for bodily organ. The main point is exhortations to let our soul, or rational thought, investigate all by clear and reasonable: the soul is the proper subject of sense perception, its sense faculties operating through certain bodily organs. itself, Socrates never speaks of the body acting by itself.'* Nor, I 108 109 have argued, can we construe the philosopher’s striving for release At 79C 3, with similar indifference to a distinction between organ from the body in terms of ascetic avoidance. In the case of percepand faculty, Socrates speaks of the soul using the body to examine tion, this is intrinsically absurd. In the case of pleasure and pain, we something and immediately explicates this (c 3-4) in terms of the seem to have redescribed the situation as one in which separation is soul conducting its examination through seeing, hearing, or some other sense—that is to say (he adds) through the body (c 4-5). He for its detachment from the soul. pre-empted, the body being made safe enough to obviate the need goes on, again, to contrast this with soul investigating by itself (79 D We return, then, to the idea of release from the body in life 1). For this to be a genuine contrast, it must once more be soul that as a disdain for the experiences that arise through it. In keeping in the former instance too is doing the investigation, except not by the body sufficiently threatening to motivate detachment, a further itself. Thus in either case the soul is the proper subject of whatever advantage of this reading presents itself. It offers a more satisfying explanation of Socrates’ apparent pessimism over the prospects for cognitive activity is taking place. What is notable, though, is that Socrates does seem willing, dedoing philosophy while embodied. This pessimism is especially spite this, to treat the body as the agent of the confusion and falseprominent at 66 B-E, where Socrates represents the attainment of hood that arises from investigations through the senses. In trying wisdom as virtually impossible for the living, given that one is either to conduct an investigation in consort with the body, the soul is fighting wars (explained in turn as a means of acquiring material said to be deceived by it at 65 B 9-11. And at 79c 6 the soul is goods) or being disturbed by the body even when at peace. For the similarly said to get ‘dragged by the body’ into the confusing realm ascetic reading this passage will represent a somewhat gratuitous denial that one can ever become an ascetic. At any rate, someone of instability. It is as if the body represents a genuine cognitive with the body’s necessary assistance. So I think we have to see this who reduced his material needs to an absolute minimum would have little cause to go to war on Socrates’ grounds, and be little in terms of the autonomy not of the body as subject of experience disturbed when at peace. danger, even though the actual cognition is done by the soul albeit but of sense perception as the deliverer of a misguided picture of On the evaluative reading, by contrast, the philosopher, while reality. Since sense perception needs the body to do its work, it is regretting that he is not disembodied, does not strive to wish his quite natural for Socrates to treat the body as the agent of the erroembodiment away in the literal-minded fashion of an ascetic. He neous reports that, strictly speaking, the faculty of sense perception recognizes that he is compelled to satisfy a certain range of material needs. His attitude to this process is one, as we would put it, of delivers through the bodily organs. It presumably strikes Socrates that, since without bodily organs the faculty of sense perception is useless, this faculty cannot be an essential part of the soul, but maximal psychological detachment. This notion, mundane enough for us, is one that Socrates is trying to formulate in the Phaedo for embodied. He holds that abstract thought can proceed perfectly perhaps the first time. The best way to reconcile Socrates’ advocacy of separation as the mark of the philosophical life with his apparent well without use of the senses, and hence without use of the body. despair at its possibility is to interpret his conception of separation Fromall this it is plausible to infer that souls are not essentially perin life as implying a categorical contrast with the literal separation of soul from body that he takes to constitute actual death. He does rather something that perhaps only arises at all in so far as we are cipient, and therefore to ‘blame’ the senses on the body, even while maintaining (as I have argued he does) that souls are the proper not, as an ascetic reading might suggest, intend that we aim in life subjects of perception. for an approximation to the actual condition of death as devoid of There is no question, then, of the philosopher leaving the body to carry on with sense perception independently. That is not the way to understand what separation means. By contrast with his bodily experiences. Instead of initially promulgating separation as '* The body only comes to be by itself—that is, becomes an inanimate corpse—on death (64

an ideal of life only to decide within a few pages that it 1s not really (even approximately) attainable, Socrates can now be read, in a less mercurial fashion, as proceeding to draw out some corollaries of the original vision. The philosopher all along has a range of needs that require satisfaction. And certainly one may be compelled to do (cf. dvayralöueda, 66 c 9) what one would not, in an ideal world, choose to do. In this way one can explain why the release of death really is something that the philosopher would look forward to, as it clearly is for Socrates. This, he wants to maintain, is true for the person living a philosophical life, not just (and really not even) for someone who has failed to live it, if only by failing to live up to it. But then the (embodied) philosophical life needs to have some significant built-in limitations. The evaluative reading encourages this view, as the ascetic reading does not. Indeed the The Practice of a Philosopher 111 been addressed. Next comes the Recollection Argument, which concludes that ‘our souls existed before they were in human form and had intelligence’ (76 c 11-12). This is more promising, but as the interlocutors are quick to object (77 B—C), does not show that our souls will exist once we are dead. Socrates’ brief suggestion at 77 C—D that this will be shown if we combine the Recollection Argument with the Cyclical Argument fails to assuage the interlocutors' fears.'? The spotlight thus falls on what follows the Recollection Argument in sequence, namely the so-called Affinity Argument (78 Bff.).!* This argument in turn is somewhat reserved in its claims about immortality. Indeed one thread of my interpretation will be that the argument may not even necessarily guarantee that every soul has immortality, in the basic sense of everlasting survival of death. This thread would need a larger defence than I can mount here, and my former is predicated on the existence of such limitations, to which one can then at best adopt an appropriately Kiplingesque attitude. In removing these limitations, literal release from the body will, just as Socrates portrays it, represent a big step forward for the Argument with an argument that the living come to be from the dead (so that philosopher. the soul must survive even when nominally ‘dead’) suffices to show that the soul’s remarks will at most be suggestive.'° More definitively, though, the ' As well it might. For it is unclear that simply combining the Recollection rational powers are carried forward as well, To do this one would need to show that the retention of those powers is essential to the soul’s survival. Otherwise rationality simply has the status of an ‘add-on’, which might be picked up and dropped as the II soul passes through its cycle of life to death and back. But even the Final Argument of the Phaedo, though attempting to show that the soul is essentially alive, does not I hope thus far to have provided some good reasons for preferring the evaluative reading over its ascetic rival. But now 1 want to offer some counter-argument. First, let me reiterate that as an interpretation of what the text has to say about the philosophical life, the evaluative reading is in my view much the more satisfactory option. Where it scores less well is in accounting for what Socrates has to say about (actual) death. My main discussion here will focus on the Affinity Argument. But let me begin, by way of preliminary claim that it is essentially rational, As Gallop notes (Plato; Phaedo, 136), neither the interlocutors’ objection nor Socrates’ response actually mentions the issue of the survival of the rational powers. But contra Gallop (who is forced to say that Socrates has erred in appealing to the Recollection Argument here), I take the silence to indicate not that this is not the issue but that it is so obviously the issue that there is no need to spell it out once more. Socrates’ appeal to combination suggests an acceptance that neither argument thus far is adequate on its own. Yet no one had doubted that, as far as it went, the Cyclical Argument showed the souls of the dead to exist. Equally, it was silent on another central component of Cebes' original worry. '* That the Affinity Argument is introduced in response to Cebes’ plea that the interlocutors’ ‘child within’ be soothed (77 E 6-8) should not incline us to suppose justification for this focus, with some scene-setting. that what is to come is not intended as serious argument. Cebes still wants the inner The arguments for immortality come in response to Cebes’ worry that the soul may be ‘scattered to the winds’ on death and not be anything anywhere (70 A 3-7). There is a need (he says) for confichild persuaded (cf. perareiBew, E 7) out of its fear of death; and Socrates himself takes the persistence of the childish belief that the soul may be ‘scattered to the dence and reassurance that the soul be shown both to exist when one is dead and to possess some power and intelligence (B 2-4). But the first argument, the Cyclical Argument, concludes merely that ‘our souls exist in Hades’ (71 E 2), or that ‘the souls of the dead exist’ (72 D 9-10). Only the first part of Cebes' request has winds’ to be a sign that the interlocutors wish further time devoted to the argument (Aöyov, D 7), Socrates is to ‘charm’ the child (éraôen, E 9); but he of course is the charmer by argument par excellence (cf. Chrm. 175 F-176 8), the verb's usage at 114 D 7 notwithstanding (cf. n. 49 below). !“ To forestall one methodological objection, though: 1 do not think that a failure by the Affinity Argument to guarantee every soul’s survival would entail a troubling clash with either the Cyclical or Final Arguments, both of which purport to show that whatever is a soul will survive. Such variation on Plato's part may simply encourage readers to enter the dialogue by comparing and contrasting the

113 argument claims that souls which fail to live the right kind of life take on a bodily condition which prevents them enjoying the rich immortality of everlasting communion with the Forms. Whether basic immortality is at issue or not, I shall argue that it is the ascetic reading which makes better sense of what the Affinity Argument has to say about the cause and prevention of this undesirable bodily statement such as “The cheetah, which is swift and agile by nature condition. and outruns any other animal, is far from subject to destruction by that invisible entity which goes on death to the realm of the noble, pure, and invisible (D 5-8) and is like that itself by nature (oùrw repuxuia, D 9), that will be far from subject to immediate destruction (D 10-E 1). This seems clear-cut. But as a generic statement, it is of limited value in telling the fate of individual souls. Compare a One of Socrates’ main assertions in the argument is that the soul the buffalo.’ Evidently a cheetah that was (say) laid low by disease is like (or ‘more like’ or ‘most like’) the immortal (e.g. 80 B, 81 A). And the task that he sets himself at its outset is to show simply that it is not fitting (mpoonkeı) for the soul to be scattered (78 B 4-9); in similar terms he says at 80 B 10-11 that it is fitting for the soul to be might lack its natural qualities and be easy prey. In the Phaedo, a indissoluble,?° Now clearly ‘it is fitting for x to be F’ does not entail ‘x is F’; nor does Socrates draw that inference. What he commits himself to thus far is the thesis that the proper condition of the soul is immortality.?' At 80 C—D he points out that, suitably treated (as for example by the Egyptians), bodies can endure intact for an incalculable time, and that some parts of the body (like the bones) are in any case pretty much immortal.?? Here, then, Socrates resists the move from ‘it is fitting for x to be F” to ‘x is F”. For he is happy to claim both that it is fitting for the body to be dissolved (80 c 4) body (e.g. 66 D 1). What, then, of such impure souls? and that sometimes it will be virtually indissoluble. Socrates’ remarks on almost immortal bodies lead one to expect, when one starts to read his next statement beginning “The soul, then... at 80D 5, that he will say something like ‘The soul, then, even more so is immortal’. But this is not quite what he does say. Instead he actually implies that the soul’s immortality is conditional on the kind of relationship it has had with the body. It is the soul, as thing's being naturally F does not mean that, necessarily, it is F. Thus the soul is naturally ordained to rule the body and the body to be its slave (79 E 9-80 A 5), yet often the soul is the slave of the Socrates proceeds to assert at 80 E 2-3 that if (¿av pév) the soul escapes pure, dragging none of the body with it, then . . . There is no apodosis. Instead the remainder of the sentence elaborates on the condition for achieving such purity, and equates it with philosophizing and the practice of death (E 3-81 A 2).* We reach a quasi-apodosis in Socrates’ next speech at 81 A 4-10: in this state (ourw . . . €yovoa, A 4)—i.e. having lived a philosophical life—the soul will reach the immortal realm and dwell with the gods for the rest of time. Here the soul finds happiness (A 5-6), having presumably fulfilled its nature. Given the link already forged between the journey to the divine realm and the avoidance of dispersal on death, a suspicion is raised that the soul that has failed to live up to its nature has no similar assurance of an immortal existence. One might indeed affirm straight away that immortality has not been achieved by the impure soul, just because of its failure to reach the immortal realm; and this is perhaps part of Socrates’ point. Imarguments and forming their own judgements about the import of their respective conclusions. What I do suggest (see further sect. 111 below) is that the conclusions of the Cyclical and Final Arguments offer too thin a conception of survival (or, if you will, immortality) to provide the kind of reassurance that the interlocutors seek. # Even here there is some qualification. Socrates says that the soul is fit to be altogether indissoluble ‘or something near to this’ (1 éyyus ri rodrov, B 11). 2 This relatively weak thesis explains, for example, the caution with which Socrates declares the soul to be ‘more like’ the unseen than is the body (79 B 16-17), in virtue of its not being visible (as well, perhaps, as Cebes’ reluctance to concede straightforwardly that the soul is invisible, B 7-15). As we shall sce, a soul corrupted mortality has (for him as for us) ethical overtones that go beyond ‘mere’ everlasting life. But at this point even the latter seems in the balance. Suspicion is maintained when Socrates elaborates the gloomy alternative at 81 B 1 ff, But if (éav dé), he continues, the soul does not escape pure from the body, thanks to its constant association with it (B 2)... Again, there is no proper apodosis, but soon enough we discover (81 c 8-D 4) that through possession of the bodily (ro by the body may actually become visible. 22 As the ‘pretty much’ (as éros eireiv, 80 2-3) qualification may indicate, a slightly odd usage, since the body parts are no longer animate; but given the forthwe are supposed to take the Affiniry Argument and the material on practising death coming comparison with the soul, a rhetorically intelligible one. as connected. I shall explore the connection further as we proceed. # "The insertion of these references to the practice of death evidently shows that

owpatoedés), which is heavy (Bapé), earthy, and visible (C 9), such since, he says, the soul has proven immortal, its only salvation is to a soul will itself be weighed down (Bapúvera:, C 10), seen (D 4), and become as good and wise as possible (107 € 8-D 2). 114 115 will presumably (by parity of reasoning) also be earthy. It will in fact Yet if the Affinity Argument itself should offer no guarantee of shun the invisible realm and remain on earth (c 9-11), a long way immunity from destruction for impure souls, this would have a therefore from the destination with which immortal life had been protreptic force of its own for all but the incurably bad, since it associated at 80 D. Far from dwelling with the Forms forever, it is means that the opportunity for redemption and the chance to dwell unclear whether a soul in this state should be considered immortal with the gods is not limitless. Failure to guarantee a soul's everat all. Socrates should not at any rate deny that what has weight and lasting survival would in fact be quite consistent with the promise visibility is capable of being destroyed. For this would vitiate the that death is no instant ‘release from everything’ for the wicked major contrast on which (on any reading) the Affinity Argument (107€ 5-8), which is the main thrust of the later protreptic. What rests, that between what is visible and destructible (on the one hand) does the real motivational work here is the prospect of posthumous and what is invisible and indestructible (on the other).** He might, suffering (108 B-C, cf. in all consistency, maintain both that bodily souls remain on earth nor sufficient for that.?? Socrates indeed is somewhat extravagant 114 B); and immortality is neither necessary after death (in one guise or another) and that, in such a condition, in making his point rest formally on the soul’s immortality, and they are in principle destructible even if not prone to the immediate one suspects that Plato is aware of this. As Cebes’ weaver analogy, dispersal from which, generically, the soul is exempt. His emphasis, for example, has taught us (87 D-88 B), there is logical space for the though, falls on animal reincarnation, not destruction, as the fate of soul’s long-term survival of bodily death (with plenty of room for the impure soul (81 D-82 B), and this serves an edifying protreptic suffering) even without immortality. function.” It is the wretchedness of such a soul’s post mortem Socrates at any rate upholds a certain exclusivity about immorexistence that leaves the main impression.** As Socrates puts it tality right to the end of the Affinity Argument. He is clear that only later, in the wake of the Final Argument, it would be a ‘stroke of by having practised a philosophical life (cf. ex ris roravrns rpodns, luck’ (€patov, 107€ 6) for the wicked if death marked the end of 84 B 3-4; raura Ô emırndeucace,B 4-5) will the soul not fear dispersal everything, since it would free them from their wickedness. But on death.?* This seems not to mean that the philosophical soul will realize by its practice of philosophy that all souls are immortal in virtue of their affinity with the Forms. For the subject of the whole * "Thus visibility is connected with instability at 79 A g—10, which in turn features in a line-up that includes dissolubility and mortality at 80 B 3-5, Invisibility is related in corresponding fashion to its complements at 79 A 9 and 80 8 1-3 respectively. ** paragraph 84A 2-8 7 is ‘the soul of the philosopher’ (Huy ävôpôs huÂocopou, A 2-3). Thus at B 1-3, for example, it is the philosopher's I see, however, little justification for Christopher Rowe’s view that reincarnation is itself a denial of immortality on the grounds that ‘Socrates does not propose (Plato: Phaedo (Cambridge, 1993), 9). Even if one accepts that continuity of con- 27 Even the incurables, Aung into Tartarus ‘never to emerge’ (113 £6), seem by this language unenviable less for an eternity of suffering than for the loss of opportunity to reach a better state. The latter point is inditferent to whether eternal survival goes sciousness is necessary for immortality, this is at best an argument from silence. along with their eternal banishment. Continuity of character, at least, is a basic feature of the reincarnation story (81 E example) not have room for the donkey into which Sardanapallus’ soul has entered ** Some editors excise (or amend) the manuscripts’ raûra 8’ èmirmôeéoaaa. This decision does not affect my main point, and the reading makes for an awkward sentence, with virtual repetition and clumsy syntax. But I am inclined (with Duke et als OCT) to keep the phrase, and treat it as a case (nor uncharacteristic of the to remember having been Sardanapallus. The myth (114 a-B) has certain departed Phaedo) of emphasis triumphing over smoothness. Translate e.g. ‘As a result of this souls hoping for refuge at the Acherusian lake (the place of transit for reincarnation) beg their victims’ forgiveness for their earthly crimes, which, as Gallop points out, nurture, there is no danger of it [sc. the soul of the philosopher] being afraid [ovde:: dewör un doßndn], but having practised these things, Simmias and Cebes, [it will ‘they must, presumably, remember having committed’ (Plato: Phaedo, 223). not be afraid] that [örws an] it will be dispersed etc. Or one might take dmws un any continuity of consciousness between one period of incarnation and another’ 2-4). And it is risky to suggest that a dialogue which bases one of its major arguments for immortality on a doctrine of Recollection might (to adapt Rowe's own ?* At least in the case of those reincarnated as beasts. "Those who become social as governed directly by odder Sewór, giving the stronger ‘there is no danger that’ it insects are somewhat anomalous (cf. n. 42 below), and said to be ‘happiest’ of those who undergo reincarnation (82 # 11), though evidently the prospect of being an ant will be dispersed etc. For a substantive in the appropriate position, albeit with the sense of ‘fear’, cf. 77 B 4 (70 run moAAdy, drws un. . .); also Sym. 193 A 3-4 (doßos or wasp in a future life is not particularly appealing. ov €or... OTWS uh. . .).

soul that thinks it should live in the right way and that when it dies it should be free of human evils.*® Since there is no indication of a change, we must take it that the philosopher's soul remains the subject down to the final statement at B 5-7: it has no fear that it will be dispersed on death and not exist anywhere. Reassurance on behalf of other souls is no more forthcoming here than it was earlier. To read it in (such that the fears of even the non-philosophical about destruction turn out to be groundless) would be to impute a liberality to Socrates that he shows no sign of possessing elsewhere in the argument.?” How, then, should the Affinity Argument be understood?*' We can see that two connected principles underlie it. First, the soul is not guaranteed immortality, at least of the rich sort that involves communion with the divine (and possibly not any sort). Though it is the soul’s natural and proper condition, such immortality is not, so to speak, automatic. Second, the soul takes on the character of that which acts upon it. In particular, that which is bodily causes the soul to become bodily. This in turn should remind us of a principle which we know independently, from its prominence later in the Phaedo, that Socrates takes very seriously: only that which has a certain quality can cause something else to take on that quality. Or, like causes like. This principle, together with its complement that The Practice of a Philosopher 117 Socrates does not use the term airia in the Affinity Argument, the argument is none the less suffused with language suggestive of causation of this kind. Thus the soul becomes unstable/stable inasmuch as (are at 79 C 8, D 6) it is in contact with what is unstable/stable respectively (compare the similar co-ordinate usage of dre at 80 E 3, 81B 2). This surely means, or at least implies, because it is in contact with such things. It is by being the kinds of things they are (rocovrwv) that bodies and Forms respectively give to the soul, through contact, the character that it thereby acquires.?* Similarly, at 83 D 10-E 1, the soul's being full of the body results in (wore, D 10) its falling back into another body.** The body’s association with the soul made (éverroinae, 81 C 6) the bodily ingrained in the soul because of (Sta + accusative, € 5) the soul's always being with the body. Each (bodily) pleasure and pain makes (mo:ei) the soul bodily at 83 p 4-6.** Perhaps most strikingly (given the terminology), souls not purified of the body ‘participate’ (ueréxouca:) in the visible, whence (8:0) they are seen (81 D 4).” Later in the dialogue it is of course participation in the beautiful that makes things of the later discussion; and with the relevant properties of bodies and Forms in the Affinity Argument. ** The means of contact is in turn given as, respectively, sense perception (79 c 3-5) and pure thought (the soul examining ‘itself by itself’, D 1). opposites cannot cause opposites, underlies Socrates’ whole discussion of cause (aëria) later in the dialogue (96 A-ı02 A).*? Even though ** Given that its ‘fullness’ results in the soul falling (Grew), one should take ‘full of the body’ literally here. The soul becomes heavy when saturated with the body, as (for example) a sponge will when saturated with water. But is the soul's weight its own? Perhaps it remains weightless itself and, more generally, immaterial. The > Compare the similar point, also restricted to the philosopher's soul, at 81 A 7-8. ' Without it, indeed, Socrates’ own emphasis on the soul not being scattered to the winds (84 B 6-7, cf. 77D 8-E 1) when it departs the body is given a nice extra body remains essentially foreign matter even when absorbed (as is perhaps true of the water in the sponge). One can, though, be weighed down by one’s own bulk, even if the latter is ultimately derived from external sources. In calling the bodily ‘ingrained’ in the soul (ovuguro», 81 C 6) as a result of its association with the body, twist. Far from the soul’s ethereal quality being the danger, the only souls at risk of destruction are those that take on the condition of bodies. 31 For a different attempt at understanding, relying on a rather more elaborate apparatus than mine, see D. Apolloni, ‘Plato’s Affinity Argument for the Immortality of the Soul’, Journal of the History of Philosophy, 34 (1996), 5-32. Apolloni is somewhat over-elaborate in taking it (14-15) that only a distinct, ‘physical’ part of the soul can be infected by the body, its intellectual part remaining uninfected; Socrates suggests that this is the right model. Telling, perhaps, is Rep. 609 A 9-10, which argues that only an evil that is aûuduror in a thing can destroy that thing; there the term is clearly equated with ‘one’s own’ (cf. oixeias xaxias, 609 D 1). This is part of a proof that the soul is not destructible (since the soul’s own evil, vice, does not actually destroy it). By allowing, as the Republic does not, the bodily to be cúuguror in a soul, the Phaedo stands at some distance from that proof. purification involves the separation of the latter part from the former. Lack of textual ** It is possible to read owuaroeôés as ‘body-like’ rather than ‘bodily’, but this support aside, this reading makes it puzzling why infection by the body should be of concern for Socrates, given that the only part of the soul even in the running for immortality apparently remains unaffected throughout. Apolloni claims that if the intellect were capable of being infected, it ‘could be destructible . . . render[ing] unsound all proofs for the immortality of the soul’ (14). But this rather begs the question of what exactly the Affinity Argument is trying to prove, and its relation to does not affect my interpretation, The soul becomes like the body in taking on the the other arguments. 12 More strictly, only that which has the property essentially can apparently function as a cause. This seems to be the case both with the ‘safe’ and ‘subtle’ causes appropriate properties: weight, visibility, etc. % Given this, it is a mistake to suppose, with Rowe, that ‘what we see , . . is not souls themselves but their “bodily accretions”' (Plato: Phaedo, 194). Rowe is referring to Socrates’ talk of ‘apparitions’ (dav7dopara, 81 D 2) of souls being seen and ‘images’ (eda, D 3) that such souls provide. But Socrates does not speak here of an invisible soul producing (mysteriously enough) a visible image. It is souls that are seen, and they provide these images just in virtue of their having taken on a visible condition.

beautiful, and so on. In context, ‘the visible’ here presumably refers to visible material absorbed by the soul rather than any Form of the Visible; but the linguistic resonance is suggestive none the less.*’ If this is right, then we have good reason to take the language of the Affinity Argument as an exemplification of the principle that On the principle that like causes like, a soul that indulges the body’s appetites is infected by the qualities of what acts upon it 118 119 however much it might disdain those qualities. And this is where the evaluative reading runs into difficulty. Central to this reading like causes like. The soul's actual condition is given by the nature was the idea that, even if the philosopher did not in any event indulge his body to excess, the point was not to avoid bodily purof what acts upon it, whether this be visible object or Form.?** As suits but to place no great importance on them. Thus it is hard, several of the expressions indicate, the principle kicks in (on the in good conscience, for a defender of the evaluative reading to say that it is only excessive indulgence that on Socrates’ view makes corporeal side) when the body is the active power in the relationship; when, however unenthusiastically, the soul goes along with or gives in to the body’s tendencies." It is, to this extent, the fact of its being acted upon by the body and not merely its attitude towards the body that counts.** Thus in the later discussion of causation a thing is beautiful ‘because it participates’ (cori peréyei, 100 € 5) in the beautiful. The discussion, as we can see, does not only utilize atria language to capture the causation relation. Cf. e.g. rroweí (100 D 5, 99 R 7); dud +accusative (esp. 101 A-B). 1% Once we acknowledge the operation of this underlying principle, it should be accepted that the Affiniry Argument is meant seriously. It is, after all, the only one of the arguments for immortality in the Phaedo aimed at showing how the soul may commune with Forms after death. One should therefore think twice before adopting the view of Christopher Rowe that it is written as a deliberate failure, with the dramatic function of allowing Simmias and Cebes to raise objections, thus forwarding the debate and illustrating the value of genuine dialectic (‘Philosophy and Literature: The Arguments of Plato’s Phaedo', Proceedings of the Boston Area Colloquium in Ancient Philosophy, 7 (1991), 159-81). (Compare, from a different perspective, M. Elton, “The Role of the Affinity Argument in the Phaedo’, Phronesis, 42 (1997), 313-16, who claims that it is written to illustrate a bad form of argument.) It would be the mark of a poor (or perverse) dramatist to write a passage as intricate and suggestive as the Affinity Argument as a kind of Aunt Sally, put up in order to be knocked down (or ‘well and truly buried’ as Rowe himself puts it, 178). To be sure, both interlocutors prove to be dissatished with the argument. Their objections lead to counter-objections (in the case of the harmony theory) and new theorizing from Socrates. But why regard this as a zero-sum game from the perspective of the author? Dramatic power is gained rather than lost in taking the later material not to supersede or ‘refute’ the Affinity Argument, but to encourage a closer reading. * Socrates has no need to commit himself to the soul’s corruption in those exemplary cases of interaction where the soul rules the body. Here the soul is an active power, opposing the body's tendencies (évavrcounévnr, 94 B 8, C 1), ‘resisting and not giving in’ (82 c 4). The relationship is fundamentally asymmetrical, however. The body can be resisted and ruled by, but not assimilated to, the soul. “° It is noteworthy that the soul is also pictured as passive when it comes to intellectual operations (at least in the initial phase). Philosophy is said to take hold of the soul imprisoned by the body and try to free it from its bonds by persuading it to rise above the senses (82 E-83 A). The portrayal of philosophy as virtually an independent force liberating a soul powerless, at first, ro help itself reflects, I think, a genuine epistemological concern, which one might label the ‘bootstrap’ problem. How can a soul which (thanks to its embodiment) encounters only the corporeal the soul bodily. Even if this is right,*' the defence exploits what is merely in the end a contingent feature of how, on the evaluative reading, the philosopher lives. What matters on the evaluative reading is attitude, not behaviour. It just happens to be a psychological fact, on Socrates’ view, that excessive behaviour of a certain kind itself plays a role in shaping attitude. The ascetic reading, by contrast, fits the Affinity Argument with no rough edges. What matters on the ascetic reading is the philosopher's behaviour: his actual refraining from bodily activity. This is the dimension against which one’s preparedness to escape the body, when death comes, is measured. Complete abstention is plainly not possible for a human being. But, as far as any human can, it is the ascetic with regard to the body who will, in virtue of his asceticism, keep his soul from becoming a corporeal kind of entity, thus preserving the purity needed to reach an everlasting communion with the Forms. One who is merely Kiplingesque about the come to be aware that there is something more? To imply that the soul cannot initiate this process is to acknowledge (if not greatly illuminate) a puzzle which | suspect has considerable importance for Plato. In more generalized form, it bears some resemblance to Meno’s Paradox; and there is an overt parallel to be explored in the way the prisoners are portrayed in the Cave analogy of Republic 7. In that book information provided by the senses apparently helps to turn the soul towards Forms (cf. n. 6 above); but the text is clear that the prisoners neither free themselves nor infer a world outside from their own circumstances (515 CE). Philosophical inspiration (perhaps prompted by a good educator) must strike a soul that could otherwise make no progress. * At 83D 4 it is, starkly, ‘each pleasure and pain’ that Socrates says will make the soul bodily, and one might imagine that any quantity should have some effect. But this is in a context in which he seems to be talking specifically about intense experience (cf. ofd3pa, 83 B 8, c 6). The advocacy of abstention from desire at 82 c is similarly poised (cf. n. 9 above). It is an obvious challenge that there seems no way to secure oneself against intense pain (though doubtless steps can be taken to reduce its chances of occurring), even if intense pleasure can be avoided; and Socrates evidently regards pain as an equal contributor to the soul’s becoming bodily. There may be cases where learning to belittle one’s pain is the best one can

body cannot, just in virtue of that no doubt admirable attitude, do the same. The Practice of a Philosopher 121 Change of behaviour, specifically abstention, is the required antidote. Even so, evaluative and ascetic strands remain intertwined. Let me quote a relevant passage at somewhat fuller length: Yet one must not simply write the soul's beliefs out of the picture. If Socrates’ only concern here had been to show what one [E]ach pleasure and pain rivets the soul to the body as if with a nail, and must avoid if one wants a soul that is not liable to re-embodiment, he could have told a much simpler and in some ways more plauswelds it and makes it bodily, believing those things to be real that the body declares to be so. For as a result of [èx] believing the same as the body and enjoying the same things, it is compelled, I suppose, to take on the same character and nurture and not be in a condition to reach Hades in purity, but to depart always full of the body, so as soon to fall back into another body and grow into it as if planted like a seed, and as a result of this to have no share of association with the divine and pure and uniform. (83 D 4-E 3) ible causal story of how interaction with the body makes the soul bodily. It would have been the soul's seeing, tasting, and touching of material objects, through the body, with the accompanimentas it may be of intense pleasure and pain, that corporealized the soul.* Instead he has gone to the trouble of inserting as an intermediate step in his story the soul’s taking on a certain attitude about the nature of reality, which seems an unlikely candidate for actually Earlier, in defending the evaluative reading, I took the soul’s belief that the bodily was reality to be giving the sense in which it is made bodily. This is certainly, in isolation, the most natural reading of the opening sentence, and one supportive of the evaluactivity, can show how the Affinity Argument saves one from an soul’s bodily character is not reducible to its materialist beliefs. earthbound post mortem existence. But what one believes to be real and important remains the core criterion for distinguishing the ative reading. But the following sentence in fact suggests that the Rather, as a consequence of its sharing both the beliefs and the enjoyments of the body, it literally becomes bodily, ‘full of the body’, heavy enough (and only fit) to fall back into the now fertile territory of another body to inhabit. Instead of the philosopher being able to rest (relatively) content with having the right evaluative attitude towards the body—not being bodily in that sense—the danger for those concerned with their soul’s posthumous fortune is not now that one becomes materialist, but material. And what seems essential to this process is the brute interaction between soul and body with its concomitant experience of pleasure and pain.* 4 Even when it comes to reincarnation, it seems to be the exercise or cultivation of one's character traits (81 E 3-4, E 6-7) rather than their mere possession that condemn one. There is no mitigation for those who ‘preferred’ (rporeriunxéras, 82 A 4-5, an evaluative word etymologically) injustice, tyranny, and theft; but this still sounds as if one actually did these things (note the plurals at A 4 suggesting cases of them). The position of those who might have fancied a spot of tyranny but (say) lacked the opportunity is admittedly unclear. They could hardly have earneda life with the Forms, yet their circumstances will have shielded them from much bodily contamination. Perhaps they are comparable to (or even a version of) that other anomalous category: the peaceable folk who on the basis of habit and practice adopt a life of ‘demotic’ justice and restraint and incur the least bad reincarnation as social insects such as bees, wasps, or ants (82 A 11-B 8). Their lightness of body and (as with some ants) enjoyment of Hight might suggest an intermediate realm between heaven and earth (they go to comparatively the best place, BéAr:aro» romov, A 12), turning the soul corporeal. This suggests that Socrates retains a deep concern that one take the right view about reality. Perhaps only the ascetic reading, with its doctrine of abstention from bodily philosopher. If the ascetic reading is back in the frame, it should none the less be noted that when it comes to explaining the soul’s reincarnation, Socrates appeals to its fear of the invisible realm (81 c 11) or, more ‘positively’, its desire for the material realm (81 E 1-2).* Does this mean that attitude alone suffices after all? One needs to exercise some caution here. Entering a body and becoming bodily though this may prove hard to square with the presence of birds of prey in the ‘bad’ category (82 5). j | a This would have retained a parallel with the Forms, with whom interaction is achieved by means of rational thought, corresponding to perception in the case of material objects. But it is as if, even in the case of the abandoned hedonist the soul cannot help exhibiting a rational aspect in forming the albeit ‘degraded’ abstract belief that the real is the material. Yet from within Socrates’ own viewpoint, it would be hard to regard such a belief as a case of genuine interaction with the bodily that might therefore corporealize the soul. Interaction with the bodily is (necessarily) interaction with material particulars through perception. a See here S. Broadie, ‘Soul and Body in Plato and Descartes’ [‘Soul and Body’] Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, 101 (2001), 295-308 at 304-6. I am not unsympathetic to Broadie's characterization of soul in the Phaedo as ‘essentially a valuing power’ (305), which enters bodies because it wills (albeit in ignorance of its own best interests) to do so, though I think this reading fails to capture the full picture,

123 are distinct episodes in a soul’s career.** Not every embodied soul is doomed to become bodily (or remain so, if its bodily condition 111 was the cause of its present embodiment). And when one does, this of course precedes its next incarnation. It is because the soul is What this shows is that we need to give interpretative space to in possession of the bodily (6 [sc. ro owuarocidés] ô «ai éxovca 7 both the evaluative and the ascetic readings of the philosopher’s roiaürn buy, 81 C 9-10) that it is dragged back down to the visible practice of death. The former gives the more cogent account of realm, haunting the earth through fear of the invisible (c 10-D 1). the practice of death as a way of (embodied) life. But the latter, There is apparent ‘over-determination’ here. What attracts the soul within the Affinity Argument, is needed to secure the appealing to earth is said to be both its bodily condition and its fear. One can vision of immortality on offer there. This multivalence should not best explain this by invoking the ‘weight’ (Bapú, C 9; Bapúvera:, C alarm us. On the contrary, it seems to me right to view the Phaedo 10) of its bodily condition as direct cause both of the soul's failure as both a meditation on the fear of death and an exhortation to to climb free of the material realm and of its fear of so doing. That live the philosophical life. Socrates is about to die; but neither his the fear is also mentioned as cause of the former is presumably on interlocutors nor, in general, we the readers are facing imminent the grounds that it is the kind of thing that would cause the soul demise. Still less are we likely to have Socrates’ rare justification to remain, were not its weight in any event making escape imposof knowing that one is about to die. Most of us at some time have sible.** Thus we have a straightforward explanation of the failure felt the need for the sort of reassurance that Simmias and Cebes in terms of like causing like: interaction with the body has imbued demand. But for all of us, the immediate question remains how the soul with bodily weight that prevents it escaping. The fear is in best to live. This dual aspect is brought out by Socrates himturn explained by the same fact that the soul has, through its assoself. He may only have death to be concerned about; the others ciation with the body, become bodily (81 c 4-6), and so desirous of have the whole of the rest of their lives (rod ereıra Biov ravrós, avoiding the (now alien) realm of the immaterial. So at 81 E 1-2 the 90 E 3). desire that leads to reincarnation is specifically that of souls which This leads me to suggest that, though both these themes are have the bodily ‘in accompaniment’ (ovverakoAovdoüvros, E 1).*” In present, a somewhat more determinate conclusion can be drawn. the end, interaction with the body is cause of the soul’s becoming For Plato, the question of our present lives remains paramount. both bodily and re-embodied.** This may seem a surprising claim, and not just because the Phaedo is packed with arguments that purport to demonstrate the soul’s immortality. Commentators have often remarked on the way that Socrates apparently metamorphoses from agnosticism about death ** Broadie (‘Soul and Body”) is concerned chiefly with the former. in the Apology to a conviction in the Phaedo that at least the soul * So my being badly hung over might cause both my failure to go to work (by of the philosopher can enjoy an immortal existence. making me physically unable to do so) and a strong desire not to go to work which would itself suffice for me to stay at home. A common way of explaining this is to say that the Apology represents some- “ I take the relation between ém@upia and Tod owparoeıdoüs at E 1-2 to be objective thing like the authentic voice of the historical Socrates, which the rather than subjective, with souls being the subject, since this is clearly the relation Phaedo replaces with the doctrines of the authorial Plato. I do between dößw and rob didovs in the co-ordinate passage at 81 C 11, ** As to why the soul becomes embodied in the first place, Broadie (‘Soul and 4 Socrates later implies, at 114C 6-9, that the possibilities for the soul after Body’, 304) speculates that this is because it (mistakenly) ‘feels incomplete’ without a body. The Phaedo itself shows little interest in addressing the question, presumably death provide the main motive for us to share in wisdom and virtue in life, But the because its ineluctable starting point is that we are embodied humans. Simmias’ in which (he says) is ‘worth risking’ (114 D 5), given that the risk is a fine one, and which one should ‘chant to oneself’ (èrgôerr éavro, D 7). This seems rather a tenuous harmony theory (rejected by Socrates) would of course make the question redundant in its conception of the soul as supervenient on the body, though Cebes’ theory (as Broadie points out) speaks of the soul making or ‘weaving’ its bodies. Socrates’ recapitulation of Cebes’ position at 95 B-E does not pick up on this idea, speaking more simply of the soul ‘entering’ a human body (D 2). possibilities he is referring to are those that have just been relayed in the myth, belief basis on which to justify the virtuous life, and suggests that for Socrates the myth is not primarily a demonstration that virtue’s value is instrumental. If anything, it is a chant (or charm) that has instrumental power here. All Socrates commits himself to is that one tell (and retell) the myth that it may encourage a virtuous life.

not wish to challenge this view directly. But it does leave somejury.*? So what he says to the jury does not in itself tell either way thing important out of account. In both works the dramatic ocon the question. 124 12 ur casion (respectively, Socrates’ trial and the day of his death) is At Ap. 29 A-B, however, Socrates denies that anyone (alive) knows very much to the forefront; and these occasions are chronologwhat death is like. Is this not an agnosticism flatly inconsistent with ically in close proximity, even given the stay of execution nethe views he expresses in the Phaedo? Note that his denial here is cessitated by the voyage of Theseus’ ship (Phaedo 58 a-c). It is targeted against the idea that death should be feared, and is no rather unsatisfactory from a dramatic point of view to take Plato doubt rooted in the commonsensical thought (one suitable for a to be portraying Socrates as radically, and without apparent cause, jury) that no one has yet experienced it, something that (in this changing his stance towards death in the period between his trial sense) he would hardly deny even in the Phaedo.** Likewise, his and his execution.*” Even if we maintain that the two works were ridiculing of those on capital charges who abase themselves before composed at quite different times, and that the distance between the jury ‘as if they would be immortal’ if spared (35 A 6-7) is not a them marks a shift in various ways in Plato’s own philosophidenial of post mortem survival, but the sensible point that we are cal position, it seems preferable in principle to offer a reading all, in the mundane sense, going to die. Nothing here should give us that can explain the differences without appealing to a significause for surprise when at Phaedo 63 € 2-4 Socrates reveals his own cant shift in philosophical viewpoint on the part of the character conviction (cf. 5uoxupicaiuqy, C 4) that after death-he will be in the Socrates. hands of gods who are good masters. The rest of the Phaedo offers Given that Plato’s Socrates has a firm belief in the soul’s imreasons, before a suitable group of interlocutors, for that conviction. mortality in the Phaedo, what should one make of his attitude to- If an agnostic about the afterlife is one who lacks conviction that wards death in the Apology? In the Phaedo this belief is grounded there is one, then Socrates is not to be convicted of agnosticism on some fairly sophisticated arguments, many of which appeal to either in the Phaedo or the Apology. The most secure verdict in the heavy-duty metaphysical doctrine. Such arguments are quite aplatter case is perhaps ‘not proven’; but there is nothing to compel propriate for the philosophically sophisticated Simmias and Cebes. attribution of a radical shift in the Socratic position between the But the body of regular Athenian citizens who composed the jury two works. at Socrates’ trial, even those who voted against his execution and to Plato’s stance, though, is more complex. He has written into whom his remarks on death are primarily addressed, would prob- Socrates’ discussion in the Phaedo a model of the philosophical life ably make little or nothing of them. A which best captures Socrates’ own life. But this model (exemplifytrial is, in any event, not the place for philosophical argument.*' Socrates contents himself with ing what I have been calling the evaluative reading), while in general assuring his supporters that he goes to a death which is either like making the best sense of what Socrates says about the practice of a peaceful sleep or provides the opportunity to have marvellous death, offers no argument for immortality. In itself, there seems no conversations with the long-dead Homeric heroes in Hades. We reason why it should. Do we not, after all, have a whole collection cannot read anything beyond this into the text of the Apology. But of arguments for immortality in the Phaedo? Yet if interaction with if Socrates does have a more reasoned and sophisticated position the corporeal corporealizes (as my reading of the Affinity Arguup his sleeve, this would not be something communicable to the * The notion that Plato's Socrates takes into account the level of accomplishment of his audiences or interlocutors is not always given sufficient weight, though it is, I ** "The hypothesis that the wait might have, so to speak, concentrated his mind does not really fit one who is already perfectly untroubled by the prospect of death think, demonstrable in a number of cases. Socrates himself tells us that the proper in the Apology (and, for that matter, in his prison cell in the Crito, e.g. 43 8). Phdr. 277 €. " Cf. Theaet. 172 0—E. Early on in the Apology (19 A) Socrates doubts his ability to defend himself properly in the fixed time that court procedure allows. The Phaedo rhetorician matches discourse to soul in terms of the sophistication of the latter at ** Indeed at Phaedo 91 8 3 he is still canvassing the possibility that there is nothing after death, if only (in typical fashion) to encourage his interlocutors to maintain actually presents itself (63 8) as Socrates’ attempt at a better defence than the one he made before the jury, at least on the question of why one should look forward to a critical stance, in this case towards his arguments against that possibility (B 8-c death. encourages Simmias to investigate further (107 B 4-9). 6). Even Simmias’ scepticism in the wake of the Final Argument is welcome, if it

ment suggests), then we have reason to think that the soul of the philosopher who, like Socrates, practises death as understood on the evaluative reading (which does not enjoin radical bodily abstention) will have a corporeal (and to that extent a mortal) soul, one that is thereby excluded from communion with the Forms. By contrast, those who abstain even for the wrong reasons (like those mentioned at 82c 5-8) will not, to that extent, be corporealizing for him. He will go to his death ‘with good hope’ (67 € 1, cf. 114C 9), leaving Plato perhaps less sanguine than his protagonist about 126 their souls. Nor, it turns out, is there a battery of extra argument waiting in the wings to shore up the position in a way that might reassure us. The Recollection and Cyclical Arguments, separately or combined, leave the interlocutors unsatisfied (as we saw above). The Final Argument (like the Cyclical Argument) may establish the soul’s immortality as a life force, but does not even purport to demonstrate the retention of its rational powers. It rests its case on a proof that the soul is essentially alive; but evidently what has life does not necessarily have reason (and Simmias remains sceptical at its close). So there is no comfort to be had in relying on these conclusions. The Affinity Argument remains indispensable as the only one to offer an explicit recipe for the soul's communion with the Forms after death. In so doing it suggests that immortality on these terms is conditional on the practice of death (81 A 1-2). And here the latter must be interpreted ‘ascetically’, in the light of the principle that interaction with the corporeal corporealizes. Failure to be an ascetic will therefore leave us with one or other unappealing prospect for the soul’s career after death. So we need a reading of ‘practising death’ different from the evaluative reading that worked best with the earlier material. I have suggested that in the context of the Phaedo this multivalence can be welcomed. But we still have to ask: should Socrates have been an ascetic after all? Given the way his life is presented as paradigmatic (as the last line of the Phaedo blazingly confirms), Plato’s answer must be ‘no’.** But if that zs his answer, then it is not immortality that is his main concern, but the living of a good life. Socrates himself seems unaware of the tension. He does not separate out the evaluative and ascetic strands that Plato has written * I doubt much can be made of the hint of a qualification in Phaedo’s remark that Socrates was the best of those they knew ‘at that time’ (röre, 118 A 16). It is one thing to allow the possibility of emulating or even surpassing Socrates; quite another to suppose that living even approximately as Socrates did would represent a second-rate form of existence through a lack of rigorous asceticism. 127 the connection between living well and one’s reward in the hereafter. A Socratic life is not necessary for the ‘weak’ immortality offered by the Cyclical and Final Arguments; nor sufficient for the ‘strong’ immortality on offer in the Affinity Argument. It may seem unfortunate that this reading commits Plato to a Socrates who unwittingly fails to show that he is properly prepared for death; a consequence I invoked as undesirable in motivating the evaluative reading earlier. Socrates’ recognition at 69 D that he will not know clearly whether his efforts to live philosophically have ‘achieved anything’ until he reaches Hades (D 4-6) is little mitigation. For he insists at the same time that he has striven in every way to practise philosophy (D 3-4); and these remarks form the climax to his defence of the cheerfulness with which he contemplates death. Socrates is confident that he is well prepared for the latter; and his belief that he has lived philosophically is surely not misplaced. What is in question is the linkage between the two. So his remarks prompt quite starkly consideration of the relative weight one should attach to, respectively, one’s present life and what comes after. If the way one lives one’s present life is of paramount value, then even a Socrates can be portrayed as not necessarily having secured an ideal existence after death. The close of the Phaedo, at any rate, is anxious to affirm that his ‘achievement’ may be susceptible of evaluation independently of any subsequent career in Hades.** Notice, then, how in introducing the first argument for the soul's immortality (the Cyclical Argument), Socrates makes the somewhat defensive remark that not even a comic poet could accuse one in his position of ‘idle chatter’ in discussing the issue of whether ** Socrates indeed seems as much droros in death as in life, with no clearly defined place (for all the Phaedo’s emphasis on this concept) in the post mortem scheme of things: not obviously a candidate for reincarnation; but not certainly qualified to dwell with the Forms. Perhaps, as Rowe suggests (Plato: Phaedo, 288), he will find himself on the radiant ‘true earth’ of the myth, the destiny of one who has lived a distinctively holy life (114 B 6=c 2) but without having been sufficiently purified by philosophy to live altogether without a body in realms even more beautiful (c 2-6). This certainly upholds Socrates’ faith in the power of philosophy to render one bodiless, even if it chimes a little too modestly with his earlier epistemic reservations about his own life. At any rate, his fate on this view will rest exclusively on the myth Plato has him construct, since the notion of a (so to speak) super-refined bodily existence after death has no echo elsewhere in the dialogue. Even so, dwellers on true earth, being longer-lived than us (111 B 3-4), would therefore presumably themselves be subject to death and, in principle, the cycle of reincarnation (cf. Rowe, 278),

129 the soul survives death (70 B 10-c 2). No such defensiveness was sented, it seems to suggest that, even as he lays out the arguments deemed necessary for the preceding discussion ofthe philosopher's practice of death. This, as I have been trying to emphasize, is a disfor immortality, the author of the Phaedo would first and forecussion of how the philosopher is to live his embodied life. Socrates’ defensive remark serves to indicate that the question of immortality Socrates bids Simmias, at the end of the Final Argument, to exammost have us live well, and leave what follows to take care of itself. ine more clearly ‘the initial hypotheses’ (1078 5), which we know is in principle a distinct one. It also highlights a fact so basic that include the positing of Forms (100 B 5-7). Socrates says that if he it has attracted less notice than it deserves. Socrates is portrayed as does so adequately he will follow the argument (7@ Adyw) to the discoursing on death on the last day of his life. If Plato’s point were greatest extent possible for a human, and seek nothing further (D that death is something that should concern us in the midst of our 6-9). Socrates probably means that once Simmias has better examlives, then he has chosen a rather odd way of making it.** Socrates’ ined the argument's basic premiss, he will be sufficiently reassured formulation, even as it exculpates him, invites the question: what about its conclusion. But Plato has written a piece of text that is acquits his interlocutors and the dialogue’s readers, who are probnoble, in a different way, when detached from the issue of immorably not about to die, of the charge of idle chatter? The saving tality. By studying Forms, one can fully achieve the highest goal clause is surely that the arguments for immortality will themselves possible for a human: to follow reason (rw Aoyw). For Plato, I suginvolve the direction of one’s thought to that eternal realm whose gest, the mark of a philosopher is to seek nothing further than this. contemplation is the centrepiece of the practice of a philosopher. All the major arguments for immortality (with the exception of the Cyclical Argument) make extensive use of the theory of Forms. By this measure, each argument represents steady progress over the Harvard University ay) TOLD STUDIES ¿NN ANA CMs Los 26 previous one, and the structure of the Phaedo is vindicated. The BIBLIOGRAPHY Final Argument is no anti-climax (as it might appear when viewed Apolloni, D., ‘Plato’s Affinity Argument for the Immortality of the Soul’, just as a proof of immortality),*” since it involves the dialogue's Journal of the History of Philosophy, 34 (1996), 5-32. most elaborate consideration of the Forms’ nature and role. And Bluck, R., Plato’s Phaedo (London, 1955). this study is something we can undertake today, as the Phaedo so Bostock, D., Plato's Phacdo (Oxford, 1986). ably demonstrates, however imperfect the conditions. Broadie, S., ‘Soul and Body in Plato and Descartes’ [‘Soul and Body’), Let me not put too much weight on Socrates’ off-the-cuff remark.** But in conjunction with the other evidence I have pre- Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, 101 (2001), 295-308. Dorter, K., Plato’s Phaedo: An Interpretation (Toronto, 1982). Elton, M., ‘The Role of the Affinity Argument in the Phaedo’, Phronesis, 42 (1997), 313-16. ‘* Socrates discourses on death (mainly but not exclusively by way of myth) in dialogues set at earlier periods of his life. Yet his fullest discussion is reserved for Frede, D., Platons ‘Phaidon’ (Darmstadt, 1999). his final hours, as if this were indeed the most appropriate occasion. Gallop, D., Plato; Phaedo (Oxtord, 1975). ‘ The most one can say is that, from a formal point of view, it nullifies Cebes’ challenge, thus (in conjunction with the refutation of Simmias) removing the barriers Pakaluk, M., ‘Degrees of Separation in the Phaedo’, Phronesis, 48 (2003), placed in the way of accepting the results of the Affinity Argument, But considering its position in the dialogue this ‘back-stop’ role still looks rather thin on its own. * Though one hardly need point out that an off-the-cuff remark by Socrates does not equate to an off-the-cuff sentence by Plato. Notice, too, how Socrates’ special position continues to be emphasized, albeit with a dose of irony, at 91 Ac. The interlocutors should take care lest his enthusiasm in pressing the case for immortality is just a symptom of his imminent death (a similar concern that the latter may aftect his views at Crito 46 D~47 A). By implication, the proper perspective for both interlocutors and readers is not to be so heavily ‘invested’ in the issue that their judgement is led astray. A genuinely philosophical stance (cf. dirooddws Exew, 91 A 2) mandates one to care for the truth, whatever it may be (A 4-5). 89-115. Rowe, C., ‘Philosophy and Literature: The Arguments of Plato's Phaedo', Proceedings of the Boston Area Colloquium in Ancient Philosophy, 7 (1991), 159-81. Plato: Phaedo (Cambridge, 1993). Weiss, R., “The Right Exchange: Phaedo 69a6-c3’, Ancient Philosophy, 7 (1987), 57-66.