Laches

This is another early Socratic dialog that attempts to define what courage is.   It shares the same structure as Euthyphro and Charmides.  We start with some literary scene setting.  In this case, Lysimachus and Melesias invite Nicias and Laches to talk with them about the appropriate subjects for their four similarly aged sons to begin studying.  Since they're watching some armed warrior give a demonstration of his prowess, they begin by wondering whether the boys should study fighting in armor.  They can't decide, so they pull Socrates out from behind a sign to join them in their debate.  As usual, Socrates doesn't have an opinion about the particular question, and instead shifts the dialog up a level to ask how we would even go about figuring out which subjects are the most important ones to teach our kids.  And, as in the other cases, his first follow up question is whether we are ourselves experts in the matter at hand, or whether we know some expert who it would be better to defer to.  Since here we're dealing with how to educate the young in general, in this case it becomes a question of whether anyone can claim expertise in adding virtue to their souls, since this must be the ultimate goal of any education.  Before we can find out who is an expert in instilling virtue though, we better figure out what it is.  Unfortunately, this is much too big a question.  In view of this, and considering the setting, Socrates settles for asking the group to define courage, which surely is one part of virtue as a whole.  Predictably, Nicias and Laches spend the rest of the dialog failing to define courage, and when the curtain drops we once again only know that we know nothing.

There's a clear pattern to these dialogs that reflects a successive transformation of an initial question.  

1) The fairly realistic preamble and setting that leads to a practical question.  Should we teach our kids to fight in armor?

2) The realization that to answer the specific practical question, we are forced to confront a more general abstract one.  How do we decide whether our kids should learn to fight in armor?  How do we know what to teach them to make them good?

3) The deconstruction of the more abstract question till it reveals that we are really being asked about what we think is valuable in life.  How do we know which good things we should aim for our kids to learn?  What is the good?

Laches actually contains an explicit allusion to this pattern.

You don't appear to me to know that whoever comes into close contact with Socrates and associates with him in conversation must necessarily, even if he began by conversing about something quite different in the first place, keep on being led about by the man's arguments until he submits to answering questions about himself concerning both his present manner of life and the life he has lived hitherto. (187e)

Ultimately all of Socrates' questions lead back to the question of whether we're living the good life.

It's also becoming clear that there are a couple of argumentative tropes Socrates uses repeatedly. 

 

1)  Since he knows nothing himself, his first question is always to ask whether anybody is an expert or knows an expert.  Alongside this, he always brings up a question of lineage.  An expert must have studied under a prior expert and must teach later experts.  Laches is explicit that this question is not democratic in the least.  Socrates is asked to break a tie between Nicias and Laches over whether their sons should study fighting in armor.  But he points out that since neither he nor the other two gentleman have any expertise in the matter, majority rule would here be a stupid prodecure for deciding something as important as how to educate our kids.

2)  Socrates will never let anyone get away with just giving examples of what he wants them to define.  They have to define what the thing is abstractly and in itself.  For example, Laches says that someone who doesn't run away from his post when the enemy attacks is courageous.  Socrates doesn't disagree, but points out that one might also retreat courageously, and even courageously face dangers or temptations that have nothing to do with a battlefield.  He always demands one definition to fit all these cases. 

3)  Socrates' preferred method for revealing the inadequacy of a definition is to show how it implies that something we all agree is a good thing -- courage, temperance, piety -- might in some cases turn out to be bad for us.  In this instance, Laches, thinking of his man at the post, tries to define courage in general as "a sort of endurance of the soul" (192c).  Socrates points out that it wouldn't be courageous to endure in doing the same foolish thing long after it makes sense.  So endurance is not always a good thing.  Since we're seeking a definition of courage in itself, and we know this is a good thing, a correct definition will never leave it good at some times and bad at others.  Implicit here is the idea that qualities in themselves are either good or bad.  When a thing appears good in some cases and bad in others, this must be because we're mixing together more than one thing-in-itself.  In this case, we're in danger of mixing courage with wisdom or intelligence (or really their opposite I suppose).  

There's also a fourth trope (or maybe meta-trope) that is coming into view but which I don't understand clearly.  The dialogs tend to end just at the point where we discover something like a circularity or overreach of some sort in the definition.  In Euthyphro every definition of piety was reduced to simply "whatever the gods like".  But without another way of knowing what acts are pious, this definition is tautological.  In Charmides, the good ship Temperance sank on the iceberg of a "science of science", a thing which might not exist and seemed like it would be content-free and unhelpful even if it did.  In Laches we find something a little similar.  

After Laches' definition of courage is shot down, Nicias proposes a more sophisticated one.  He claims that courage is, "knowledge of the fearful and the hopeful in war and every other situation" (195a).  While it starts off as a bit obscure, Nicias is trying to get at the way that courage can't be totally independent of our knowledge or wisdom.  For example, if we have no understanding of what bad thing might happen to us, we can't be courageously facing it down.  We can't overcome our fears or persevere in our faith if we don't know what despair is threatened or hope promised.  In other words, courage seems to require consciousness of what good and bad things might happen in the future.  Accordingly, animals and children and fools never have enough knowledge or wisdom to show courage.  

At first it seems Nicias' definition has taken the opposite approach to Laches'.  Laches defined courage too broadly as endurance of the soul in the face of difficulties.  This opened the door to ignorance or foolishness increasing our courage insofar as they increase our difficulties.  The definition captured more than just courage.  Nicias' definition, on the other hand, seems to make courage too small.  It eliminates the rash action of someone who doesn't know any better, but it seems to simultaneously eliminate all action, and reduce courage to just knowledge of what to fear or hope for.  Socrates quickly points out that such knowledge  depends entirely on knowing what is good and bad for us to begin with, and just applying this to the future.  Which means that Nicias' narrowing of the definition has actually taken us back to the starting point -- knowledge of what's good and bad for us is not mere courage but the whole of virtue itself.  Since we thought courage was only one part of virtue, something must be wrong with this definition as well.  The more narrow definition paradoxically turns the part it sought to define into the whole -- courage dissolves into something indistinguishable from virtue.  

There's a circle at work here that seems similar to the earlier dialogs.  The final definitions aren't working because in their groping towards generality, their search for the truly in itself, they overshoot the mark.  We thought we were discussing one specific good thing, but we end up trying to define the good as a whole.  It seems that to know "what is X?" we would have to answer "what is the good?".  But this is exactly the question we posed at the outset, which has circulated around and come back to us.  I'll have to think more about how exactly this works and what it means as I continue reading.  I don't feel like I'm describing it adequately yet.

Charmides

We now return to our regularly scheduled programming.  From here on out I'll stick with the dialogs we know Plato himself wrote.  Charmides, the next on our list, makes crystal clear how much more interesting these are than the generic Socratic dialogs included in the collection.  It treats one of the same themes that we saw in Theages, Rival Lovers, and Second Alcibiades --  philosophy is not a skill like others, but some sort of meta skill of knowing about skills -- but in a much more interesting, if less conclusive, way.  

The whole of Charmides explores the question of what temperance is, but the dialog falls into two pieces.  In the first, Socrates oggles both body and soul of the title character, a handsome and aristocratic youth, by asking him to define temperance.  Apparently, the greek word "sophrosune" doesn't have an adequate translation but is something like:

... a well-developed consciousness of oneself and one's legitimate duties in relation to others (where it will involve self-restraint and showing due respect) and in relation to one's own ambitions, social standing, and the relevant expectations as regards one's own behavior. It is an aristocrat's virtue par excellence, involving a sense of dignity and self-command. (editors comments)

Since Charmides descends from a famously noble family, we presume that he is eminently temperate, in which case he must know that he is temperate and should be able to describe it without trouble.  But when Socrates asks him exactly what temperance means, he proposes three definitions, and Socrates proceeds to shoot down each one.  First, Charmides says that temperance is doing everything "in an orderly and quiet way".  We might generously guess he means possessing something like Victorian manners or decorum.  Socrates, however, doesn't interpret the definition so generously, and proceeds to describe many cases in which we do not want to do things quietly or slowly.  Since we assume temperance is an unalloyed good, it therefore can't be the same as doing things quietly, which only works some of the time.  Next, Charmides suggests that temperance is the same thing as modesty.  Here again, Socrates points out that while modesty is certainly good sometimes, that's not true in every situation.  Finally, Charmides himself is out of ideas, but remembers that someone wise once defined temperance as "minding one's own business".  At this point, Socrates smells a rat and begins to suspect that Charmides' uncle, Critias, who introduced the two and is present for the conversation, supplied Charmides with this definition.  Nevertheless, he briefly questions Charmides by pointing out that minding one's own business, at least if it means everybody must focus on doing everything for themselves alone, would seem to preclude a harmonious division of labor in society.  But the kid has gotten in over his head, and has no idea how to answer a challenge to a definition that is not his own.  Overall though, perhaps we can summarize the sense of Charmides' naive definitions of temperance as, "doing only what corresponds to you; doing your duty."

At this point, we shift to the second, and more complex, half of the dialog, where Critias steps in for his nephew and tries to defend his definition of temperance as "minding one's own business".  While (or maybe because) Critias is much older and less apt to fall into Socrates' traps, his defense of this definition starts off as a little obscure.  In fact, it quickly morphs from "minding one's own business" in the sense of being self-sufficient to "knowing one's own business", or basically knowing oneself.  At which point Socrates changes the terminology slightly:

"Well, if knowing is what temperance is, then it clearly must be some sort of science and must be of something, isn't that so?" (165c)
...
"And if you should ask me about housebuilding, which is a science of building houses, and ask what I say that it produces, I would say that it produces houses, and so on with the other arts. So you ought to give an answer on behalf of temperance, since you say it is a science of self, in case you should be asked, 'Critias, since temperance is a science of self, what fine result does it produce which is worthy of the name?' (165d)

I don't know quite which greek word is translated as "science" here, and what all its resonances might be.  I would have thought knowing oneself was an art, but maybe this distinction isn't as profound for the Greeks as for us.  At any rate, the question is clarified now.  If temperance is the science of knowing our self, then what kind of practical self-knowledge does it produce?  

Of course, Critias' answer is that temperance is supposed to produce knowledge of exactly what we know and don't know; precisely the only knowledge that Socrates famously claims to possess.  But this makes it an odd sort of science that is no longer analogous to the others.  Because now the object of the science is only our knowledge itself.  Temperance is a way of knowing what our knowledge is; it is a science of what science we possess and what science we do not possess.  It doesn't actually teach us any of these specific knowledges, but seems to simply inventory whichever ones we have.

... all the others are sciences of something else, not of themselves, whereas this is the only science which is both of other sciences and of itself. (166c)

The remainder of the dialog is concerned with the problems that come up in thinking about this meta-level knowledge.  Since this is the tenth dialog I've written about, it's becoming clear that some type of meta-problem is central to Plato's philosophy.  So it's interesting to find that here, Socrates is very skeptical that something like a science of science can exist.  He tries to understand what this might be like by analogy to our other faculties like sight and hearing.  Just knowing what it is we know or don't know, just cataloging our knowledge, seems like a type of seeing that doesn't see objects, but sees seeing, or a hearing that hears hearing itself.

... consider, for instance, if you think there could be a kind of vision that is not the vision of the thing that other visions are of but is the vision of itself and the other visions and also of the lack of visions, and, although it is a type of vision, it sees no color, only itself and the other visions. (167d)

This type of self-reference leads to all kinds of problems and paradoxes.  Socrates compares it to something we claim is the double of itself, which would also be half of itself, or something greater than itself, which would necessarily also be less than itself.  From these analogies he goes on to observe that meta-level knowledge, since it is its own object, seems to require that the knowledge itself share the characteristics of the thing known, which leads to a kind of proto-homunculus structure with a little seer inside the eye.

   "And something that is more than itself will also be less, and the heavier, lighter and the older, younger, and so with all the other cases—the very thing which has its own faculty applied to itself will have to have that nature towards which the faculty was directed, won't it? I mean something like this: in the case of hearing don't we say that hearing is of nothing else than sound?"
   "Yes."
   "Then if it actually hears itself, it will hear itself possessing sound? Because otherwise it would not do any hearing."
   "Necessarily so."
   "And vision, I take it, O best of men, if it actually sees itself, will have to have some color? Because vision could certainly never see anything that has no color." (168d)

Critias doesn't have a comeback to all of this, so Socrates goes on to magnanimously grant him the existence of his dubious science of sciences.  Then he asks what good this science would do us anyhow.  By hypothesis, temperance doesn't teach us anything concrete; it is only the knowledge of the presence and absence of a particular knowledge.  So we know never what we know because of temperance, but because we learned that particular thing in another way.  Temperance as a science of science would only be able to tell us that we know what we know, and it's not very clear how it would even be able to evaluate those claims since it seems to have no real expertise of its own beyond identifying the presence or absence of knowledge.

   "And how will he know whatever he knows by means of this science? Because he will know the healthy by medicine, but not by temperance, and the harmonious by music, but not by temperance, and housebuilding by that art, but not by temperance, and so on—isn't it so?"
   "It seems so."
   "But by temperance, if it is merely a science of science, how will a person know that he knows the healthy or that he knows housebuilding?"
   "He won't at all."
   "Then the man ignorant of this won't know what he knows, but only that he knows."
   "Very likely."
   "Then this would not be being temperate and would not be temperance: to know what one knows and does not know, but only that one knows and does not know—or so it seems."
   "Probably."
   "Nor, when another person claims to know something, will our friend be able to find out whether he knows what he says he knows or does not know it. But he will only know this much, it seems, that the man has some science; yes, but of what, temperance will fail to inform him."
   "Apparently so."
   "So neither will he be able to distinguish the man who pretends to be a doctor, but is not, from the man who really is one, nor will he be able to make this distinction for any of the other experts. And let's see what follows: if the temperate man or anyone else whatsoever is going to tell the real doctor from the false, how will he go about it? He won't, I suppose, engage him in conversation on the subject of medicine, because what the doctor knows, we say, is nothing but health and disease, isn't that so?" (170c-e) 

Splitting off knowing what we know from just knowing something has led us into huge difficulties.  If temperance is a science of knowing totally separate from other sciences, we might know something, but not know that we know it; we might know it unconsciously, as it were.  Or on the other hand, we might know that we know something, but have no idea what this knowledge actually consists of.  It's as if we'd locked one part of our brain away from the other, or formed a brain within a brain.  

Although he has been skeptical of Critias' claim that temperance is a science of knowledge, Socrates tries to extend an olive branch at this point.  He tries to describe what temperance, this thing we think is so beneficial, ought to concretely do for us.  We were hoping that if we possessed temperance -- knowledge of what we know and don't know -- we could always know who to ask about any problem.  If we knew that we knew the right thing to do in some situation, then we could trust ourselves to do it.  And if we knew that we needed to purchase a clue from someone who did know, well, then we could go ahead and do that.  It seems like everything would run so smoothly if we just knew what knowledge corresponded to each person, and put them in charge of the object of that knowledge.  Socrates describes this as the dream life of the perfectly "scientific" person, who trusts always in knowledge and the knowledge of knowledge.  He even goes so far as to speculate that maybe we could use this meta-knowledge to figure out who the true seers and prophets are and then put them in charge of telling us how the future should look.  

But just when it seems like he's going to clear things up and propose a definition of temperance that delivers all this, Socrates undercuts himself and ends the dialog in confusion.  Because he asks whether this hypothetical perfectly scientific person is actually happy, and if so, whether it's really because of his possession of the master science of knowing what he does and doesn't know.  To be happy, isn't it more important to possess the science of what's good and bad for us than the science of what sciences we know?  Wouldn't the important "master science" be the "science of benefit" or the "science of the good"?  Isn't this knowledge, and not some meta-knowledge, the only one that can make us happy?  

   ... it was not living scientifically that was making us fare well and be happy, even if we possessed all the sciences put together, but that we have to have this one science of good and evil. Because, Critias, if you consent to take away this science from the other sciences, will medicine any the less produce health, or cobbling produce shoes, or the art of weaving produce clothes, or will the pilot's art any the less prevent us from dying at sea or the general's art in war?"
   "They will do it just the same," he said.
   "But my dear Critias, our chance of getting any of these things well and beneficially done will have vanished if this is lacking."
   "You are right."
   "Then this science, at any rate, is not temperance, as it seems, but that one of which the function is to benefit us. For it is not a science of science and absence of science but of good and evil. So that, if this latter one is beneficial, temperance would be something else for us." (174c)

Like the other early dialogues, it's not really clear where this leaves us.  Is a "science of good and evil" meant to replace temperance as the master science since it's the one that actually tells us what would be best in each situation?  Does the importance of self-knowledge lie not in knowledge of knowledge but in knowledge of what's good for you?  And don't we still have the same problem?  How do we know that we know what's really good for us?  Socrates ends the dialog by saying that we've gotten nowhere and that we seem only to have shown that temperance doesn't provide us with any benefit (because there is a separate science of benefit).  

I also don't see Plato implying a clear position here either.  However, he does add one more twist by framing the whole discussion in a curious way.  At the beginning of the dialog, we learn that beautiful young Charmides has a headache.  So Socrates, in an effort to seduce him, claims that he has a cure for headaches -- some special leaf or other.  But he says that this cure only works in the fashion of holistic medicine.  Just as you can't treat the head alone without treating the whole body, you also can't treat the body alone without treating the whole soul.  Before Socrates gives Charmides the herb then, he has to treat his soul with a "charm".

 'And the soul,' he said, 'my dear friend, is cured by means of certain charms, and these charms consist of beautiful words. It is a result of such words that temperance arises in the soul, and when the soul acquires and possesses temperance, it is easy to provide health both for the head and for the rest of the body.' (157a)

As a result, the whole conversation begins because Socrates proposes to question Charmides and either arouse or verify his temperance.  But this idea of a headache and a charm is actually just the first pick-up line that a lovestruck Socrates stumbles upon when he sees the beautiful young Charmides.  Then, at the end of the dialog, we haven't been able to prove that temperance would be of any use in curing headaches or anything else.  Yet it turns out that Charmides is in fact charmed, and promises to talk with Socrates every day till they figure out whether he has temperance or not.  In other words, temperance is just a pick up line, and the charm doesn't really do anything.  But it works!  Is this how a "science of science" or a "science of self" functions as well?

Theages

Following the order given in the Cooper edition, Theages is the last of the non-Platonic dialogs before we return to the early dialogs we know were written by Plato himself.  There are a number of other Socratic dialogs not written by Plato included at the end of the collection, but I expect I'll skip those.  Reading five of these dialogs of dubious authorship is enough to understand some of the context in which Plato wrote; for example, it was news to me that the Socratic dialog was a generic form that a number of authors used.  It's also enough to see that Plato probably got famous for a reason -- these other dialogs are less nuanced stylistically and less interesting philosophically.

Theages has been nagging his father Demodocus to pay for Theages to go study with an expert tutor so that he can become wise.  Since Demodocus doesn't know exactly what kind of tutor makes one wise, he enlists the help of his friend Socrates, who questions the boy to try to draw out what he really wants.  In other words, the problem is how can we learn wisdom, so the initial question obviously becomes what Theages thinks wisdom is.  First, similarly to the other impostor dialogs we've just read, Socrates establishes that wisdom is not a skill like making shoes or breeding horses.  If you want to become wise in those skills, go apprentice with a shoemaker or a horse breeder.  Then he proceeds to suggest, along the lines of Rival Lovers, that maybe wisdom is a more general skill that organizes the use of other skills, and so what we're really trying to learn in becoming wise is how to direct or rule over and organize others that have those skills.  Unfortunately, one learns the skill of ruling over others either from tyrants or from democratic politicians, and neither of these seem like particularly wise or savory characters to Socrates.  So then who can Theages learn wisdom from?

In his despair, he proposes to study with Socrates himself.  But what does Socrates know?  Here the dialog takes a slightly odd turn.  Socrates, of course, famously, knows nothing.  Though, presumably after his starring role in the Symposium, people think he knows all about love (of wisdom).  How just loving wisdom is supposed to make you wise is then deliberately left vague here.  Socrates says that while, yes, some of his students have gotten wiser, he doesn't really teach them anything at all.  He himself attributes their progress to some mysterious resonance with his inner voice, which here seems to go beyond simply warning Socrates off of certain actions, and extends the same service to his students.  Meanwhile, Theages thinks that the mere presence of Socrates is educational somehow, even though he never teaches anything.  So the dialog ends with Theages deciding to learn wisdom just by being near Socrates, while Socrates disclaims all liability.

"By the gods, Socrates, you're not going to believe this, but it's true!  I've never learned anything from you, as you know. But I made progress whenever I was with you, even if I was only in the same house and not in the same room—but more when I was in the same room. And it seemed, to me at least, that when I was in the same room and looked at you when you were speaking, I made much more progress than when I looked away. And I made by far the most and greatest progress when I sat right beside you, and physically held on to you or touched you. But now," he said, "all that condition has trickled away."
    So this is how it is when you associate with me, Theages. If it's favored by the god, you'll make great and rapid progress; if not, you won't. So think about it; wouldn't it be safer for you to become educated in the company of somebody who has control over the way he benefits people rather than taking your chances with me?

Perhaps the implication is that falling in love with Socrates, the greatest mental lover of all time, is the only path to wisdom?  Truly, the brain is the biggest erogenous zone.  Too bad they didn't just title this one Jackie Treehorn to make the meaning clearer.

Rival Lovers

This is another pedantic and narrow-minded dialog that Plato did not write.  The most interesting thing about it is probably that it is not told directly as a dialog; Socrates relates the conversation from memory in the first person.  The conversation itself finds Socrates arguing with some yutes about the definition of philosophy.  Most of it is spent shooting down the idea that the philosopher is just a jack of all trades, who knows a little something about everything.  That would just make the philosopher into a pentathlete, who wins by finishing second in every event.  Instead, this Socrates claims that the philosopher must possess a positive and authoritative skill or expertise in their own right.  In other words, he argues for the old view of philosophy as the queen of skills, the knowledge that will order all the other knowledges.  In this case that's the knowledge of justice or good sense, which essentially seems to boil down to how to give people orders and put everything in its rightful place.  It's a completely boring and aristocratic defintion of philosophy that doesn't seem to have much of anything to do with the vision of it we saw in Phaedo.

Hipparchus

Hipparchus is another dialog included in this collection that was not written by Plato.  It is completely forgettable.  Socrates and Friend try to define greed.  Here, Socrates plays the spoiler in the most sophistic, and least sophisticated, way, as he constantly turns his friends common sensical definitions of greed around to deprive them of substance.  Since what a greedy person wants is something they can profit from, and what profits anyone is valuable for them, then, insofar as we all pursue valuable things, we must all be greedy!  

It's a trashy piece of reasoning whose flaws are so obvious that it's almost worthy of our current administration.  And in fact, perhaps it was written by a sort of William Barr avant la lettre.  The title of the dialog comes from the name of a famous Greek tyrant whose assassins were celebrated as Athenian heroes. The dialog itself contains, as an almost total non-sequitur, a revisionist history of this tyrant that claims he was a wise and gentle man (who carved his name and alleged wisdom into every lamppost in town), and that the real tyranny started only after he was unceremoniously offed by some jealous lovers.  As a result, you might read the whole thing as the predictable bullshit of someone paid to be the devil's lawyer.

Second Alcibiades

The provenance of this dialog is even more dubious than the first Alcibiades.  The editor tosses out a few suggestions for who may have written it -- apparently there was quite an Alcibiades franchise, as it were, among the Greeks -- but none of them are Plato.  As I pointed out last time, even without being a classicist, you can spot the change in the tone and the sophistication of the argument, and the shift is even clearer with Alcibiades 2 than with the original, uncompromised, first draft.

Beyond the moronic title character, the only thing that really holds these two dialogs together would be some concept of "first knowledge".  What is the most important or most fundamental knowledge that we should put before all the rest?  How can someone as dumb and dangerous as Alcibiades begin to work his way out of ignorance?  Alcibiades concluded that the first step was to know thyself, to recognize our own ignorance and our need to cultivate a knowledge of that most essential self, our soul.  Pretty basic stuff perhaps, but it was sage advice delivered with a flirtatious twinkle.  Like many sequels, Second Alcibiades doesn't live up to the original.  Here, Socrates really just points out that it's more important to know which skill is the best or most useful than it is to know any particular skill itself.  In other words, there's a meta-skill of knowing what's good for us that we should logically master before we focus on acquiring any other expertise.  People who haven't pursued this meta-skill are ignorant -- defined as ranging from stupid to mad -- so can't be expected to do the right thing even if they're all around polymaths in other areas.  As Homer apparently did not say, "he knew a lot of things, but he knew them all wrong." (I didn't realize that the Margites is also the source of the fox/hedgehog saying as well)

The only really interesting twist to the dialog is the way this idea of a first knowledge gets expressed as a critique of prayer.  Socrates points out that if we don't know what is best, we don't even know what to pray for, and we might ask for stuff that does us harm.  Instead, he favors praying as the Spartans did, "to give them first what is good and then what is noble; no one ever hears them asking anything more." (148c).  Other than that setting, it's pretty tautological.  Of course the best knowledge would be the knowledge of what's best.  Unless it's actually better to know about the best knowledge, which I guess is exactly the knowledge that Socrates offers to Alcibiades.  Or maybe we should start off knowing that we should know about knowing what's best.  Or ...  Alcibiades the first at least pointed this recursion back at itself by making the most important knowledge self knowledge.  Whoever wrote this second version was a fuuuuucking amateur.

Alcibiades

So I'm skipping ahead 10 dialogs in the Cooper collection to go directly to the next 'early' or 'Socratic' one.  Which happens to be one that classicists are not even sure Plato really wrote.  To clarify, this Complete Works collection contains a number of dialogs that are explicitly marked, "It is generally agreed by scholars that Plato is not the author of this work."  We'll come to several of those next.  Alcibiades is merely marked, "It is not generally agreed by scholars whether Plato is the author of this work."  Regardless of whether the authorship is in dispute or not, the tone of this one is completely different from any of those we've read.  

Alcibiades is a question and answer based Socratic dialog, but the namesake character is such an ignorant kid that Socrates is forced to lead him like a horse to water.  In fact, Socrates sort of runs circles around the poor boy, constantly teasing him, and just in general comes off as a bit of a sophist here.  This, it turns out, is all in the name of seducing him -- it's an explicitly homoerotic dialog. Alcibiades is a rich, handsome, noble born boy who thinks the world of himself and intends to jump into politics and take Athens and by storm.  He has already had many suitors, but, in his arrogance, spurned them all.  Socrates, however, persists in his love, seemingly hopelessly, given that fact that he's uglier, poorer, and less politically influential than the other men who have fallen in love with Alcibiades.

Obviously, what Socrates has to offer is his peculiar ironic brand of wisdom.  He claims that Alcibiades will come to love him once he understands that he won't achieve any of his worldly ambitions without what Socrates has to teach him.  The dialog consists in Socrates gradually unfolding what exactly this is, and how it's going to help Alcibiades.  The kid is such an arrogant dunce though that Socrates can only convince him he'll be better off listening by making him look like a fool and confront his own ignorance.  Which is why the whole dialog has such a mocking flirtatious tone.

While it's sort of amusing, there's not a whole lot of philosophy to this one.  Basically Socrates just points out that if Alcibiades wants to lead the people of Athens, he ought to first cultivate some sort of expertise.  Specifically, he should learn about what is the most important thing for a city -- what is just and unjust.  Naturally, Alcibiades (and everyone else) thinks they already just know what is just and unjust, and so doesn't believe he is in need of any cultivation on this point.  The fact that Albiciabes spins in self-contradictory circles when Socrates asks him to say exactly what he means by justice proves just the opposite.  

Finally, worn out by Socrates and finally admitting his confusion, Alcibiades asks what he has to do to cultivate his understanding.  At which point Socrates drops perhaps the greatest pick up line of all time.  No, not, "Somebody better call God, because he's missing an angel."  He says that Alcibiades needs to take the first step out of ignorance and follow the Oracle's advice to "know thyself".  And how do you come to know yourself for itself?  Well, you have to get to know your own true inner self, your soul, and not merely learn some skills that this soul possesses.  And how can we manage to know our soul?  We have to see it reflected in the soul of another, the way we can see an image of our own face reflected in the eyes of another. So stare into my eyes Alcibiades.  Closer ... deeper ... Do you have a map Socrates? I keep getting lost in your eyes.  Depending on your perspective the ending is disappointingly softcore.  But, you know, tasteful.

Phaedo 2 -- Souls and Forms

Okay, enough about the literary structure of Phaedo. Let's get down to the philosophical brass tacks.  What should we think about death?

Contrary to the ignorance he professes in Apology, here Socrates is going to argue that death is a good thing and the culmination of a truly philosophical life.

I want to make my argument before you, my judges, as to why I think that a man who has truly spent his life in philosophy is probably right to be of good cheer in the face of death and to be very hopeful that after death he will attain the greatest blessings yonder. I will try to tell you, Simmias and Cebes, how this may be so. I am afraid that other people do not realize that the one aim of those who practice philosophy in the proper manner is to practice for dying and death. Now if this is true, it would be strange indeed if they were eager for this all their lives and then resent it when what they have wanted and practiced for a long time comes upon them. (64a)

At first, his argument seems pretty straightforward.  Death is the ultimate moment when the soul separates from the body.  The true philosopher is interested primarily in those essential Forms -- like Bigness, Health, Strength, etc ... -- that can only be apprehended by reasonsing, and never through the senses.   She will thus have spent her life cultivating a disregard for the sensuous pleasures and pains of the body, and a focus on those things that can only be apprehended by the soul.  In other words, a philosopher practices her whole life to be able to separate soul from body so that she:

... approaches the object with thought alone, without associating any sight with his thought, or dragging in any sense perception with his reasoning, but who, using pure thought alone, tries to track down each reality pure and by itself, freeing himself as far as possible from eyes and ears and, in a word, from the whole body, because the body confuses the soul and does not allow it to acquire truth and wisdom whenever it is associated with it.  (66a)

Death is the apotheosis of this development, a moment when the mixture of body and soul is purified into its component parts.  In a sense then, the philosophical life is lived in constant conscious imitation of death.  The philosopher lives as if already dead and deserves to be dead, not as a punishment, but as a reward.  So the courage of the philosopher in the face of death, her sobriety or moderation with respect to the bodily pleasures of life, is not about remaining stoic in the name of some inner equilibrium.  Bravery and moderation arise naturally and positively from the philosopher's love of wisdom and extreme devotion to a world beyond the senses.  

-----

And now for a bit of a tangent.

But, you might ask, why does one need to spend a lifetime practicing the separation of these parts when death is inevitably going to do it for you anyhow?  Or, if you want to practice dying, why not just kill yourself now?  This is a tricky question that isn't addressed straight on by Socrates' arguments, but takes us into the realm of myth we talked about last time.  In addition to the final long myth, Socrates sprinkles his usual question and answer discussion on the immortality of the soul with other speculations about what exactly might happen to it after we die.  He suggests that perhaps some souls wander the earth after death because of their ingrained habit of clinging to the body during life (81c).  Even those souls who have logged enough practice to make it to Hades, might eventually be drawn back into the realm of the body again, reborn as an animal or something (82a).  Or then again, maybe some souls simply get lost wandering in Hades and it's only those who study a map of the realm beforehand who are able to find their way to the gods once they arrive.  A philosopher's lifelong practice of searching for super-sensual wisdom would then be a means of finally attaining wisdom after death.

... wisdom itself is a kind of cleansing or purification. It is likely that those who established the mystic rites for us were not inferior persons but were speaking in riddles long ago when they said that whoever arrives in the underworld uninitiated and unsanctified will wallow in the mire, whereas he who arrives there purified and initiated will dwell with the gods. There are indeed, as those concerned with the mysteries say, many who carry the thyrsus but the Bacchants are few. (69c)

Each of these fables is set off from his argument in some way or another, for example, here by the "likely" and the fact that the idea is attributed to "those who established the mystic rites".  I can only assume that Plato opens this gap between what can be established by argument and what requires an appeal to myth to reinforce what we pointed out in the last post.  The philosopher doesn't know the truth, doesn't possess wisdom, but is its lover and pursuer, the eternal finacé.  As such, she is always running a risk.  And at no moment is this risk more tangible, and the necessity of practicing taking it more crucial, than at our moment of death.  

I wanted to quote this passage here as well because I think it may be the source of some of Deleuze's comments about the strangely paradoxical figure of the philosopher.  He and Guatarri speak of the relationship between philosophy and death several times in What is Philosophy? 

For example:

Through having reached the percept as "the sacred source," through having seen Life in the living or the Living in the lived, the novelist or painter returns breathless and with bloodshot eyes ... In this respect artists are like philosophers. What little health they possess is often too fragile, not because of their illnesses or neuroses but because they have seen something in life that is too much for anyone, too much for themselves, and that has put on them the quiet mark of death. But this something is also the source or breath that supports them through the illnesses of the lived (what Nietzsche called health). "Perhaps one day we will know that there wasn't any art but only medicine."

Or:  

The philosopher, the scientist, and the artist seem to return from the land of the dead. What the philosopher brings back from the chaos are variations that are still infinite but that have become inseparable on the absolute surfaces or in the absolute volumes that layout a secant [secant] plane of immanence: these are not associations of distinct ideas, but reconnections through a zone of indistinction in a concept.

Or: 

Thinking provokes general indifference. It is a dangerous exercise nevertheless. Indeed, it is only when the dangers become obvious that indifference ceases, but they often remain hidden and barely perceptible, inherent in the enterprise. Precisely because the plane of immanence is pre-philosophical and does not immediately take effect with concepts, it implies a sort of groping experimentation and its layout resorts to measures that are not very respectable, rational, or reasonable. These measures belong to the order of dreams, of pathological processes, esoteric experiences, drunkenness, and excess. We head for the horizon, on the plane of immanence, and we return with bloodshot eyes, yet they are the eyes of the mind. 

Don't worry, I won't bore you with a long discussion of the plane of immanence and how it compares to Hades.  I'm just noticing the shared idea of the philosopher as someone who takes a risk, who has a special relationship with death, and whose extreme sobriety hides a strange kind of drunkness.  This last connection is only implicit in Socrates' speech, and you have to read the footnote that accompanies the final clause -- the Bacchants are, "... the true worshippers of Dionysus, as opposed to those who only carry the external symbols of his worship."  Here a man who preaches reason and moderation and the snares of the body appeals to the god of wine, fertility, madness, and excess.  It's really a peculiar God for the supposed champion of Western rationality to be interested in worshipping.  But there's no question that the idea is right there in Plato's text, and not merely a stretched revisionist reading.

----

At any rate, let's get back to the main argument.  The philosopher practices separating soul from body.  She thinks this is the route to a deeper wisdom that cannot be grasped through the senses.  But what is the soul like and where did it come from?  Socrates continues by pulling back a bit from his moral or karmic speculations and trying to establish that the souls of the living can only come from the souls of the dead, as if Hades were a sort of cosmic soul recycling plant.  Souls are immortal.  To justify this he invokes a more general principle, that opposites come into being from opposites -- the larger from the smaller, the stronger from the weaker, the living from the dead.  The message seems to be that the qualities of all phenomenal things are relative and hence have to become what they are.

And so too there is separation and combination, cooling and heating, and all such things, even if sometimes we do not have a name for the process, but in fact it must be everywhere that they come to be from one another, and that there is a process of becoming from each into the other? (71b)

Naturally then, a living soul comes into being from its opposite, a dead soul.  And in fact, there must be a process of circulation between living and dead, where they constantly convert into one another.  Otherwise, if the process of becoming only went in one direction, say from living to dead, all the souls would have already accumulated in the underworld!

... if everything that partakes of life were to die and remain in that state and not come to life again, would not everything ultimately have  to be dead and nothing alive? Even if the living came from some other source, and all that lived died, how could all things avoid being absorbed in death? (72d)

Since Socrates is explicit that this doesn't just apply to human souls, but to animals and plants as well, this is our first glimpse of the Platonic idea of metempsychosis.  Souls just circulate around getting reincarnated in different bodies.

This discussion leads directly into another famous Platonic idea.  Learning in this lifetime is really just remembering what your soul knew while it was dead -- learning is just recollection.  Socrates explains this by way of how we come by a concept of something abstract like, say, Equality.  We see two sticks or stones that we say are "equal".  But of course, no two sense objects can ever be perfectly equal, not least because there are two of them.  So it appears that we never have an actual experience of true Equality.  Seeing two similar, though different, sticks or stones brings to mind the concept of Equality by a sort of association of images.  It's as if we remember or recollect Equality upon seeing the unequal, the same way we remember the face of a friend upon hearing their name.  Where can this concept of Equality have come from though, if we've never actually experienced it?  We must be remembering something we experienced before we were alive.  

Whenever someone, on seeing something, realizes that that which he now sees wants to be like some other reality but falls short and cannot be like that other since it is inferior, do we agree that the one who thinks this must have prior knowledge of that to which he says it is like, but deficiently so?
  Necessarily.
  Well, do we also experience this about the equal objects and the Equal itself, or do we not?
  Very definitely.
  We must then possess knowledge of the Equal before that time when we first saw the equal objects and realized that all these objects strive to be like the Equal but are deficient in this. (74e)

...

Therefore, if we had this knowledge, we knew before birth and immediately after not only the Equal, but the Greater and the Smaller and all such things, for our present argument is no more about the Equal than about the Beautiful itself, the Good itself, the Just, the Pious and, as I say, about all those things which we mark with the seal of "what it is," both when we are putting questions and answering them. So we must have acquired knowledge of them all before we were born. (75d)

At the end of this discussion, Socrates bends the argument back around, and uses the theory of learning as recollection to justify his assertion that the soul is immortal and must have existed before we were born.  If we grant that concepts like Equal, Beautiful, and Good exist beyond the realm of our senses, then Soul falls into the same category.

If those realities we are always talking about exist, the Beautiful and the Good and all that kind of reality, and we refer all the things we perceive to that reality, discovering that it existed before and is ours, and we compare these things with it, then, just as they exist, so our soul must exist before we are born. If these realities do not exist, then this argument is altogether futile. Is this the position, that there is an equal necessity for those realities to exist, and for our souls to exist before we were born? If the former do not exist, neither do the latter? (76e) 

The analogy is getting clear by now.  The Soul is to the body as the Beautiful is to a beautiful thing or the Equal to things we call equal.  In other words, Soul is a Platonic Form.  So the movement of the Soul as it comes to occupy various bodies through MadamePsychosis is analogous to the way the Forms come to occupy the various phenomenal things in the world.  Or, as we'll see shortly, we can state this the opposite way around, and say that the things become what they are by participating in the Forms, and bodies come to be alive by participating in the Soul.  

But this is getting ahead of ourselves.  First, while Socrates's companions are convinced by the example of recollection that the soul exists before the body, they raise a couple of objections as to whether what he has said fully proves the immortality of the soul.  Simmias asks whether the non-sensuousness of the soul might just be like the harmony produced in a lyre when the strings and body of the instrument resonate together.  This would make the soul equally ineffable as far as the senses go, but totally dependent on some composite parts interacting in a certain way to bring it into being.  Wouldn't the soul then disappear when those parts fell out of attunement?  And Cebes wonders whether Socrates has merely proved that the soul indeed lasts a long time and inhabits many bodies, but not that it is immortal.  In that case, is this body perhaps destined to be its last?

Socrates dispatches Simmias' objection fairly quickly.  Mostly, he simply points out that harmony is a composite entity.  It requires the interaction of parts.  Which means that it cannot pre-exist the interaction of those parts, nor can it really direct the subsequent movement of those parts as we presume the soul directs the body.  In addition, since a harmony is not a simple, indivisible, and pre-existent entity, it is subject to becoming more and less harmonious.  Lyres fall out of tune if the parts are not properly adjusted.  Socrates also thinks that individuals can have more and less harmonious souls, the virtuous being harmonious and the wicked discordant, but this doesn't mean that they have more and less soul, or are more and less alive.  If the soul is itself only a harmony, how could we have a discordant or wicked soul, which would be like a disharmonious harmony?

His response to Cebes is significantly longer and more complex.  In fact, it forces him into an entire discussion of causality -- how did things get to be how they are?  Socrates relates how he was once enamored of what we would today call science.  He wanted to know how things got the way they are so he investigated their mechanisms.  At some point though, he realized that understanding a mechanism may tell you how a thing came to be, but it does not explain why.   Today we would say that it tells you the efficient but not the final cause.

If someone said that without bones and sinews and all such things, I should not be able to do what I decided, he would be right, but surely to say that they are the cause of what I do, and not that I have chosen the best course, even though I act with my mind, is to speak very lazily and carelessly. Imagine not being able to distinguish the real cause from that without which the cause would not be able to act as a cause. (99b)

Disappointed with and confused by science, Socrates retreated to the theory of Forms as the perfect expression of his ignorance about causes.  That is to say that the Forms are not meant to be a secret or hidden hypothesis, but the simplest possible response to why things are as they are.  They are precisely what we do know when we know that we know nothing.

I no longer understand or recognize those other sophisticated causes, and if someone tells me that a thing is beautiful because it has a bright color or shape or any such thing, I ignore these other reasons—for all these confuse me—but I simply, naively and perhaps foolishly cling to this, that nothing else makes it beautiful other than the presence of, or the sharing in, or however you may describe its relationship to that Beautiful we mentioned, for I will not insist on the precise nature of the relationship, but that all beautiful things are beautiful by the Beautiful. That, I think, is the safest answer I can give myself or anyone else. And if I stick to this I think I shall never fall into error. This is the safe answer for me or anyone else to give, namely, that it is through Beauty that beautiful things are made beautiful. (100d)

This passage really casts the Forms in a new light for me.  Rather than thinking of them as something esoteric and essential, we can begin by thinking of them as the most vapid and obvious non-answer.  On the one hand, it's sort of irrefutable.  If the Beautiful refers to anything at all, it must be something beyond the mere collection of all the things we have applied the word to, or to some subset of characteristics of that collection.  On the other hand, the response seems to completely beg the question in the same way as the old gem that suggests opium puts you to sleep because of its soporific qualities.  Socrates doesn't even try to disguise the simplistic aspect of the theory.  Instead, he only warns us to evaluate a hypothesis on the basis of its consequences, and not on whether we find it immediately appealing.

And you would loudly exclaim that you do not know how else each thing can come to be except by sharing in the particular reality in which it shares, and in these cases you do not know of any other cause of becoming two except by sharing in Twoness, and that the things that are to be two must share in this, as that which is to be one must share in Oneness, and you would dismiss these additions and divisions and other such subtleties, and leave them to those wiser than yourself to answer. But you, afraid, as they say, of your own shadow and your inexperience, would cling to d the safety of your own hypothesis and give that answer. If someone then attacked your hypothesis itself, you would ignore him and would not answer until you had examined whether the consequences that follow from it agree with one another or contradict one another. (101d)

Where does this hypothesis of the Forms get us then?  Well, the nice thing about it is its simplicity.  Things are more or less beautiful depending on whether they participate more or less in Beauty, or, conversely, whether Beauty "occupies" them to a greater or lesser degree.  Basically, Beauty the Form structures an entire line or dimension of the more and less qualitatively beautiful, the far end of which should be marked Ugliness.  Socrates actually explains this point by reference to Tallness and Shortness, but the idea is the same.  Any actual thing will be some mixture of two opposite qualities, but the qualities that define the components of this mixture are pure abstractions that can never themselves be mixed.

Now it seems to me that not only Tallness itself is never willing to be tall and short at the same time, but also that the tallness in us will never admit the short or be overcome, but one of two things happens: either it flees and retreats when- ever its opposite, the short, approaches, or it is destroyed by its approach. It is not willing to endure and admit shortness and be other than it was, whereas I admit and endure shortness and still remain the same person and am this short man. But Tallness, being tall, cannot venture to be small. In the same way, the short in us is unwilling to become or to be tall ever, nor does any other of the opposites become or be its opposite while still being what it was; either it goes away or is destroyed when that happens. (102e)

The Forms are like pure elements that can only be exactly what they are.  By contrast, as we saw before, actual things become what they are through a process of qualitative change.  These things are subject to a logic of more and less, which now we can interpret as moving closer to or away from the Form that epitomizes a particular quality.  As Deleuze points out, a Form is something that can only be itself, whereas actual things are composite that are not self-identical and are subject to change.  Indeed, this is why things are always coming into being from their opposites, like the larger that becomes larger, having once been smaller (71b).  The distinction between the mode of being of Forms and of things is subtle but so important that Socrates calls it out explicitly.

   When he heard this, someone of those present — I have no clear memory of who it was — said: "By the gods, did we not agree earlier in our discussion to the very opposite of what is now being said, namely, that the larger came from the smaller and the smaller from the larger, and that this simply was how opposites came to be, from their opposites, but now I think we are saying that this would never happen?"
   On hearing this, Socrates inclined his head towards the speaker and said: "You have bravely reminded us, but you do not understand the difference between what is said now and what was said then, which was that an opposite thing came from an opposite thing; now we say that the opposite itself could never become opposite to itself, neither that in us nor that in nature. Then, my friend, we were talking of things that have opposite qualities and naming these after them, but now we say that these opposites themselves, from the presence of which in them things get their name, never can tolerate the coming to be from one another." (103a)

I don't think it's clear at this point whether we've advanced much beyond the starting point of our non-answer.  Things are beautiful because they have Beauty and ugly because they have Ugliness and something in between because they become some changing mix of the fixed poles of Beauty and Ugliness.  This may just restate the original idea of what a Form is.  But now Socrates is soon going to use this property by which a Form never mixes with its opposite to actually get somewhere.  

Because it turns out that there is a structure to the realm of Forms itself.  It seems that if certain Forms are opposites, others are natural allies that always appear together.  In a sense, there's a certain alchemy of Forms.  When one Form comes to occupy something, it drags along others that are somehow in sympathy with it, so that there's a sort of multiple occupation.  The occupied will then not mix with either of the opposites of the Forms involved -- its own, or the one it drags along.

As for what I said we must define, that is, what kind of things, while not being opposites to something, yet do not admit the opposite, as, for example, the triad, though it is not the opposite of the Even, yet does not admit it because it always brings along the opposite of the Even, and so the dyad in relation to the Odd, fire to the Cold, and very many other things, see whether you would define it thus: Not only does the opposite not admit its opposite, but that which brings along some opposite into that which it occupies; that which brings this along will not admit the opposite to that which it brings along. (105a)

While the basic intent here is clear, the more carefully you read this passage the more confusing this doctrine gets.   It's not clear whether we should really say that Forms have allies as well as opposites, or whether there is some special class of thing that so resonates with a Form not its own, that, while not itself participating in that Form, it can still exclude its opposite Form.  Also, it's not clear how we would find out about the structure of the realm of Forms.  Opposites are perhaps definitional, but the fact that triads exclude Even and fire excludes Cold seems like something you would have to learn empirically. Maybe this will become clear in another dialog.

In any event, this strange resonance of Forms makes the theory of the Forms into a more than a simple tautology.  Socrates is wise because of his ignorance. 

If you should ask me what, coming into a body, makes it hot, my reply would not be that safe and ignorant one, that it is heat, but our present argument provides a more sophisticated answer, namely, fire, and if you ask me what, on coming into a body, makes it sick, I will not say sickness but fever. Nor, if asked the presence of what in a number makes it odd, I will not say oddness but oneness, and so with other things. (105c)

 And from here it's a short jump to the immortality of the soul.  The Soul is a Form that is brought along whenever something is alive.  Since the opposite of life is death, the resonance of the soul and life means that Soul can never combine with death -- it is deathless.  At first this conclusion seems a bit at odds with the whole idea of metempsychosis and the passage of souls through the underworld in transit to rebirth.  And I actually think Socrates does pull a little bit of a fast one here by treating deathless and indestructible as synonyms.  The intended resolution to this problem is pretty straightforward though, and we already saw it in the quote about Tallness (102e).  When a Form is confronted by its opposite with which it can never mix, it either goes away, or is destroyed.  But of course we presume that an abstract thing like a Form can't be destroyed, so when death approaches the soul, it must simply go away so as not to mix with it.  This going away is the life of the underworld, maybe a virtual life as it were, which we should think of as a sort of transitional life the soul is temporarily forced into because it won't mix with death.   

So to wrap it all up.  Taken as a whole, this dialog seems to be meant to be an application of the general theory of Forms to the case of the Form of the soul.  All the conclusions about how we should look at death and what happens when we die follow naturally from the analogy between Soul and Form.  One obvious question is left hanging by this analogy.  No beautiful thing can be Beauty.  Likewise, the idea of metempsychosis implies that no particular incarnation can be my Soul.  What this does to the question of individuality and identity isn't discussed.  

Phaedo 1 -- Setting and Structure

Even though Phaedo is set narratively the day after Crito -- that is, on the day of Socrates' poisoning -- it is clearly a major stylistic leap from one dialog to the next. Phaedo is way longer, much more complex, and contains a whole positive philosophical theory of the soul.  The editor of the collection I'm reading is at pains to say that the grouping of Plato's works into an early, middle, and late period is fairly speculative history, but really it's pretty obvious that this is a more mature work.  According to this grouping, despite its depiction of the end of Socrates' life, Phaedo comes from the middle period of Plato's writings.  Apparently, almost all the dialogs of this period focus on Plato's famous theory of the Forms, and here, we find the theory applied to the question of death.  The basic idea is that the Soul is analogous to the Form of Beauty of Justice or the Good.  Hence it is part of an indestructible essential reality that only comes to occupy the body, and upon death it decamps for fairer realms.

Phaedo is philosophically and literarily complex, and I should say at the outset that I'm not sure I'll be able to completely do it justice yet.  Scrambling the order of the Cooper edition (which it inherits from the 100 A.D. collection made by Alexandrian philosopher Thrasyllus), I think I will continue by first reading through all the 'Socratic' or early dialogues before I tackle another of the major middle or late period works.  Whether this is reading them in strictly chronological order is an open question, but I think it may give me more context on some of the stylistic devices that I can already see the later dialogs layer on to the earlier ones.  Nevertheless, I just read Phaedo, so let's dig in and do the best we can to unravel it.

The dialog is a moving portrait of a man who dies doing what he loves.  Socrates said in his Apology that he would rather die than give up philosophizing, and in fact he spends the hours leading up to his death conversing with his friends about the nature of the soul, continuing his vocation right up to the end.  Which leads us directly to the first puzzling piece of Plato's account of his end -- after his conviction, Socrates suddenly dreams that he should start writing poetry!

The dreams were something like this: the same dream often came to me in the past, now in one shape now in another, but saying the same thing: "Socrates," it said, "practice and cultivate the arts." In the past I imagined that it was instructing and advising me to do what I was doing, such as those who encourage runners in a race, that the dream was thus bidding me do the very thing I was doing, namely, to practice the art of philosophy, this being the highest kind of art, and I was doing that. 

But now, after my trial took place, and the festival of the god was preventing my execution, I thought that, in case my dream was bidding me to practice this popular art, I should not disobey it but compose poetry. I thought it safer not to leave here until I had satisfied my conscience by writing poems in obedience to the dream.

This is very strange.  I remember from the Republic that poetry is a big Platonic no-no.  Also, here is yet another example of the paragon of rationality hearing little voices that tell him to do stuff.  What idea is this passage directing us to then?  Perhaps that Socrates was unsure of everything even up to the end?  Is this supposed to reinforce the irony of a man who is sentenced to death because of the unshakeable courage of his conviction that he knows nothing?  I don't know, but there are a couple of other odd moments in the story that might serve this same goal.  

The key drama in the dialog is obviously that the guy calmly discussing what happens after we die is himself about to die.  So when the question of the immortality of the soul is raised, Socrates could be subject to some motivated reasoning, to say the least.  In his public Apology, he claimed that it was pure ignorance to fear death, because no one could know whether it was good or bad or what it was like.  But now that he's speaking amongst friends, he will argue that the soul must be immortal, and that death is the philosophical moment par excellence because it is when the soul is liberated from the constraints of the body and free to focus exclusively on the contemplation of those things which go beyond the senses -- the Forms.  For a man who only knows he knows nothing, who famously follows the argument wherever it might lead, and for whom literally everything is open to discussion, this creates a real problem.  What if Socrates concludes that he's wrong, and, on the day of his death, becomes convinced that the soul doesn't exist or is destroyed along with the body?  

And how would you like to be the friend that convinces him of this?  There are several references in the dialog to his friends' squeamishness on this point.  Socrates always laughs off their delicacy and encourages them to ask the hard questions despite knowing what is at stake.  The most beautiful example of this is his reference to the literal swan song of this, his final conversation.

When Socrates finished speaking there was a long silence. He appeared to be concentrating on what had been said, and so were most of us. But Cebes and Simmias were whispering to each other. Socrates observed them and questioned them. Come, he said, do you think there is something lacking in my argument? There are still many doubtful points and many objections for anyone who wants a thorough discussion of these matters. If you are discussing some other subject, I have nothing to say, but if you have some difficulty about this one, do not hesitate to speak for yourselves and expound it if you think the argument could be improved, and if you think you will do better, take me along with you in the discussion.

I will tell you the truth, Socrates, said Simmias. Both of us have been in difficulty for some time, and each of us has been urging the other to question you because we wanted to hear what you would say, but we hesitated to bother you, lest it be displeasing to you in your present mis-fortune.

 

When Socrates heard this he laughed quietly and said: "Really, Simmias, it would be hard for me to persuade other people that I do not consider my present fate a misfortune if I cannot persuade even you, and you are afraid that it is more difficult to deal with me than before. You seem to think me inferior to the swans in prophecy. They sing before too, but when they realize that they must die they sing most and most beautifully, as they rejoice that they are about to depart to join the god whose servants they are. But men, because of their own fear of death, tell lies about the swans and say that they lament their death and sing in sorrow. They do not reflect that no bird sings when it is hungry or cold or suffers in any other way, neither the nightingale nor the swallow nor the hoopoe, though they do say that these sing laments when in pain. Nor do the swans, but I believe that as they belong to Apollo, they are prophetic, have knowledge of the future and sing of the blessings of the underworld, sing and rejoice on that day beyond what they did before. As I believe myself to be a fellow servant with the swans and dedicated to the same god, and have received from my master a gift of prophecy not inferior to theirs, I am no more despondent than they on leaving life. Therefore, you must speak and ask whatever you want as long as the authorities allow it."

But is Socrates really so certain of himself that he rejoices in death?  We've already seen how he's writing poetry because he wonders at the last minute if maybe that's what his dreams were all about?  And in this passage he seems to be saying that he'd rather delude himself about the immortality of the soul than find a convincing argument against it just now, because he would then worry his friends with his sadness about dying.

This then is the first thing we should guard against, he said. We should not allow into our minds the conviction that argumentation has nothing sound about it; much rather we should believe that it is we who are not yet sound and that we must take courage and be eager to attain soundness, you and the others for the sake of your whole life still to come, and I for the sake of death itself. I am in danger at this moment of not having a philosophical attitude about this, but like those who are quite uneducated, I am eager to get the better of you in argument, for the uneducated, when they engage in argument about anything, give no thought to the truth about the subject of discussion but are only eager that those present will accept the position they have set forth. I differ from them only to this extent: I shall not be eager to get the agreement of those present that what I say is true, except incidentally, but I shall be very eager that I should myself be thoroughly convinced that things are so. For I am thinking — see in how contentious a spirit — that if what I say is true, it is a fine thing to be convinced; if, on the other hand, nothing exists after death, at least  for this time before I die I shall distress those present less with lamentations, and my folly will not continue to exist along with me—that would be a bad thing—but will come to an end in a short time. Thus prepared, Simmias and Cebes, he said, I come to deal with your argument. If you will take my advice, you will give but little thought to Socrates but much more to the truth. If you think that what I say is true, agree with me; if not, oppose it with every argument and take care that in my eagerness I do not deceive myself and you and, like a bee, leave my sting in you when I go.

So while Socrates makes a forceful argument that the soul is immortal, the structure of the dialog appears to undermine the certainty of this conclusion, and relegate it to the role of mere hypothesis.  This reading culminates in the extraordinary myth that Socrates relates from 107c to 114d.  Socrates spends the whole dialog arguing for the immortality of the soul.  After meeting many objections, he manages to convince all his companies that death is nothing to fear, and indeed, will even supply the complete knowledge of the Forms we can only approach in life.  We'll look at the argument in detail in the next post.  From a literary perspective though, what's most interesting is the strange climax.  After triumphing by rational means, Socrates goes on to tell an elaborate fiction about what happens to our souls after they depart our bodies and head into the underworld.  We're talking Dantesque levels of elaborate here.  He describes the structure of the underworld and the earth's relation to it, how it is surrounded by rivers and the dead souls gather at a lake to be judged, some to be reborn, some to pass on to ethereal realms of beauty, and some to be cast forever into the pit of Tartarus.  After the careful argumentation of the dialog, the story comes off as completely delirious.  And then it ends with Socrates disavowing the whole works.

No sensible man would insist that these things are as I have described them, but I think it is fitting for a man to risk the belief—for the risk is a noble one—that this, or something like this, is true about our souls and their dwelling places, since the soul is evidently immortal, and a man should repeat this to himself as if it were an incantation, which is why I have been prolonging my tale. That is the reason why a man should be of good cheer about his own soul, if during life he has ignored the pleasures of the body and its ornamentation as of no concern to him and doing him more harm than good, but has seriously concerned himself with the pleasures of learning, and adorned his soul not with alien but with its own ornaments, namely, moderation, righteousness, courage, freedom and truth, and in that state awaits his journey to the underworld.

Even though Socrates takes it as more or less established that the soul is immortal (as established as things can be by argument) he still needs to spend his last breath telling himself this fable as if it were an incantation in order to go stoically to his death.  Perhaps this is some of the poetry he has been writing?  It's a strange and paradoxical move where reason joins forces with religion, and certainty and doubt come side by side.  It seems anything but obvious what exactly Plato wanted to convey with this structure.  It doesn't seem meant to undermine the evident courage Socrates shows in calmly facing death.  Nor does it really seem to suggest that this courage is just a blind faith with nothing rational about it.  Maybe the intent is just to show us a man who was willing to take the a risk right up to the end, the risk every seeker of truth takes that they are believing in a fairy tale.  

Crito

Crito bribes his way into the jailhouse on the eve of Socrates' execution with a plan to spring him and flee the city.  First though, he has to convince Socrates that such a plan would be the just course of action, rather than one motivated simply by the fear of death, or, in Crito's case, motivated by the fear that he will be criticized for not helping his friend out of a jamb.  In fact, knowing that Socrates is to die tomorrow has left Crito a little hysterical, so Socrates himself has to sort of fill in an argument for him.   After quickly putting aside Crito's worry about what the majority will think of their course of action -- since when has Socrates worried about what 'they' think? -- he gets to the heart of the question about whether it is just for the wrongfully convicted to flee.

SOCRATES: As we have agreed so far, we must examine next whether it is just for me to try to get out of here when the Athenians have not acquitted me. If it is seen to be just, we will try to do so; if it is not, we will abandon the idea. As for those questions you raise about money, reputation, the upbringing of children, Crito, those considerations in truth belong to those people who easily put men to death and would bring them to life again if they could, without thinking; I mean the majority of men. For us, however, since our argument leads to this, the only valid consideration, as we were saying just now, is whether we should be acting rightly in giving money and gratitude to those who will lead me out of here, and ourselves d helping with the escape, or whether in truth we shall do wrong in doing all this. If it appears that we shall be acting unjustly, then we have no need at all to take into account whether we shall have to die if we stay here and keep quiet, or suffer in another way, rather than do wrong.

At this point, the dialog takes an interesting turn.  Having supplied Crito's side of the argument, Socrates goes on to supply the opposing side as well by personifying the laws and the state of Athens.  In other words, he is not arguing just one side here, but imagining a dialog where The Laws question him about whether it is just to flee.  This is an interesting rhetorical maneuver -- Socrates questioning himself -- but it also has a philosophical point.  It elevates The Laws into its own character, meaning that they are not just the opinion of the majority of Athenians.  And it's this tension that is at the heart of the dialog.  We know from the Apology that Socrates was unjustly convicted by a narrow majority of Athenians based on nothing more than the flimsy opinions of supposedly wise men irritated by his questions.  So wouldn't it be in keeping with the Socratic premise that it's only truth and justice that count, not mere opinion, to flee his death sentence -- this most unjust, yet effective, opinion of the majority?  Obviously, for Socrates to accept his sentence when it is avoidable, he has to draw some distinction between the majority opinion and The Law.

What Socrates ends up outlining in the voice of The Laws is a simple sort of social contract theory.  The Laws point out that he was born and raised in Athens, that he liked it well enough never to move or travel, that he gained from all his associations in the city, etc ... and that this implicitly expressed satisfaction is tantamount to an agreement and commitment to abide by the laws of the city.  In this sense, The Laws deserve more obedience than even a father, because Socrates has chosen voluntarily to live by them, and was always free to try and change them through the court of public opinion.  Given this agreement, it would be unjust and unwise for Socrates to disobey The Laws at this point.

"Be persuaded by us who have brought you up, Socrates. Do not value either your children or your life or anything else more than goodness, in order that when you arrive in Hades you may have all this as your defense before the rulers there. If you do this deed, you will not think it better or more just or more pious here, nor will any one of your friends, nor will it be better for you when you arrive yonder. As it is, you depart, if you depart, after being wronged not by us, the laws, but by men"

To me this reads as only an unconvincing fragment of a larger argument.  Athens being democratic, The Laws are explicitly constructed by majority opinion.  Why does Socrates suddenly reify the majority opinion he normally disparages when it takes this public form?  Does this magic somehow happen through the process of public debate?  Is the contract signed simply by being in the city, or is it really through participating in those debates?  The dialog seems to beg the question of what makes the laws of a democracy more just than the opinions of those in it.

Apology

It's immediately evident why the Apology is situated at the beginning of Plato's works.  It provides the crucial backstory to the literary character of Socrates.  I'm guessing this may be the only time we really find out much about the man himself, as opposed to his questions or views.  Of course, there don't seem to be a whole lot of other sources describing the historical Socrates, so we should take Plato's account with a grain of salt.  But I doubt there's much point in questioning the now classic descriptions.  Socrates is only wise because he knows that he is not wise; he believes that the pursuit of virtue is more urgent than the pursuit of money or fame or pleasure; he thinks the unexamined life is not worth living; he has no fear of death because he cannot know what it's like; etc ...

Plato is able to present all this background because the Apology is not really a dialog.  There's some back and forth with Meletus, who has brought Socrates to trial on charges not believing in the gods of Athens and for corrupting its youth.  But basically it's just Socrates' long soliloquy defending himself.   And since the charges are a bit vague, it gives Socrates a chance to talk about what he's been doing all these years and why he's caught flak for it, not for the first time.  In fact, there's quite a lot of autobiography here, and since it is presented with a rhetorical flourish (however ironic) intended to convince the jury, it's a bit flowery compared to his usual speech.  So I'll just focus on what I consider the crucial bits.

Socrates got started in the philosophy business after he went to see the Oracle at Delphi.  He asked the Oracle if any man was wiser than he, and was told that "no one is wiser".  Since then, he's gone around talking to people who claim to be wise, asking them questions and discovering from their replies that they don't have the deepest questions any better figured out that he does.  Doing this publicly is enough to make a fella unpopular, which is why he's on trial.

I went to one of those reputed wise, thinking that there, if anywhere, I could refute the oracle and say to it: "This man is wiser than I, but you said I was." Then, when I examined this man — there is no need for me to tell you his name, he was one of our public men—my experience was something like this: I thought that he appeared wise to many people and especially to himself, but he was not. I then tried to show him that he thought himself wise, but that he was not. As a result he came to dislike me, and so did many of the bystanders. So I withdrew and thought to myself: "I am wiser than this man; it is likely that neither of us knows anything worthwhile, but he thinks he knows something when he does not, whereas when I do not know, neither do I think I know; so I am likely to be wiser than he to this small extent, that I do not think I know what I do not know." After this I approached another man, one of those thought to be wiser than he, and I thought the same thing, and so I came to be disliked both by him and by many others.

So Socrates is the original speaker of truth to power.  A gadfly as he describes himself.  Though the only truth he has to offer is that power is ignorant.  Philosophy begins with this circularity -- the paradoxical wisdom of ignorance.  Even though this is phrased, like pretty much all paradoxes, as a negation, it immediately implies some positive content.  We move in the direction of wisdom when we acknowledge and confront our ignorance.  Knowing that you know nothing still places a value on the pursuit of knowledge.  Socrates makes this positive content clear when he tells the jury that he's so convinced of this one thing he does know that he would rather die than give it up.

... if you said to me in this regard: "Socrates, we do not believe Anytus now; we acquit you, but only on condition that you spend no more time on this investigation and do not practice philosophy, and if you are caught doing so you will die;" if, as I say, you were to acquit me on those terms, I would say to you: "Men of Athens, I am grateful and I am your friend, but I will obey the god rather than you, and as long as I draw breath and am able, I shall not cease to practice philosophy, to exhort you and in my usual way to point out to any one of you whom I happen to meet: 'Good Sir, you are an Athenian, a citizen of the greatest city with the greatest reputation for both wisdom and power; are you not ashamed of your eagerness to possess as much wealth, reputation and honors as possible, while you do not care for nor give thought to wisdom or truth, or the best possible state of your soul?'

Still, I think it's not clear from this how consistent Socrates is being with his convictions.  He only knows that inquiry or the pursuit of knowledge stands above all else, because it provides the only means for overcoming our ignorant belief that we know something.  However, is this the same thing as caring for our soul in preference to wealth, reputation, and honors?  Or has he slipped in another assumption on the sly?  If we're totally ignorant, why bother to even pursue wisdom or truth or justice?  How do we even know what to aim at or what should be secondary?  How do we become aware that our ignorance is ignorance?  At this point, I'm not sure whether this is a separate question from the central circularity, or really just a restatement of it.  

On the other hand, Socrates is clearly consistent about one thing, even though it makes his impassioned commitment to philosophy a bit less dramatic -- he could care less about death.  He reasons that we really don't know anything about death, so it is pure ignorance to fear it.  He suggests perhaps we simply return to ashes, in which case there is no one there to suffer the death.  Or perhaps our soul is transported to some wonderful heaven.  Either way, Socrates is clearly committed to the counterintuitive idea that living well is more important than living, or that there's more to life than being alive.  I'm already tempted to interpret this as asking, "why fear death when we don't even know what the good life is yet?"  As in, "who am I and what makes whatever that thing is live?"  But this may be projecting Spinoza, Deleuze, and Zen back onto Socrates.

The same ironic or questioning attitude shows up in a few other comments Socrates makes in his defense.  First, in accord with his knowing nothing, he has never presented himself as a teacher of anything.  In particular, his is a purely public discourse, free to all, and he has never charged anyone a fee for any sort of private instruction.  On the other hand, he has also never sought any position of public political power that would enable him to impress his views on others.  He is thus the founder of a lineage that has mostly died out today -- the public intellectual who inspires us to think without having any specific expertise or authority.  As a private citizen, Sorcates did serve in the army, and on various citizen councils, but found that these posts were incompatible with his unbroken commitment to following his questions towards truth and justice and wisdom.  The way he explains how he discovered this incompatibility is curious enough to bear mentioning; the guy hears voices.

It may seem strange that while I go around and give this advice privately and interfere in private affairs, I do not venture to go to the assembly and there advise the city. You have heard me give the reason for this in many places. I have a divine or spiritual sign which Meletus has ridiculed in his deposition. This began when I was a child. It is a voice, and whenever it speaks it turns me away from something I am about to do, but it never encourages me to do anything. This is what has prevented me from taking part in public affairs, and I think it was quite right to prevent me. Be sure, men of Athens, that if I had long ago attempted to take part in politics, I should have died long ago, and benefited neither you nor myself. Do not be angry with me for speaking the truth; no man will survive who genuinely opposes you or any other crowd and prevents the occurrence of many unjust and illegal happenings in the city. A man who really fights for justice must lead a private, not a public, life if he is to survive for even a short time.

It seems important to note that even these voices preserve the open-endedness of Socrates' character.  They never tell him to do anything particular, only what not to do.  Even the guy's inner voice is only wise in recognizing he made a mistake.  I don't know how often Socrates' voices will appear in the dialogs, but they make a dramatic entrance at the end of the Apology by not appearing.  Even when the jury convicts him and sentences him to death, he tells them that he must have made the right decision in defending himself as he did because his voices never spoke up to warn him as they always have in the past.  In a sense the death of Socrates is divinely blessed.