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.
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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.
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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.
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