PHAEDO: A Summary

The Phaedo is a platonic dialogue that relates the conversation between Socrates and his
friends on the day of his execution. It starts with Phaedo who was actually present at Socrates
execution, recounting the story of everything that happened that day to Echecrates, a friend of
his. The story starts when Socrates friends are finally allowed into his jail cell after he had
been let out of his chains. They began to converse, given the circumstances, the conversation
naturally turns to questions concerning death, the soul and the afterlife. The friends of
Socrates are sad about his impending death but Socrates tells them that he is cheerful at the
thought of death and promises to tell them why.

First Socrates seeks to define death itself. The consensus he gets from those present is that
death is the separation of the soul from the body. Next he gets an agreement that a
philosopher is someone who denies himself the pleasures of the body. That in fact, a
philosopher seeks to detach himself from his body as much as it is possible and turns toward
the soul. That a philosopher is someone who seeks not pleasures of the flesh, wealth or riches
but ideals like virtues, justice, intelligence and wisdom. Furthermore, if wisdom is the
philosopher’s goal the body is a hindrance in every way that it could possibly be. Its faulty
senses deceive at every turn. Socrates explains that man can only attain wisdom after death
for it is only then that the mind is liberated from the distractions of the body. Given, isn’t
death what a philosopher wishes for most of all, to be entirely free of the body and its
limitations. Socrates adds that death seems to be the only way to achieve wisdom in its purest
form.

Socrates shift gears here for a moment and points out that for most men the reason that they
are able to face death with bravery is because they fear more what would happen if they run
from death. For instance, a soldier who faces down a Harold of enemies to protect his family,
he fears death no less than any other man, its only that he fears the idea of losing his family
even more. In that sense according to Socrates, the man is only brave through his greater fear.
Which is ridiculous according to Socrates, it makes much more sense to exchange these fears
and vices not for more fears and vices but for wisdom so that a man may gain real
temperance, real courage, anything else is just wasteful, he argues.

Despite Socrates’ confidence some of his friends are not convinced that the soul would
survive after the death of the body. They are fearful that after the body dies, so too will the
soul. To dispel their fear, Socrates then goes on to explain a couple of arguments that are
design to prove just that.
PHAEDO: A Summary

The first argument as it was is based on the idea that everything comes into being through its
opposite state. For instance, for something to come in at a state of being big it must
necessarily at one point have been small or at least smaller. The same applies to life and death
which are opposite states, to be dead it must have once been alive, and to be alive means it
must have once been dead. Socrates further reasons that it must be cyclical process. For if it
were to proceed in a straight line, life to death with no way back, eventually everything will
gather at the end and the whole world would be dead. This theory does not completely satisfy
everybody present, so Socrates raises up another idea based on his theory of recollection,
which marks the beginning of his second argument.

Socrates’ second argument, the theory of recollection, is based on the idea that all learning is
merely recollection. It Involves remembering things that the soul once previously knew. The
gist of recollection is that because people are able to comprehend abstract qualities that aren’t
actually observable in the real world, they must have had previous knowledge of them.

For instance, the fact that some can see two sticks lying on the ground and recognize that
while they aren’t exactly equal in length and other aspect, they come close, that is to say that
the fact somebody can recognize that two sticks defectively resemble a state of equality
implies that the person has knowledge of equality. Socrates knows this because things in the
real world deficiently resembles a perfect ideal, and we recognize this instinctually. Socrates
maintains that we had this knowledge before our birth but at the moment we came into this
world we lost all of it, thus requiring us to re-learn everything through recollection. This
implies that our soul must have existed before birth, for it to lose something at the moment of
birth we must have had it before and to have knowledge of anything requires the soul itself to
actually exist.

Socrates then proceeds to his third argument. Socrates claims that the soul bares an affinity to
the invisible, the immortal and indissoluble while the body exhibits an affinity to the visible,
the mortal and the dissoluble. Socrates first remarks that the forms such as beauty, equality,
justice are invisible and immutable. The soul likewise is invisible and immutable, the body on
the other hand is visible and susceptible to change. Finally, he notes that the soul resembles
PHAEDO: A Summary
the divine because the soul commands the body and not vice versa. Thus, Socrates concludes
that because the soul bares an affinity to eternal forms, the soul must also be immortal.

Next, Socrates faces a competing view on the nature of the soul presented by Simmias and to
a lesser extent Cebes, who believed that the soul is a composite of parts, an attunement as
Socrates puts it. Now at this point everyone in the room is utterly convinced on the theory of
recollection which Socrates state is incompatible with the idea of the soul as an attunement.
This is because an attunement should be impossible if the component parts, meaning the body
don’t exist yet. Furthermore, an attunement necessarily follows from function of its parts, it
can’t direct them.

The metaphor that Socrates uses to explain this is that of a harp and the parts making up the
harp, the wood and the strings are like the part of the body with the attunement being the harp
itself. The parts used to create the harp determine the shape, form and quality of the harp
itself. If this is the case of the body and the soul, then the soul would be incapable of
opposing the body. But Socrates shows this is not the case by looking at any philosopher,
who strives to master his body and deny its urges.

Socrates also notes another major problem with the idea of an attuned soul. That no soul can
be more or less a soul than any other, which Socrates and his friend agree, that virtues are yet
another kind of attunement then all souls should be equally virtuous in fact, assuming that
vice is the opposite of virtue and therefore a non-attunement vice shouldn’t exist in any soul
at all which is obviously not the case.

At this point Socrates has established firmly with those present that the soul exists before life
and after death. But that’s not enough, Cebes agrees with Socrates that the soul is more
enduring than the body, but he maintained that no one can be sure of that, after the soul
repeatedly wearing out a great many bodies, it does not at last perish itself? He argues that
death maybe precisely this the destruction of the soul after a great many lives. Thus, life is
still a whole lot more precious than Socrates makes it out to be.

So, Socrates sets out to prove that the soul is in fact undying, immortal. To do this Socrates
tells everyone present a story of his younger days, when he dabbled in natural science,
PHAEDO: A Summary
looking for the cause of things coming into being and ceasing to exist. One day he stumbled
upon the writings of Anaxagoras and his theory of mind. It caught his eye. What Socrates got
out of it is, this entity called mind would arrange things in a way that was best for that
particular thing. And he then explained the cause of that thing by describing how it was best
for that thing to be the way it was. Socrates was delighted by this idea but as he read further,
he realized that Anaxagoras didn’t take this avenue of reasoning at all. He set a few premises
seized what followed from them, keeping what would agree with what he said as true already.
Which he considers as illogical.

The premise that Socrates starts with is, there’s such a thing as beautiful, just, small, big and
the like. That is to say there’s an ideal form of such things and the like. Socrates reckons that
with this he can finally explain the ultimate cause of things. Something would be big because
it connects in some way to the ideal form, bigness. And something beautiful because it
touches on the ideal form of beauty. This may not be the most descriptive explanation but
Socrates is trying to work with as few assumptions as possible. In summary, things only bare
characteristic because they connect with the ideal forms these characteristics represent.

Furthermore, these forms can never admit their opposites, according to Socrates, that isn’t to
say that something that is tall cannot become short and vice versa but tallness can never
become shortness, for something tall to become short that thing’s tallness must either retreat
or be destroyed. To illustrate this point Socrates compares the height of himself, Simmias and
Crito, Socrates is the shortest followed by Simmias in the middle and Crito is the tallest.
According to Socrates, Crito isn’t the tallest because he is Crito, it’s just he has more tallness
than either Simmias and Socrates while Simmias has more tallness than Socrates but less
tallness and more shortness than Crito. And Socrates has more shortness than either. Simmias
then is both tall and short, tall compared to Socrates and short compared to Crito. This is
possible because Simmias is not dependent on the characteristics of tallness and shortness for
his existence he merely happens to connect to the form of tall and short in a particular way.

Socrates then gives another example, in this case comparing the characteristics of fire and ice.
Fire being hot and ice being cold. In this case both fire and ice are dependent on their
connection to their respective form of hotness and coldness and seize to exist when that
connection is savored. Bring coldness into fire and the fire goes out, heat into ice and the ice
PHAEDO: A Summary
melts. They will never admit their opposite characteristic for they are defined by their
connection to their respective form.

Using this idea of things that always bring along their respective form such as fire always
bringing along hotness. Socrates derives a more descriptive way of naming causatives. A
person’s body is hot not because of heat but fire which brings heat along with it. And to
explain if someone is sick, we don’t say he possesses sickness but rather he has a fever,
which necessarily brings sickness along with it. Then Socrates concludes that the thing that
brings about life in a body is soul, this would mean that life would then be a necessary
characteristic of the soul and that the soul can therefore never admit the opposite of what it
brings which is death. And that which does not admit death, is immortal, thus the immortality
of the soul.

Now with this everyone present with Socrates at the time is convinced of the immortality of
the soul, which allows the soul to retreat at the prospect of death in the same way that fire
would retreat or perish to on coming cold. Deathlessness must also imply indestructibility,
though no formal argument is given for it, there’s some justification for it, at least in the
minds of the men present, that if the form of life itself and all other deathless entities are not
indestructible then nothing at all is. This proposition appears to be something that either
Socrates or any of his companion are willing to venture.

At this point the formal discussion ends and Socrates spends sometime finishing up his affair.
He bathes and speaks to his family and children and then close to sun down, he finally
requests to be given the poison that would kill him. As the poison starts to reach his heart,
lying on the bed, he speaks his last words to Crito and bids him to offer up a cock to
Asclepius (The god of Doctors and medicine) who typically receives sacrifices when people
want to recover from sickness, the point being that even with his last breath Socrates once
more affirm that death is the cure to the limitations of the body.

The Phaedo is not only a philosophical discussion but also a great work of literature and
should be approached as a work of art. The setting and dramatic interplay of characters help
create an artistic effect which, in its way, produces a transformative experience and this
transformation parallels what Socrates is describing in his discussion of what philosophy is.
PHAEDO: A Summary
The ultimate aim is thus accomplished, and that is to help us gain a glimpse into what is the
essential message of philosophy (or more accurately, Philosophia = love of wisdom). We
love wisdom on part because we, our souls, are of the same stuff as it is – something divine,
external, transcendent and immortal. In order to experience this, essence, we must learn to
detach ourselves from clinging or yearning for material things. And this is what I believe he
means by the ‘practice of dying’

An important point to note about Phaedo is the grace with which Socrates faces his final
hours. This work is quite a testimony to the character of Socrates, as Plato saw from his
perspective, and an inspiration to those who truly believe in themselves and their personal
philosophy. Socrates was a dedicated philosopher with a talent for discussion and passion for
learning. He was remembered by his friends for being wise and good-natured, and in the
closing words of Phaedo, “such was the end of our comrade. A man who we would say, was
of all those we have known the best, and also the wisest and the most upright”.