Phaedo

Introduction

The Phaedo is Plato's dialogue on the immortality of the soul, set on the day of Socrates's execution in 399 BCE and narrated retrospectively by Phaedo of Elis to a Pythagorean group in Phlius. It is the fourth of the four dialogues that frame Socrates's death (Euthyphro, Apology, Crito, Phaedo) and the first work in the Platonic corpus to present the Theory of Forms as a developed philosophical doctrine. It is also one of the most dramatically realized of the dialogues — the dialogue's setting (the prison cell, the gathering of friends, the moment of death) is integral to its philosophical work, not merely backdrop.

The Phaedo sits at a transitional moment in Plato's writing. The early Socratic dialogues had largely operated within the historical Socrates's apparent commitments, with the elenchus producing aporia about ethical concepts. The Phaedo operates differently: Socrates here is a speaker for distinctively Platonic doctrines (the Forms, recollection, the tripartite soul foreshadowed) in a way that suggests Plato is using the figure of Socrates to advance positions Plato himself has developed.

Form, length, date, language

The Phaedo is a narrated dialogue: Phaedo of Elis tells the story of Socrates's last day to Echecrates and a group of Pythagoreans at Phlius, several months after the event. The narrative frame embeds direct dialogue within it. The work is approximately 30,000 words in Greek and was composed in Plato's middle period, conventionally placed around 385–380 BCE. The original language is Attic Greek.

The dialogue's principal interlocutors with Socrates are Simmias and Cebes, two young Theban philosophers with Pythagorean training. The choice of Pythagorean interlocutors is significant — the doctrines under discussion (the immortality of the soul, the cycle of births, the philosophical life as a preparation for death) have Pythagorean as well as Socratic roots, and the Phaedo is partly a working-out of how the Socratic tradition will engage the Pythagorean inheritance.

Why it was written

The Phaedo responds to the same event as the Apology — Socrates's execution — but addresses it at a different level. Where the Apology presents Socrates's defense in his own voice, the Phaedo asks the philosophical question that the execution raises most acutely: if the soul dies with the body, then Socrates's calm acceptance of death and his commitment to philosophy as a way of life make no sense, since the philosopher would have been arguing himself into worse rather than better circumstances. The dialogue's argument is that this conclusion can be resisted: the soul is immortal, philosophy is the preparation for the soul's separation from the body, and Socrates's death is not a defeat but a culmination.

The larger philosophical purpose is the working-out of a metaphysics adequate to ground the Socratic ethical commitments. The argument requires the Theory of Forms (without eternal objects of knowledge, the soul's immortality would not give it anything stable to know); the doctrine of recollection (without prior contact with the Forms, the soul would not have the knowledge it manifestly has); and a sharp distinction between soul and body (without which the soul cannot survive the body's death). The Phaedo is the first dialogue to assemble all of these into a single argument.

Structure and argument

The dialogue divides into the dramatic frame and four major argumentative sections.

The setting and the philosopher's attitude toward death (57a–69e). Phaedo describes the morning of the execution. Socrates is calm and even cheerful; he explains that the philosopher should welcome death because philosophy is precisely the practice of separating the soul from the body — the cultivation of pure thought against the distractions of sensation, appetite, and embodied desire. To die is to complete what the philosopher has been practicing all along.

The cyclical argument (69e–72e). Socrates argues that opposites generate opposites: the warmer comes from the cooler, sleeping from waking, dying from living. If the cycle is to be maintained, the living must also come from the dying, which requires that souls persist after death and return to bodies.

The argument from recollection (72e–77a). Knowledge of necessary truths (such as that two things can be equal) cannot be derived from sense experience, which provides only imperfect particulars. The soul must therefore have acquired this knowledge before birth, retained it in latent form, and recollected it through experience. This requires the soul's pre-existence and (by extension) its persistence beyond death.

The affinity argument (78b–80c). The soul, being unitary, invisible, and akin to the eternal Forms, is by its nature more like what is imperishable than what is perishable. The body, composite and visible, is more like the perishable. By natural affinity, the soul is more naturally immortal.

Objections and the final argument (84c–107b). Simmias and Cebes raise serious objections. Simmias proposes that the soul might be like a harmony of bodily parts, perishing when the parts that produce it are dissolved (the harmony objection). Cebes proposes that the soul might persist through several bodies but eventually wear out (the weaver objection). Socrates responds to both with extended arguments. The final, most ambitious argument (the argument from the Form of Life) holds that the soul cannot admit its opposite (death) any more than the number three can admit its opposite (evenness); the soul, by its essence as the principle of life, cannot die.

The closing myth and death (107c–118a). Socrates concludes with a long myth describing the geography of the soul's journey after death and the various conditions awaiting souls based on the lives they have led. The dialogue ends with the actual death: Socrates drinks the hemlock, walks until his legs grow heavy, lies down, and grows cold from the feet up. His last words are reportedly Crito, we owe a cock to Asclepius; pay it, do not forget — a request that has been the subject of two and a half millennia of commentary.

Key passages

• 64a — Those who do philosophy in the right way practice nothing other than dying and being dead.
• 66b–67b — the body as the prison-house of the soul; philosophy as purification.
• 72e–76e — the argument from recollection.
• 78b–80c — the affinity argument; the soul's kinship to the Forms.
• 96a–100b — Socrates's intellectual autobiography, including the famous rejection of Anaxagorean mechanism and the second sailing toward the Forms.
• 102a–107a — the final argument from the essence of the soul.
• 115c–118a — the death scene.

Reception history

The Phaedo was foundational for the Platonist and Neoplatonist traditions and for the Christian appropriation of Platonic metaphysics. Augustine's account of the soul in De Immortalitate Animae and De Trinitate draws heavily on Phaedonian arguments. The medieval Latin West knew the Phaedo in Henricus Aristippus's twelfth-century Latin translation (the only Platonic dialogue available in complete Latin form before the Renaissance), and it shaped the medieval discussion of personal immortality.

The Renaissance recovery, especially through Ficino's translation and his own Theologia Platonica (1482), made the Phaedo one of the central texts of Renaissance Platonism. The Cambridge Platonists of the seventeenth century (Henry More, Ralph Cudworth) treated it as a primary text. In the modern period, the Phaedo's arguments for immortality have been less central to academic philosophy (which has largely set the question of personal immortality aside) but the dialogue remains a standard text for its treatment of the Theory of Forms and its dramatic philosophical staging.

The Phaedo's influence on the practice of philosophical death has been substantial. The model of Socrates dying calmly in conversation with his friends shaped a long tradition of philosophical death scenes — from Seneca (whose death deliberately echoed Socrates's) through Hume (whose calm last weeks, recorded by James Boswell and Adam Smith, were treated as a kind of secular Phaedonian death) to modern reflections on philosophical equanimity in the face of finitude.

Contemporary engagement

The standard contemporary scholarly edition is David Gallop's translation and commentary (Oxford, 1975); other major editions include G.M.A. Grube's (Hackett), R. Hackforth's Plato's Phaedo (Cambridge, 1955), and the Loeb edition by H.N. Fowler. Major recent scholarly monographs include David Sedley's The Midwife of Platonism (2003), Christopher Rowe's Plato and the Art of Philosophical Writing (2007), and the relevant chapters in the Cambridge Companion to Plato. Active scholarly disputes concern the philosophical adequacy of the four arguments for immortality (whether any is sound by contemporary standards), the relation between the Phaedo's metaphysics and the later Republic and Parmenides, and the interpretation of Socrates's last words.

Further reading

• Plato — the author
• Socrates — the speaker, here in his final hours
• Apology — the dialogue framing Socrates's trial
• Platonism — the tradition
• Dialectic — the method the arguments deploy
• Virtue — the ethical concept Socrates's life and death embody

The most dramatically realized of the Platonic dialogues. The first systematic statement of the Theory of Forms.