Ep. 265: Plato’s “Phaedo”: Philosophy as Training for Death (Part One)

0:07 Mark: You're listening to the Partially Examined Life, a podcast by some guys who are at one point set out doing philosophy for a living, but then thought better of it. Our question for episode 265 is something like, does the soul persist after death? We're reading Plato's dialogue Phaedo, probably written around 390bc. For more information, please visit partiallyexaminedlife.com this is Mark Linsenmayer exchanging all my coins for wisdom in Madison, Wisconsin.

0:30 Dylan: This is Seth probably not on my last body for this soul in Austin, Texas.

0:39 Seth: This is Wes Alwan trying to perfect the art of dying in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

0:44 Wes: This is Dylan Casey wondering if the jacket I bought this weekend will outlive me or not. In Madison, Wisconsin.

0:51 Mark: The Phaedo Man. Why didn't we do this eight years ago? Yeah, I guess I thought it was redundant of other things. I remember reading this as an undergrad and really being turned off by it because it was just so. Oh yeah, the soul persists after that. I didn't want to hear this from philosophy. I didn't want to hear the dogma that I was raised on being affirmed by Socrates. I liked the apology. I liked other things by him, but this one just turned me off. And I thought it was much shorter than it was. I thought this would, like, be not even a whole episode's worth. But it is. It's beefy.

1:25 Wes: It's like a whole statement of everything in Plato all in one little dialogue.

1:31 Seth: Yes. Well, it's the first, and it's the first statement of the theory of forms.

1:35 Wes: And a recollection of the theory of recollection.

1:38 Seth: Yes.

1:38 Wes: Rereading it made me think, you know, if there's one Platonic dialogue that someone should read, it should be this one. It's readable, it's literarily very consumable. It's not like a gigantic book like the Republic it cover. This is the one you should read.

1:56 Dylan: Stylistically, it's like a prototypical Platonic dialogue. Yeah, it flows exactly like you would expect. If you want to get a taste of how it usually rolls.

2:05 Mark: Is it the Platonic form of a Platonic dialogue?

2:09 Wes: Yes, instantiated, so it's one step removed. I happened to also listen to it while I was driving back from Santa Fe on audible, and there are a couple of different versions, but I just picked the one that had the largest number of starred ratings and it has some goofy music on it, whoever put it together. But it's read as a play and it's just remarkably listenable. I was flabbergasted at how listenable it was. And to anybody who doesn't want to necessarily read it, go listen to it. It's like two and a half hours. And it was really pleasurable.

2:45 Mark: Well, even the Librivox version, the reader is quite good on this one.

2:50 Wes: Cool.

2:50 Mark: I started the dialogue reading it and then put it aside for a while and then felt like, okay, let me just listen to the whole on fairly fast speed to kind of get. Map out the terrain and then I can take my notes. And that works very well. Sort of like the Timaeus, but. And there is a Timaeus like section toward the end where he's telling the story of what he actually thinks happens to the soul after death and describing the terrain of Tartarus and the details. More cosmology, really. You can see that this is the same person who wrote the Timaeus, whereas so much of the rest of it is very much like you'd expect from the Mino or Euthyphro or something like that.

3:24 Wes: I agree about that. But the myth that's at the end of here reminded me a lot more of other myths than the Timaeus did. When we read it, it reminded me of the myth of er, and Socrates trots those out all the time. And I didn't feel exactly that same way when I was reading the cosmology of Timaeus.

3:40 Mark: Dylan, did you teach this multiple times?

3:43 Wes: I read it at St. John's and I wrote a song when I was an undergrad that imagines this moment keying off of Socrates, writing lyrical poetry and dancing. So when I was undergrad, I wrote a song called I Saw Socrates Dancing.

4:03 Mark: Well, maybe I'll break my no music at the end of part two convention. And we'll stick that there for the supporters. Seth, what was your deal with this?

4:12 Dylan: This might be my first time. It's very possible that I read it a long time ago, but it's not something that ever came across my path that I have strong memories of the way I do of other Platonic dialogues. And since I wasn't, you know, a classicist or. It's not something that came up and it's not one of those dialogues that gets referred to often in the kind of contemporary continental line that I was studying. You know, sometimes you have these weird readings like Heidegger or Derrida or whoever's reading. They'll make reference to Plato. It's not typically to this postmodernism isn't very fascinated with the afterlife.

I guess I Will say after Timaeus, it was a pleasant surprise. I know I didn't participate in the Timaeus episode, but I found the reading torturous and just hellish because I thought we were reading philosophy and it just. I was like, if I wanted this, I would just read works and days. I found this one super consumable. It's so good in that the argument is so on the face compelling that you're like, oh, it's the best of Plato, where you're like the best of a Socratic dialogue, where you're like, it's too obviously good, but I can't quite figure out how it's not right or it's not working or what the assumptions are.

And it makes you want to just dive in and start peeling it apart. It's super enjoyable.

5:27 Seth: Wow.

5:27 Mark: I guess I did not agree about the quality of the arguments. I mean, we'll get into it obviously, but as an overall structural thing, maybe we can just lay it out for folks. So this is right up until the moment of Socrates death. He's been convicted maybe a year ago, something like that. But there was some deal with a ship and honoring Apollo. Athens wasn't going to kill anybody until a certain time had passed. So he got this extra time. So he's talking with his followers, including Phaedo, sometimes called Phaedo, or Phaedo if you're British. So the whole thing is Phaedo telling another guy's this story and the story that he's telling, mainly Socrates interlocutors are these guys, Simmias and Cebes or Cebes, C, E, B, E, S from Thebes.

So these foreigners, they're the ones who are mostly engaging with him about does the soul persist after death? That's the bulk of the philosophical work. First, did the soul exist before we were born? And so that's when the theory of recollection comes in and the theory of forms comes in. And then through some cosmological reasoning, do things always come from their opposites? That was a very strange section for me. And a few other things does decide that yes, actually we can know for sure that the soul exists after death, or at least for sure enough.

Whereas most of these dialogues seem to be just for truth's sake, like Socrates is a very important thing that he needs to soothe himself, he needs to face death in a courageous way. And he starts off the dialogue saying, of course, you know, I've been preparing for death as a philosopher, the philosopher. This is exactly the kind of text Nietzsche was arguing against. The Philosopher eschews the things of the mortal realm, money and pleasure and fame, and is always looking toward what is otherworldly, what is pure. That's how the philosopher prepares for death.

So that's the starting point. Goes through these arguments with Simmias and Kabes, Simmias and Cebes. How do you guys want to say that? Simmias and Cebes, I guess I like that the best.

7:25 Wes: That's what I would say.

7:26 Mark: Then ends up having some exchanges with Phaedo himself and Crito right toward the end. And then we have some drama about him actually dying.

7:34 Seth: On a surface level, it's framed as a dialogue about what happens after death. Right. And so the idea is that Socrates need not be afraid of death, and Simmias and Cebes, who are very unhappy about what's about to happen to Socrates, is poisoning, which, by the way, is a very poignant ending. I think he's reassuring them. But really, really, it's just a vehicle for giving us an explication of some metaphysical and epistemological views and some ethical views. So I don't see this dialogue primarily as about what happens to the soul after death. I think in the same way that, you know, the Timaeus gives us a lot of epistemology as well, I see this primarily as a way of getting those views across.

We'll end up getting basically four arguments for the immortality of the soul. Each of those arguments will present some sort of epistemological or ontological view. Essentially, those views are put forth in service of the immortality of the soul.

8:33 Wes: It's clear that there's those epistemological and ontological views presented in there. But there's also the, for lack of a better term, the dramatic action about, like, what he's doing with respect to presenting a kind of consolation to Simmias and Cebes as part of his argument. And I think there's some interesting things about how that ends up working out. I mean, not the least of which is you have this presentation of arguments which it's not clear that they're very good. It's not clear that they aren't at times contradicting each other. In fact, it's sort of explicitly called out later in the dialogue that one of the versions of the immortality seems to contradict the beginning version of immortality.

And Socrates addresses that. And then there's the myth at the end and how those are all functioning in terms of what kind of teaching about the philosophical life is being implied there. And what's that relation with sort of the Explicit teaching to the extent that it's clear. Clear about forms and immortality of the soul and stuff like that.

9:36 Seth: That's the ethical component of the dialogue. Right. How ought we to live? And we ought to embrace dying. Philosophy turns out to be a form of dying. So not only is it that we should face our deaths happily because the soul is immortal, but in fact we should be doing that during life and purifying ourselves in preparation for actual death by practicing the art of dying, which is philosophy. I think Nietzsche was thinking a lot about this dialogue. When he's writing about things like the

10:04 Wes: ascetic ideal, there's interesting pieces where his bodily existence, his enjoyment of life and enjoyment of living is depicted. Here he's not a Stoic monk. Right. He's laughing, he's cajoling, he's playing with Phaedo's hair in the last days of his life, he's writing verse. And you know, maybe contra Nietzsche's interpretation, at least here, he doesn't seem to me to be. He's certainly not embodying a kind of Stoic ideal.

10:34 Seth: So there's a tension between the dramatic elements, between the way Socrates comes across and behaves, and the assertions within the dialogue about how we ought to treat the body as a prison and all our desires and bodily functions as distractions, things that we need to turn away from. Yeah, I think that sort of tension is something we've seen arise many times in the Platonic dialogues and in various forms. For instance, since the criticism of art and poetry versus the quasi poetic forms

11:07 Wes: of the dialogues, I think we should take it seriously.

11:10 Mark: This is around the same time as a symposium, right. As far as scholars know.

11:13 Seth: Yeah. They place this in the middle period,

11:16 Mark: or early middle period, I guess, before the Republic is, from what I understand.

11:19 Wes: Yeah. What I read was uncontroversially, it was

11:23 Seth: written before the Republic, So right before the republic. So the Republic is also a middle period dialogue. So we've done. The early period dialogues that we've done are Protagoras, for instance, apology, Crito, Gorgias, the Euthyphros in the first two, and then stuff we haven't done, like Lysis.

11:38 Mark: So where is Symposium?

11:39 Seth: Meno, Symposium, Republic. Symposium is middle as well. Right before the Phaedo.

11:44 Wes: The only other setting thing is Mark mentioned about the delay that was going on. So the delay is that there's a ceremony where they sail, seven teenage girls and seven teenage boys and they sail to Delos from Athens and then come back. It's a part of these Ian commemorating sort of the sacrifice of the young people to the gods for the Minotaur. That whole story of Theseus and stuff like that. One thing I wanted to comment on is I actually, a year and a half ago, sailed to Delos.

12:18 Seth: Wow.

12:19 Wes: From Athens. I was on a sailing trip and one of the places we stopped was Delos, which was honestly really quite cool. I mean, it had, you know, these 2,000 year old ruins and older ruins than that, depending on the wind. That's why it took so long. You know, they sail there and then there's also lots of ceremonies they have to do. It's not so far that I would expect them to take a year to make the round trip sailing.

12:44 Mark: I saw that it was a vow to Apollo to honor this thing that Theseus had done. And I didn't know if that was significant because Socrates identifies Apollo as sort of his God. You know, of course, Nietzsche runs with that.

12:55 Wes: It probably is.

12:56 Mark: And we do get some stuff that is very much like the republic in here in terms of not exactly the myth of the cave from the Republic, but something pretty darn close to that in the mythical section that does really divide up the world into this dark place that we experience on a day to day basis. And what we're going to be in touch with if we've been good philosophers after death, that division between the real world and this world of shadows, that is another thing that Nietzsche specifically wants to destroy that distinction, that thinks it has terrible results for how much you don't appreciate your current world and your current life.

And I like having that in mind and seeing if that is fair, I wanted to point out how close it is to the symposium because the symposium is also about, you know, it's a big party. Well, this is not a big party here. Although he does, when he's about to drink the hemlock, he's like, can we make this a toast?

13:50 Wes: Pour some libations.

13:51 Mark: Yes.

13:52 Wes: He can't pour it out because there's only enough to kill him.

13:55 Mark: Okay. So that's when you kind of drop some on the ground. I wasn't sure if he's like, can we hand some of this out to everybody?

14:02 Wes: He's praying to the gods. And so he doesn't pour the libations because he has to take the whole drink. But he does pray.

14:07 Seth: So he wasn't trying to turn that into a Jim Jones moment. Let's all drink the Kool Aid together.

14:15 Mark: Well, but one of the first things he says here is like, tell this other philosopher he should Follow me into death pretty quick. That kind of gets the ball rolling of like, why would you possibly say that? That sounds horrible. Like, well, for a philosopher, death is not so bad. And this kicks off the initial question of why shouldn't you kill yourself if death is so great? If you're not afraid of death, Socrates, then why not suicide? If you think heaven is so great, well, just freaking die already. But that's ruled out right at the beginning of the dialogue here.

14:46 Wes: Yeah, so this is like around 61 and beginning of 62. Right before this, Socrates was talking about the fact that he was putting Aesop's fables to music. Then he has a comment about Evenus. Cebes asks him, what are you saying? It isn't lawful for him to do violence to himself, but the philosopher should be willing to follow after somebody who's dying. And he then goes on to talk about why you can't kill yourself. The account that's been given about these things and the mysteries that we humans are in a sort of garrison and one is bound not to release oneself from it or run off, appears to me to be a grand one and not easy to make out.

And yet this at any rate seems to me to be well put. The gods care for us and we humans are one of the gods possessions. So he goes on to basically make an argument that we belong to the gods. That's the first one, the first of his defenses about not committing suicide.

15:40 Mark: Right, we are owned by God. It is not within our right to do that. Cebes says it's unreasonable that the wisest of men should not be resentful at quitting this service. In other words, God's service, where they're directed by the best directors there are the gods. Since a man of this sort surely doesn't believe he'll care for himself any better on becoming free, a stupid man would perhaps believe that. He would think that he should escape from his master and wouldn't reflect that a good master is not one to escape from, but to stay with as long as possible.

And so his escape would be irrational. But a man of intelligence would surely always want to be with one better than himself. So this is not Socrates talking, but just we were starting off on a very archaic note. In other words, you could see what this had enormous influence apparently on Christian theology. And starting right here with this idea that we're owned by God and we should not want to escape, servitude to the right master is good. Something that sounds very weird to us, but it seems like then if you believe that, then you shouldn't follow Socrates.

So this sort of opens up this problem for Socrates of the philosopher does seem to want to escape life. And if life is sort servitude to the gods, why would he want to do that? So Socrates explained that this is not actually what the philosopher's death amounts to.

16:50 Wes: Socrates characterizes what's being asked of him as making another defense. So there's a sense of that in the court of Simmias and Cebes, he's got to defend his point of view. So hearkening back to the apology, it's

17:02 Seth: his right to die he's defending though

17:04 Mark: well, he thinks he'll enter the presence first of other gods, both wise and Good. This is 62E or so and next of dead men better than those in this world. Then I should be wrong not to be resentful at death, but as it is, be assured that I expect to join the company of good men, although that point I shouldn't affirm with absolute conviction, but that I shall enter the presence of God, who are very good masters. A man who has truly spent his life in philosophy feels confident when about to die and is hopeful that when he has died he will win very great benefits in the other world.

So he's going to try to explain why this could be. On the one hand, he wants to say that it's not a matter of us trading in lesser pleasures for greater ones, right? This is the way Locke had put it, that the pleasures, the afterlife, are going to be so great that we should not be swept up in these immediate temptations. And sometimes Plato, through Socrates mouth sounds exactly like that. But in other times he's saying that it seems just the spirit of Platonic inquiry, of Socratic inquiry, is it's toward truth, it's virtue for its own sake. It's not because I will receive great rewards, whether in this life or the next.

It is because it's just the right thing to do because I'm pointed toward the good. So that was a strange conflict for me. I don't know. Did you guys feel like he was wavering in his absolute devotion to truth and virtue by emphasizing how great things are probably going to be for him?

18:22 Seth: In talking about the philosopher dying and making a practice of that in life, he is sort of talking about the reward in this life because it is intimately connected to virtue and to happiness. It represents an ethical ideal, this dying, an ethical ideal that involves separating our soul, as he puts it, from the body. So that's what he thinks of as death in a literal sense. But that is also something that is possible. If we do enough philosophy, we can pry them apart gradually in life. And the advantage of that is that in prying them apart we can gain more access to what is true and not be distracted by the body.

And I presumably become more virtuous, less bothered by bodily needs and so on. So I think, yeah, Mark, you're right to say in some ways he's setting up a set of rewards in the afterlife as a motivation. But those rewards, there's an image of them within life that are ethical and intellectual rewards that we enjoy while living. Those are just things that are kind of mirrored in the afterlife.

19:30 Wes: And also that the rewards of moderation and justice, not just for the intellect, but also for the enjoyment of life. I think that's part of the argument.

19:41 Mark: I'm just trying to think about the difference between an Aristotelian view of virtue, where as Socrates points out here, obviously not talking about Aristotle, but talking about some people use temperance because they are afraid of their own, really, to get further pleasures, right? If you drink so much that you feel terrible the next day, on balance, that was not a good investment, right? Because you're not maximizing your pleasure that way. And that's one way maybe an Aristotelian might say, or a Stoic might say, that you can maximize your overall pleasure or your minimized pain, right?

That's the thing to worry about for the Stoic, much more so by being moderate in all things. Whereas the way Nietzsche dismisses all these guys, it's they're being ascetic, they're really throwing away even all the pleasures of this world for something singular, not as Aristotle would describe it, having a well balanced life. The relevant part in this dialogue is around 68, 69. This is what I referred to in my intro, the exchanging of pleasures for pleasures, pains for pains and fear for fear, greater for lesser ones, like coins. It may be rather that this alone is the right coin for which one should exchange all these things.

Wisdom, that the philosopher is not temperate just so that he can have a nice relaxed time. He's temperate because he just does not care. He despises, actively despises the things that one might indulge in because they're so crappy compared to wisdom. And yes, wisdom is a satisfying thing. And maybe you can have a nice time with your friends in a way that Aristotle would approve of and not like a hair shirt. I will whip my back for the sake of wisdom because I so don't care about the flesh, that I will mortify the flesh. Like it's not that kind of asceticism, but it's not either Aristotelian balanced kind either.

21:33 Wes: The word in my translation, it gets used as purification. There's something in common with it. But this purification seems different than the kind of purification of deprivation.

21:44 Seth: Simply speaking, we're engaged in moderation, not as Mark is emphasizing, for the sake of future pleasures. So this is not the marshmallow test. This is not delay of gratification. That's not what's going on here. That's what he's trying to say. This is self denial. Wouldn't say exactly for its own sake, but for the sake of. I think he's kind of already spelled it down for the sake of getting away from the distractions and the pains of the body. And I would see it as, in a way, as serving the Aristotelian ideal of contemplation. So for Aristotle we do get a more practical take on all this.

He includes habituation, he talks about activity in accordance with virtue and all that. But he kind of takes a turn when he talks about the highest activity that we can engage in is contemplation. And it sort of trumps everything else. And I think that's what's going on here. A kind of contemplative life is important for its own sake and is the highest good.

22:44 Wes: It's probably worth commenting here that at least by reputation, Socrates had the reputation for being able to drink more than anybody else all the time without getting drunk.

22:55 Mark: Without getting drunk.

22:56 Wes: Yeah. That he didn't lose his faculties, but he could drink more than anybody else.

23:00 Mark: So 64 he's talking about. Do you think it befits a philosophical man to be keen about the so called pleasures of, for example, food and drink? Not in the least, Socrates, said Simmias. And what about those of sex? Not at all. And then clothes and fame. Right. Such a man's concern is instead directed toward the soul. So does that align with him being fond of a drink or the fact that he doesn't get drunk means that he's merely. He just likes to have to pee. I guess he just likes to drink for no reason.

23:29 Wes: I guess what I find myself going back and forth on it is that there's the. On the one hand, the seriousness with which to take the teachings and then the way in which. Central to the whole thing is the fact that you're constantly making arguments and going back and forth on them and that routinely. And this dialogue isn't Any different. That there is a kind of plea, it's better to have this view than not kind of argument. Because of basically a kind of mythical plea that we live better lives by thinking about it in this way. And so I find myself alternately taking seriously and then not taking seriously all the pieces.

24:14 Seth: So I think, for the sake of this dialogue. I think you're right, Dylan. Of course, there's lots of tension between different views of Socrates. You know, the whole thing about him being able to drink a lot. And I think within this dialogue, it's pretty consistent. You know, it may be rather that this alone is the right coin for which one should exchange all things, wisdom and the buying and the selling of all things for that. Or rather with that may be real bravery, temperance, justice, and in short, true goodness in company with wisdom. Then he says, temperance, justice and bravery may in fact be a kind of purification of all such things.

And wisdom itself a kind of purifying. Right. So I just wanted to emphasize, once again, this conception of virtue or the highest good is one that emphasizes the contemplative life and wisdom and not what we might think of as ordinary practical virtues and the leading of a good life in the ordinary sense. I think it does emphasize the aesthetic. How that fits in with the rest of the dialogues. And the Platonic or Socratic view as a whole, I think is a very complicated question. Because I think Plato, in a way, is ambivalent. And that comes out in some of

25:21 Dylan: these tensions that felt to me like a very Platonic position. You're talking about it in terms of virtue and telos and so forth. But ultimately this hangs on the idea that wisdom is acquisition of sure, permanent and eternal knowledge. Knowledge of the good, the beautiful, the just. And the access to that is through, as you mentioned, Wes, it's contemplative, it's reason. And that strikes me as very consistent with the vast majority of the way Plato positions knowledge in other parts of the corpus. So this didn't strike me as unusual for Plato or for Socrates, but making the distinction here, the abnegation of the body more aggressively.

I had to read the section on temperance against that to say it's not that he's saying you shouldn't enjoy food or life or what have you, right? We're servants of the gods. The gods have given us this life. It would be bad if we were to just be like ascetic cynics. But by the way that you live, you substitute the search for wisdom, particularly something that's embodied or that's temporal, that's tied to the body, like physical exertion or drinking or food or sex whatever whatever. It's two things. You're not being temperate, but you're also pointing at the wrong goal.

26:41 Mark: Right? I think Wes was contrasting the folks on the contemplative life to the practical virtues as like, you might think that courage is a special virtue, that you don't really know how to do it until you've faced a variety of dangers, types of danger, situations that you had with relation to the danger. It's something that you need to feel your way through partially by paying attention to your body, right? You hear bromides like it's okay to feel fear because courage is facing that fear. Well, being in touch with your fear and your relation. Fear is the mind killer.

You know, even if you ultimately come down to there has to be some executive part of you, whether it's the reasoning part or some other executive part of you that trounces on the fear or trounces on these other temptations, the things that the body might be telling you to do, fight or flight. It still is a matter of engaging with your body. Whereas his view of wisdom here is that it really is. Anytime the body gets involved, it distracts you from the pursuit of wisdom.

27:44 Seth: In thinking of courage or bravery in the ordinary way, I might think, well, it's what I need to go into battle, it's what I need to face certain challenges in life. It's what I need for, let's say, assertiveness, to put it in more contemporary terms, and stuff that's applicable to practical daily life. And what Socrates wants to say is actually true bravery, true courage, the way we need to understand that is saying screw it to daily living. And I'm just going to devote myself to wisdom, come what may. And that may mean not having a wife, that may mean not making any money, that may mean suffering in all sorts of bodily and practical ways. And the courage is an acceptance of that consequence. If what I get in return is the true coin, which is wisdom.

28:28 Dylan: I didn't see that thread. It's not clear to me that what he's saying here is the courage to seek after wisdom is the true courage, right? As opposed to the other kinds of courage. But that's just being biased towards philosophy. It's the standard philosophical hubris. Without necessarily saying that the other kinds of courage is. Is unnecessary. It's not as though he's saying that, it's just the philosopher says you have to be courageous to examine your own ideas. That's Real courage that takes real courage only because it's less common.

28:57 Seth: So that's my interpretation of this passage Marx pointed out around 69A. And in a way it sounds like a Nietzsche critique. What he's rejecting is the pleasure principle. He doesn't like the pleasure principle version of morality, where he calls it trading pleasures for pleasures or pains for pains, the kind of thing that Locke, for instance, embraced. Nietzsche didn't like that either. It's just that he goes in a different direction. Nietzsche thinks he can give a non ascetic version of the rejection of this view of the ethical. The pleasure principle, for Socrates, it's about making wisdom the highest thing.

And so the way he puts it, goodness of this sort may be kind of illusory facade and fit for slaves. Indeed. So goodness of the sort that involves ordinary daily bravery, temperance, justice, and that we do it because we want the greater reward that comes with self restraint. That may be a kind of slavery. And I think Nietzsche might agree with that. He's just going to come to a different conclusion, which is that it's not, you know, I think you could go in an aesthetic direction. But for Socrates, wisdom becomes the gold standard.

30:02 Mark: I'm wishing now that I had listened to our Protagoras episode because I know he discusses courage and some of the other virtues specifically in there. And my understanding is that the idea was that they all amount to the same thing, they all amount to the form of the good. That if you analyze any of these specific virtues, you'll see that they're actually all the same thing. Which that seems to argue against what you were just saying, Seth, about. Well, courage is still basically an assertion of machismo or something like that. It just depends on what you're doing it in favor of.

So it kind of sounds like a Nietzschean sort of critique that the philosopher is just pulling a slave revolt and saying because he's not able to go out and fight wars and things like that and be courageous in the traditional ways, he's saying the real courage is to be okay with being weak. And I don't think, I think that Plato is arguing something more subtle than that. That actually once you reduce courage and the other virtues, temperance, to sort of their common coin of virtue, then they don't look at all like the element of machismo or the element of temptation, resisting temptation, that all kind of goes away, all the emotional resonances go away and it turns into just this contemplation of the beautiful form of the good.

But that is not really spelled out

31:10 Wes: in here, the activity that's going on. Right. Like what Socrates is doing, you know, this isn't a depiction of somebody who's sitting around contemplating the form of the good. It's all his conversation and going back and forth and I don't know how to articulate it. There's this kind of. I don't know if it's dissonance exactly,

31:25 Mark: but dramatic irony, something like he's proclaiming all these as I think this is. Wes pointed out this difference, that there's a difference between, you know, despise the body. He's actually using words like despise, I think in here. And yet he's playing with Phaedo's hair. You know, it's just the fact that he sent the women away. He doesn't want, you know, his wife crying over him. He doesn't want that kind of.

31:48 Wes: That's right.

31:48 Seth: Also, he's a ripped dude. That works out a lot.

31:53 Mark: The more that you hang out with your body and grapple with it in various ways, the less pure you are, the less philosophical you are and like. But isn't being physically fit part of what he thinks? You actually sort of need that in order to think clearly. Right. Strong body, strong mind.

32:10 Seth: It actually reduces the distractions to be fit. You know, being fat can be very distracting. It'd be hard to be a philosopher if you're gluttonous and in pain all the time because you're so unhealthy. I think this is in the same dialogue. It might be the symposium that mentions the rumor about him being able to drink.

32:26 Wes: It was symposium as much as he

32:28 Seth: wanted, but how far he could march and what a kick ass soldier he was.

32:33 Mark: All right, so we've been focusing on the ethics here. I think we've kind of beat this to death, but we should at least open the door of the epistemology here. That what we were just saying. Saying that he has just said, you know, one who cares nothing for the pleasures that come by way of the body runs pretty close to being dead. That's kind of sums up. But then very soon after that, this is in 65 or so. Is the body a hindrance or not? As a partner in the quest for wisdom? This is the sort of thing. I mean, do sight and hearing afford any truth?

Or aren't the poets always harping on such things, telling us that we neither hear nor see anything accurately? So this is not one of the great arguments. Seth, you know, he's not even going to bother to argue this skepticism because I guess he thinks, feels like it's been established in other places, established in other dialogues. Is that yes, of course, the senses deceive us all the time. And it's only reasoning, isn't it? Reasoning, if anywhere at all, that any of the things that are become manifest to it.

33:26 Dylan: Right.

33:26 Mark: Reasoning should not be distracted by the senses. The soul, the philosopher utterly disdains the body and flees from it, seeking rather to come to be alone by itself. Cut off the senses and then the mind. Reasoning, contemplating it itself. That's the only way that you can get truth.

33:41 Wes: At 66, you're getting in this section, the beginning of the forms, right? Do we claim that there is a just itself or no such thing? Also some beautiful and some good? And then he goes on to say, wouldn't that man do this most purely, who approaches each thing as far as possible with thought itself, and who neither puts any sight into his thinking nor drags any other sense along with his reasoning, but instead uses unadulterated thought itself all by itself. He attempts to hunt down each of the beings that's unadulterated and itself all by itself. And once he's freed himself as far as possible from eyes and ears and so to speak, from his whole body, because it shakes the soul up and doesn't let her attain truth and thoughtfulness when the body communes with her. Isn't this the man simmias of anyone who will hit upon what is.

34:27 Dylan: Yeah, I'd like to defend myself from further criticism by saying, I didn't say the arguments were good. What I said was they had that kind of prima facie clarity about them that makes you think, oh, yeah, no, that makes perfect. And then you're like, wait a second, I don't. I don't like where this is going. And you got to kind of figure out what's really irking you. I'm contrasting this with, like, trying to just understand. Like, for example, in Parmenides, you remember how we couldn't even figure out what the argument was. There are dialogues where you can't even follow because they're too convoluted.

It has the rhythm of the Cartesian meditation, right? Oh, I'm sitting in my chair. Isn't it true that if you're sitting in a chair and you're holding wax near the fire, the wax changes? Is it the same wax or is it a different wax? Well, geez, I don't know. You know, you're just kind of like you're going down the path. Yeah, of course. No, we can't trust our senses, sometimes we're wrong. Right. And you know, different people see things different ways. So if you really want secure knowledge, you want to use your reason, and that's what philosophers do.

And I'm just saying, like, it's easy to ride along with this thing. It didn't fight me at every step of the way.

35:30 Seth: Yeah. When we talk about the world, we have to talk about in general terms. We have to use concept words, we have to use universals. And if we don't do that, we don't get anywhere that's built into language and the way we know things. And when we talk about those universals, we talk about them at the very least as if they are these stable, unchanging entities. When we know that the actual empirical world, everything that's going on around us, doesn't match up to that in a neat way, everything is changing, growing, decaying, and we can't actually get the same kind of fixity that we want for anything that we would say that we know, or that we can even talk about reasonably.

And even when we do the natural sciences, right, we're working with mathematical concepts. We're working with what that Plato and Socrates think of as the sort of paradigm for knowledge, which is these unchanging abstract entities. Part of the anti empiricism that's involved here is the sort of primitive empiricism, which involves just looking at the appearances and summing them up and not being able to make sense of them. As a scientist, you have to be able to build models, right? We talked about this in the Timaeus last time as well. You have to be entering this otherworldly area where the intellect is at work and where the objects of the intellect aren't just the appearances themselves, but their structure, the way they are ordered.

And those things have to be. The argument here is treated as separate objects in and of themselves. If we're to make sense of it,

36:59 Mark: you're trying to de emphasize the difference between nominalism and realism about the forms or something like that. It still is quite different, of course, to say, the real world, the world in itself is messy and I don't know how to make sense of it. So I'm going to create these models. They're going to be representations of the world, they're going to be simplifications of the world. And it's only those simplifications that I can actually say sensible things about. So even though I never see any perfect triangles, I create a model triangle and I can do the pythagorean theorem.

And I can determine all these other things about the model, but there's still a basic empiricism about that epistemology because it's you relating to these images you've created which in turn somehow relate to the world out there. Whereas for Plato, you are not creating these images, you're recollecting these images. You're finding, finding these images. And the phenomenal world, the world you actually experience, see and taste, is the reflection is the imitation of that real world. Reverse the epistemological picture.

37:56 Seth: The argument here, right, is that we are actually good at noticing that there are essences in things even when we don't know what they are. So this gets us back to Kripke, for instance, right? And if you think of tigers, someone asked me to give a necessary and sufficient conditions of being a tiger. And, and I would say, well, I can't really do that because if I say, well, having stripes and someone's going to say, oh, look, there's a tiger over here that doesn't have any stripes because of such and such an exception. And you know, maybe I could go the Wittgenstein route and talk about family resemblances, but really I can treat any of those qualities as a, you know, for what Kripke calls a fixing.

I can't say what the essence is, but I know that there is an essence to that being. I know that in reality, whatever reality is, there's some tightly organized structured thing with very fancy functional and causal relationships between its parts and so on and so forth and a whole history, you know, evolutionary history as we understand it, that I could point to that make this a whole, that make this one thing with an essence. And when I am talking about, when I say that I have knowledge of this thing, that's what I'm talking about. I'm talking about these real essences.

And I have to act as if they are real and they become the subjects of scientific investigation, right? So I don't know in what water, long before I know there's H2O, I say, yes, there is an essence to this. And if I'm a Platonist, I might want to say there's waterness, you know, it partakes of the water form, which later on Plato will say, that's kind of the ignorant way of doing it. But that's the way I prefer. Instead of talking about beauty as trying to break it down into oh, it has this shape or it's this or that, he's going to say, I'm not into that natural science approach, I'm more into just saying takes in the form of beauty.

Even though that sounds naive and there are reasons for that, which we can discuss later. I think there's a lot of important stuff going on here that is defensible.

39:44 Dylan: I agree.

39:45 Seth: What I was saying is that we don't know that it's H2O, but we assume that there's some essence and that can be an object of investigation. It may take hundreds of years to figure out what water is at that level, that it's H2O. But what I know from the beginning is I had this gestalt experience of there being some essence, whatever it is, and I have an intellectual relation to that of some sort. And that is not the same thing as just having an experience through the senses. Or we might even say whatever we get through the senses is already theory laden. You could put it in a million different ways.

40:16 Wes: I think I agree with you. But you're drawing the line with. When Plato's talking about isn't there the beautiful isn't there the. Just that things that are beautiful partake of and things that are just partake of in the same way that there is a triangle, that things that are triangular partake of that. Even if we could point out that there are lots of differences there maybe and Kripke would, for instance, would disagree on certain points that that insight that there are essences to things and that those are the things that I'm acquiring and I am reasoning about and I'm using to talk about. Well, this thing is like that thing and I'm making extrapolations about how the world works. That activity is the same kind of thing that Plato's pointing out.

41:00 Mark: Well, let's wrap up part one. There's a lot more to say still about forms. We haven't even gotten to his arguments specifically about the immortality of the soul, which are awesome.

41:10 Dylan: Complete, consistent, convincing.

41:14 Seth: I'm gonna corner Seth again.

41:17 Dylan: Well, look, it made me feel better. Now that I know that my soul's gonna live forever, I can just throw this meat sack away, get ready for the next ride.

41:24 Seth: Meat sack? Yeah.

41:26 Mark: Supporters can hear all that in part two. Should be the next thing in your feed.

41:30 Unknown speaker: Thanks.