Ronna Burger: The Phaedo: A Platonic Labyrinth. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1984.
Like Dorter, Ronna Burger follows in the line of those who interpret the Platonic dialogue as “a unified whole, whose philosophic content cannot be separated from its dramatic form.” The dialogue form itself distances its author from any one argument or doctrine advanced in the dialogue by one or more of the characters portrayed. If written, ‘dialogue’ implies two or more interlocutors not only within the text but between the author of the text and its readers. And all of these layers of meaning exemplify Socrates’ “second sailing”—his abandonment of the attempt to intuit the nature of things directly and his turn toward approaching them indirectly, through the logoi. Accordingly, Burger doubts Dorter’s extraction of “a meaningful sense of immortality” to be found in the doctrine of “the ‘world-soul’ of which all individual souls are portions”—a doctrine that does indeed sound suspiciously proto-Hegelian.
Duality or doubleness of meaning famously involves Socrates’ irony. Here, Socrates “appeals to the ordinary understanding of ‘death’ or ‘immortality,’ while deriving from reflection on the unrecognized presuppositions and implications of that ordinary understanding, his own philosophic reconstruction of it.” Philosophizing via speech advances thought by identifying contradictions within that ordinary understanding, those stated opinions of un-philosophic persons. Those persons may dislike the process of so identifying their errors, even to the extent of killing the one who performs the operation. By attacking the body of the philosopher, however, they concentrate his mind still further on the way in which “thought or awareness can be affected by the cessation of certain mechanistic processes in the body lead us to an understanding of psychē that affirms its independence from the body, precisely because we are compelled to confront just the opposite.” In this the practice of dying and being dead becomes a kind of purification.
Purification in the form of separation of the psychē from the body recalls the doctrines of the Pythagorean philosophers. Phaedo narrates Socrates’ death to an audience of Pythagoreans. Insofar as one might infer Plato’s teaching from his labyrinthine dialogue, he disagrees with the Pythagoreans in identifying first principles with the “ideas” not numbers. He also disagrees with them concerning their doctrine of reincarnation, a process requiring the separability of psychē from body. Plato’s Socrates “attempt[s] to reinterpret the meaning of ‘separation,’ and in so doing to reverse the Pythagorean position”; Burger says that “one might say” this is “the fundamental intention of the Phaedo.”
There is a moral and political dimension to purification. The delay between Socrates’ trial and his execution occurs because it permits the Athenian citizens to purify themselves ritually from exacting the death penalty. But Socrates too “acknowledg[es] the need to purify himself before dying because “he may be guilty of having neglected” to “make himself understood by the nonphilosophers who have convicted him.” The dialogue does that in a more permanent or ‘immortal’ way by having him make appealing but unsound arguments about death and immortality. The sounder and underlying implication of these arguments is that for Socrates dying is “a separation of logos from just that attachment to the self that the hope for immortality brings.” The “center of the dialogue” features Socrates’ redefinition of the greatest fear from fear of death to fear of “misology” or hatred of speech and reason. The latter fear occurs when philosophers misunderstand wisdom as the (impossible) “direct contact of the pure psychē with the ‘beings themselves,'” as the Pythagoreans attempt to do. The center of the dialogue thus splits this dialogue about duality into two halves, “exhibit[ing] the tension between concern with the self and concern with the argument for its own sake, between the fear of death together with the hope for immortality and the fear of misology together with a technē of logos.” The dialogue moves away from concern with the ‘self’ or psychē and toward concern with logos, with argument and a corresponding unconcern for the ‘fate of the self.’ The social and political problem may be described as the philosophic desire for the release from the body in the form of the pursuit of sound arguments and the non-philosophers’ desire to valorize their desire for self-preservation through worship of the gods. Mythos threatens logos. It is not for nothing that Burger divides her book into thirteen chapters. To purify oneself from the mythologically valorized quest for self-preservation, the Platonic dialogue serves as a therapeutic medication—ironically symbolized in the action of the dialogue by the poison Socrates takes as the means of liberating his psychē from his body.
In the dialogue’s Prologue, we learn that Phaedo’s first words to his Pythagorean audience refer to the ‘self,’ to himself, as present at Socrates’ death. “The dialogue, traditionally understood as the Platonic account of the separability of the psychē from the body, begins by referring to the self as an inseparable unity of psychē and body.” The narrative form itself transforms deed into speech; Burger remarks that “the narrative form is the exemplification of what Socrates will present as the crucial turn in his own philosophic development” from direct noetic experience of the beings to examination of the logoi about the beings. The Apology isn’t the only dialogue featuring a defense of Socrates by Socrates. Accused by his companions of effectively committing suicide by refusing to escape when given the opportunity, Socrates must begin his final conversation with a defense of what seems to be an act of running away from life.” Far from running away from life, Socrates maintains, by staying on to ‘face the music’ he continues steadfastly in the best way of life. “Socrates identifies the city, the domain of political authority and opinion, as the prison in which the philosopher is interned and from which he longs to escape; in attempting to demonstrate the immortality of the psychē, he identifies the prison no longer with the city, but with the body.” After all, the philosopher must live somewhere in order to philosophize, and in any city other than his own he likely would be regarded as not merely a foreigner but a likely enemy, affirming “the reputation of philosophy as a destroyer of the laws, hence of thoughtless young men.” “But” (and this an important “But”), “if the historical Socrates could not make this journey, the Socrates of the Platonic dialogues, in the days following his condemnation, shows how philosophy can be exported safely outside Athens” by means of the written ‘dialogue’ itself, purveyors of the philosophic way of life.
Logos and mythos interact in the passage 60b1-60c7, beginning as it does (after weeping wife Xanthippe is escorted out) with an Aesopian story claiming that pain derives from the imprisonment of the psychē in the body, whereas death releases the psychē from that imprisonment, bringing it to a condition of pleasure in the ‘afterlife.’ Socrates responds by asking what pain and pleasure are. Such a ‘What is?’ question aims at the assumption of the maker of the mythos that pain and pleasure are self-evident; such questioning distinguishes the ‘givenness’ of mythos from the interrogation of logos. Further, if life is painful, then does this not mean that the divine prohibition of suicide works opposes the good of human beings? But human beings cannot make that judgment, having no experience of death. Then again, Socrates says that to philosophize is to practice dying, to anticipate the experience of death. In so saying, he redefines death away from the bodily, leaving behind the common definition of it as a physiological phenomenon. The action of dialoguing or conversing “has in fact a double function: if, in its physiological effect, it chains the psychē to the body, it is at the same time the means of separating the logos from the psychē united with the body.” As I converse, I employ my body to form logoi; simultaneously, the logoi or arguments my body forms take on ‘a life of their own.’ They are apprehended (or not) by others, passed on, perhaps written down for others to read.
This is what “the practice of dying” entails (63c8-64c-9). If that practice, that philosophizing, is so good, why does the philosopher not long to prolong his life, even as ‘the many’ do (if for different reasons)? Simmias laughs at Socrates for this: Where is your duality of ‘the few’ and ‘the many’ now? To this sally Socrates brings his signature irony, introducing the way of life of men he calls the “true” or “genuine” philosophers, who in fact resemble ‘the many’ more than Socrates does. “Just as [the true] philosophers seek the separation of the pure psychē from the body, the many—who want to ‘die of pleasure’—seek the separation of pure body from psychē.” Hedonism and asceticism add up to two sides of the same coin. The supposedly “true” philosophers are Platonists as Platonists are popular conceived, neglectful of their bodies, wishing their heads could float up to the clouds, like balloons. In the actual practice of Plato’s Socrates, however, philosophy requires staying in the city and conversing with real people, few of whom philosophize. “Reducing every obstacle to a corporeal one”—a matter of overcoming the bodily—the “true philosophers” “absolve themselves of all responsibility for their inability to obtain the phronēsis”—the practical wisdom—”they desire,” finally “maintain[ing] a false standard of absolute wisdom, while refusing to acknowledge one’s own deficiency,” thereby gestating “resentment against logos through which one deprives oneself of the very possibility of seeking truth and knowledge of the beings.” “The genuine philosophers misunderstand the nature of philosophy”: whereas their “longing for death is based on a resentment of life that is unconditional, it is Socrates awareness of his particular—political—circumstances that allows him to construe as a benefit his imminent release from the city, from the body, from life itself.” Practical wisdom or prudence is like money: It isn’t an end in itself but a medium of exchange, and not of exchanging one pleasure for another, one pain for another, one fear for another, without any reference to the virtues of justice, moderation, and courage, all of which rein in pleasures, pains and fears. Prudence rightly supports the virtues, not the passions. ‘The many’ suppose otherwise, and, by accepting the popular notion of the sharp bifurcation of psychē and body, the putatively true or genuine philosophers end up as mirror-images of ‘the many.’ In insisting, rhetorically, on the immortality of the individual psychē, Socrates responds to “interlocutors who are moved by their own fear of death, together with pity at the imprudence and anger at the injustice”—as they suppose—”of Socrates’ acceptance of his own death.”
Thinking about this claim of the immortality of the psychē, Cebes asks, how do we know the soul survives the death of the body? He neglects to ask what the psychē is. Nor does Socrates broach the subject. Instead, he makes a speech about “the logic of becoming,” of genesis. The argument is sophistical. Claiming that ‘the greater’ must originate in ‘the smaller,’ and vice versa, he induces Cebes to agree that ‘therefore’ the living must come from the dead, and that ‘therefore’ a dead body will generate a soul that lives on. As Burger remarks, unlike ‘greater’ and ‘smaller,’ “living and dead” are “not contradictory but contrary opposites,” since “something may be neither dead nor alive.” Further, Cebes ignores the obvious fact of organic genesis: that the living originate from the living. “Cebes has become blind to the most evident facts of experience,” taking on the illusion of the ‘genuine’ philosophers, with their “disdain for the body.” Socrates’ sophistry and Cebes’ folly notwithstanding, the argument will turn out to be true in one sense. If one follows Socrates in turning “from investigation of the beings to investigation through logoi,” then the logos in which a philosopher dies will bring him back to life in the mind of the reader. Written by a mortal man and featuring mortal men, the logos by and about men now dead revives them in speech if not in being.
This leads to the topic of anamnesis or ‘not-forgetting,’ of being mindful. Socrates offers Cebes another dubious argument: If knowledge is anamnesis, then our soul must have been somewhere before birth. Simmias too buys into this claim. Why is it so attractive? The answer lies in souls pervaded with the egalitarianism valorized in a democratic regime. “If learning were in fact nothing but recovery of knowledge that is one’s own, every man should be capable of this self-actualization.” Once again, there is “a nonmythological core” to this, namely, that “learning is intelligible only as the actualization of a potential that belongs to man as such.” The “recollection thesis” lends mythological persuasiveness to a real insight into nature.
So far, Socrates has presented two (specious) arguments for the immortality of the soul, the hope for which so strongly animates his interlocutors that they incline to believe them. One argument describes the soul as the animating principle of the body, as the source of its life; the other describes the soul as a “medium of cognition.” Burger criticizes Dorter for overlooking the disjunction between life and cognition. This distinction comes out in Socrates’ third argument, the argument from ‘likeness.’ Here, Socrates (already having pretended to establish the doctrine of reincarnation) presents a sort of Aesopian fable, saying (in Burger’s paraphrase) that “each psychē becomes in another life what it is like in this life, given its habits, its hopes, and its fears.” He does this in answer to Cebes’ fear that the soul might survive release from the body only to be dissipated, like smoke. Not so, Socrates replies. If the psyche can be dragged down and confused by the body and its senses, so too, after escaping the body, will it attach itself to “the pure and lasting and deathless” ideas or forms. In this argument, “The psychē seems to have no nature of its own but only to assimilate itself to its object.” But of course “to grant the likeness of the psychē to the invisible and unchanging does not… satisfy the challenge for a demonstration of its immortality and indestructibility.” For the psyche or soul to be truly immortal it would need to be or to become like the forms themselves—a whole without parts, “incomposite.” Socrates “has not established” that. What Socrates does argue seriously is a ‘likeness’ of the argument about likeness: Most souls entrap themselves in bodily desires (including the desire for self-preservation, reified in the yearning for the immortality of one’s soul). “Only philosophy… sees what is most terrible about the situation—namely, that comes about through desire, so that the prisoner himself is responsible for his own incarceration,” whether in the polis with its idols or in the body. The soul isn’t reincarnated after the body’s death but self-‘carnated’ during life, taking on the characteristics of the objects of its desires. “What is apparently meant to explain the physiological origin of the living being is in fact the description of a mode of conduct in life.” Since the soul is necessarily entrapped in the body and a polis, only the arguments it makes might be separated from the body and the polis, becoming immortal. “Socrates ends this third argument… by determining not what kind of being is naturally subject to dispersion, but what kind of psyche is naturally inclined to fear dispersion. His condemnation of the foolishness of this fear entirely independent of any proof of the immortality of the psyche.”
The seventh, central chapter of Burger’s thirteen chapters focuses not on the centerpiece of the dialogue—the critique of misology—but the preparation for that critique. Although she has emphasized the turn from concern for the soul’s survival after the body’s death to concern for argument, for logos, one must also notice that the term ‘psychē’ recurs frequently in her book. And indeed without the soul there would be no arguments. She titles this chapter “Images of the Psychē,” raising a question Socrates has avoided so far: What is the soul? And how can we know it, given the elusiveness of direct noetic apprehension of being? Here Socrates introduces the image of the swan, and the swan song. The swan is said to sing before dying, having no fear of death. Socrates describes himself as a fellow-servant, with the swans, of Apollo; he “departs from life no more sorrowful than the swans, blessed with the gift of prophecy from the same master.” It a gift governed by the same irony Socrates exhibits on other occasions, however, inasmuch at “Socrates sanctions his claim to knowledge of what awaits him after death—that ultimate limit of human knowledge—by appealing to the god who proclaimed him the wisest of men only because he had knowledge of his own ignorance.” As for Cebes and Simmias, they continue to identify the soul with the mind, hoping for its immortality, even as Socrates conceives of immortality as logos, and indeed a logos or set of arguments that can only endure if a philosophic mind manages to bring other minds to understand one or more of the arguments it generates. Socrates can be satisfied that this fragile immortality will at least survive him, if dimly, because his interlocutors have understood that his arguments for the immortality of the soul in the more conventional sense do not withstand logical scrutiny. “But neither entertains the possibility that this is the fulfillment, rather than the failure of his intention,” Socrates having “spoken nowhere of the imperishability of the psychē.” One story tells of Plato’s dream, just before his own death, of “a swan darting from tree to tree, unable to be caught by the fowlers”; Simmias the Socratic interpreted this to mean “that all men would try to grasp Plato’s meaning but none would succeed, and each would understand him according to his own views.”
That too would be a sort of immortality—to be forever sought, never captured, only glimpsed. Is being itself like that? This might lead to considerable frustration, however, and to abandonment of the hunt, even to the all-too-human reaction that what we can’t have isn’t really worth having, anyway. Now Burger turns to the center of the Phaedo, which she has placed just off-center in her book. The danger of misology, hatred of logos, hatred of argumentation, arises as we wander through the labyrinth of logoi, compounded of the many, and contradictory, arguments we hear about just about everything. And since human beings are the argumentative animals, misology leads readily to misanthropy, quite apart from our opinions about Apollo and the other ‘gods.’ One needs the equivalent of Ariadne’s thread, a “technē of logos,” to oppose this incipient confusion and despair. Socrates logical art (he is the first to enunciate the principle of non-contradiction) offers a modest guide. Whereas disputatious souls, described ironically as the “genuine” philosophers, “discover the untrustworthy character of all logoi, as well as of pragmata [perception of material objects], Socrates discovers only knowledge of his own ignorance.” This “knowledge of human nature”—knowledge of the limitedness of its own ability to know—”save[s] him at the same time from misology, for only be recognizing his own deficiency can he escape from blaming his ignorance on logos itself.” “Avoidance of misology depends precisely upon abandoning the desire for knowledge of the beings themselves, in order to preserve trust in the possibility of discovering ‘the truth of the beings’ through logoi.” By contrast, the “genuine” philosophers attempt the impossible and end up resenting “the body as the obstacle to the attainment of phronēsis, construed as direct contact of the pure psychē with the pure beings.” That is, they begin to despair of both argumentation and life itself. The art of logos at least ‘weeds out’ those logoi that are self-contradictory, bringing the logician-philosopher nearer to elusive being, affording him clearer glimpses of it in flight, possibly even the hope of discerning its flight-patterns. The immortality or at least the endurance of this effort will depend upon its transmission to other souls, however, and here is where Socrates (who evidently glimpses souls via logoi, with some success) brings Phaedo in. “Phaedo is to cut off his hair in mourning not for the death of Socrates, but only for the death of the logos”; he will indeed transmit the story to the Pythagoreans, and (at least according to the surmise Plato invites) to Plato, author of the dialogue named for him. As for Simmias and Cebes, they “must separate from all self-interest their examination of the logos: only through this separation can they participate with Socrates in the practice of dying.” Their concern with psychic immortality betrays that self-interest; their halting attempts to follow Socrates’ arguments and indeed to refute them promises a chance at letting go of it, and concentrating the minds they wish immortal on the arguments themselves, which may prove perennial.
“The one argument that both Simmias and Cebes wholeheartedly endorse,” the recollection argument, suggests to Socrates a turn to the question of harmony. Simmias had compared the soul to a harmony: the lyre represents the body, the strings the elements composing the body; Socrates implied that the harmony produced by the strings of the lyre represents the soul and its affects. “While the coming into being and perishing of the psychē is thus dependent on the instrument of the body, the harmonic order imposed on the psychē is not necessarily dependent on the body.” The soul’s “capacity to give a logos” provides a way to knowledge surer than “the understanding of the beings as the object of a passive vision by the pure psychē,” whose stubborn impurity so frustrates the “genuine” philosophers. For his part, Simmias fails to understand that “the nature of logos as a composite whole… has qualities other than those of its component parts”; he commits what later logicians would call the reductionist fallacy. His reductionism leads him to a mistaken egalitarianism, a supposition that all souls are equal because they are all equally souls. Socrates observes that because souls comprise several elements, those elements may be better or worse harmonized with one another; in this sense, all souls are not equal. For example, as he now leads Simmias to see, the soul can choose to rule the appetites of the body, denying food to the stomach’s hunger. Further, to say that the soul can choose to do this suggests that the soul’s real struggle is not so much with the body but ‘with itself,’ more precisely within itself, as reason and affects struggle for rule. Indeed, it is the spirited or thumotic element of the soul which constructs “the ideal of the pure psychē separate from the body and compelled to tyrannize it”; the “pure beings” originate not in nature but in “willfulness and moral indignation.” Thus “the common ground of harmonization, understood as the well-ordered state of the parts of the psychē—in relation to the whole, and harmony, understood as consistency of logoi, must be the law of noncontradiction.”
Turning next to Cebes, whose physiological account of the soul mirrored Simmias’ ‘idealistic’ but in fact thumotic account, Socrates says more about that very art of logos, that law of noncontradiction, and, crucially, the way of life you might have if you organized your life around that art, that law. Cebes’ discomfort at Socrates’ “confidence in dying” implies discomfort at Socrates’ confidence in his way of life. Burger devotes the longest chapter of her book to Socrates’ unfolding of how he came to understand and further the philosophic way of life, with its “trust in logos.”
If Socrates was simply blinded by his attempt “to look directly at things and grasp them through the senses,” in the way of materialist naturalism, how then could he have arrived at his way of life, his reorientation of the philosophic enterprise? As mentioned earlier, the beginning of this turn was ‘meta-mathematical’: If ‘two’ in math can occur by adding one and one or by splitting one into two, how does ‘one’ come to be? Opposite causes can produce ‘two’; opposite causes can also produce ‘one.’ These perplexities returned when he considered other dualities, including those of pleasure and pain, body and soul. Materialist naturalism cannot answer such questions. But neither can immaterialist teleology, the claim that the mind arranges all things. Moreover, teleology subtly tempts us, “project[ing] onto the whole the operation of the human mind, without necessarily acknowledging that projection.” This turns out to have implications for the immediately preceding topic of harmony: Is the good of the whole, the posited telos, identical with the good of each particular within the whole? (In theology, this becomes a serious question indeed—the problem of evil.) One might redeem teleology by distinguishing the good from the necessary, the end from the means; evil particulars might serve the good of the whole, and/or evils done to some particulars might do so. If so, however, one still needs an argument showing what the good of the while is, and why it is good. “A comprehensive teleology would require a defense of the superiority of life, or of death, not merely for one individual but for that individual as a single part of a cosmic whole.” The composite character of the soul, pulled as it is in different directions, calls teleology into question. What is the standard?
If both materialist naturalism and teleology do not suffice, what if they are combined? “Socrates brings to light the inseparability of mechanism and teleology, and with that of body and psychē.” Mechanism fails to search “for the power that causes things to be placed as best” in soul and body, and in the cosmos itself. “Those who will be psychically blinded by their unwillingness to rely on reflections… mistake the pragmata grasped through the senses for the beings themselves.” But that is not the fault of the senses, the body, but of the “needs and desires, and hopes and fears of the psychē.” Socrates ‘turn’ to the logoi thus did not turn him away from consideration of things and of actions. Far from it. “Socrates deed of remaining in prison”—itself a physically restricting thing which restricts another thing, the body—”provides in the Phaedo the proper context for the speeches on immortality.” “To pursue the Socratic second sailing is to replace investigation of the beings themselves with investigation of their truth,” meaning that “the truth must be the bond between the mind and the noetic object”; “investigation of the truth of the beings is investigation of what makes knowledge possible,” as light “serves as a bond between the eye and the visible object.” The principle of non-contradiction applies because “each pragma [thing] is an inseparable unity of a subject and a quality ascribed to it, and when the opposite pragma is ascribed to that subject, that inseparable unity constitutes the opposite pragma,” thus contradicting the prior ascription. One must learn to investigate one’s noetic visions, testing them for logical inconsistencies, treating them as hypotheses and not as unquestionable beings-in-themselves. And this goes for the ‘Platonic’ ‘vision’ of the ‘ideas’ as causative entities. Plato isn’t necessarily a ‘Platonist,’ much less a Neo-Platonist. Cebes has been too much the noetic visionary in his very materialism. In “introduc[ing] the technē of logos in an attempt to turn attention away from all self-interest,” Socrates does not present the full picture of the philosophic life but rather prepares Cebes for it by quieting his inordinate fear of death, which may plunge him into misology. Recognize your starting point not as a self-evident truth but as a hypothesis, and you will uncover “the deeper levels of assumption concealed in the initial hypothesis.” “Every Platonic dialogue” proceeds this way. That “the security of Socrates’ technē of logos” may itself be questioned, treated as a hypothesis, isn’t an inquiry that this dialogue addresses.
Instead, the conversation turns back to immortality. “The identification of the self with the soul, as a self-identical substrate regardless of its properties… is precisely the target of Plato’s critique here,” a reprise of the point he made against Simmias’ egalitarian assumption that because all souls are equally souls they are therefore equal in all respects. Socrates never speaks of an idea of soul, and this matters because the principle of non-contradiction governs the ideas primarily; things often do feature contradictory elements within them. (The soul does, as its emotions conflict with or ‘contradict’ one another, and reason.) The more nuanced or refined ones definition of the cause of a thing or an action becomes, the less irrefutable it will be—as modern political pollsters have learned, to their embarrassment. To use Socrates’ example, the argument “that fire can be the cause of heat only and not of cold… did not and could not have established that fire is the only cause of heat.” Although Cebes believes that soul is the only cause of life in the body, Socrates knows that body might be the cause, just as easily. At best, a philosopher can test a hypothesis and certify it as free of self-contradiction, but it might yet turn out to be “empirically wrong.” Whether soul is the cause of life, and whether it is immortal, might be so certified, and for “demotic” or rhetorical purposes this can reconcile the “music” played to ‘the many’ with the “music” heard by ‘the few’ philosophers, but for those philosophers those claims will remain hypotheses, not certainties, pending further investigation. With respect to the soul, Socrates distinguishes between perishing and destruction. “To perish, Socrates seems to suggest, is simply to cease to exist altogether, whereas to be destroyed is to turn into something else because of losing an essential attribute.” Whereas a number could perish if another number were added to or subtracted from it—add ‘two’ to ‘three’ and each is altogether changed—add fire to snow and you get water, which retains the same chemical composition as snow but has changed it structure. Similarly, the soul (a compound) may be imperishable but nonetheless destructible, as Socrates the person dies even as his arguments, and indeed himself as a human ‘type,’ the philosopher, live on. As he puts it, “When death approaches the man, the mortal, as it seems, of him dies, while the immortal departs, going away safe and incorruptible, withdrawing from death.” This doesn’t mean that the soul itself is immortal, although most men will hastily assume that it does. Socrates advises the philosophic few: Let them.
Meanwhile, live as if your soul were immortal, worth caring for. “The evil from which [the soul] must escape is not life itself… but the opposite of being good and prudent.” The contrary of Socrates is the Athenian dēmos which condemned him to death, “believing it to be the greatest evil.” The mythos or story which Socrates reserves for his last long speech treats the cosmos as an image of the body writ large. In the Republic, the polis was the body writ large, the regime its soul. “Now the walls of the polis within which we are chained prisoners are replaced by the boundaries of the known world, the shadows cast on the wall by artificial objects reflected in the light of man-made fire replaced by the natural phenomena of our environment systematically misperceived through our murky depths.” Only care for the soul will prevent these misperceptions caused by the mind-darkening emotions. Earlier, he had commended the virtues of moderation, justice, courage, and phronēsis as one considers ones “hope for the beautiful reward of a particular fate after death”; now, he commends the virtues of moderation, justice, courage, and freedom and truth in considering the philosopher’s confidence about life and death. This suggests that the reward of the previous set of virtues and born fruit.
The poison Socrates must now drink, in accordance with the verdict of the Athenian jury, he describes as a pharmakon, that is, a medicine. “The pharmakon that Socrates drinks is simultaneously a poison that brings his life to an end and a remedy that cures a disease” or, the use a previous metaphor releases him from prison, “from the self-imposed chains of attachment to pleasure and pain.” Burger contends that the real pharmakon that “fulfills the practice of dying, as a separation of logos from the living self,” is the Platonic dialogue. When Phaedo closes his account of this day, he calls Socrates as “the best and most prudent and most just” man of his time, a “judgment of exoneration” of Socrates from the verdict of the jury handed down by a man who knew him better than the Athenian assembly did.
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