O'NEILL'S PHILOSOPHY PAGE

Harmony Refutation

Refutation of the Harmony Argument

91E
There are three refutations of the Harmony Argument --
1. Recollection and Harmony are Logically Incompatible
2. There are significant differences in hiow we use "soul" and how we use "harmony", and these differences   make the two concepts occupy incompatibly different logical spaces.
3.The leadership argument, in which Socrates argues that souls conflict with their bodies while harmonies do not.

1. Recollection: it is evident that if one thinks that the soul pre-existed the body, by itself, and was therefore by our previous discussions, necessarily non-composite (bercause composite things cannot exist by themselves), then if we define harmony as essentially composite,  that is, made up of the many elements that make up he body, harmony is clearly a function of the existence of the lyre, and really the very last thing about it to come into existence. Without a lyre to tune there can be no attunement so clearly  the attunement must perish as soon as the lyre is damaged. But souls are just not like this. About them we say that they are, in their nature, non-composite, and also, implicitly, that  they are  what they are precisely because, even though they inhabit and direct bodies, they are not essentially  about bodies at all, but about  themselves. What really distinguishes souls and justice and beauty and health from harmony is that all of the former are auto kath' auto (itself according to itself) kinds of things, things that refer to and sustain themselves, that are ontologically free-standing, if you will, while harmony is inherently functional to the  body that it harmonizes.
So, the likenesses in definition cited by Simmias, especially the first set about both soul and harmony equally earning the adjectival modifiers  "invisible, incorporeal,  beautiful and divine", is just wrong. Harmony may in a sense be "invisible", but, interestingly , not because it is non-composite. And the question of whether it is "incorporeal" is    hardly resolve -- under Socrates' description it certainly seems to be corporeal.
But this raises a very interesting and unresolved issue. If harmony is invisible and yet is not non-composite or incorporeal, then what happens to Socrates' earlier, confident division of beings into the visible/composite and the invisible/non-composite? We seem  to have generated an important exception: harmony is both invisible and composite!
This issue is never addressed.
On the other hand Socrates is flat out rejecting Simmias' earlier attempt, in the second half of the harmony argument, to align the soul with harmony as something inherently composite. But, and listen/read carefully -- if there can be something legitimately invisible and composite (harmony) why can't there be more than one such thing, as for instance, the soul?... This is a serious objection to the refutation. Ponder it.
The QED of this argument - that if souls recollect they must have pre-existed the body on their own  and be non-composite,  and cannot therefore be the same sort of thing as harmony, which cannot pre-exist the things it harmonizes, but must come into existence only after they  exist -- is then offered and accepted by Simmias who never raises the objection I made above.
Here there is a fascinating little disquisition on the kinds of arguments we ought to believe. (92 D-E)
Simmias admits that the recollection argument has a different logical and ontological status because it was "demonstrated",   while the harmony argument came to him aneu apodeixis , that is without  proof, without being proven. But it had the superficial virtues of being both "probable" (eikotos tinos) and   appealing (euprepeias).  These ,qualities - believability and something indefinable but real, a certain "curb appeal" or  "sexiness", are what often make arguments attractive to people and Simmias,  in this regard admitting that he is still a philosophical "civilian", says that he was taken in by these misleading qualities. Think back if you will to the discussion of misology at  89D, where  Socrates argued that   letting ourselves get taken in, naively, by arguments that do not deliver on their promises (like this one!) can lead to a thorough-going and inappropriate skepticism about the business of  making arguments itself, which business seems to make up a large part of, if not the  whole of, the practice of philosophy.  The recollection argument on  the  other hand was not like this, but was a righteous demonstration that the soul had to exist before the body because it was  just  like the beings in themselves. (Get the exact translation here)
Simmias hereby reveals that he is not a misologist because when prodded he recognizes the difference between a good argument and a bad one and evinces absolutely no cynicism about the validity of the practice of making arguments to prove things. We also note however that we might be justified in feeling just a twinge of misology because    nowhere around here does Socrates specify exactly what marks a "good" argument, save in the most general way.
2. Uses of "soul" versus uses of "harmony".  At  this point Simmias is completely ready to accept the pre-existence of the soul and therefore to reject the  harmony argument, so we ought to be done. But Socrates is, we remember, a Herakles slaying many-headed monsters and  refutational overkill  seems in order. On a more skeptical note, Socrates' second attempt to refute the Harmony argument might suggest to the  unkind that perhaps he sees its flaws and, even if it convinces Simmias, whose street creds as a judge of good arguments are clearly already suspect,  it might need some shoring up by being joined by argumentative  "siblings" that will either correct its flaws or divert our attention from them by offering arguments that are even, perhaps, better. Let's see.
We begin with some definitional exercises. First, as to how we use "harmony". (93 A-B):
First, if a Harmony (H, hereafter) is  essentially a composite thing, that is something made up of parts different from each other, can that H ever, then,  ever be in its own state  of being, by which I mean  a condition  that is essentially different from and which in no way refers to, or depends on, states in which its component parts would find themselves? The idea is that a composite, as composite, is not and cannot be more than the sum of its parts. This is a mechanical rather than an organic definition of composite, one in which the assembled elements cannot do anything that the parts themselves can do. Whether this is so, or even possible, I am not sure.
From this definition Socrates concocts a consequence: HARMONY CAN NEVER HAVE  any properties that whatever it harmonizes does not already have.
If this is so, there can be degrees of H, greater and less iterations of it, because just like the composite things it orders, H can be more or less Harmonious, depending on how fully its parts are coordinated. What this means on a deeper level is that there is no such thing as Harmony-in-itself, Harmony that is free-standing and has no reference to anything else.

But, as Socrates carefully established in both the Recollection and the Affinity arguments, whatever else we might think of them, souls can never have degrees of their soulishness . Since for Plato and Socrates souls are really non-composite, souls are in themselves like little nuggets of pure undifferentiated Parmenidean Being -- thast is, internally self-same, without parts, perfectly unified with themselves, one all the way down. And here’s the rub: Souls are, rightfully, said to be either good or evil. But how do such descriptions work if we try to assimilate soul-talk with harmony-talk, in-itself talk with degree-talk?

Let’s see what happens. If we want to use harmony-talk and still talk about good and bad souls we have to say first that since both good and bad souls are souls, and since souls = the harmonies of bodies, then even though it seems right to talk about bad souls as disharmonious. And we also want to talk about good souls as harmonious in themselves AND as harmonizing the bodies that they order. So this is the deal: if good souls are harmonious in themselves, as souls, and also harmonious with respect to the bodies they harmonize, then all good souls have at least a double harmony. In the same way, we cannot really say that bad souls DO NOT harmonize their bodies
,because they do. but that they are in themselves, as souls, disharmonious.
But this introduces two issues: it seems on one hand that there could be an infinite regress of the harmonies in good souls because we have to ask what harmonizes the harmony that orders the good soul; is it yet another level of harmonizing? Second, in the case of the bad souls we are forced into the logically uncomfortable position of  asserting on the one hand that bad souls are harmonious insofar as they order their bodies and internally disharmonious, which seems  counter-intuitive.

But this combination of harmony and disharmony soon shows itself to be impossible if we remember what we said about souls before we said that they were harmonies. Socrates clearly established that all souls are self-same and cannot, like harmonies, possess degrees of being themselves. So, if every soul has no degree then if it is a harmony it must be a perfect harmony, not some degree or other of harmony. It cannot be other than itself, so each soul is perfect harmony. If this is true then all souls have an equal degree of harmony, that is a perfect degree.

But if we associate badness of soul with some form of disharmony
we must also, given the above, assert that no soul, however bad, can ever be in disharmony, and therefore that all souls must be equally good, which runs directly counter to what we want to be able to claim about souls and their differences.
What this suggests to Socrates is not that we need to stop talking about good and bad souls but rather that we need to stop talk about souls being any sort of harmony. Souls are good or evil; clearly, if harmony talk, allied with soul talk, makes it impossible to tell the difference between good and bad souls, then soul-as-harmony talk is not what we want, and the analogy breaks down. Our conceptual and linguistic conventions need to allow us to say things like - “There are good and bad souls, and we can tell the difference.”
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HARMONY ARGUMENT

Simmias begins the argument by reminding Socrates that one can say the same things about the soul that one can say about the attunement or harmony of a lyre ( we will use "guitar" from here on because that is more familiar.)

That is:

One can say

HARMONY =  INVISIBLE, INCORPOREAL, VERY BEAUTIFUL, GODLIKE

SOUL = INVISIBLE, INCOPOREAL, VERY BEAUTIFUL, GODLIKE

LYRE = VISIBLE, BODILY, COMPOSITE, EARTHBOUND

BODY = DITTO DITTO DITTO DITTO

SIMMIAS HAS POSTULATED AN EXACT ONE-TO-ONE CORRESPONDENCE BETWEEN HARMONY AND SOUL, BETWEEN LYRE AND BODY, BECAUSE WE DESCRIBE EACH PAIR USING EXACTLY THE SAME ADJECTIVES.

The precise form the argument takes is a little indirect. Simmias argues that if the harmony guy was arguing about harmony as Socrates had argued about the soul he would be compelled to say that even after the guitar got smashed its attunement would still live on, even if it had nothing left to harmonize.

And in addition to the fact that we attach the same family of adjectives to both soul and harmony, don't we in practice talk about the soul as if it performed the same functions vis - a- vis the body that harmony does with respect to the guitar, namey, it integrates the various elements that make up the body and in a claim with which Socrates, as we will see, would never agree, Simmias even claims that the soul itself is made up of these diverse elements, only this time in harmony with each other.

Simmas' conclusion also carries this ideas of mixture forward. He says that if the soul is defined as a mixture, rather than as the attunement, of the elements that make up the body, then it must dissipate when the body dissipates, because it has nothing to it but the same elements that are in the body, and the body is mortal.

We should note that strictly speaking Simmias makes two arguments here because he slides in his definitions in a very clever way. At the beginning of the argument he defies harmony using words otherwise used to describe the soul, assimilating attuement to otherworldly soulishness. Then, mid-argument, he redefines harmony as the balancing of the body's several elements and says that harmony is made up of these elements. Then he defines the soul in terms of this meaning of harmony, suggesting that people also think of the soul as being made up of the different elements that make up the body, with the difference that the soul is a more cohesive arrangement of such parts.

After the first definition Simmias asks whether anyone would argue that the harmony would survive the death of the guitar as Socrates says souls survive the death of their bodies. He is asking whether something beautiful and invisible and divine would survive even if it had all these qualities, if, as he defines harmony (and soul) in the second part of the argument, harmony's job was to integrate the body's parts, and might well be made u of the same parts. An integrating function would have no reason to survive; but Simmias only gets to this conclusion by secretly substituting the functional, integrating definition for the more soulish definition, for both soul and harmony, halfway through the argument, without telling us that he is doing so or why he is doing so. We begin with a completely different definition of soul than the one with which we finish. Tricky!

MISOLOGY

kevin o neill
Phil 200
November 21, 2007
misology

When the worthies, both “in” and “out” of the dialogue (in the jail or in Phlius), are “wounded” and also thrown into disarray by the persuasive arguments of Simmias and Cebes (covered in the Harmony and Old Coat segments of this site), Echecrates asks Phaedo, anxiously, how socrates responded to these attacks.
Phaedo uses two more figures (they are all over the place in this dialogue, aren’t they?), of Socrates as healing doctor and as general rallying his troops. How many people, animals, mythic figures has Socrates been in this piece?
In any event he now immediately assumes two , or perhaps even three, new identities, First he becomes an Argive, a warrior of the land of Argos (Remember Jason and the Argonauts?), which was thew homeland of Herakles, and a significant Athenian ally in the second Peloponnesian War in which Sparta defeated both Athens and Argos at Mantinea, a battle, in 418, in which Socrates probably fought. He then quickly becomes Iolaus, Herakles’ lover and sidekick who helped him defeat the Hydra (like Misology, a many-headed monster), and then as quickly Herakles himself, a hero like Theseus with whom Socrates has already been implicitly affiliated early in this dialogue.
Socrates is the heroic warrior Herakles when he battles not merely Simmias’ and Cebes’ arguments, which are not yet worthy of attention, but the far more sinister threat of misology, the tendency to doubt the efficacy of all arguments (and therefore of reason) because one has been burned, once or more, by arguments that looked promising at first but then turned out to be flawed and unworkable.
Note the references to hair, haircutting and battle -- a combination of eroticism and warrior spirit that might have been familiar to Greek male aristocrats.
MISOLOGY -- this is as far as I know a neologism (a newly coined word) that Plato created to describe a condition which, in a move typical of this figure-filled dialogue, Socrates uses as a parallel to the more common misanthropy.  Misanthropy he describes as a condition in which men hate other men because, says Socrates, the man-haters are ignorant about the world. He says that misologists are idea-haters, for exactly the same reason - they, too, are culpably naive about the world of argument, as misanthropists are culpable for their naivete about human friendship.
Misanthropy happens because people are too innocent. They meet someone and immediately, because they do not know better, think without justification that because that person appeared friendly and trustworthy that he or she really is, not only pretty trustworthy and reasonably decent, but an absolute paragon of loyalty and nobility. Then when this putative best friend entirely human weaknesses, as one imagines many people will do, and proves false and evil in some way, and if this happens not once but several times in succession (always because the misanthrope is willfully naive), then the budding misanthrope grows to hate people and mistrust them, as if all people were in principle and necessarily untrustworthy, which is just not true. This guy had the responsibility to figure out what everyone else knows or can know rather easily -- namely that most people are neither good nor evil, neither paragons of trustworthiness and honor nor hatable as evil and false. Rather the huge majority, those of us who live in the fat middle swoop of the moral/friendship Bell Curve, are indifferent in terms to loyalty and evil; we are neither outstandingly good nor outstandingly bad. but a mix of qualities and defects in moderate proportion and degree.
This is pretty cool stuff because it has practical sense and could prove useful as a guide. There are few instances of anything at the extremes and anyone who acts as if this is not true is ignorant and not to be trusted.
Interestingly, at this point Socrates makes the odd and unexpected point that this is not the parallel he meant to draw between misanthropes and misologists. He says that he inadvertently went too far, got carried away! (But did he???) He restricts his point: what misanthropists and misologists have in common is simply that when misologists meet several promising arguments in a row that turn out to be disappointing they, like disappointed friendmakers, turn against argument itself as the misanthropes turn against people, and think that all arguments are untrustworthy, which is not, according to Socrates, the case at all. There are good arguments and, we presume, the ones he has presented are implicit candidates and the ones Simmias and Cebes are presenting are not.
What interests me is that Socrates and Plato leave hanging the intriguing possibility that Socrates rejects: perhaps arguments like people rarely come in extremes, so that very few arguments are either really well-made or really deceptive. Under this description Socrates could be suggesting that we can have friends and arguments that are imperfect but good enough... Interesting thought.

AFTER AFFINITY

VARIOUS REMARKS BETWEEN END OF AFFINITY AND START OF HARMONY
Things to Note

First, the sequence is as follows:
First, the Socrates arguments end and at 77 B there is an interlude of doubt in which Socrates asks S what C believes (?) and is told that he is the karterotetos among men, and though convinced that the soul exists before birth is not persuaded that it survives death.
Then the Affinity Argument, after Socrates points out that a combination of Opposites and Recollection arguments should suffice to convince C. 77C and D. But S figures they want more discussion and further proof because of childish fear.
C chimes in and agrees: yes, maybe not us but the child inside us wants more. Does this mean that the arguments might be okay but that the irrational fear demands more, that there is something inherently wrong with the arguments, or that there are simply more plausible arguments that Socrates can deploy?
Mormolykeia 77E

Affinity Argument Proper 78B -84B
Including the long disquisition on philosophy and purification and on what happens to souls that do not purify themselves (nearly all, by this account).

The core of the argument ends at 80E but I would do the purity bit as well because it tells a lot about how Socrates/Plato views the philosophical life.

After Affinity/Purity, there is a slience. (Cebes laughed at 77E)
Then Socrates sees the boys whispering to one another and admits that “there are still many subjects for doubt and many point open to attack” 84C. If the boys have something better on offer he’d like to hear it.

The boys – well, Simmias – admit that they have been holding back, wanting to ask questions but being held back by their fear that rude questions, that might undercut Socrates’ belief in his happy immortality, would be out of place under the circumstances. 84D

Socrates has a double response – first, he wants them to ask away because if he cannot persuade them he cannot persuade anyone. Second he is insulted by the fact that they lack faith in what he calls his “prophetic powers”, that is, his ability to speak truth in the name of the god Apollo
Note that Simmias says, right after the swan reference, that the only thing that provides a safe vessel is the strong ship of godly logos – which in the swan song Socrates just suggested that he has!!
Remind of the ship sacred to Apollo that sails to Delos to commemorate Theseus saving Athens from a monster, which is Theseus’ ship; is this also Theseus’ ship, that is, philosophy that provides the arguments to overcome at least two(actually, three) monsters – the mistaken belief that the object of fear/passion is the truth; the childish fear of death; a little later, mislogy)?
So – reassured that they are allowed to tell the truth – an important, crucial reassurance in a philosophical dialogue – the boys “rudely” let Socrates know that they each have a counter-argument that might sink the ship/raft and prove the prophetic logos wrong.
Socrates as poet, music-maker, hymnologist, mythologist, singer of charms vs. Mormolykeia, singing swan of Apollo, Theseus(?), philosopher – does the last word encompass all the others??
Terror and the narrative break: Echecrates enters the prison, the respondents appear in Phlius, the thin membrane between the past and the narrative present is ruptured, revealing that whoever wrote this thing is entirely in control and knows what one can do with time and space in stories, which one cannot do at all in real life.
Phaedo resumes the tale: 89B

The hair comment – they will cut their hair to mourn the death of the argument for immortality, mourning the death of deathlessness.
Then he shifts the meaning of the haircutting – the Argives cut their hair and kept it short until they avenged a defeat, or achieved victory. Now the argument is no longer a song, or a charm, or a court pleading but a battle, and Socrates undergoes still another transformation to a warrior.
Now Phaedo shifts the battlefield metaphor – even Herakles could not fight two heroic foes (he could clearly fight many normal people)at once, so he will need help.

Note also that at this point Socrates shifts the argumentative onus to Phaedo who has not said a thing to this point, as if he and Socrates were tag team partners and it is now Phaedo’s turn in the ring. But this does not happen.
Socrates replies that he is willing to serve as Iolaus, H’s sidekick/wingman – get the case – again as if Phaedo has been the main man.
Note, too, the return of the hero motif. Herakles and Theseus were quest partners and H’s specialty as a hero was killing monsters. He was finally killed by the ruse of a typical monster, the halfman-halfhorse Centaur (the Minotaur was half-man, half-bull). We come full circle – Socrates, like his Athenian forebear Theseus, is a hero fighting monsters, assisted by Apollo(god of reason asnd prophecy).
Phaedo reasonably defers and asks Socrates to switch identities again – from Iolaus to Herakles, which S does, of course.
And the danger they will fend off, the argument they will battle, the monster they will slay, before they deal with S and C’s arguments, is the very thing that has terrorized Phaedo and Echecrates – what S describes as the worst evil that can befall a man. (at 83 c, he calls the belief in the truth of what causes pleasure or pain the greatest evil!)
Sunday, November 18, 2007

AFFINITY

AFFINITY ARGUMENT

We have done the recollection dance and Simmias claims to be convinced. S is Cebes, but only that the soul exists before we are born. He just won’t hear the perfectly reasonable Socratic claim that the arguments from opposites coupled with the recollection argument require that souls exist after they separate from the body. It might be that Cebes sees how lame the Opposites argument really is, and the Recollection Argument, standing by itself is, strictly speaking, only about the pre-existence of the soul.

So we begin new moves, the first of which are already rehearsed elsewhere.

Now:
We make the subtle point (79A) that even earthly things that earn the descriptors “beautiful” or “good” are in themselves ever-changing, especially in themselves.

Now these changeable things are grasped or known by the senses, while the things holding to themselves by themselves, that is the things that keep being selfsame, we can only know using reason, i.e., through one seizing them in the reckoning of one’s thoughts (epilaboio he to tis dianoias logismo), here Socrates creating a strong parallel between aesthesis, or sensing and dianoia, or knowing.

What is most striking about these things that are known rather than sensed is that they are all “invisible and not to be seen.”

(aeide and ouk hopata – the privative of “seen” plus a verb-based adjective ‘seen’ – NOT)

SO NOW THERE ARE TWO DIFFERENT KINDS OF BEINGS – VISIBLE AND INVISIBLE

V = constantly changing – Herakleitean –AND WHY DOES CHANGE MATTER SO MUCH TO THESE FOLKS??

~V = THAT WHICH NEVER EVER CHANGES AND FOR PLATO THIS IS A MAJOR GOOD THING, THAN WHICH NOTHING AT ALL COULD BE GOODER. [REMEMBER WHO? – PARMENIDES]

New twist: and we are, to reiterate, made of 2 things – soma and psyche?

Word, dawg.

Now we get the move that tells sooo much: to what is the soma syngenesteron ? This here word means “of the same generation/family with”, related to, like, but in a relational way – think of Wittgenstein’s ‘family resemblance.’
Now see what we have: the body is most like, similar to, but not identical with, the visible things, or the images produced by the senses.
And by extension the psyche is more syngenesteron with the ~V.

C qualifies – yeah, to man.

This means that V and ~V are not absolute categories of Being but relative to the human situation; accidental properties, not essential.

Now the psyche cannot be seen in this world.

So the psyche is more like (homoioteron) the ~V, while the soma is more like the V.

And we know and have said in the past that whenever the psyche tries (desires, proschretai) to use the soma to find things out by sight or hearing (bodily scoping and sensory scoping are the same thing), then the body drags the soul around (insults, treats rudely) to investigate or hang out with (utterly inappropriate) things that never hold to themselves according to themselves (this is what changing means). And in this activity, when the psyche tries to learn via the body and the senses, it wanders around (planatai) and gets really confused and fuddled (tarattetai) and gets vertigo (ilyggia) like a drunk, when it lays hold of these sorts of things.

But he says when Mr. Soulie goes off by himself (aute kath auten), he goes off or departs (oichetai, a verb often used to say that someone departed for the next world or died), he hangs out, is with, the pure and deathless and thing holding to itself as itself, and stays the same and unchanging with the changeless. It can do this because it is like them and belongs with them.

This hanging out = phronesis, or wisdom.

Upshot, which is much weaker and more suggestive: the soul is more like the ~V; not identical, but more like.

What this shows, says Socrates, is that the psyche is way more like “the always holding as much as possible, to the max, to its own being” than it is to the opposite, namely that which is ever-changing.

NEW TWIST: THE RULER ITERATION OF THE AFFINITY ARGUMENT

Divine things are meant to, and do, rule. Souls rule, or should rule, bodies. The divine and the soul are naturally made to lead what is lesser.
QED: “The psyche is like the divine, and the body like the mortal.”Literally, “The soul is like the godly, the body like the die-y.”

Sum on 80B: QED – soul is most like the “deathless and immortal and divine and intelligible and one-ideaed and unloosable and the always-with-itself”while the soma is most like, but again, not identical with, the manyideaed and the soluble and the not-with-itself, etc..

So if all this is true here’s the payoff:
80B
Isn’t it likely that Mr.Soma will be quick to come apart, while Ms Soul will almost indissoluble??

Very interesting!

REMARKS

What type of thing is the soul?
If we can determine that we can know the fate of the soul, namely what happens to it after death. If any X is originally and naturally "compound"(syntheto, from syntitheimi, to put together, to compound) then it can sufer, and tends to suffer, and is always capable of suffering, pulling apart, decompounding (diairethenai). And if anything just happens to be naturally non-compound (axyntheto), then it would not naturally decompose, because that is just not its nature.

And it's likely that the things that are naturally not compounded are the things that always stay with themselves as they are, while the things prone to "synthesis" are also the things that are likely to come apart.

And mustn't the things that we just discussed as true being equality itself and beauty itself, any being tha is by its own is, be without composition or change? How that is can something perfect to itself, pure equality for instance be anything but pure equality or become anything but what it has always and will always be -- pure equality?

Plato does not call this "essence" or "pure"; namely just that it is ising as itself. Very verbal, rather than reifying and nominal.

Now Socrates makes a subtler point: how about all the things that change all the time but that also earn names that seem to be the names of things that cannot change, such as "horse" or "cloak?" He means what is going on when we call something a "good" horse or a "beautiful" cloak?

Recollection

11/3/2007

Kevin O’Neill
MORE PHAEDO
72 D ARGUMENT FROM RECOLLECTION

Cebes uses the occasion to “remind” Socrates of something he had told C before, namely that “our learning is nothing other than ‘recollecting’(an-a-mnesia -> not-not-remembering, which logically parses to not forgetting r, more accurately, unforgetting, or the opposite of forgetting, which means remembering, but not simply remembering but doing so after one had forgotten.
Recollection does not work as well unless we assume that the soul preexisted to learn what it now remembers.
So, this argument supplements the recollection idea, but also stands on its own. Let’s look.

Humorously, Simmias says that he cannot remember the theory about memory.
First, Cebes offers what he calls a “really beautiful (but very brief) argument: When you ask people good questions they give you good answers, which they simply could not do unless they already had in them, or to them, some knowledge or other, and ‘right reason’, or literally ‘straight story’. This shows most clearly if you give these people access to diagrams or anything of that ilk.
If this doesn’t do it for you, Sim my boy, I have other ways to prove it. You are skeptical, or have no faith in, recollection, ain’t that so?
That’s not it, my man. The thing is, I just don’t remember the proofs. So, jog my memory and in so doing, and by the way, rove your point about learning as unforgetting. I am your perfect test case because because I once knew the proof and have now forgetted it.
What C said jogged his memory and half convinced him. Tell me more!
1. If A remembers X, then he must already have known X at t1?
2. But there is more to this simple story. It is also the case that when A sees X, he might also remember Y because X reminds him of Y, as the lyre and the lover.
3. Can we call this kind of indirect reminding recollection? Can we be reminded of, and recall, things that we have forgotten either through time or lack of attention?
4. And can we also therefore have a picture(a representation, image, copy) of X remind us, not of X, but of Y? Or, can a picture of S remind us, not of S, but of C?

Note the difference between this complex set of cases and the much easier one of mathematical diagrams – are these diagrams representations or images of the mathematical objects and relations that they represent? Are the diagrams images at all?
Second, why is Socrates so interested in these two indirect cases, in the first of which some X reminds us of some Y, in the second of which some image of X reminds us of some Y? How does this differ from the diagram case?
The conclusion: recollection can be caused by both like and unlike things, equally well.

And in the case when X reminds us of X, we want to know whether the recollection of X, X-R, = offers a “perfect likeness of the things recollected”.

Here’s the deal. X provokes memory (image) of X. Q: is X-R a “perfect likeness” of X, or of X remembered?

Let’s see if this is so.

Consider the case of Equality – Ison (This by the way is an adjective, a modifying word, not a noun, a name for a thing.)
We believe that , or we say that – “There is such a thing as equality.”
We do not mean that A is equal to A but Equality Itself (auto to ison).
We say that there is such a thing, namely that Ison is real.
And not only do we say it is real, but we also know it.
Q: how do we know it?
Do we know it from the pieces of wood?
Watch this argument closely. It is this: it is not that I derive a concept of perfect equality empirically from comparing the pieces of wood. It is that the pieces of wood lead me to remember a perfect equality of which they remind me. The key is this: Socrates says that the knowledge of perfect equality is “another thing”, and this connects to his claim that “unlike” things can spark memory, and also to his claim that we expect or look for a perfect representational fidelity between images of things and the things like them that rovoke the,m.

In the case of the perfect equality and the equality of the pieces of wood, there cannot be, nor is there expected to be, a perfect representational likeness between this level of equality and perfect equality because they are not the same thing, but we know that unlike things can remind us of unlike things.

Even bits of wood or stones that we consider “equal”, and which remain the same, that s, do not change, sometimes
‘appear as equal in ne respect and not in another?” Here he probably means that if they appear equal in length they might not appear equal in width or mass or weight or color or texture.

So, even though the bits of wood are equal in length, they are not equal to each other is the same way that equality not only is, but must be, equal to itself in every conceivable way. Absolute equality can therefore never APPEAR TO BE unequal to itself. The concept just does not work.

The conclusion of this part of the argument is that the “equality” shared by the two pieces of wood is not the same equality as that of equality itself.

The puzzle is that people who recognize that the two pieces of wood are equal are, by that equality, reminded of the reality of equality itself, which is for Socrates a different equality.
And this is advanced as an instance of one unlike things reminding me of another unlike thing!

Now we take another turn, a serious twist not really warranted by what has gone before:
When we see that this piece of wood is equal to that one, do we think that they are equal in the way Equality is equal to itself? No; even though they remind us, they are seen not to be this sort of equality.

We “see” that this thing – the wood equality – is “trying” to be like something else better than it but is failing. But how do we know that this instance of something is defective or less unless we always already know whatever it is that the thing we are thinking of falls short? We are saying two things: first that when we experience an inferior version of X we are led inevitably to think about what it is inferior to, which is different from it. Second we can only know that it is inferior and the degree to which it is so if we already know the other thing to which it is inferior.

His points are: seeing the inferior equality reminds us of its unlike, perfect equality but only because we always already knew AND COULD remember what perfect equality was. And the nonperfect equality could remind is because our knowledge of perfect equality was always already there as a standard of which to be reminded before we ever saw any two pieces of wood.

So, Socrates’ real point is that order to see the pieces of wood as “equal” we must always already have possessed an idea of perfect equality, at which all the equal pairs of things in the world are necessarily aiming. In a sense, the already-existing idea of equality reminded us that the pieces of wood were roughly equal; conversely, the already-existing idea of equality was what the woods’ lesser equality reminded us of. But no reminding could have taken place unless there was always already something to be reminded of.

Does this same rule apply to pictures of Simmias that remind one of Cebes?

Now, even though we gain knowledge of perfect equality only through the senses,and “it is impossible to gain this knowledge except by sight or touch”, what we learn is that all “sensible objects strive after absolute equality and fall short of it.
‘
But for any of this to work, we must assume that prior to our ever sensing anything we had to have acquired a knowledge of “absolute equality”. Otherwise, the pieces of wood would not remind us of perfect equality because we would not even be rendering the rough judgment that the two pieces were equal in the first place.

And since we have had our senses since we were born we must necessarily have acquired our idea before birth. Therefore our souls, which are what knows and has such ideas, must necessarily have existed before we were born.

In addition, 75 C-D, this claim applies to all abstract ideas – in Greek, “to all such”(w/o specification of ‘abstract’; so, to all such ideas without specification as to their character.)

And we have to be born knowing all these things for we must be able to deploy them right away and besides there is no way to learn them in this world through the senses. By ‘absolute’ the Greek means “to o esti”, or the ‘it is’.

So, we always have a knowledge that we can temporarily forget and of which we must then be reminded which is why Socrates says that all serious learning is a form of remembering.

76A

Summarizes:

Things perceived trigger memories of other things, either like or unlike themselves, which we “remember” not in the sense of recalling something from our past in this current life but which we re-member from our soul’s “life”;we remember what we have never experienced.

So learning is either always already there, or remembered during life. In any case, and in both cases, learning = recollection.

ARGUMENT STRATEGIES

ARGUMENT STRUCTURE
WARNING: THESE ARE OVER VIEW REMARKS ABOUT HOW THE DIALOGUE IS PUT TOGETHER FROM THE DEFINITION OF DEATH THROUGH SIMMIAS’ RAFT
NOT SO MUCH DETAILED TEXT ANALYSIS AS SCHEMATIC

1. DEATH DEFINED 64c
2. Discourse on why philosophers want to die and about the relationships among soul, body, knowing and purification: There are Things to know; it is the Psyche’s “job” and goal to know them, and they cannot be well known while we have a body, which blinds and misleads us through the senses and diverts our attention through its fears and passions and longings. Philosophy is an activity, a form of life, based on the premise that that all bodily passions and all sensing are inherently negative activities with respect to the soul’s development.
64C-69E.
3. Cebes’ objection: people are afraid that when they die their souls will dissipate like a puff of smoke or a breath. People are just unbelieving about the soul’s capacity for survival. (And so am I, says Cebes). It will take some mighty good arguing and proving have to intervene to prove what the skeptics and Cebes think needs proving to warrant Socrates’ near-death optimism. And what needs proving is the claim that “some form of power and intelligence remain in the soul of the dead (one).”70B
4. Opposites Argument – which proves that souls must have pre-existed but not that they possess either power or intelligence, and does not directly address the issue of the post mortem persistence of souls. 70C-72E
5. Note that the discussion of why philosophers are willing and eager to die takes up more than 5 Stephanos numbers while the first proof is done in just over 2, suggesting the relative importance of the topics discussed.
6. Recollection Argument follows immediately without skeptical interlude because this argument in a sense builds on, or appears to build on, the one before. The nub here is that there had to have been another temporally prior world in which the soul learned the ideal standards of judgment, and in this world there had to be things that were or expressed this standard. 72E – 77D, almost 5 full numbers.
7. Interlude of Doubt: Mormolykeia, childish fears, the Inner Child and Socrates as charmer and bewitching singer, no longer as pleader in “court.” Audience now not jury but children needing a good, that is soothing yet plausible story, to soften their fears and ward off the Vampire goddess, Mormolykeia, who can be combated with magical incantations. 77E-78B
8. Affinity Argument 78C – 80B
9. Second disquisition on the relationship of the soul to the body, in which Socrates again excoriates (!) the body and introduces ghosts, asses, wolves and kites and bees and ants as sites for defective souls, indicating that they are not inherently human, but can easily travel into animals! THE GREAT EVIL 83C Thinking that the object that evokes pleasure or pain is thereby proved true or real. 80C- 84B
10. Note – disquisitions on knowledge and bodies and purification take up 7 Stephanos numbers; objections take up 2, and arguments take up a total of 9 such numbers, so that that objections plus remarks on soul-body relations take up as much room as Socrates’ arguments.
11. Objection: Simmas and Cebes whisper to each other, clearly not satisfied. Socrates responds to their concern that their skepticism is inappropriate given the circumstances with the Swan Song and makes himself now into a dying Swan (balletic figure?), a prophet attuned to Apollo, and as still a happy philosopher ready to continue the argument. Simmias responds with the RAFT and his fascinating disquisition on what sort of answer he expects.
12. Note the raft image and the continuing importance of water motifs – the sea voyage to Delos, Theseus’ tragic voyage home. Later Socrates will call his attempted refutation of Cebes’ argument as a “second sailing” (deuteron plous).
13. Also note the ubiquity of journey motifs – Simmias on the raft, Socrates on his way to the afterworld, Phaedo on his way home, the Apollo ship,Theseus – and the soul, going from one world to the other and from this world to the other one via recollection. All is in motion.

Phaedo Two

The dialogue itself begins with a somewhat rude and peremptory challenge, the personal reflexive pronoun “Autos!”, which roughly translated means “You!” or “You yourself!?” and in context means - were you really there, as an eye witness?
Echecrates poses the question to Phaedo.

Echecrates is a Pythagorean who lives in the small and somewhat out of the way city of Phlius, apparently leader of a circle of like-minded thinkers. Word is that he had to get out of southern Italy fast when the Pythagoreans were attacked and expelled from many Greek cities in that part of the world. So, we know that he is both philosophically committed and a kind of philosophical exile. Like Socrates but to a lesser extent he has paid for his beliefs and lifestyle. He also knows a little about philosophy and how to do it.

Phaedo was born and grew up in the Western Peloponnesian city of Elis, within whose boundaries the Olympic site is located and where the Games were held every four years for many centuries, from 776 bce. Sources tell us that he came from a noble family, and that in some obscure war he was captured by the Athenians and taken to that city as a slave/captive. His family either did not or could not buy his freedom and so, apparently because he was very good-looking, he was put to work as a male prostitute in an Athens brothel.

The story tells us, further, that he accidentally heard Socrates discussing philosophy in the public “square” (Agora or marketplace) of Athens and became fascinated by both the man and what he was teaching, to the extent that he would sneak away from the brothel to hear his new “master.” Eventually he became part of Socrates’ regular circle of young devotees and Socrates prevailed on his richer friends to buy Phaedo’s freedom, which they did.

Phaedo was of course present at Socrates’ death and is present in other dialogues. We realize he was doubly injured by Athens - first they enslaved him, then they executed his guide and mentor. It is no wonder that he leaves Athens soon after the death even though he seems to have been part of a lively circle of philosophically engaged people, and even though he must have known Plato who began his Academy soon after all this. Phaedo had no reason to love Athens, and so despite its attractions he split.

We find him halfway home, en route, stopping for the night in this small city, and either running into Echecrates or, more likely, sought out by him because Echecrates knew something about the philosophical scene in Athens and wanted very much to find out more about the death of Socrates who clearly was a known quantity even far from his hometown.

But there is an element of narrative anxiety in the opening. What if Phaedo had pushed on to the next town or if Phlius had not been part of the itinerary? What if he sailed down the Corinthian Gulf rather than taking the more difficult and time-consuming overland route? What if Echecrates had not heard that he was in town? Or what if he’d been ill, as Plato allegedly was when Socrates drank the hemlock? What if Phaedo had been in a huge hurry and did not want to pause to tell his tale? There are so many ways, given the way the dialogue is set up, in which the opportunity to tell that tale could have been missed, and in that case the most important things Socrates ever said -- the arguments trying to prove the immortality of the soul -- would have been lost to posterity.

This sense of anxiety is underscored by the unframed immediacy of the opening -- we are all of a sudden and without preamble or explanation thrown right into the middle of an ongoing conversation in Phlius -- where in that city, we never know -- in which Echecrates is stopping Phaedo and demanding to know whether he had been an eye witness to Socrates’ death. As you will see when you read Symposium, this is not how dialogues “have” to open.

The narrative anxiety is increased when we realize that all this is happening far from “home”, and that the crucial story is put into the mouth of a non-Athenian who is leaving town as fast as he can. This is both the wrong place and in a sense the wrong time, and it might well be the wrong person.

On the other hand, who better to tell Socrates’ tale than Phaedo? He, like Socrates, was mistreated by Athens. He, like Socrates, loves philosophical conversation. He, like Socrates, has left Athens and gone on a homeward journey. The fact that Socrates’ journey is to his home among the gods, and Phaedo’s is to his earthly home in Elis, is relevant but perhaps secondary. Both men are pilgrims going to a better place.

Both journeys, besides, have to do with self-discovery and self-fulfillment. Socrates’ heavenward journey means that he will finally achieve the freedom from his body that he needs to live in the truth; Phaedo’s homeward journey means he will finally have the freedom from censure and arrest that he needs to pursue his career as a philosopher, which he apparently did, writing dialogues whose names are known to us even if their texts are lost.

We can look at Phaedo in another way, as well. He is a kind of Socrates substitute, almost an Elvis impersonator, who can “do” Socrates perfectly, enacting the last scene in his mentor’s life over and over, not as a third person report but as a performance, which resurrects Socrates, brings him to life again and again in the narrative present, spreading philosophy, via Socrates, throughout the Greek-speaking world. By choosing Phaedo as the mouthpiece Plato might be making a backhanded political comment. He sends philosophy on the road, donates it as a kind of gift to the rest of Greece, and also sends it away from its proper home in Athens, as if that city had lost the right to hold Socrates as its own because it had rejected him. Now anyone who hears Phaedo, in any town in Greece, on any day, can know something crucial not only about the soul and its fate but about what it takes to be a philosopher, to be, in effect, another Socrates. If the story were put in the mouth of a stay-at-home Athenian, this would never happen. Athens would unjustly keep philosophy as its own and no one else would be able to embrace it as directly.

We will end this somewhat rambling and allusive account -- it is after all a blog, an unedited journal -- for the moment with the thought that in opening this dialogue as he does Plato has created an interesting mixture of immediacy and distance -- immediacy because everything is happening right in our faces. We are in Phlius, right in the intense exchange between Phaedo and Echecrates, unable to take any distance at all. If Phaedo was right there when Socrates died so will we be. On the other hand by setting the stage far from Athens, by putting the story in the mouth of a non-Athenian, by making it occur some indeterminate time after Socrates’ death we are also, complexly, removed from the scene and made distant observers of something that, like the events in “Star Wars”, happened in a galaxy far away, and a long time ago. The net effect of the closeness-distance is disruptive but also enabling. We get to know philosophy first hand but with enough distance to make reasonable judgments about it.

Phaedo Opening

The Opening of the Phaedo

Once we have established that we will read each dialogue as if it were all philosophy, rather than chunks of philosophy imbedded in some other text, like bits of fruit in a Jello mold, we have to take seriously everything that we are given in the piece whether it looks like philosophy to us or not.
I am not of course saying that reading Plato require that one abandon one’s sense of what “proper” philosophy looks like, but rather that reading Plato, who is after often called the “father”(!) of philosophy in the West, might lead one to see that at least some other thinkers have a different notion of what philosophy includes than we do.
A second benefit of reading in this way is that it is consistent with other disruptive reading practices that important and interesting 20th and 21st century philosophers have forced on us, or recommended to us. Nietzsche (really a 19th century figure), Kierkegaard (deep 19th century, having died in 1855), Wittgenstein, Heidegger, Derrida, Quine, Foucault and others since them have suggested that we need to read and write philosophy somewhat differently, to generate different looking philosophy terxts for a variety of reasons. We will not delve into those reasons here because that would make this endless and increasingly irrelevant to a Greek philosophy class. Suffice to say that when we read any of the above-named people, inter alia, we must learn first to read them, then to understand them, and in so doing we have to try to grasp how their textual eccentricities are meant as substantive critical commentary on philosophical “styles” that have gone before. Their shared commitment is to the rough idea that how we write philosophy tells a great deal about what we think it is, and what its job(s) is(are) supposed to be.

This awareness will, oddly, help us read Plato much more intelligently because poor old Plato is one of the primary victims of certain trends in historiographies of philosophy that insist that he must have been a Kantian, Leibnizian or Hegelian systematizer before the fact, and that therefore we have a responsibility to ferret out his doctrines and theories. But if we take the same care reading Plato as we do reading Derrida or Wittgenstein, neither of whose works are any stranger than Plato’s, we learn that perhaps such reading yields some hunches that point in the direction of the position that maybe, just maybe, Plato is a much more subtle, less cut and dried figure than we might have imagined.
This is the gist of a modern movement, sparked by the twin sources of Schleiermacher’s principles of criticism, which were revived in the 20 th century, and Gadamer’s “continental” readings of Plato inspired by German Scriptural scholarship. This modern movement, dubbed “The Third Way” by Francisco Gonzales, and represented in a spate of excellent studies that try to balance “philosophical” with “literary” or “philological” analysis in reading Plato, are some of the inspiration for how I have been teaching Phaedo, but I almost have to admit that I had started reading Plato this way long before I ever heard about the Third Way or Gadamer. So my reading is a meeting of my own interests and those of people with whom I later discovered I had a lot in common.

But that us not terribly to the point. Next entry will detail the opening of the dialogue.