← Ascend - The Great Books Podcast
Loading summary
Transcript41 lines
- [00:00]
A
Today on Ascending the Great Books Podcast, we have a wonderful episode for you. We have a recording live from X with Alec Bianco and the Athenian Stranger introducing the Phaedo. A wonderful and beautiful dialogue on the soul by Plato. It is a different kind of dialogue. It has a different kind of character, a different read to it. It is long, it's complicated. Socrates makes a lot of arguments that we aren't used to him making. And so a lot of people can get lost in this. So what are we going to do to help you out? Well, first we have this episode, which is an introduction just to the beginning, just to get you started, right. How should we read this dialogue? Why should you read this dialogue? And what is this myth of Theseus at the beginning? What is Plato trying to teach us at the beginning of this dialogue? Then we're going to work through the whole dialogue in two more episodes with Dr. Christopher Frey at the University of Tulsa. He's going to hold our hand and walk us through Plato's arguments, Socrates's arguments for the immortality of of the soul. And there's a lot of things here that you can miss. Maybe you get frustrated, you skip over that. If we take a little bit of patience and we work with this kind of long, complicated dialogue, there's a lot of beauty. There's a lot of beauty that you can unearth. So join us today for a wonderful conversation. Just introducing the Phaedo with Alec Bianco and the Athenian Stranger. Welcome to Ascend the Great Books Podcast. My name is Deacon Harrison Garlick. I live on a small homie farm in rural Oklahoma with my wife and five children and serve as Chancellor and General Counsel for the Roman Catholic Diocese of Tulsa. In my free time, I host Ascend the Great Books podcast. If you're new to Ascend, we are a weekly podcast that helps guide you through the great books. Check out our pinned post here on X to view our 2025 reading schedule which includes the Greek plays, Dante's Inferno and Plato. You can also check us out on YouTube, Facebook and Patreon. We appreciate all of our supporters and visit thegreatbookspodcast.com we actually have written guides that help you through the great books, which for example, we have a guide to the iliad with over 100 question and answers that can help you or your small group read the Iliad together. Tonight we are live here on X discussing Plato's dialogue, the Feedo subtitle on the soul, the death of Socrates. We have a wonderful guest tonight, Athenian Stranger, you can follow him on x, please visit athenscorner.com we have where he has lectures on philosophy, and he is always doing great spaces here on X. Athenian stranger, how you doing tonight?
- [02:44]
B
I'm doing good. I'm doing good. Really appreciate you guys having me on for this. I love whenever I get the chance to talk with you guys, you guys are doing really, really great work.
- [02:52]
A
No, I appreciate that. Yeah. So let's talk a little bit about, like, how this came about, because I think it was kind of comical, a little circular. So I run a Sunday great books group at my home, which was the original kind of impetus for this podcast. It's just a group of men, mainly young adults, who wanted to read the great books. Half of them had never read anything before. Never read the Iliad, never touched it. We have a new classical school here in Tulsa, Oklahoma, and a lot of those guys are sending their kids to classical school, but they themselves were not classically educated. They wanted to read the great books. And so I started hosting a group at my house. We meet together once a month. It's, you know, 30 minutes of scotch, charcuterie, boards, just catching up, and then three hours of discussion. And so this month, we were reading the Pheedo, and I'll be honest with you, I was struggling with a little bit. And so I just posted on ascending, you know, picture reading the phaedo, probably some scotch, you know, some typical things that I post. And I just said, who loves this dialogue? Like, who. Who really loves it? I didn't really critique it. I just kind of threw it out there. Like, who actually really appreciates this? And lo and behold, Athenian stranger says, this is. I love this dialogue. I think he says, I think about it almost every day. And then I check in X and guess what? He's hosting a space on the feedo, inciting the tweet. And so then I listen to his space and. And it just simply wanted me. Kind of left me yearning for more. I wanted to understand the dialogue better, particularly, like, the beginning. I think this has a beginning in this dialogue that you can quickly kind of skip over. But I actually think it has a really, really rich setting and it opens up with a myth, and there's just a lot going on here. So I invited our good Athenian stranger to come on board and kind of give us a good introduction to the phaedo. Like, what would really set us up well to kind of mine this dialogue for, I think all the treasures that Plato has to offer us. So kind of before we get into there, you know, Athenian stranger. Mr. Stranger, let's take a step back. Like why, why should we read the great books? Like, why should people take the time, you know, to even read some of these difficult texts like Homer and Plato? Like, why do we read the great books?
- [05:01]
B
First of all, I always like to say that they're not for everybody. Because I mean, look, this is the whole purpose of Plato's Republic is that you have to find the people who have the philosophical natures. You have to, you have to find those. Because he says quite explicitly that education, genuine education, the kind that traffics in great books and these things are great because they speak to the only few questions that are worth, worth asking in life. When you have people who are just talented enough to sort of skim them, they can end up misunderstanding them and things can go so wrong that it could turn out that philosophers end up being considered worthless and the city itself or the polis or the people end up hating them all. That's exactly what happens in the Republic. And Plato, Socrates says it at a number of other places, so there's that. But for those few people who do have an appreciation to go, as Plato, Socrates says in the Republic, the longer road, right, not the shorter road, but the longer road, those are the kind of people that are going to have the effected change that you want. Not simply for the political community, but for the ensuring of the tradition being handed down properly. The tradition that, that of the forefathers being handed down properly. So that's, that's the key thing. And plus, I mean, it's just everyone knows what passes for terrible education these days. So you know, we stand on the shoulders of giants. But if we don't realize that, we end up making huge mistakes. Because when you allow, see, see, if we are the eyes of the giants upon whom we stand, when giants fall, it can be disastrous. And so it's incumbent upon us to understand our predecessors in a way that they intended for us them to be understood because they have given us the world that we have. And so we need to know it. And if all we know is whatever is the latest, or if all we know is, you know, some just Cliff Notes versions of these things, then we are in great peril, genuinely in great peril, because we end up thinking that we know more than anyone who lived before us. And that's disastrous.
- [07:46]
A
So yeah, no, very good. Yeah, I agree. You know, when we approach the great Books, you know, we, we approach kind of the perennial truths which are really kind of rooted in the perennial questions like who is man? What does it mean to be a good man? You know, is there divine? If there is a divine, what's his relationship to man and our free will? Like, these are the questions that form us. You know, on the podcast, we did an entire year dedicated to Homer. And it's amazing that you see a lot of the questions that Homer raises are the same questions that say, Plato's going to wrestle with Aristotle, wrestle with, then Boethius will, St. Thomas Aquinas will like, and then Nietzsche will. I mean, these are the same questions that come up. And so kind of the piggyback on what you said, we kind of stand on the shoulders of these giants, right? We can actually join the great conversation, which in a certain way is, like, really humbling. Speaking of Homer, if you think of the Iliad, or, excuse me, if you think of the Odyssey, you think of Telemachus. You think of this young man who has to kind of go on this maturation journey, right? He has his own little odyssey. He has to move from being a boy to a man. And he was supposed to be helped by a man named Mentor, who kind of failed in his duty. And so Athena comes and kind of takes on the guise of Mentor. She becomes the mentor to him who's really trying to help Telemachus, because Telemachus is suffering from fatherlessness, right? He doesn't have Odysseus, he doesn't have his father. And that. That mentorship, which is where we get that word, right? We need a mentor. We need someone like Athena, goddess of wisdom, to come alongside us and guide us, kind of just to echo what you said. I think this is really important in the great books. We have to have a mentor. We have to have someone that can come alongside us, like Athena does to Telemachus, and actually guide us through these texts, because they can be really difficult, they can be confusing, they can be disheartening if you don't know where you're going. And so you have to have some type of mentor. That's one thing the podcast is trying to do, is to help people that you can read the great books and. But there's, like, a certain humility when you approach these kind of intellectual giants. And to find a mentor, I think, too, in that we can ask what the role of friendship is like. The role of friendship and pursuing the great books. I think there's a world of difference between reading, say, the Iliad by yourself and reading it with, like, a group of men. And I think that iron, sharpening iron, it's hard to. Unless You've done it. It's really hard to express the amount of fraternity that can come out of a group like that of trying to pursue wisdom together and not simply like in an academic or sterile way, but like I'm really trying to become a better man. I want to become a better husband, I want to become a better father. And like I'm in a room with like 8 to 12 guys that are pursuing that same good while reading about, you know, say Achilles and Hector. And so, you know, I think the great books, you know, it's an invitation that I think we offer to everyone, but it has to be done. Well, now we look at the great books, it's really hard to think of the great books without thinking of Plato. So we talk about why do we read the great books? Why read Plato? I mean, why can't we just read Aristotle? I mean, isn't Aristotle just better? He just improved everything. He writes like a treatise, he gives us a instruction manual. Like why do we even have to bother, you know, reading Plato? Why should someone even bother reading him?
- [10:54]
B
Yeah, a number of things she said. I mean I, I agree with so much of that. And, and probably the most important thing I think there was the humility that reading the great books has to instill. This is, this is how you find out who, who can be educated and who cannot. Do they approach the books knowing that they have something to learn or do they think they know better than the books and they're just going to read them as a kind of antiquarian activity or something? But Plato in particular, look, with the great books and the so called philosophers of the Western tradition, I like to be rather provocative, but I think this is true and say that there's only been about maybe 13 or between 13 to 15 people, period. That's it. These are the ones who stand out and have shaped so very much of what we understand as ours today. Plato in particular. Certainly for Christians especially regardless of denomination or anything or, or denomination or creed, Plato is absolutely, just unbelievably important here. And, and we're going to see why. Because what I like, again, I like to sort of traffic in provocation because education is so, so diluted and so corrupted today that you have to, there's an art to teaching. And, and in this dialogue, Socrates is actually going to talk about his art of teaching. But there's an art to it where you have to, you have to be, you have to present the material in a way that makes people interested in it. Because most people flatty, I mean they just don't even like education at all. I mean, they. Almost nobody reads anymore. And the. Our culture is going in the direction of which no one has to read. I mean, people just, you know, they listen to audiobooks. That's not reading. They. I mean, look, the stuff like what you do and like what I do, we get seriously into the material that's different. These things are far and few between. There's not many people that really do that kind of serious analysis. And people are typically not listening to the sort of stuff that we do. And so this is why I really love working with guys like you and a couple of my other friends on here that do this. But. But Plato in particular, you know, there's. There's the famous comment. I forget if it was Alfred North Whitehead or Bertrand Russell who said something to the effect. I think it was Whitehead that said something to the effect of all of Western philosophy is a footnote to Plato. I mean, that's hyperbole, of course, but there's a lot of truth to it. But what I like to say about it is the same thing I say about Homer. See, once you learn how to read these. These deep thinkers, it turns out that they have so very much to teach you that you start to. You start to think. And I honestly believe this, that you can find pretty much everything in them. You can find everything in Homer if you know how to look. You can find everything in Plato if you know how to look. Which is to say, if you know how to slow down and read and think very, very deeply yourself, because you will become deeper as you try to read these things. They're not easy. Same with Shakespeare. And you'll start to see, oh, my God, it's all the way Aristotle phrases it in the poetics is. He says this is that in other words, when you recognize one of the characters in a dialogue or a Shakespearean play or any movie, you say, I know someone like that, right? And so that's the beauty of it. That's the joy in learning. And we ourselves become deeper because of that. But again, Plato in particular, because of the novelty that he presents in philosophy itself with the form of the dialogue. And that could be a whole discussion of itself. But suffice it to say, what's so crucial about Plato is that because Plato never says anything himself, he presents dramatic dialogues. And so you have to take into account the various arguments, logoi that are being presented by the various dramatic personae, which is to say the various kinds of souls. And so you yourself can't Understand whatever philosophy he's getting at unless you engage in the activity of philosophizing yourself. In other words, you have to wrestle with the dialogue to try to understand these people and what they have to teach. And if there is an overall teaching that's going on from the dialogue itself. In other words, what's the. I like to call it the overall logos. And typically with Plato, the way you usually see it arise is it's some kind of what is question. Aristotle points this out. He says Socrates was always asking the what is, you know, what is courage? Or what is beauty? Or what is justice? Right. These are various dialogues, but usually what happens is everything comes tumbling out. In one of the shortest dialogues about what is courage? It turns out that literally all of philosophy comes tumbling out. You're talking about the. They end up. He asked these two athletes what courage is, and within the span of about three sentences, they're talking about the cosmos. So that tells you we're in the realm of some pretty serious stuff. But anyway, I don't want to ramble on too long because as I added my notes up there, I spent so much of my life just buried in the phaedo. And every time I go back to it, I find even more. And as you could tell from my notes in there, I've tried to answer the. So see, see, what the listeners don't know is Ascend sent me some bullet points of what he wanted to cover as a kind of intro to the discussion. And one of them in particular was the role of myth versus the role of logos, et cetera. And I was so proud of this diagram that I drew out on a notepad, trying to organize it myself, that I did the. I did the rare thing of making notes again for my spaces. So while it might look like a bunch of sort of random citations with these various triple underlines and arrows and things, but I assure you there's going to be some magic that comes out flowing forth from all of these things here pretty soon.
- [17:12]
A
So, yeah, that's very good. I appreciate your. I appreciate your comments. The. Yeah, I've come to appreciate Plato as philosophy, if that makes sense. And again, that's. That's probably a hyperbole, but I really do think kind of echo your comments. Everything really is in Plato. And I think sometimes when we compare him to Aristotle, it's way too narrow of a comparison where we kind of look at what Plato taught that Aristotle rejected. We kind of try and make these distinctions between the two, not really thinking that, like Plato, you know, overall is what gives us, like, teleology, right? The telos arete questions of virtue, form, education, like all these deep, deep subjects that kind of echo throughout all the philosophers throughout time. Really do start with Plato. And one of the ways that I think I've come to really appreciate him is to take up the question of how to read him. Because I think how to read him actually kind of illuminates why he is so important. And so, you know, not to belabor this point, but, you know, how do we read Plato? And I think that this. This conversation on the phaedo will basically be an exercise and how to read Plato correctly. But, you know, just like, in short, the drama of the dialogues is part of the pedagogy, or the drama is pedagogical, you know, meaning that we have to look at the setting, we have to look at the characters, we have to look at what they're doing. And these aren't things to skip. This isn't just like the fluff, right? So we're looking at the phaedo. We're looking at mainly just the preamble, just the setting, who he's talking to, a myth at the beginning, a comment on Plato, and. And that's it. It's like maybe two pages. Like, why not just skip all that? Why not just skip to, like, his arguments on the immortality of the soul, which is. Which is a way that some people read Plato. You read him kind of coldly, just to abstract, you know, what is. Whatever the philosophical principle is. I think it's a terrible way to read him because we have to remember that Plato, you know, was a dramatist, right? He was a. He was a. You know, he wrote plays, and upon meeting Socrates, he burned all of his plays. But as he tells us about Socrates, he tells him about. He tells us about his life. You know, he puts it in this poetic form in the dialogue. And so we have to realize that all of these little points of the drama, right? So think about, like, the Symposium, like, where they sit, the order they speak in. Aristophanes getting hiccups, who can drink wine and who can't, who's drunk and who appears halfway through the play or the drama. Like, all of these actually have, like, a pedagogical purpose that carry, like, deeper levels of insight into the philosophical truth. Like, they're not things to skip over. And the phaedo is like, no different. I think that's one of the reasons I was really excited to talk to you about this tonight is because the front of it, right, The Preamble is just kind of chock full of all of these statements, which if you're used to reading Plato, where the drama has pedagogical value, you realize there is so much going on in this preamble. And to tailor that to like why we read him, like, why. Why does this have a great importance? Well, one of the reasons is because the way that you read Plato is actually very similar to how we read sacred scripture, where the drama, the narrative is part of the teaching. And if you look at Socrates and also Plato's Socrates, not only how Socrates taught, but also how Plato presents him, it's incredibly similar to our Lord, who teaches in narrative, who teaches in parable. And then the Gospels are presented in a narrative form. And then you even get to the early church fathers and the way that they want to read scripture, right? The quadriga, this four horsed chariot where they tell us the way to read scripture. There's like a literal meaning, right, this layer, and then there's an allegorical meaning to the scriptures. Then you pull out a moral. What does this mean for our own life? And then an anagogical. What does this mean for the end of my life? And literally Plato is underneath that and hellenized mind on how to read a text deeply is from, from the Greeks. It's from the Hellenized tradition, which is really deeply rooted in Plato. And so I teach the great Books for our diaconate formation program for our diocese. And you know, it's wonderful that, you know, these guys that are going to become clerics are reading the great text. But one of the things I tell them is like learning how to read Plato, learning how to read Homer will actually make you a better reader of Scripture. I mean, any, anything I missed or anything you want to tack on about how we should actually read Plato.
- [21:34]
B
Yeah, just a pedagogical note. When I, when I took my first course in philosophy, which was a course in, it was the survey course. Most undergrads, the programs, they break it up into the required survey courses where you take ancient philosophy. Then they always, they always. Well, better way to phrase that is they never provide a medieval philosophy course because there's no universities that take God seriously. So they skip the medieval altogether. They teach ancient philosophy, then they teach modern philosophy, and then they teach usually something like, they'll call it something like 19th century philosophy or maybe postmodern, but doubtful. Usually the third is going to be essentially something like Kant and beyond. And I was fortunate enough to have an amazing professor and he began the course, by making us read Aristotle first and then go to Plato because he wanted to emphasize that we not try to associate them in a kind of. In a mere chronological order. Because. Because he said that takes away the richness of their thought. And I think that's correct. And just for your listeners, the intro that he provided for us that we read was we began with Aristophanes play the clouds for. Because that's where Socrates is going to get named and accused of being an atheist or something. Then we read the apology, then we read the Crito, and then we read the Phaedo, this dialogue, and then we ended by reading the Symposium for that section of the course. But what we're going to find out is that in the phaedo in particular, this issue that you're speaking of, of the drama of the dialogue, plus the various arguments that are presented from the dramatic personae, right? So we have these two things going on with any particular dialogue. There's the. The specific people, in other words, their specific souls, and then there's the specific arguments that have to be catered or tailored to those souls. It's going to turn out that the separation of those two things is impossible. You can't separate, which is to say, you can't separate a soul from the kind of logos that is required to get through to it. That's why, for instance, in Plato's Republic, in the cave, only one person leaves at a time, if they even leave. In other words, you can't enlighten the masses. It has to be a one, a one on one kind of thing. The only time Socrates ever spoke publicly, he got the death penalty. So that should tell you something. But what we're going to see that arise in the dialogue itself almost immediately, because what is wanted so desperately, and people fail to realize this because it's still every bit with us today, what is wanted so desperately by Phaedo and by Socrates's friends is they want to believe that the mind can in fact be separated from the body, so that the mind by itself can just live on these pleasures of philosophizing unattached to the body. And what Socrates has to do is he has to find a way to subtly let them know in a way that they'll be able to follow him, that that's not possible, that the human being as a. This strange composite of both mind, or we could say soul and body, is itself a unity. The separation of the two things is. Is no longer what we would recognize. And that's, That's a difficulty Now I should also add that in this particular dialogue because a very good mutual of mine brought this up to me after my feto space and he said, he said, you have to, you have to take the context into consideration, which is to say the two main characters that Socrates is speaking with, this is going to be Simeus and Kibis. These are the two people who Socrates is trying to persuade about the immortality of the soul. What has to be understood is they come from Philia and they are students of one particular. They, they seem to be students, at least this is what Socrates himself suggests very early on. They seem to be students of a well reputed Pythagorean. And so the issue of Pythagoreanism is, is, is a foot in this dialogue and has to be recognized. But, but I, I don't, I don't, I usually don't point that out immediately to students on a first reading because you can't expect them to juggle so many things. But also textually, what we're going to find is both, well, Kebes himself and Socrates both say that they're not really, they've never really been persuaded by that particular school of thought, that nothing is sure to them. And so this thing that we call logos speech. Well, think of it this way. What we ultimately have going on in this particular dialogue, especially not only the, the allure of the so called demonstrations of the immortality of the soul, spoiler alert, they all fail. But not only what's going on there, deeper is we have this issue of man's mortality in combination with this other thing, which is only the one thing that separates man from all the other creatures, logos. And so with between these two poles, the mortality of man, in other words, what happens to him after death and the fact that he has Logos as opposed to all other creatures, is nothing less than what everyone is probably already familiar with, the claim that Aristotle makes regarding what, what man is. Man is by nature the creature with speech, logos. So that's what's going on so much in this particular dialogue is, is what's going to come tumbling out from that. I mean, there's a number of ways we could go from there. But one thing I would also add too is what's important to realize about this dialogue in particular. It's up there on my notes at the very bottom of all of the Platonic dialogues, there are only three in which Socrates himself is not the narrator. And it's precisely in those three dialogues that are always looking back in time. That's where we get some kind of account of the early Socrates. So it's never told by Socrates himself. This is always second or third hand information from a long time ago. And it's in the Phaedo in particular where we get the young Socrates as the most presocratic that we will ever see him with regard to the so called, well, the people who philosophized prior to Socrates and that. So that's interesting, right? Because we are, we live at a time when we're obsessed with knowing people's biographies. In many respects most people understand the study of history as simply reading about the biographies of various men. But the teaching that's going on, this is going to be the dramatic high point of the entire dialogue is when it turns out that Socrates is not able to convince Kibes or Simmias of the immortality of the soul. What happens is they. Socrates has to point out to them because, and you see this at the top of my notes up there, he warns them against mythology, in other words, and it often gets translated as hatred of arguments. But that's also where we get our word like misanthropy, misogyny, all the misses. Right. And Socrates is going to say in this dialogue, he also says in the. In the Republic. I pointed it out there as well. What Socrates is going to say is that when people are unable to in this dialogue, he's going to say when you have people who are especially prone to debating other people. Right, the debate me bros. He says what happens is they often end up getting good at it. But then they discover that when they think they've won or something like that, it turns out their argument is not as airtight as they had thought it was. In other words, there's no real stability to the logos that they thought they believed in. And so what ends up happening is they end up becoming, and I note this up there at the top, what we think of as other skepticisms with the great danger of slipping into cynicism. And that's when you no longer believe even the motives of anybody. And Socrates flatly says both in this dialogue and in the Republic that there is no greater evil than slipping into the realm of mythology. Because then you miss out on the possibility of knowledge that man might be able to attain in this life. So all of that is wrapped up in this. We've got the nature of man himself. I mean that's the question what is man? Because remember, it's between these two poles on the one hand of the mortality of man. And on the other hand what is this thing called logos? What does logos accomplish? Well, we're going to find out. This has to do with the so called eye of the soul. And I put some references up there on the side right there for the Republic of where you can find this both in the Bloom and the Sax translation. There's two parts in particular, but there's something about logos itself that is so intricately related to this thing we call the mind. And that's always going to be the problem. You see that little diagram on the left over there? I put eye of the soul and then I have a little double arrow to being and, and then a little double arrow to logos. How do we get to knowledge of being with this thing we think of as noose or mind, intellect within the soul that requires that we communicate it by way of logos. And so that's all of that is at issue here with regard to the. And not only that, but if you can believe it or not, the status of whether or not to take refuge, as Socrates says, the imagery he uses is taking refuge in the logo. So the whole so called theory of the forms pops up at the dramatic high points of this dialogue. And Socrates tells us that he, how he himself was worried about becoming, as he says, soul blinded. In other words, the eye of his soul would slip into mythology. And so he has to take a so called second sailing. And what that means is that. Well, there's two ways to interpret that, but I'll provide the one that everyone's probably going to run into at some point. What that means is that when the wind is. When you're, it's an, it's a nautical term when you, when you have a sailboat and you're following the wind towards your destination. In other words, and the imagery he uses in this dialogue is sailing on the sea of life. What happens is when all of a sudden you encounter problems that you did not foresee, in other words, the wind dies down, how do you continue along? Well, the so called second sailing is when you put the rose out, the oars out, and then you have to row with your own force, right? That something has gone wrong with the tradition or what you believe was the truth. And so now you've got to work your way by your own wits towards it. And that's why I have underneath mythology up there the following, the logos, that's the imagery that Socrates is going to use throughout, is that one has to follow the logos. And the thing about that is that what that means, and this drives most people insane, is that you don't get to dictate where the logos goes. In other words, you don't get to pick sides. Like with the debate me, bro, kind of guys, they can't pick the sides if they're going to do true philosophy because you have to follow the logos where it goes. In fact, there's a number, well, there's a number of things that are entailed in that. But it's not mere rhetoric where you're going to decide that. You just want to persuade people. That's not how philosophy works. That's how rhetoric works. That's not philosophy. Philosophy goes where the argument goes. In other words, where the logos goes. And that's what's going on here is Socrates has to follow the logos by rowing him, rowing with the so called forms. But I'm already getting way ahead of myself because that's, that's far beyond the intro. The intro is going to involve the myth with Theseus and all that that you had asked about with the cool little diagram that I made down there. So I'll shut up and let you go ahead here.
- [35:07]
A
So, yeah, it is a cool, it is a cool diagram. I appreciate you, you sharing that. Yeah. Going back to what you said at the very beginning, because I really want to stress it particularly for those who might be new to reading Plato, because I think this is something that it seems simple, but it's actually really difficult to sometimes keep in mind, which is the dialogues and the lesson in each dialogue. The teaching is tailored to the interlocutors. And we're so used to reading things that's like, okay, the teacher is teaching what he thinks everyone should learn. So he's teaching a universal. Because he's writing this dialogue, he's writing a treatise, he's writing a book. And so he's just going to write on his face what he thinks everyone should know about it. But when you read a dialogue, it's really like being a fly on the wall in another person's conversation. And so for instance, like if you think of like the Euthyphro, this wonderful dialogue about piety, if you know anything about Plato, like Plato could have taken that dialogue much deeper. He could have taken it in multiple different directions. But he doesn't. And so sometimes readers get frustrated, like, why is he not pushing? Why is he not doing this? Because he's not giving a treatise on the divine, he's not giving a treatise on piety. He is trying to help Euthyphro. And it's really interesting because it's really contrary to how we typically read modern Texts, and probably his modern texts simply just are not written like this. But in this dialogue, as you mentioned, I think laid out really well, you know, we have to keep in mind then, like, what are the presuppositions of Socrates's interlocutors? Like, what philosophies are they bringing to the table? And what is the setting? Like, where, where are we? Socrates is in jail. He is in his prison cell. He is about to die. All of these kind of dramatic elements lend into the teaching. They're not something to ignore, they're something that you have to hold together. And a lot of times you have to read a dialogue multiple times, because the first time you cannot hold all of these threads together. And that's okay. Like, that's perfectly fine, right? You, you read one and you'll notice, like I notice this character's doing this, or I notice every time, you know, Socrates speaks, he does this. That's great. Pull that thread. Follow that thread through the dialogue and when you read it again, you'll focus on something else and you'll start to kind of slowly build this picture together. I do want to stop though, for a second. Alec Bianco, our friend, has joined the space, and so I want to acknowledge Alec. Alec's helped us on the podcast several times. I always really appreciate his insights. Alec is the director of curriculum at the Searcy Institute, which helps people in classical education. And so maybe Alec, kind of by way of setting you up in the dialogue, kind of taking a step back, you know, why, why should people even read the Phaedo? Right? So we've talked about great books, we've talked about Plato, like, why should we read the Phaedo? Because personally, particularly as a first time reader of Plato, when the first time I picked it up, I found the Phaedo very difficult. I think it's structured very clearly, but I found it a difficult read. So, Alec, why, why should people bother reading the Phaedo?
- [38:12]
C
Yeah, it's, it's a beautiful, a beautiful dialogue. I also find it, it's, it's a difficult one. It's easy in the sense for beginners because it's structured so well, but there's so many interesting, I, I almost want to say paradoxical questions that occur in it. And then also one thing I just, I would love to just quickly touch on and maybe you guys talked about this, but is the, the cardinality of this dialogue compared to some of the others? For many of the Platonic dialogues, you have this sort of intellectual, kind of higher, you know, Ascending higher. And the dialogue itself takes you into that ascending higher. And then you have this interesting, this is the, the paradoxical point. Socrates in the Phaedo is saying, look, what is just about the philosopher, what makes him live a higher life, is that he is separating himself. He is, he's trying to stay away from the physical as much as possible. And that's what allows him to ascend to this higher, higher place and receive a better ending when the life, when this physical life ends. But all throughout the dialogue, in the drama of the dialogue, what we see is the physicality, the carnality of Socrates and the people around him. Lots of weeping, laughter, writing, speaking, hugging. It's a very, It's a very beautiful dialogue in that sense. Even just rereading it today, I find myself, you know, wanting to weep along with Apollodorus and these others. I mean, it's just, it's an extremely moving dialogue. And at the same time, I am, I'm seeing how, how interesting it is along Socrates sort of line of argument. I, I will say this for the, for the newcomers to Plato. He's not suggesting, as strongly as it might appear, this denigration of the physical. I don't want to say that. I'm only bringing it up as a question that I think Plato is trying to get us to think about, which is the nature, purpose and propriety of the physical with relation to the soul. And that's a strong question, I think that is, it comes through the phaedo. But all that to say it's a beautiful dialog that helps us wrestle with the nature of the soul and the nature of the body. So in ancient times it was called, along with phaedo is also called on the Soul. But I think another apt name for it would be on the Body because. Precisely because I think that Plato was. Wants us to wrestle with that question. And I think that Socrates, the way he's portrayed in this dialogue, is a very human character. It's a side of Socrates we don't often see in the dialogue. So it'll be really interesting to discuss this tonight and it's a beautiful read for those who are either newer to Plato and if you're not new to Plato, then yeah, it's. There's so many interesting questions to wrestle with. But, yeah, thanks for having me on.
- [42:00]
A
Yeah, very good. Athena. Stranger. What do you think? Why do we. Why should we read the Phaedo?
- [42:05]
B
Yeah. One thing I wanted to point out with what we would. We could refer to as the asceticism that's going on in this particular dialogue because that's going to speak to the kind of dramatic context that's going on here. And what we find out that Socrates goes out of his way to mention to us is that Simmias and Kibis, he says they have spent time with Philaleos. And that's going to be the Pythagorean connection here. And I'm always cautious for newcomers to Plato. I have to emphasize, just take the dialogue on its own, right? Just read the dialogue on its own. Don't necessarily try to read it in some kind of historical context or anything or whatever you've heard about other people saying that. But these are the little breadcrumbs that he's leaving to give us an indication of many of the themes that are going to pop up. And Philolaos is going to be, or Philola, however you want to pronounce it, is going to be that connection to Pythagoreanism. And then he's also going to, to mention in conjunction with that the mysteries, in other words, the kind of the mystery cult that comes along with Pythagoreanism and all of that is associated with a kind of very strict asceticism. That's why there's going to be emphasis away from the body. But, but Socrates is always doing something where he's taking whatever the presuppositions of his listeners have and he's going to make it into something so much more rich for the discussion itself. And so, for instance, everyone's familiar with the role of mathematics and Pythagoras, right? This so called Pythagorean theorem, the high point of this entire dialogue, just to give an indication of how complicated it can be. But in a fun way, let me emphasize this is not like the Parmenides. The Parmenides is rough. That one's gonna, that one's, that one's a beating. But this one is fun because the drama is so high, because he's going to die. This is Socrates's last day. He's going, you're going to witness him drink the hemlock and he's going to die. He's going to say that of all the philosophic questions that stopped him dead in his tracks, the one that, that. Well, of all the philosophical questions he faced, there was one particular question that stopped him dead in his tracks. And that was how it is that one plus one equals two and how it was that two equals one plus one. So again, you're going to have that element of Numbers, the asceticism of the Pythagoreanism going on. But again, just to emphasize that final comment there about how it is that one plus one equals two or two equals one plus one, what Socrates has done is he's taken the presuppositions of the Pythagoreanism from those two individuals. He's trying to show the immortality of the soul to. And he's, he's found a way to circle back with that to what Socrates takes to be the most important question. And so he, in other words, he's using what, what we would call the baggage that they bring with them as individual souls. And he's using what he's going to flatly refer to as his art of speeches, which I like to call his technology. He's going to use his art of speeches in order to lead their soul in the direction that he wants them to go. That will make them deeper because they fear that not only is Socrates going to die, but with Socrates dying, so too is all of philosophy itself. And so he, what we're going to get in this dialogue is Socrates is going to provocatively say very early on, he's going to define, he's going to define philosophy in a way that is extremely perplexing, but in a way that is the hook for these two otherwise Pythagorean influenced students to find their way with Socrates's help, as their guide to a much richer understanding of what philosophy is. Because it also has to do with the impact of Socrates on students. This is the impact of, we could say professors or as you rightly pointed out, mentors upon the mentees. They all love him. And that's getting in the way of their ability to properly philosophize.
- [47:01]
A
No, Very good. I really appreciate that. The, you know, let's push into the actual text. You know, we're kind of flirting with it right now. Let's push into the actual text. And so maybe to go back to our thesis that the drama is part of the pedagogy, the drama is part of the teaching. The first thing that really alerts us here, as I think you've already alluded to, is that we're not just getting the straight story, right? We're getting the story retold, right? Fido is going to tell another individual about what he saw happen. And I think a lot of times as moderns, we just blow right past this. It's like, okay, great, like, please get to the story of what actually happened. But we have to take a step back and Ask ourselves, right? Like, why has Plato structured it this way? Why is he actually doing this? And so this actually becomes. Once you kind of get used to reading Plato, this becomes like a flag, it becomes a key, right? Like, oh, wait, something's happening here. He has elected to open the dialogue in this way, and there's a reason why, right? Just like, again, it's analogous to scripture. Scripture does not give any unnecessary detail. So, for instance, like in the Old Testament, we don't know what most of the characters look like. They don't ever tell us what the characters look like. But if they ever do tell us what a character looks like, there's a reason for it. Same thing here. If there's details given to us, there's some reason for it. We have to kind of stop and think what's going on. And I think you've already cracked this open for us, but I kind of want to know why, if that makes sense. So my understanding, right, is we get Phaedo, he's on his way back, Socrates is dead, he's on his way back home, and, you know, he's kind of stopped at a city. And, you know, the people he's talking to are again, Pythagoreans. And then the people in the dialogue themselves, the two, the two main characters, right, Simonius and Cebes are also Pythagoreans. And you've, you've kind of flagged that for us, and that's fantastic. But can we ask why? Like, why is it, like, what is the purpose? Like, why has Plato elected to kind of shoehorn this in the beginning and then make them the main interlocutors? Like what. Why is it that he's trying to tether this dialogue on the immortality of the soul to the Pythagoreans? Like, Athenian stranger, do you want to take that one?
- [49:22]
B
I mean, I'd have to think about that. I mean, I think that one way to frame it would be sort of how Alec had pointed out is the, the emphasis on. On the body here. This, I mean, that, that kind of asceticism that we're going to see as the. What Socrates is going to refer to as a number of times, of the kind of purification of the soul itself. And think of that word purification with regard to the mysteries, right? He's going to tell us very early on about these mysteries that they should be familiar with. That kind of asceticism really brings out what we all sense or recognize insofar as the distinction between body and soul. And because that Asceticism is a kind of denial that we have the body. And so that more than anything, and this is just me sort of speculating here, but it seems that that more than anything really drives home the point of what would this separation of body and soul look like from this perspective, which is to say from a kind of philosophical perspective. I'd have to think about that a little bit more, though. But that's. That's what I would go with as a kind of a starting point there.
- [50:56]
A
Yeah, no, I think that's very good. I think that's a good. That's a good foundation, you know, my. You know, my understanding, you know, maybe kind of speculating. Like, why would Plato try and create these sinews? Like, why. Why is he creating this kind of, like, infrastructure between this dialogue and the Pythagoreans? You know, just like a few, like, you know, just quick observations. One, they believe in immortality of the soul, right? This. So the. The purpose of the dialogue, this kind of teaching of the immortality of soul is already a tenet amongst their own beliefs. They also believe in reincarnation, and they also believe in trying to keep the soul pure because you might be reincarnated. And so, you know, if you're. If you're good, you can be reincarnated in a better soul, a better human. If you're bad, you could even be incarnated in an animal. So it's kind of interesting that on its face, it seems that Plato is, you know, you could say, like, is he coming alongside? Like, he's adjacent to a philosophy that, you know, has similar points. Is he trying to, like, build a bridge here? Like, I think there's a lot of questions, but he's, like, very clearly created this tethering to the Pythagorean philosophy right here at the beginning. And then it continues. It echoes throughout the entire dialogue because of the presuppositions of the main two interlocutors. And so this is just, you know, we could explore this. It's. Maybe it's a. You know, ultimately it terminates in mystery. But I think just maybe, as a Plato 101, this is a good question to ask. Like, this is how you read. Like, why is he. Why is he creating this narrative at the beginning of the. Of the dialogue being retold? Why he. Why did he pick this interlocutor? Yes, there's probably, you know, historical kernels of truth behind these dialogues, but also because Plato's retelling them, they have a strong artistic veneer. He's Choosing the setting. He's choosing the interlocutors, he's choosing the narrator. There were many people there. We're going to get into how many people were there, because I think that's important. But there are many people there. Plato could have retold the story in many different ways, but he chose this particular one. So maybe, you know, what I would just like to emphasize here is that I think this is part of how you should read and take the setting and take the interlocutors, you know, very seriously. Now, something I want to get into here, which I. The first time I read it, I just completely missed it. Like, I. I thought something was here. It was kind of like this Pythagorean question, you know, something's here, but I quite don't know what it is. And then I listened to you on your space on it, and you really just helped unfold it. And it's this mentioning. Right, right after the beginning, we get the setting, we get Phaedo talking to his interlocutor, and then they mention the myth of Theseus, because obviously one of the questions is, well, why. Why was there a delay in Socrates execution? And for those who don't know, you know, Socrates was condemned to death. That's in the apology. Him in his prison cell is the crito. And. But he has like a month between his sentencing and his execution. Why? Well, there's this religious festival, this is ritual that calls to mind the story of Theseus. If you remember Theseus, this was, you know, the young Athenian, if you remember, they had the Minotaur in Crete. And so Crete had conquered Athens. And Athens had to send in tribute. They had to send in these young people, right? Seven women and seven men. These young women and men, they had to send them to Crete to be devoured by the Minotaur. And so Theseus, you know, his narrative, his famous story in Greek mythology is that he shows up in Athens. This is undergoing. He says, nope, I'm going to kill the Minotaur. He accompanies, you know, the 14 young Athenians to Crete. He's then helped by the young princess. She gives him a yarn that I believe Daedalus gives her, right? The Daedalus is like the master craftsman, the kind of technological expert in the Greek mythology stories. And this yarn will unroll, it will roll through the labyrinth. The Minotaur is at the heart of this maze, the labyrinth. And so this yarn will actually roll through it, show Theseus where to go, which will also allow him to know how to get back Out. And then he has to kill the Minotaur at the beginning, at the middle of the labyrinth. And so the Athenians kind of present day, taking it to the dialogue. The Athenians had prayed to Apollo that Theseus was going to be successful. And so now they have a ritual. They have an annual festival, a religious ritual of, you know, they send this ship to Delos and they sent it to Delos and it has to come back. And one of the oddities of the ritual is that no one can be publicly executed. And so, you know, by the providence of the God, Socrates is able to last, you know, a month or so inside his prison cell. And this is also mentioned in the Crito, Right? This isn't a surprise. What surprised me, though, when I read the Phaedo is that it's mentioned again in such detail. It's not just like a, you know, a little illusion. It's not just a side mentioning, it's actually mentioned in a lot of detail. And again, if we're learning how to read Plato, all of our alarm bells should go off. Why is he telling me this? He's not just mentioning the ritual. He's telling me explicitly that there's seven young men and seven women. He's giving me details like, you know, Athenian stranger, like, what. What is he doing with this myth at the beginning? Like, what, is he trying to set us up for something? Is he trying to, you know, illuminate some mystery that's going to be out throughout the phaedo? Like, why does he give us this myth at the beginning?
- [56:41]
B
So I'm having a little fun up in the nest because I'm just so happy with the little diagram that I made, which. Which, by the way, these are fingerprints of my previous life as a mathematician. There's a. There's a very famous mathematical equation involving matrices that I've mirrored that little graph on. But it's. What we have to understand is there was in fact, at least, if we are to take feto at his word, because all of this is being told to us by Phaedo. Feto is the one speaking of all of this. So we could even go so far as to say Plato's Phaedo's Socrates telling the story. But what happens is that there is the myth of. And we don't necessarily even need to call it the myth, but I mean, they certainly understood it as myth. This is what Plato's Veto Socrates refers to it as a myth about the story of Theseus taking the. There were 14 people. And what Athens would Do by law is they would suspend anything that would make the city impure. In other words, capital punishment. They suspended doing that until the. And the ritual was taken care of. And so what, what we have in the listing very early, because Echocrates has asked Phaedo, who all was there? I want to know who all was there. And if you go just by the, the number of people that are listed, there's 14. And then he says, and some others, but apparently the others don't matter. But those, those 14, who almost none of them have anything in the dialogue whatsoever. It seems to be the case that Plato is yoking the story of Theseus slaying the Minotaur, trying to work his way through the maze. Right. In other words, the dialogue, this dialogue itself would be the maze. We're to find the thread and the imagery we get at the very end of the dialogue is that Socrates was sitting there with a sort of a terrifying bullface look. And that is there in the story of Theseus, at least with regard to Plutarch. Now, so, in other words, so, so what's the Minotaur that's being slayed? If, if, if the imagery is to tell us that Socrates is Theseus, what's the Minotaur that has to be slayed? Well, it would seem to be the fear of death or the. Well, let me be more specific. And I wrote down exactly where you'll find the fear at the very bottom of the notes on the left, where they come explicitly out for the second time and say, no, this is exactly what we're afraid of. And what it is, is they're afraid that the stories of what happens to the soul just are not true. They're not persuaded by the stories that the soul is, does in fact get reincarnated or something to this effect. In other words, they're skeptical of the logo, they don't know the power of the logo. And they, they. Well, let me rephrase that. They know the power of the logo of given a logos, but they're not persuaded by the logos. That's their traditional understanding of the divine. We could think of this as a kind of collision between philosophy and theology. Now that is, that has been a very powerful reading of what's going on here, but we need to. It's not necessarily the case. And just give me one second, and I'm not even going to try to provide the analysis here, because this is, this is at a second order level kind of reading here. But let me just read this real quickly. That challenges the role of Socrates as being the Theseus who's going to save his men, the 14 men, by going through the maze, in other words, the various logoi, and slaying their fear, because they do in fact say they're crying. They do in fact say, we need. We want you to speak to us like children and give us lullabies because our souls are so terrified that, you know, not only will we never see you again, and not only will philosophy die with your death, but also we ourselves are simply afraid of death because we don't know what's on the other side of it. Now, this is. This is an important thing. I'm not going to read who the author is because I know him and he's been very uncharitable to a number of my friends in my orbit. But I do give him credit for this analysis. He says, in keeping with the myth Phaedo recounts, the number of Socrates's named friends who were present at his Death is also 14. Nine Athenians, five foreigners. And then he gives the Stefanus paginations 59b5 to c6. And this is the difference here. And this, I think this is actually quite persuasive against that reading of Socrates being in fact Theseus. He says, on closer inspection, even the distribution of 14 is in. Is in keeping with the myth. For as Plutarch tells us, Theseus brought along not in fact the mandated twice seven. That's how it's phrased, twice seven, he says, but two additional men disguised as women, hence nine men, he says. Now, it's often supposed that in likening the Phaedo to the Theseus myth, as he surely does Plato, like in Socrates, to Theseus, who somehow saved the 14 from all but certain death, he says, and he names off all the various authors, very famous authors who, commentators who have done this. And he says, as Plato stresses here, however, this is at 58 A 10 to B B 1. He says Theseus was himself numbered among the 14, whereas Socrates is not one of them. So Socrates is not one of the 14. He says Socrates would seem to be likened instead to one of the mothers who, according to Plutarch, and this is in the life of Theseus, when the twice seven youths were about to go to their death in Crete. And then he quotes Plutarch, this is paragraph 23, third sentence, when they were to go to Crete to their death, he says, for the sake of comforting and encouraging the children, spun out muthos, muthoids, plural for them. And so as a whole, well, he says, See, the story of Theseus as a whole, but that's the key there, is that it might not be the case that Socrates is Theseus the hero, but it might in fact be the case that Socrates is one of the disguised women who, Plutarch specifically tells us spins out myths in order to calm down them along the journey. But be that as it may, either way, what I would simply say is, well, I'll. I know you have something to say, but I. I wanted. I'll. Let me explain my graph afterwards. Go ahead. Because I think the. The graph I've made there is a little more important for the broader scheme of things. But. But, yeah, go ahead. Sorry.
- [64:53]
A
Yeah, No, I appreciate that. Yeah. I mean, this is fascinating because. Right. What's happening here? We have a myth. We have something that Plato has clearly brought into the dialogue at the beginning. We're teaching ourselves, we're habituating ourselves to the fact that this has to have a pedagogical purpose. And so the question here then is, like, how do we interpret it? I do think there's a numbers game going on. And so let me kind of just sketch this out. So I'm pulling from Eva Brann, you know, God rest her soul. And so she wrote a book called the Music of the Republic, which is actually just a collection of articles and essays that she wrote. And she has an introduction to the phaedo. And she. I originally heard it from your space, and then I went to go research it. And so she plays this out, too. She tries to understand what is the allegory, to use that word. What's the allegory that Plato's trying to give us. And I think that she gives the one that might be the more normative one. Right? So just to kind of play this out, there's 14 young people, right? So there's 14 people in the myth, the seven maidens, the seven young men that are sent to Crete to be sacrificed to the minotaur. And what we get here in Plato is that in the listing that you did, which is what 59A, 59B is that we get 14 named people. And there's two ways to read that because it's actually 15 people. But again, subtleties matter. One of the people, one of the persons, is not named. And there's two ways to Read that. One is that because they're not named, it comes up with 14. So the 15th one doesn't count. The other one to read it is that the one that's not named is actually credo. It's the father, it's the older individual. And so there's an argument there that he's not one of the young people, and so he doesn't count towards the 14. And so we end up then with these 14 individuals that mirror the myth. And yeah, I think the normative read is that then Socrates is Theseus, right? He's. He's the hero of the dialogue. And so Eva will kind of hold to that picture that the Minotaur, right? Or. Or death. Like what symbolizes the Minotaur is death. That's what has to be conquered in this dialogue, in the immortality of the soul. That's what we're discussing. And so what has. What has to be conquered, what has to be killed in this dialogue is death. We have to understand that death is not the end, that the soul actually will endure. And the other thing that pops up too, that's a problem is where does Phaedo fit in? Phaedo's not one of the 14. He's also not Theseus. And so it's really interesting that Eva actually sets up Phaedo as the princess, as the one who helps Theseus to slay the Minotaur. Phaedo is the one that actually comes in to help by being the storyteller. He comes in to help slay the Minotaur by assisting Socrates, you know, as the Theseus character. And so you kind of get this really beautiful picture that Eva sets forward that, you know, Phaedo is the one who gives us the yarn to lead us through the labyrinth that is the Phaedo, the dialogue. Right. So the dialogue itself is a labyrinth, and we're trying to follow its twists and turns. And for those who haven't read it, it has a lot of twists and turns. It's straightforward for a dialogue. I think it's probably one of the most structured dialogues we have, but there's a lot of different arguments. There's a lot of things that I think can throw you for a loop. And you want that yarn, you want someone to be. Use our original metaphor, that mentor to guide you through it. The other thing, too, that I think is really fascinating in Eva's account is that she actually goes so far to then structure the entire dialogue into 14 parts, that Plato actually structured the entire dialogue around the. The myth of Theseus, that the whole dialogue really is the labyrinth and we have to lead through it. I think the kind of counter example that you gave Athenian stranger is really fascinating. It's one that I want to go back. If you don't know, actually have it right here in front of me. But if you don't know Plutarch's the Rise and Fall of Athens and the parallel lives the very first Athenian he takes and gives us the biography of is Theseus. And that's something I need to go back and read and kind of take up what you said because I think that's actually a fascinating parallel and a pretty good pushback. Alec, anything on, anything on how to read this myth of Theseus here at the beginning?
- [69:26]
C
Yeah, that's, that's really interesting. I have to reread that essay from, from Bran. But no, I would just quickly add that I think it's really fascinating to think about the, the myth there just over the whole context of the dialogue where we start out with this, let's call it a historical fact, which is that this, whatever religious ceremony or surrounding Theseus has, is what has prevented Socrates's execution from occurring at a more regular time, so to speak, based on the, on the dialogue there. And then what we have is this really interesting encounter with Socrates again through the voice of Phaedo. I think stranger pointed this out that the whole thing is through this voice of Phaedo. So that's another interesting question to think about. So again, a kind of myth making in its own. That is to say we're hearing it secondhand and that's sort of what myths do do for us is they're through a specific voice, they reveal truth through us, through a glass darkly. But anyway, so Phaedo is telling this story about the, the end of Socrates and he's talking about the fact that he is afraid that he may have misinterpreted the words of the, of the, of the God interpreting his own dreams. So again you have this interesting myth making happening where Socrates is trying to uncover the truth in his own dreams and making sure that he understands that he's done the right thing and he's afraid that he may have misinterpreted it. And I don't know if Plato means this to be comedic or not, but it is sort of funny to think about the fact that on his deathbed he decides that maybe, maybe I was wrong all along. And so I'll just very quickly, just hash out some poetry real quick before, before I died just to make sure that I interpreted the God correctly. It's, it's somewhat funny to me, but it's, it's interesting that all that to say. So we're starting out with this myth of Theseus that is having this direct physical Impact on Socrates. Okay, so that's the first direct impact of the myth on Socrates and the people of Athens. Secondly, you have this other myth, mythological impact on Socrates, which is, have I been doing, have I been studying the arts correctly? I thought it was philosophy, but maybe I actually need to be doing poetry. And so then he's doing that. And then the course of, over the course of the dialogue they're having this somewhat typical Socratic dialogue about.
- [72:51]
B
The, the.
- [72:52]
C
Immortality of the soul. But then Socrates ends it with this really, I guess I'm sure we'll speak to it at some point, so I won't, I won't say a lot, but this myth of the afterlife, what the earth looks like, how the world works, the cosmos works, etc. Um, so you have that big myth and then the very end, I would argue you have a, you have a final myth which is in the very, very last lines, which is so 1 15ish, something like that. You have Socrates on his, the last words of Socrates saying, we owe a cock to Asclepius. So a final myth that sort of, you know, puts the final nail in the coffin, so to speak, for Socrates, but also for us philosophically, a myth, a mythical point about what the purpose of philosophy is. So this dialogue is very interesting. It's, it's, it's bringing in myth all throughout. And the question then is, what are these myths mean for us as we ask the same questions these people are asking?
- [74:14]
A
You know, I really appreciate that. I am, you know, I want to come back to Stranger and kind of the, he wanted to continue to kind of play out his notes and his structure there. And so I'll just kind of set up this question and then refer back to Stranger to kind of let him take it as he wills. But like, the other thing that really stands out to me, right, so we have the setting with the Pythagoreans and like, how does this play into the immortality of the soul? Why is Plato building these sinews here? We didn't have a myth. You'll see that like, you know, there's a, there's certainly a good faith effort here to see how is this like allegorical to the dialogue overall, right? Is there, is there kind of a surface level allegory? Is there a way to push into it in which, you know, maybe even Socrates is the Minotaur, right? Is it that kind of maybe turns it on its head? Or is he Theseus? Is he the hero, right, who is slaying who? I mean, I think this is A great question to ask. I think Plato puts these details in here on purpose. You know, the other. The other thing that really caught my attention about this preamble is that Plato is ill. Plato is sick. He's not here at the death of his master. And again, like, if you just kind of read that flatly as a historical note, it's like, oh, that's sad. It's really sad that Plato was sick and not able to be there. But, like, pedagogically, like, you know, what do we make of this? Like, what do we make that Plato kind of removes himself in a certain way from the dialogue. If those are for those of you who are familiar with Plato's dialogues, he really does not put himself in them. Right. Socrates is the speaker. There's other interlocutors. Like, you know, Plato is not really putting himself in these dialogues and, like, having conversations with Socrates, he very much, you know, bleeds the background as the author. And so here, you know, I think anyone would ask, like, why would Plato not be at the death of Socrates? And so he kind of gives himself an out. It's like an escape hatch. Well, he. He was ill. He was sick. I mean, any thoughts here, stranger On. On Plato setting himself up as ill to be absent from this dialogue?
- [76:20]
B
Yeah, I mean, I think he has to, because were he to include himself in there, he knows very well that what would happen is that the readers are going to say, well, this is his. This is. This is how all Plato should be read based upon whatever he says here in this dialogue. So he has to remove himself from this dialogue in particular, because, of course, Plato would be there at his master's deathbed, his mentor's deathbed, but he can't allow himself in the dramatic representation of it because he knows full well that, I mean, this is the whole. Again, this is the whole point of the imagery of the cave is that, you know, the city is the greatest sophist. They will simply always look for the. The short road, like Glaucon wanted in the Republic, and say, well, oh, here's an instance where, you know, Plato had to be there. And so we really want to know what he says here because this is going to give us the key to understanding all the Platonic dialogues. And so he. He just simply removes himself and says that he was sick because, again, to, To. To know how to read a Platonic dialogue is very similar to knowing how to read a Shakespearean play. You can't just take quotes out and say, you know, attribute them to Shakespeare, like everyone does. With Polonius, right. To thine own self be true. Well, okay, but that's not Shakespeare, that's Polonius. And Polonius was a fool in Hamlet. Very much a fool. So it's very dubious to just sort of say that this is what Shakespeare's teaching is because I mean, just, just listen to, to how many times you'll hear people say, well, Plato believed in this and Plato taught this and this is Platonic, right? Well, wait a minute. Plato never speaks in any of the dialogues. And they'd say, well, you know, I mean it's, you know, it's whatever, it's what you think it's supposed to be, right? I mean, obviously he's representing Socrates, blah, blah, blah. Well, is he? We don't know. I mean it, that needs to be argued, right? I mean that has to be, you know, so I think that's important. And let me, let me just sort of clarify here so that the audience, your listeners know the fear that is overtaking all of them, but in particular his two interlocutors here as he says, it's 70A in the Stephanous pagination. Those are the page numbers you'll see off to the side. And by the way, when you see little page numbers on my notes up there, I'm referring to the, the focus Philosophical Library translation by Braun Calcavage in Salem. The best translation you'll find is only available online. It's the center for Hellenic Studies. It's free. It's by Gwendolyn Grwall. I. Anyway, it's an amazing translation but I'm, I'm not particularly fond of her. So there's that this, this would be the best translation in English that you'll find available. But it, it's got problems and we'll see in just a moment because what happens is that, remember I said following the logos, right? This is the imagery that he's always going to give. He's going to give it in this dialogue itself that he has to follow the logos. Well, what happens when it's no longer a logos but it's, as the translators say, a story? Storytelling. Because storytelling is, it's not a myth, it's not a logos. Turns out that it's a combination in the Greek of both of them together. Muthologian. So, so there's going, that's going to be interesting with the stuff about the, the status of these so called arguments for the immortality of the soul. They're not arguments, they're not logo, they're mutho logo. But we're also going to see quite bluntly that at. As I point out somewhere in the notes up there. Oh, yeah, it said 82D in the Phaedo. It turns out that Socrates is going to flatly say that following the logos is philosophy. So what does it mean to follow the logos? And then he's going. He's already had. He's already going to tell us very early on that it's the practice of dying and being dead. But he clarifies that and says that it's the purity of the soul from the body, which is. It's a rough. I don't like the translation in this. It's important to know the Greek here. It's phronesis, which is usually. It's often translated as practical wisdom or prudence. I like prudence better, but phronesis is not wisdom, so we need to keep an eye on that. Now, it's often said by some great scholars, by the way that played in the Platonic dialogues, you do not get a distinction, a clear distinction, between phronesis and Sophia, in other words, prudence and wisdom. You certainly do in Aristotle. That's the whole point of book six of the Nicomachean Ethics. Trying to piece them together is very difficult. But I'm not too convinced that they're not separated. I think that Socrates is very much aware, and Plato is very much aware of the difference, but about the myth in general, which is why I laugh about my little diagram, like, who does that, the. Whether or not it's, you know, Braun's translation. Braun is getting that, by the way, from her teacher Jacob Klein, who founded St. John's and Klein is the one who really sort of sets the stage for that interpretation, which is good. It might be right, but it might also not be right. It's. One has to make. There's good arguments for both cases, but the more important thing to keep in mind is that what. Why is Socrates making poetry? Right? He says that he thought that the best poetry was philosophy. So instead he's practicing what he calls demotic, or as this translator puts it, popular philosophy. We could call it. I'm sorry, popular poetry or vulgar poetry. You get the same thing with virtue and the Republic. There's. There's philosophic virtue and then there's popular or vulgar or political virtue. So when the city. And this is what this gets to, the diagram there you have. You have the city of Athens, okay? And then you have Socrates. Socrates practices philosophy. That's what he thinks is his pragma, his affair, the City of Athens operates at the level of myth with Theseus and their laws. So when they. When they stop doing their laws in order to go to be in accord with the piety of the myth, Socrates stops doing his business, his pragma of philosophy, and starts doing poetry. So, well, what happens when the city of Athens and the person of Socrates collide? Well, that's. You get the apology of Socrates, Socrates. That's the whole point of the apology. It's a rough collision. But what happens when you get myth that Athens operates on and philosophy, which Socrates operates on, colliding in Plato? What's the analog for the apology of Socrates? Well, it's the phaedo. And what I put over there into the side is Phaedo 63A through 6. This is right after he's talked about practicing, writing Aesop's fables and such. What he says is that I need to be more persuasive to you guys, if you are my jurors, than I was at that, that trial of mine, which was a sham. And he, he subsequently says this. In other words, the phaedo, he says, is my true trial. So if you want to know what the real trial of Socrates, Socrates is, according to Socrates, it's the phaedo. And that's where things get interesting, because what we're discussing then all of a sudden is this issue of the status of philosophers doing their philosophizing about the most important things, the most sacred things, the immortality of the soul and whatever the limitations of logos are under the auspices of what political community requires. So that's why I did that tweet earlier today where I said these are the two defining pillars of Plato. On the one hand, genuine inquiry into the natures of things, which we call either metaphysics or ontology, will always lead to a true understanding of politics. Socrates, Plato. Socrates famously says he's the only statesman in classical Athens, not Pericles or anyone, but he. And that's the corresponding truth to that is it's contra positive, which is to say that this, any true or serious inquiry into politics leads to a true inquiry into the natures of things or metaphysics. So, so these two things are related. This thing that we think of as philosophy, philosophy and its inquiry into the deep things of. Of our existence is. And that is completely correlative inherently to this other thing that we call politics and that should be relevant to everybody because political community stands or falls on this thing that we understand as philosophy, whatever it is, but. But it stands in this great tension that corresponds to this, on the one hand, Athens and Socrates, which what I'm suggesting is myth and philosophy. Now the reason I drew the, the. The reason I wrote Theseus and the parentheses up there between myth and Athens is because that's what is required to get this whole dialogue going that 30 days or something. But what's the analog between philosophy and Socrates? Is it going to be as. As Braun and Klein and such and other great thinkers have thought and put good arguments for, or is it going to be something else? So that's why there's that question mark there. But that's ultimately, I think, at least a template to understand this relationship. On the one hand, that's going on in the dialogue between Muthos, myth and Philosophia, which we could also think of in some sense as dialectics, which he talks about in the Republic at length with following the logos. That's why I have over there on the side that little diagram, eye of the soul, being and logos, because that's when this question of mythology comes up. Notice there's never anything of mysomuthology. Right. No one ever hates mythology, but it could turn out that people hate philosophy. That's problematic. That's very problematic. We call that nihilism today. But anyway, go ahead. Sorry.
- [88:16]
A
No, I really appreciate that. The, you know, the one thing that occurs to me, it's not really. It's not an answer, it's just kind of a further observation and maybe a question that it's really fascinating to me that Plato takes himself out, out of the feto because he's ill, because he has a bodily problem. Right. So here we have this dialogue in which we're discussing the immortality of the soul. And as Alec mentioned earlier, like, the role of the body is actually very important. I do agree with Alec and I want to mention that kind of later on for kind of like what to look for as you read the dialogue is. I do agree that it can seem like he's really disparaging the body, but I might push it against that. But just as an observation, I think it's fascinating that Plato removes himself from the dialogue because he has a bodily ill while discussing kind of the relationship between the body and the soul. You know, it's one thing I want to think about more. It's something. I think there's certainly kind of a teaching strata to that. Alec, I want to kind of turn it over to you. I mean, any thoughts on what stranger said or kind of like the role of myth in the phaedo over all?
- [89:26]
C
Yeah, just Just quickly, a couple things that Stranger just pointed out. It's really fascinating, but I think particularly the court sequence is really, really important that, that there's a clear parallel being drawn between the apology and the fadem. And it's, it's 63B where soccer Socrates explicitly states, I'm being asked to draw up a case as if I were in a court. And this is kind of before they get into the real meat of the dialogue, which is why it's okay for him to die, basically, is what they're, they're arguing for, for him. So anyways, that parallel there is, is really important. And then it was just the, the last thing that Stranger just said. Nobody hates philosophy.
- [90:34]
B
Or.
- [90:35]
C
Sorry, that's not what you said. You said nobody hates myth, they hate philosophy. And I think that that's, that's exactly right. And we're kind of getting that. And it kind of goes back to the, the earlier question about the Pythagoreans. I don't, I'm not saying this dogmatically. I don't. It's, It's a question, as I read this dialogue, trying to understand, and I thought, Deacon, you, You raised an excellent question. Why bring us these foreigners, these Pythagorean foreigners as interlocutors, and then for them to almost, interestingly, throughout the course of the dialogue, sort of not believe their own master's teaching. So they're the Simi. If I, if I'm correct, it's Simeas, but he's the one who sort of questions the immortality of the soul. But maybe it was Kibis, I can't remember, but they sort of question this immortality of the soul and, and wanted to want to know why. And I, I don't think Plato's suggesting they're not true Pythagoreans, whatever that may mean. But we're sort of setting up a situation in where. In which Socrates is providing a case for Pythagoras, for the Pythagorean teaching, which is sort of an interesting question to think about as we read this. So in a sense, going back to Stranger's point, I'm not saying that Simius and Kibis hate philosophy, but in a sense they're almost acting as the ones who do in this case, in the court case in which they're the ones that are questioning whether the soul is immortal, they're the ones questioning why it should. It's worth it for a philosopher to die as opposed to stay alive. And so Socrates is put on trial once again to provide a case for why he's. Has chosen to live the life that he's lived. It's really, really fascinating to think about.
- [92:49]
A
No, I appreciate those comments. You know, it occurs to me as you kind of speak and we kind of parse this out a little bit, it reminded me in a certain way of Glaucon's role in the Republic, where again, we have to track heavily kind of the disposition of the interlocutors and where Glaucon, you know, is pushing back against Socrates. He's pushing back against him and, you know, saying, you know, is, is justice really more profitable than injustice? Right. Look at, look at this myth of the Gyges Ring. Look at what we could do if we didn't have to, you know, be accountable for, for our actions. Look, if there were no consequences, if I could be the tyrant, you know, I could satiate myself on food and sex. It reminds me a little bit of Glaucon's role because Glaucon at the beginning of the Republic tells Socrates that he believes that justice is more profitable than injustice. But Glaucon, maybe to borrow a phrase from St. Augustine, you know, lord, help me understand that which I already believe, and that's a little bit how I read Socrates. Interlocutors in the Phaedo was simply like, I think they agree with him, or at least they want to agree with him. They want to believe in the immortality of the soul. But they are, you know, they're authentic to themselves, they're authentic to their own intellectual life. They're simply not going to agree to it because they want to. They have questions. Just like Glaucon wants to believe that justice is more powerful, profitable than injustice. But he's going to push Socrates tremendously. He's going to take up the best arguments against Socrates, right? He's, he's not going to straw man it, he's going to steel man it. He's going to sit here and say, what is the best I can do? I took this a little bit, maybe not at the same extreme, but a little bit of the same of the interlocutors and the phaedo that they, they want to believe in immortality of soul. They want to believe what Socrates is telling them, but at the same time they're intellectually honest and so they're going to put push back against him. So stranger, jump in there.
- [94:48]
B
Yeah. What you had just mentioned there, that reminded me of, I think, what's a crucial parallel that I've, I've been grasping at. But I didn't, I didn't quite see it until you, you mentioned it. What you see in my notes are lots of references to the Republic. That's just because I, I, I know the Republic very well. I know the feto very well in the symposium, so I sort of stick with those. And they, they complement each other very well. Because of course the question is, what is justice in the Republic? And that involves justice of the philosopher to himself and what's so crucial to understand about the Republic? And I, I got this from Alex Prio. I'd been studying this for years and never caught it. He's talking to the youth, Glaucon and Adimantis. Who are they? They, they say they've literally had their ears talked off. So they're so nihilism is nothing new under the sun. They, they, they present a very good case. And Socrates points it out that he's like, wow, if I didn't know you guys, I'd think that you really believe what you just said. And they're like, no, well, of course we don't believe that. But you know, sort of, sort of, it would sort of be like something like on a first date where you invite someone over and say, yeah, let's chill in Netflix. But you know, nothing like that. You know, it's really going to watch Netflix and chill, something like that. So, so what you have with the Republic is Socrates dealing with the youth who are already well down the road of nihilism. And he has to try to correct for that as much he can, given their disposition of soul. What we have in the phaedo is the correlate, where it is the grown men themselves who are already well down the road of nihilism. And this is why I say this, because it's not so much nihilism in, at all. They're on the precipice of not believing in what it is that their fathers believed in. That's a very dangerous place to be. That's where we as a country of are, if we haven't already slipped over into it, into the abyss. That's why everyone speaks of progress. They don't speak of tradition except to trash it. That's why so few people read the great books. They're so busy reading the contemporary scribblers. But this is precisely where, what, when at very early on, when Socrates says, you know, aren't you guys studies of students of Philolaus, right? This Pythagorean, don't you know, don't you know about these things? And the response is says, at any rate Nothing. Sure, Socrates. And then this is what Socrates says. I don't really like the, the Braun Kakavich translation on this, so I'm going to read from gr. She says, well, this is her translation. So this is Socrates speaking. He says, well really, I too am speaking from here, from hearsay about them, in other words, Philos, the Pythagoreans, because Kimus and Kibis and Simeons have just said they don't really know too much about those teachings or whatever he says, he says, so then I have no reluctance to speak when what I happen to have heard, he says, for in fact, perhaps it's the most, it is most fitting for one who is going to go away to that place. He's talking about death. So for someone who's going to go away to that place to both examine thoroughly and tell stories, that's the Muthologian about going abroad there, in other words, about death. He says, and this is the key, he says, this is what the stories are to do. The Muthologian, this combination of muthos and logos that occurs when the city is engaged in its most mythological thing. And Socrates has suspended his most philosophical thing and taken up poetry of Aesop says namely they are to inquiry into what sort we suppose it to be. In other words, what, what do we suppose this afterlife or, or when we die, what is, what is it going to be? And that's when Kibies just lights up and says, well then let's get, get on with it, man, let's do this. In other words, let's light this candle. So none of them have a strong grip of any of the traditional understanding of, of the gods. I mean, so this is. Socrates admits he's guilty. In the apology, he flatly says, you know, no one knows what it's like to be in Hades. You know, we only have all these great myths and poems that tell us exactly what it's like to be in Hades, but no one really knows for sure. And by the way, I'm not guilty of introducing new gods or corrupted the youth, right? So that's what's going on here is that the traditional understanding of what sustained them as a people has already become so problematic that the most thoughtful men, which is to say these guys who hang around Socrates all day no longer really believe in the myths. Similarly, the most thoughtful and talented youth of the Republic, they no longer believe in these myths or anything. And so what we get in both cases of both, both the Phaedo and the Republic, and I would say Plato at large is what is the possibilities available to us when such circumstances have arisen, when decadence has overtaken a people? What is the power of mind to affect any kind of correcting of the course? Can it, can it do it? First of all, that's the first question. Can it achieve it? How much. How much reason can be injected into the body politic, right? That's the question of the collision between Athens and Socrates in, in the apology of Socrates in the little diagram I have up there. And the Phaedo is going to be, as he says, his real. His real apology. So we're going to find out exactly a kind of answer to the most thoughtful men who no longer believe or have a strong grip of tradition. We're going to find out just how powerful philosophy is or is not. In other words, what are its limitations? What are the limitations of the logos upon the soul amid the worst possible conditions?
- [101:56]
A
So, no, that is excellent. I. I really appreciate you bringing in the nihilistic factor that these young Athenian men are dealing with. Nihilism, right? They want to be tyrants. You also see this in the Gorgias with calicles at the end, right? Who just finally the veneer drops off and he's like, yes, I want to be a tyrant. I really appreciate you brought that up here. You've brought it up at other places. I've appreciated you saying it because I think we think that nihilism is a modern problem, right? But actually, in certain ways it's an. It's an ancient problem. It also kind of shows us then how much in debt the west is to the mind of Socrates, of a culture that starts to take the soul seriously, a culture that actually does not aspire to be a tyrant, but actually, you know, aspires to live a good and beautiful life. So I think it's a juxtaposition that I really appreciate that you bring out because I think it has a lot of parallels for how do we reach people today. I mean, the nihilistic just kind of vapidness that has taken over our culture. It's somewhat, you know, refreshing in a certain degree to realize that that's not new, that it's been conquered before, it could be conquered again by offering people things that are true, good and beautiful. You know, our goal this evening is an introduction to the Phaedo to kind of help people get set up to read this. Well, and we're group, we've kind of exhausted. I think a lot of the exhaust is probably the wrong word with Plato, but I think we've maybe touched on a lot of the architecture and the preamble between before Fido actually gets into recounting the story. But I kind of want to focus on and maybe ask the question to both of you, to both Stranger and to Alec, about what advice you would have for first time readers of the Phaedo. So as they kind of venture out from the preamble into the dialogue overall, like what, what kind of things do you think they should be looking for? And I'll kind of sally forth first because there's two things that really caught my attention when I read them and when I discussed this in my Sunday Great Books group, this was somewhat of a blood on the floor conversation and I could be wrong and both of you guys please push back on me. But one is to kind of echo Alex earlier point that Socrates will say several things that sound very disparaging towards the body. And I think it's really kind of a knee jerk reaction to say, oh look, there he is, there goes Socrates. Like he's a gnostic, he hates the body. Like I knew it. And you know, we had people who read it that way. And I really think that is a mistake. And I think that Plato teaches us in the dialogue it's a mistake, right? Because if he's really being serious that he hates the body, I think there's some clues there that might tell us. I think maybe we could mitigate that a bit. One is, is again, as Stranger pointed out, we have to interpret these through the interlocutors. So the rhetoric, the logos, the teachings, everything that Socrates is employing to try and teach us what's true, good and beautiful is tailored to the interlocutors. And so here if he's trying to point out that the soul is most important, it's not necessarily surprising that he would overcome, emphasize, say, you know, the. He would over emphasize the importance of the soul to the disparagement of the body. But then Plato gives us little hints. He gives us little hints that that might not be an accurate way to read this. And like, what would some of those hints be? You know, one is, one is that Socrates has a wife. Two is that Socrates has children. Three is that Socrates at 70 has an infant child. He has a baby, right. These are not the characteristics of someone who hates all the pleasures of the body. Actually, Socrates was well known for when he did drink, he was able to drink more than anyone else without becoming drunk. You know, there's another scene in there where Plato gives us this detail that people are like, what is going on here. And one is that Socrates plays with Phaedo's hair. He plays he like which then we tell Fido tells us that he was accustomed to doing right. There's like this affection for feeder. There's an affection of the body. He's playing with the body. Like there are just hints here that I think that particularly for first time readers, you can walk away and say look, here's where I think Gnosticism came from. Like this, he's a gnostic, etc. I would say that Gnosticism is probably a misread of Plato and they don't have the balance there. My second maybe advice for first time readers as they move through is, is certainly tethered to that same insight. It's downstream from it, which is he also will somewhat seemingly disparage the senses, like how we come to know things. He'll talk about pure thought and things like this. And I, I've seen people kind of read him then almost in a Cartesian way like Descartes, that we just need to go and sit in a cabin out in the woods and be alone with our thoughts. And that's how we discover truth. Truth. And I really think that we again, you have to read the dialogue as a whole and then kind of read the dialogues as a corpus. And I think even in this dialogue, notice there's a point in which he talks about recollection of the forms. How do we remember the forms? How's our soul remembering these things? And notice that his example, as it does in several other places, his example begins with sense knowledge. How does the body come to, you know, recollect, say the form, form of equality? Well, it sees two sticks that it believes are equal and it's immediately reminded of the form, the perfect idea of being equal, of equality. But notice that that actually is mediated through the senses. And so I just, you know, sometimes maybe it's more on the, on the Catholic. Maybe I have too many Aristotelian Thomistic friends and so I'm somewhat like on guard about this, but I think his comments on the body and his comments, maybe disparaging sense knowledge need to be read within the drama of the dialogue. And I think his words are balanced out by some of the dramatic facts that we see in the dialogue. So maybe turning it over to Alec. One, I'm open to correction on that. And two, what advice do you have for first time readers of the Phaedo?
- [108:11]
C
Yeah, I'll just, I'll say one, the, the whole, I, I brought up the the concept of, you know, Socrates disparaging or denigrating the body precisely because that is something that we as modern readers of platforms Plato do anachronistically like we read Plato this way, particularly if you're Christian, you're going to read them that way because it's been hammered into Christians today, modern Christians, to be anti Gnostic as possible. And one issue I have with that is first of all, we don't even actually know what the Gnostics are, aside from a Wikipedia article. And that's just like not a fair assessment. So to understand what, where the purpose of the body is like to understand Plato, I, I guess I should say we don't even understand what the purpose of the body is with regard to our own scripture. There are plenty of passages in scripture that appear to be Gnostic in the sense that they denigrate the body. And yet Christians would never suggest that. And yet with Plato, with Socrates we do. So we need to be cautious of that and to make sure that we understand that what Socrates and the Pythagoreans in particular. But then Socrates, Plato and the Neoplatonists, when you, especially when as you get into Plotinus and Iamblichus and Proclus and those guys when they talk about they also were fighting against the Gnostics, this is not something that Socrates is necessarily disparaging. What he's saying is. Well, what I, I'm not going to say what I think he's saying. I, I guess I'm going to say the question is try to understand the symbolic nature of what, what he's saying. Symbol there. Meaning not some kind of categorical pattern recognition thing, but rather symbol as in transfigurative or transformative truth that comes from ascending to a higher realm. So I think exactly what you said, Deacon. Looking at the drama, we can sort of see that what Socrates, Socrates is obviously not suggesting something that the body is completely evil. I also think that the way Plato wrote it, there's two sort of fascinating points. It's the beginning of the dialogue and at the very end where you have Socrates at the beginning when they first encounter him in the cell or wherever he is, when Phaedo and the others encounter him, he's rubbing his legs. And then at the very end of the dialogue you have the, the, the, the man who's one of the 11 who's appointed to tell him to drink the poison also comes in and touches his legs. It's a very profound point I think throughout the dialogue. And we, and it's it's chiastic in some ways, but certainly the very least that there's a parallel at the beginning and at the end where we have this physicality of just in the body of Socrates himself. And so there is a sort of antinomy that occurs in this dialogue that I think is really important, and I like that word better than even something like paradox, because what antinomy is suggesting there is that these are two truths that are concurrently true and yet don't appear to be possibly true at the same time. And that is that. And Christians, I think especially should understand this, that we are not tied to this physical world. We are asked to ascend to something higher, and yet we are physical and required to maintain and to preserve the beauty and virtue of this physical body and physical world. Socrates clearly saw that, recognized it, and Plato does too. And you can see that all throughout the. The drama of this dialogue, in this dialogue in particular. So it's a really. Again, that's, that's why I said at the very beginning, I think this dialogue is rightly called on the Soul, but I also think as an addendum, it should be called on the Body because it is a really beautiful text to talk about this relationship between the soul and the body and, and what Socrates thinks about it, what Plato thinks about it. And then just for first timers, I, I would just say, I, I think that that is the question that you need to be wrestling with and you need to be thinking about. And then what I would just sort of suggest is that you take Socrates words very seriously, but that you, you don't try to think of them purely in sort of categorical terms or as sort of legalistic terms, but rather think through these words in the context of the dialogue itself, in the dot IN the, In the context of the interlocutors and with relationship to the other dog.
- [113:55]
B
This is both.
- [113:55]
C
Both of you have said very beautifully and that to. To wrestle with the questions of the soul, the questions of the body, and then again the questions of this myth and trying to understand them, I would leave it with two things. One is the one thing that really just moved me and I think is kind of a beautiful part of this story that touches on all of those questions is, is the interaction between the, the. The member of the 11 at the very end and Socrates and how even that man saw that he was the best, the most wise and, and the most virtuous man as he asks Socrates to drink the poison. There's a beautiful parallel there with the centurion at the Cross right. Who's looking at Christ and saying, you know, my Lord and my God. So there's that beautiful Christian imagery there or parallel rather beautiful Christian parallel there that is, that resonates but also within the context of Plato. Why on earth does this Athenian guard, what does he see in Socrates? Why does he see that? I think that's a really important question. Why does he see that he's the best man? And I'll just leave with this quotation from 69B approximately where, where Socrates says my good Simmius, I fear this is not the right exchange to attain virtue, to exchange, exchange pleasures for pleasures, pains for pains and fears for fears the greater for the less like coins but that the only valid currency for which all these things should be exchanged is wisdom. With this we have real courage and moderation and justice and in a word true virtue and keeps going on. It's, it's very beautiful. But I think that there so much is packed into that and that is who Socrates was and is. And that's some. Those words need to resonate as you read the Phaedo that Socrates was a believer and that he's trying to convince his interlocutors to believe just as much as he does and all throughout. So yeah, thank you.
- [116:32]
A
No Alec, I really, I really appreciate that. I thought that was beautiful. Stranger any kind of final words like advice for first time readers reading the.
- [116:40]
B
Phaedo, it's so important or it should be understood as so fascinating by people wanting to read it because what we get there is Socrates is unable to discern what would constitute a natural account, account of cause and the natural account is what he refers to as the fusiologoi and those are who we call the pre Socratics. He's unable to be persuaded of a natural account of the whole the cosmos that doesn't have a contradiction in it. And so that's where the role of myth starts to come in because we can. And he specifically says at the high point he doesn't privilege his account his any. He's explicit. It's a hypothetical account of the forms. It's not, it's not. He's not dogmatic about it at all. He says it's a hypothetical account that's his second sailing as opposed to the fusiologo. But he says he doesn't privilege it as being any more accurate. It's just an alternative way to try to get past this aporia, this impasse. Alpha primitive there means there's not a porea. In other words there's no pores. It's not porous. He can't get through it. Of how to understand cause in the broadest sense of cosmology, as we would think. And so what we think of as either physics or metaphysics, both of these things are held up as deeply problematic, according to Socrates. And all of this comes back, or we could say, collapses down into so. So the macro, the cosmos and man's place in the cosmos collapses down into the micro of man himself. That we find at the very beginning of Socrates talking about the. The pain and the. The combination of pain and pleasure that he feels by removing the shackle from his. From his leg. Because that, that's what kicks off the discussion of the poetry, because he says, Aesop would have done this. But he also mentions that by nature, pleasure and pain seem to be contrary. But then he goes into his own mythological accounts that this thing of what we think of as change or cause is nothing more than the divide between what we know of as being and this other thing we know of as becoming, right? And so that's what he's trying to get at. And it turns out that the most basic everyday experience that we all have of pleasure and pain, whether it's, you know, laces too tight on your shoes or, you know, being heartbroken or something like that, it turns out that not simply the entirety of philosophy, but the question of the. The very whole, the phenomenal whole of the cosmos comes tumbling out. And he gives all of that to us in a way that is so very human, because it's his close friends who want to be philosophers, or they. They love philosophy, but they also love him, the man. This is why we cry at funerals. There's no reason why we should cry at funerals. We should celebrate as Christians. We should celebrate because they've made the journey, they are with God now. We should be happy, but we aren't. We miss them. But that's a cause for wonder, right? I mean, this is something that. This is so very human. I mean, it's completely human. And all of that comes tumbling out of this entire dialogue. So there you have it. Cosmology, causation or cause was the longing to be with people we've lost. In fact, that's one of the key phrases in the entire dialogue. He says. He says that's the role of Eros in the dialogue. He says people want. People who have lost loved ones want to both see the loved ones and be with them. That's the problem. We want to see and be with, well, the Closer you get to something, the less able you are to see it. Think of when you're hugging someone, you can't really see them anymore. You're with them, but you can't really see them. That's the relationship of body and soul is. It complicates things. And so we have to ask ourselves why. Why is it that the separation of body and soul is so problematic? Which is none other than the relationship of the pleasures of the mind or contemplation of the most noble things. And one could even say God, of course, versus the pleasures of the body and conversely the pains of the mind if we can't establish what we seek. And the pains of the body, physical pains or the inability to satisfy things like hunger or something as simple as that. But it's all there. It's all. It's literally all there. And it all comes tumbling out in a way that is, like Alec was saying, it's. It's beautiful. And what I would say the reason for why it's beautiful is it. Is it. It's because it has all that question of intelligibility.
- [122:29]
C
Right?
- [122:30]
B
That's what makes things beautiful, is that they hold out the promise of complete intelligibility. It's in our very language when we speak of people we loved. You complete me, right? In other words, we ourselves are somehow fundamentally incomplete. And Socrates is addressing this to his friends in the most philosophical way possible. So.
- [122:49]
A
Yeah, very good. Yes. You know, Plato. Plato invites us to a beautiful life. I think that's something too, that when you read the dialogues, I think one thing you realize quite quickly is that what I'm experiencing here, this, this wisdom, this invitation, you know, to. To question things, to pursue what's true, good and beautiful in no way, shape or form can be reduced or sterilized into an academic pursuit. It can't simply be something of the mind, like, like a hobby or something I can set aside as a. As a simple interest. It is really something that Plato invites us to consume us. It's something that he invites us, that we, in pursuit of beauty, become beautiful ourselves. You know, philosophy is simply a way of life. Philosophy to actually love wisdom is to, you know, actually transform ourselves to have a beautiful soul. And I think it's something that he can really offer to us as moderns is that we can read Plato and I think be open and receptive to that invitation to beauty. And I think the phaedo inviting us to contemplate the immortality of the soul is an important part of that invitation. Athenian stranger. I really appreciate your comments this evening. I think you've given us a lot to think about, particularly those who want to launch into the Phaedo. I think we've given them a good kind of lattice work to work with. Where can people find out more about you and your work?
- [124:17]
B
So athenscorner.com is my fledgling little website where people can go and even if they don't want to study philosophy, if they like what I do, every donation helps to keep the lights on, so that's where they can find me. It's really easy and I'm, I have a lot of stuff from my Athens Corner on Spotify, Apple podcast, all those kind of places. Just, just search Athens Corner and you'll find me. By the way, it's not the lunch restaurant, that's somewhere in Wisconsin or something like that. That's not me. I'm Athens Corner with the Greek stuff.
- [124:54]
A
So that's a good, that's a good distinction. Alec, I also appreciate that you were able to join us this evening, brother. I always appreciate your insights, particularly into Plato. Where can people find out more about you and the Searcy Institute?
- [125:11]
C
Yeah, thank you so much for having me. It's always a joy to hear both you and, and stranger. Yeah. Searcy Institute, class, education, cersei, institinstitute.org and yeah, we're on all the social media and stuff and then I'm here on, on X Twitter. So yeah, please, please follow us. Join us. If you, if you love education, we're happy to help you. And yeah, but also follow the Ascend podcast, please. And then Athens Corner, he's, he's doing incredible stuff. So glad to be on. Thank you.
- [125:50]
A
No, we appreciate it. All right, everyone, well, thank you for joining us for our conversation. Introducing the FETO. You can check out more on thegreatbookspodcast.com we're also on Patreon. We're here on X. Check out our pinned tweet for our schedule of reading in 2025. We are working through the Greek plays, the Oresteia, Theban plays, the Bacchae, Aristophanes, also reading Dante's Inferno and then reading Plato as well, including first Alcibiades, Euthyphro, the Apology and many, many others. So we really appreciate it and we'll see everyone next time. Thank.